Welcome to mid-summer; it has been wet and wild, has it not? Mother Nature has been particularly busy this past month – rain and thunder and a tornado, a bumper crop of mosquitoes. To welcome me back to work on Friday morning, she toppled a huge tree right in my path as I arrived at the office. And of course the world goes on even in the summer time. The presidential election continues to demand our attention, as it seems to careen inevitably towards negativity and attack ads. The state of the economy remains uncertain; we are anxious about the basics this summer. So why, in the midst of all this, have we declared a Summer of Poetry?
Last summer we experimented with the idea of a theme for the season that would integrate our core ministries: worship, learning, and community. It was a way to counteract the summer doldrums that Unitarian Universalist congregations are particularly prone to, a way for children and youth and adults to be together at South Church formally and informally as we explored the complex and compelling theme of peace making. The Summer of Peace worked so well, we decided to try the integrated theme again this year. So here we are in the middle of the Summer of Poetry. Why poetry? Is poetry religious enough to carry a liberal religious congregation through several months of faithful living? Does poetry have the gravitas to address the compelling needs of a challenging time? Is poetry spiritual, is it prophetic, does it preach and pastor and bring people together?
The single greatest challenge of creating a healthy religious community in the context of Unitarian Universalism is the challenge of our diversity. This thing that we are so proud of is also the thin that makes it most difficult to craft an ongoing program of worship, learning, and community that is cohesive. In the 18 years of my active ministry, I have come to understand that people come to liberal religion with many different spiritual styles. Just as educators have developed theories of multiple intelligences – children who learn best through visual cues, or audible cues, or tactile sensations, theologians have developed similar theories of multiple spiritualities. Some of you are inspired by carefully crafted words, others by silence; some by traditional organ music, others by a capella chant. So where is the common core, the universal language that unites us in our diverse approaches to spiritual formation? I’m always looking . . .
I believe that poetry is one form of expression that does speak to diverse spiritualities. Keep in mind the commentary of Tobias Wolfe from our reading. We come to faith, he opined, through an aesthetic as much as through a reasoned thought process. And aesthetics are very personal. A painting that led one young man into the church sent Wolfe right out the door again. A verse that moved that same Wolfe to tears did nothing for a close friend. But poets are such a diverse group themselves, surely in the broad canon of poetry we can each find a glimpse of the sacred. If we search sincerely.
Poetry speaks on many levels and in many different dimensions. It can be deeply and intensely personal. The very well known contemporary poet Mary Oliver writes:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue are, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Another contemporary poet, Robert McDowell, understands poetry as a way to deepen one’s personal spiritual practice. He says that by reading and writing poetry in an intentional way, you can “. . . become a more fearless, compassionate, expressive, self-confident human being.” Now, there may be some hyperbole in that, but . . . what set of characteristics would better prepare us for life in 21st century
We are all mindful of the fact that this morning a group of Unitarian Universalists in
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. (T.S. Eliot)
In June at General Assembly the Ministry Day theme speaker was Dr. Walter Brueggeman, a scholar of the Hebrew Scriptures who reminded us that there are different stories in those scriptures. There is the story of Solomon – a story of economic growth and the accumulation of wealth, the story of a temple built with excruciating precision. A temple that had inner sanctums and inner-inner sanctums, each more exclusive than the one before. Brueggeman believes that this story has lived for several millennia in tension with another story. The story of Sinai and the Exodus. The story of the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, who railed against the accumulation of wealth and the inequalities that Solomon’s society created. Brueggeman calls that thread ‘the prophetic imagination’ and he says that it is the poets that express it best. Poets are the ones who are capable of imagining a different world, and giving expression to those imaginative possibilities. Poets are often the most effective prophets because they open our minds and hearts to new possibilities. Instead of beating us about the head with our failures, instead of a harangue, the poets offer us an alternative vision – an evocative picture of what could be. Hear Wendell Berry’s prophetic imagination:
“If we will have the wisdom to survive,
To stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place,
Renewing, enriching it,
If we will make our seasons welcome here
Asking not too much of earth or heaven,
Then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here.
Their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides,
Fields and gardens rich in the windows.
The rivers will run clear, as we will never know it
And over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be green meadows, stock bells in
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music risen out of the ground.
They will take nothing from the ground they will not return, whatever the grief at parting.
Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament.
The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.
This is not paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
This is a vision of holiness, of spiritual communion. Legend to song to sacrament. This is poetry that calls us into community, that calls us into communion with the earth. The music that June has played this morning is also that kind of poetry – folk music, the music of the people, often takes the form of protest songs. Singing together is a way to fortify each other, to find the courage to act on our convictions in the face of powerful opposition. “We Shall Overcome” did as much to insure the success of the civil rights movement as all the powerful rhetoric of its leaders. Holly Near’s anthem, “We Are a Gentle, Angry People” did much the same for the early gay rights movement. (And we are singing, singing for our lives . . . )
In a moment Susie Bright and I will offer you a few more poems of that imaginative genre, then we will sing our final hymn and hear our final protest song. At least for this morning. But first, we are going to pass the collection baskets again. Last spring the Outreach Associates approached the Board with a plan for a quarterly ‘second ask’ – a second collection on a Sunday morning that would go to some community organization doing charitable or advocacy work congruent with our UU values. This morning, our collection will be donated to the Unitarian Universalist Action Network of New Hampshire. This state-wide network is ”. . . a social justice advocacy network in New Hampshire committed to strengthening justice work within congregations and building links with interfaith partners and progressive organizations in order to effectively witness and advocate for Unitarian Universalist values in the public arena.” Right now, the network is in the process of hiring an organizer to help New Hampshire UU congregations engage in voter empowerment work. Our Fifth Principle affirms our faith commitment to the use of the democratic process both in our congregations and in society at large. In this important election year, we plan to work hard to insure that groups traditionally underrepresented at the polls get to cast their votes: young people, people of color, single women, and low income voters will be targeted for education, registration, most importantly, a concerted get out the vote effort. This is non-partisan work; it is done on behalf of democracy itself rather than any candidate or party. You can sign up to be part of the
“Once to every soul and nation comes the moment to decide
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side
Then to stand with truth is noble, when we share its wretched crust
Ere that cause bring fame and profit, and tis prosperous to be just.”
A little James Russell Lowell to lead us into the special offering for the UU Action Network of New Hampshire. Ushers will you please pass the baskets again? While the collection is being taken, we have some more poetry for you.
In her sermon at General Assembly in June, Rev. Victoria Safford told the story of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem about Paul Robeson. “(Nye) has a beautiful poem in which she remembers the great singer Paul Robeson, in whose devotion to liberty and justice the State Department perceived such a threat to national security that he was forbidden to travel. His passport was revoked. In May 1952, on his way to a concert in
Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border of the
and sang into
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.
[5,000 were gathered on the American side; 30,000 in
He sang into
His voice left the
when his body was not allowed
to cross that line.
Remind us again, brave friend!
What countries may we sing into?
What lines should we all be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?
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The final lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”, referenced by Tobias Wolff in the earlier reading.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Benediction
Final words of hope from the poem that opened our service: “ . . . justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.”
Let us all be attentive for the signs of just such a possibility, and let us be ready to do our share to make it so.