Reverence and Rituals

This sermon was presented on 16 November, 2014, by Doug Trenfield.

Reading 1:
Q: How many Unitarians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or
against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own
journey, you have found that light bulbs work for you, that
is wonderful. You are invited to write a poem or compose a
modern dance about your personal relationship with your
light bulb. Present it next month at our annual Light Bulb
Sunday Service, in which we will explore a number of light
bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, 3-way,
long-life, and tinted, all of which are equally valid paths to
luminescence.

Reading 2:

Catholics

for Julia

By Julia Kasdorf

In the third grade all the girls got confirmed

and had their ears pierced.  They flaunted

those dingy threads that hung from their lobes,

telling how the ice stung, how the cartilage crunched

when the needle broke through, how knots

in the thread had to be pulled through the holes,

one each day, like a prayer on the rosary.

At recess I turned the rope

while Michelle skipped and spun and counted to ten,

and a scapular leapt from the neck of her dress.

She dangled that pale pink ribbon,

a picture of the Blessed Mother on one end

and the Sacred Heart on the other,

saying, “This is my protection, front and back.”

That was when I called them Catholic

and said, “Your people killed my people;

your priests threw a man into a river,

tied in a sack with a dog, a cat, a rooster, a snake,

think how they scratched going down,

think how they drowned.  Your priests

burned holes in the tongues of our preachers,

and put pacifists naked in cages

to starve and rot while the birds

pecked off their flesh.”

Michelle and Vicki and Lisa just looked at me,

the jump rope slack as a snake

at our feet.  But in my memory

I want these girls with fine bones and dark eyes

to speak up:

those priests were not me,

those martyrs weren’t you,

and we have our martyr stories too.

I want to take their slim girl-bodies into my arms

and tell them I said it only because

I wanted to wear a small, oval metal

I could pull from my T-shirt to kiss

before tests.  I wanted a white communion dress,

and to pray with you

to your beautiful Blessed Mother in blue.

Sermon: Reverence and Rituals by Doug Trenfield

A friend of mine, Felicia, raised sort of UU -- that is, if her family went to church, it was a UU church -- told me this story years ago when I knew her. In deference to my friend, I want to make sure you know she wasn’t raised willy-nilly with odd, dissonant influences. But for reasons that go beyond this story, but which might be revealed (we’d have to ask her) in my talk today, UU-ism just didn’t stick with them. So here’s her story. She was maybe eight when she and a group of friends were talking about their churches. (Here of course I’ll make up dialog.) One friend said, “We’re Catholic, we worship this-and-that.” Another said, “We’re Methodist, and we worship thus-and-so.” And on. Felicia was quiet. Someone asked her, “Felicia, what do you believe?” She answered shyly, “Well, I’m Unitarian,” not really being anything since she didn’t go that often. “So what do you worship?” Felicia stammered, then the smarty-pants in the group said, “Oh, I know what Unitarians worship. They worship trees.” Felicia, anxious to get out of this pickle, nodded in agreement.

UU-ism is tough to get your mind around, even if you’re not an eight-year-old. What we believe must be written in long complex sentences with lots of qualifiers, not simple sentences -- one subject, one verb, one direct object. Our beliefs are expressed more like in the joke about the light bulb. It could be this. It could be that. The joke reminds me of how I’d teach writing. Students would ask me, after writing a paragraph or so, “Did I do this right?” And often my answer would be, “It depends on what effect you want.” Oh, and they’d be so frustrated. They just wanted to know, Did they do it right, and then they wanted to move on. They didn’t want to think too much.

This joke and how my students responded to my vague (but I think appropriate) responses to their writing gets at why so many people find Christianity appealing. (I will only contrast UU-ism with Christianity because, one, that’s what I know best, and two, that we all share that milieu.) Presbyterians, the Christian denomination with which I am most familiar, have their Book of Order. You want to know what you believe, you look it up. And every Sunday, you say the Apostles’ Creed, which begins with two simple declarative statements, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.” and, “And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.” So each Sunday, in a reading that takes 45 seconds, you are reminded of what you believe.

And you know what? I miss that certainty. Well, not that certainty, because I never really believed. But I miss the rituals that spring from such certainties. Like the girl in the poem “Catholics,” who berated her Catholic friends, but really only wanted to be enjoy the little rituals of Catholicism:

I wanted to wear a small, oval metal

I could pull from my T-shirt to kiss

before tests.  I wanted a white communion dress,

and to pray with you

to your beautiful Blessed Mother in blue.

What does a Christian revere? The Bible. Jesus. The Trinity. The Resurrection. What do we revere? Trees. No, we do revere many, many things (trees among them), but we can’t state them simply. And that’s not bad! I like it. Anyone who sounds certain about most anything is oversimplifying. (And now I want to take a moment to thank Laurie for these wonderful banners that I review every Sunday. I haven’t memorized them yet, not like I still have memorized the Apostles’ Creed.) I loved the poetry of the Creed [example]. And I miss singing the Doxology [“Praise God from whom all blessings flow . . .”]. And the Gloria Patri [“Glory be to the Father . . . “]. And I miss greeting people in the ritualistic way we did before I started speaking. If I was sitting among people I knew, we’d break into brief conversations, but we’d always start, “Peace be with you.”

But just as we, UU’s, are not without things we revere, though they be harder to state than those things Christians revere, we, UU’s, are not without rituals. We have an order of service. We drop stones or light candles for our joys and concerns. We have certain readings we’ve selected for certain parts of the service. But they’re not as entrenched as readings and rituals in a Presbyterian service. And that can be a good thing! We’ve selected the readings from a menu of readings for particular places in the service, whereas Presbyterians all over the U.S. say and sing pretty much the same things each Sunday.

A little sidebar. I hatched the idea for this sermon only last Sunday. Something Rachel said inspired me. And I thought, sure, I’ve got twenty minutes on this. I approach sermons as research papers, so I started reading UU stuff on reverence and rituals. Dang, what a deep well! If I were a better writer and had more time, I’d synthesize what I’ve read and report it to you in a personal context, but jeez, I found one sermon that is what I’d write if I were a better writer.

The rest of my talk today will be that sermon, condensed a bit because of the time I’ve taken so far. Well, it was actually a lecture given by The Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons, minister of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, at the 2004 General Assembly. The title is “Human reverence: The Language of Reverence Is the Language of Humanity.”

Since I first engaged in conscious thought, I have been searching for a language of reverence. I am a child of humanist parents and the product of Unitarian Universalist religious education, shaped by the philosophy of the religious educator Sophia Fahs. She advocated allowing children’s own experiences and growth to lead them naturally to discover wonder and sacredness in life, rather than imposing religious texts or ideas on them. But this approach had its drawbacks.

As a young Unitarian Universalist in the 1960s, I was educated about human sexuality in a relatively open fashion; human religious experience, in contrast, was a closed book. I discovered my spirituality in much the same way that my peers raised in more conservative faiths discovered their sexuality -- accidentally, furtively, without guidance, moved by overwhelming inner tides, and with some sense of shame. I longed for the white shirt and red First Communion ties and the menorah candles of my neighbors. I yearned for someone, anyone, to take my childish capacity for devotion seriously. But seeds planted in paper cups on the Sunday school windowsill, the dead bird discovered in the backyard, and the annual flower communion were the scant resources my liberal religious education offered. To my parents and teachers -- almost all of whom had grown up in other religious traditions -- the absence of texts, rote prayers, sacraments, holy objects, and moralistic picture books represented freedom. But without any language for my emerging sense of mystery and wonder, I came to feel the contrary: deprived of the tools with which to understand or express those experiences.

I floundered in a kind of guilty yearning until I became intellectually mature enough to claim the rich heritage of humanity’s religious cultures for myself. I did so greedily, with none of the literalism that afflicts fundamentalists, whether orthodox or humanist. What I sought was some way to bring order to what had always been going on inside of me. And I encountered a whole universe of souls, across every culture and tradition, who knew all about it.

 Thus, with great interest and personal investment, I have followed the recent conversation among Unitarian Universalists exploring the call for a language, or vocabulary, of reverence. As one raised within our tradition, who claims our peculiar humanist dialect as a native tongue, I bring yet another perspective.

I see at least three different purposes for which we might find a language of reverence useful: to respond in the moment to our experiences of awe and communion; to describe those experiences to others; and to solicit such experiences, both in ourselves and in others.

It’s a great gift when those reverent moments of ecstasy and agony that demand expression yield a novel, spontaneous response within us. But rarely do new hymns rise to our lips fully formed. Most of the time we will find our responses in the images and music, the gestures and customs that we have learned. We learn what to do with our feelings by observing those who demonstrate what love in action looks like, or how to endure pain -- or indeed, how to express reverence. We learn to pray by seeing those we admire do it and find comfort. We learn how to behave in the presence of death by moving through our culture’s rituals. We learn the hymns we hear sung.

The experience to which we must reply is uniquely our own, but our options for responding in a way that fulfills us are widened by knowing how other people have done it. I came away from the movie Schindler’s List desperately longing for a prayer to recite, an act of contrition, an acknowledgement of holiness, a blessing for the dead, something that carried the weight of human history and usage. At such a moment, the blank slate of theological freedom and diversity is a sterile mirror. One needs a vocabulary of reverence ready at hand. Often I do not find it.

Religious humanists have long held that the phenomenon of reverence is a human experience that occurs regardless of theological belief. The feelings of reverence may be experienced in a context of atheism, agnosticism, or polytheism just as much as in monotheism. In a tradition as diverse as Unitarian Universalism, the language we use to describe our experiences of reverence will be most helpful if it is truthful, clear, and well-informed.

In contrast, when we seek to evoke experiences of reverence, as ministers or laypeople, what will serve us best is language that is poetic, evocative, and metaphorical. That means acknowledging that what is powerful is not always rational. The vocabulary that has been engraved on our neural pathways over the course of a lifetime has its effect, regardless of our intellectual opinions.

But mere repetition of what we know eventually creates boredom rather than reverence. When we use familiar words, symbols, and actions in creative ways, we can break through our habitual perceptions, open ourselves again to the wonder and tragedy of the world, and thus evoke reverence. The best wedding ceremony neither mechanically repeats the same prescribed text as every other wedding, nor indulges the random impulses of a particular couple, leaving the gathered congregation mystified. Rather, genuine reverence is evoked when we use the language and symbols of tradition in creative ways so that the universal is expressed through the individual.

The individual perception of reverence, like that of love or suffering, is not arguable. No one else can deny the reality of those sensations, when you feel that you have them. Former UUA President William G. Sinkford speaks of a long night sitting in the hospital with his teenage son, who lay near death: “I felt the hands of a loving universe reaching out to hold. The hands of God, the Spirit of Life. The name was unimportant. . . . I knew that I did not have to walk that path alone, that there is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will.” No one can argue that Sinkford didn’t have the experience he says he did. The question is whether our faith community is collectively prepared to help him understand, process, and honor it.

I submit -- and I believe this is the point that Sinkford was trying to make in that sermon -- that a religious tradition that does not help its members discover meaningful and satisfying ways of expressing and responding to the human experiences of reverence that happen in the course of their human lives is missing a crucial and central piece of its function. We are not dealing in debate or persuasion here. We are talking about how we “each of us, in our uniquely constituted beings” recognize and understand and make sense of that unbidden, overwhelming awe at the wonder, magnificence, danger, demand, and delight of being alive.

How can we best enrich the options that will be on hand for us when we need them? How do we structure our practices -- both personal and communal -- so that we can interpret our experiences of reverence in satisfying, life-giving ways? How might we better support one another in recognizing and honoring the reverent moments of our lives? To engage in these kinds of reflection is to nurture the virtue of reverence, and that process is made considerably more difficult when we lack a vocabulary for it.

Some in the humanist community find traditional religious language so defiled by irrationality as to be deemed unusable. I believe, on the contrary, that we need not invent a new vocabulary of reverence out of whole cloth. Such an arbitrary system, no matter how unobjectionable and even true its expressions, will not have, at least within the first generation, the profound resonances of lifelong memory.

Moreover, if we are to have a deep engagement with the challenges of our own time, we need an awareness of our historical context. To think that we must dispense with all traditional language, symbols, and concepts in order to speak about that which is deepest and dearest, the precious source of human good, is to assume that no human beings were ever before so clever, so profound, or so committed as we are; that those who have been down the path of life before us have no wisdom to teach, that we can learn nothing from all that they have left to us.

One of the things that most reliably draws out of me a feeling of deep respect mixed with wonder, fear, and love, is the knowledge that I am not alone in this enterprise. We are not the first to walk this path, to stutter in the presence of mystery and power. The awe and gratitude, the affirmation and praise go back generations and centuries, to the first dawning of human consciousness.

What we feel on the shores of the ocean or the mountain heights is no special insight of our own; it is the common heritage of the human race. There is nothing so petulant as to throw away what our ancestors have tried to pass on to us, in stories and stones, in scriptures and songs, in rituals and prayers, because we think that we in our adolescent hubris know better now.

Genuine human language is a collective enterprise. It evolves organically in response to the demands of experience and interaction. Each of us is born with the capacity to learn a variety of such languages. Indeed, that learning process shapes our understanding of the world and our very physical brains. I see no reason to suppose that the realm of the spirit is structured any differently. What we can comprehend is to some extent a function of what we have been given names for -- even the awareness of that which is ultimately unnamable.

Each generation and each of us as individuals must make the language of reverence our own. The call for such a vocabulary is a call to move forward, not backward. It is a call for creativity, for experiment, a demand that we speak the truth as we know it. It summons us to recount to one another those moments that left us with a lump in the throat or a song in the heart; those night vigils in the hospital that ended in an embracing peace; the hours of soul searching that ended in remorse and a resolution to do better next time. It is an invitation to build from the wrecked timbers of old ritual the new structures of ceremony that can give shape to our reverence in the most awesome, meaning-laden moments of our lives.

The language of reverence is, finally, the language of humanity. The human experience of finding ourselves in the presence of that intense, fleeting, and demanding moment when the dull surfaces of things become transparent to a significance almost greater than we can bear belongs to all of us. Only by not paying attention can we avoid it. It doesn’t need gods or angels or magical other worlds. The world we have is magical enough, holy enough, sacred enough. We are the ones who bring the eyes to see, the minds and souls to marvel. We are the ones who must build the meanings of our brief days out of what we find to be deeply and powerfully important, right here, out of the utterly natural stuff of life. The holy is nothing but the ordinary, held up to the light and profoundly seen. It is the awareness of a creativity and a connection that we do not control, in a universe that is always larger, more intricate, and more astonishing than we imagine. It is the acknowledgment that we are formed by the earth from which we arise, and in which we live and move and have our being; and that we are, finally, not alone. For our very humanity is illuminated for us by our fellow beings, each of whom offers the authentic presence of the divine.

We ought to be about the business of re-examining and reclaiming the treasures of articulated reverence that star the landscape of human history -- if for no other reason, for the sake of the children we must otherwise raise in the spiritual vacuum of our own resentments. In the process, we might find ourselves improved in modesty and maturity, as well as vocabulary, and that in itself would be no bad thing.