She was one of those figures that had leaned out from the front of a ship in olden times. She was black as she could be, her face a map of all the storms and journeys she’d been through. Even though she wasn’t dressed up like Mary, I knew that’s who she was. She was a mix of might and humble all in one. I didn’t know what to think but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up.
The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest had ached then, too, this very same way.
The lips on the statue had a beautiful half smile, the sight of which caused me to move both my hands up to my throat. Everything about that smile said, Lily Owens, I know you down to the core.
I felt she knew what a lying, murdering, hating person I really was.
I wanted to cry, but then, in the next instant, I wanted to laugh, because the statue make me feel like Lily the Smiled-Upon, like there was goodness and beauty in me, too.
Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.
It was indeed twenty years ago, on my first Mother’s Day, that I officially began as your called Director of Religious Education. However, it was not my first Sunday with you. My first Sunday with you was actually before I was presented as the candidate for Director of Religious Education. Because I was not a Unitarian Universalist and had never attended a Unitarian Universalist church, the Search Committee asked me to attend a worship service here. As you know from our recent search for a new minister, the search process is confidential. So, the Search Committee coached me very carefully for the visit. My husband David and I were to arrive as close to the start of the service as we could, wait in the parking lot until time for the service to start, come quickly into the church, sit in the back, and leave immediately following the service, speaking to no one and telling no one our names.
We followed their instructions precisely up to walking into the church lobby. We had our eyes focused straight ahead at the worship hall doors to avoid any possible eye contact and were planning to walk briskly the short distance from entry doors to worship hall. We were barely a step into the lobby when we found ourselves enthusiastically approached and welcomed by a couple who were members of the church. I have never been so warmly and happily welcomed—even though I was unable to speak for a moment, the Search Committee’s faces appearing with horror before my mind’s eye. I have a vivid memory of that welcome—their faces, big smiles, posture and words all saying Welcome! Welcome! Come in, just who you are, you have a place here. Come in and be part of this great community! To me, that welcome is quintessentially you.
So many times during my first year, during my twenty years, I’ve heard your stories about finding here a warm, welcoming, inclusive community and heard you use this as a description of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville. I’ve heard your concern when someone has not felt warmly welcomed or included and your concern that we be as warm, welcoming, and inclusive community as we can. It’s a value that goes deep and has held an on-going place in the life of the church. I’ve also heard the fears, especially during times of change, transition, and growth that we will lose the warmth that many feel is such an important part of this community. I want to say one thing about this fear—whenever we say we are afraid of losing our warm community, we have lost it. Fear shuts down our welcoming and our inclusion, the very thing at our community’s core. When we hold what we care about tight because of fear of loss, what we care about is stifled, especially if that value is inclusion. We have to hold the things we care about lightly and gently, so that they have room to grow and to be transformative of us in ways that we cannot anticipate.
We are called to question continually, “How can we extend warm, welcoming, loving community into the world?” And we are called to do the acts of creation that come to us in response to our questioning.
Two years ago this spring, we were in conflict and deep hurt. We did not feel like a warm, welcoming-to-all community, or even any kind of community. So much hurt throughout our whole congregation among all ages, including our children and teens. Dr. Fred Luskin writes that each person involved in any hurtful experience will tell a different story. We each have our different story, each of us who were part of the congregation two years ago and each of us who has become part of the congregation since. We have our community story as well, our community response. In the midst of the hurt two springs ago, our common response, our community response was “We have messed up badly and we don’t ever want to mess up like this again. We want to learn what we need to learn and do what we need to do so that we do not have this kind of hurt again.”
Honesty about our fallible human community and a deep and persistent desire to recover this beloved community as a congregation of inclusion and welcome, love and trust, that honesty and desire was and is part of your glory. It is when we are willing to go to our most honest places, our most painful places that we often grow the most, there we find our compassion and forgiveness, our shame and our glory. The work of this congregation since spring two years ago has included some individual and community honesty right down to our core, like that of Lily Owens in the reading.
As I’ve thought about this period of two springs ago to our present, images from the story about how geese travel keep coming to my mind’s eye. Geese travel in a V-shaped formation, a formation in which the wing action of each goose helps support each other and the whole formation. The geese take turns flying as the leader, which is a more tiring position, so that no one gets too tired out. If one of the geese is hurt or sick, two or three other geese fall back and stay with the injured or sick one until it is well enough to catch up with the group.
In my mind’s eye I see your formation as a little ragged, but I see this as a good thing because I see it as a result of your efforts to make room for people in their different places of processing the church conflict. Making room for people whatever is happening in their lives. It seems to me that, during this period, you’ve had a heightened consciousness of how important every single person, new and long-time, young and old, is to the whole community—a heightened consciousness of how important it is to be as one. Some new people have taken turns at being leaders and some of our long-term leaders have spoken more strongly about the need for additional people to take a turn. Most important, you’ve continued to fly.
Sometimes we become so focused on our human fallibility that we forget, like Lily from the reading, that there is goodness and beauty and glory in us too. One of the blessings of the newer people among us is that you spot immediately that we are flying. You spot the goodness and beauty.
In one of Howard Thurman’s meditations, slightly edited, he wrote:
When have you last had a good session with yourself? Or have you ever had it out with you? Most often you are brought face to face with yourself only when such an encounter is forced upon you.... Whatever may be the occasion there comes a deep necessity which leads you finally into the closet with yourself. It is here that you raise the real questions about yourself. The leading one is, What is it, after all, that I amount to, ultimately? Such a question cuts through all that is superficial and trivial in life to the very nerve center of yourself. And this is a religious question because it deals with the total meaning of life at its heart. At such a moment, and at such a time, you must discover for yourself what is the true basis of your self-respect. This is found only in relation to [the Spirit of Life] whose Presence makes itself known in the most lucid moments of self-awareness. For all of us are [Life’s] children and the most crucial clue to a knowledge of [the Spirit of Life] is to be found in the most honest and most total knowledge of the self.
Our recent past has been such an occasion, such a catalyst for an honest session with ourselves, as individuals and as a community. I hope we will carry as full and whole a memory of it as we are able, no easy truth but a complex human truth of many individual stories of pain, of human fallibility, of human love and commitment, and of a community able to feel both its shame and its glory. I hope we will allow this memory to have a place in our congregation that compels each of us and each new person who comes here to ask ourselves again and again, “What is it, after all, that I amount to, ultimately?”
I hope we will carry with us as well those things that have been the bedrock of the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, of which we are a part—freedom of belief and the understanding of the responsibility that comes with freedom; the use of reason and a passion to be a voice for reason in our world; tolerance of one another accompanied by a clear articulation of our deepest commitments. I consistently find that when I am using my own freedom responsibly, I also honor the freedom of others more. When I am clearest about my own call and commitments, I am most respectful of the call and commitments of others. When I allow my reason and my passion to inform each other, I find that my passion gives my reason life and my reason gives my passion sense—I am energized for action and I become a better, more careful listener.
What part glory in a fallible human community? The glory is to look on one another with love, mistakes and all. To look on one another and want to cry and in the next instant want to laugh. The glory in a fallible human community is to look on one another and know at the same time the unpleasant truth about ourself and the goodness and beauty in us, too. The glory is, as fallible humans, to create warm, welcoming, inclusive community and to persist in being a blessing to one another and to our world.
I loved you immediately from the first Sunday I came as a pre-candidate and I still do, every one of you, I love. Thank you for the privilege of service and growth that you have called and challenged me to for the past twenty years and for sharing the blessings of this religious community with me.