Melissa Smith Our theme of the month is imagination, hence I titled sermon “reimagining ourselves into the new year.” In the process of associations for with the month of January I looked to the titular source and learned that Janus, the god, to be the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and ending. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the past and the future. That is our perspective for today.
The past is lived reality, while the future lies in the realm of the imagination. This time last year, what has to come to pass in the year 2020 was unimaginable in our wildest dreams or resolves, when and if we made resolutions at the beginning of last year. We were confronted by a political divide that widened to include whether one believed in climate change, believed in the reality of Covid pandemic, believed in systemic racism. And one of the many things we had to reimagine was how to conduct our worship service. By now, the Zoom platform has become a comfortable reality for most of us.
Before last year the figure 2020 (a.k.a. 20/20) was associated with clarity of vision. In the year 2020 we were to hold in our sights much that we did not want to see in our society. Now that the year is past, we can look at 2020 with hindsight 20/20 vision. We can look at our own personal paths in the context of a broader history. So today you will be learning some of mine; I hope we will continue to learn more of each others’ as we meet in fellowship.
For me 2020 was a turning point in some positive ways. Thanks to Zoom, Imanaged to re-join the church community by being on an equal footing with those who could use their feet. While many have been suffering from the constraints of imposed sequestration, For the last several years I have been practicing various forms of self-isolation due to the fact that I have entered the stage of my multiple sclerosis considered bedbound. This coincided with my retirement from the faculty of YSU, and some consequent floundering with ways of giving my life a sense of purpose and meaning. Thanks to the service of friends and Health Aides, I continued to attend external events, audit classes, but did considerable introspection, that led to writing an application to the Central East Region of the UUA Commissioned Lay Ministry Program (CLM). Finally, in October of this past year, I was formally admitted. I have described the CLM as similar to a graduate MA program, 2-4 years of study, reading, with a variety of mentors, but DIY course work. You recall that Gary Davenport recently completed his commission in Social Justice Ministry. My “major,” on the other hand, is Worship.
So now the question I shall be asking myself seriously in the coming months and years is “What does it mean to worship? What do we do when we come together to worship? Today I pose this question to you in the hopes that you can help me as I work towards becoming a commissioned lay minister in the UUYO.
I had always thought of worship as a private, personal thing, a check-in with my spiritual “pilot light.” Consequently, I met the assigned reading of a text entitled “Worship that Works,” with a sense of irritation. Were they proposing worship as a manipulation of the congregation? So I began to search for a definition I could live with.
Being by training a philologist, a lover of language, I looked in dictionaries, in etymologies, in thesauruses, in translations of the word in other languages in my toolbox. A common thread was reverence toward…but what? There is a common joke that UUs pray “To whom it may concern.” Is that as good as it gets? In “A Pocket Guide to Unitarian-Universalism” (edited by Susan Frederick-Gray), I found the linguistically more promising: “unlike traditional concepts, UUs use worship as an intransitive, not transitive verb” and offers instead worship as: “Way a congregation (or a people of faith) tells its stories.” Intransitive does not “carry across” (transit) but operates within. We are Alone together, bound by a transcendent spirit.
Hence my worship story, or herstory. My family migrated among sects of Protestantism, refusing to baptise me until I could reason its meaning for myself. I have acknowledged my affiliation with Unitarian universalism (which HAS no baptism) since age 11 when my family joined the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Wayland Massachusetts. My family had moved to a house located as two miles south of Walden Pond. As my father, a professor of American history, quickly chose to identify with the Unitarian part (the first u), and the rational roots of our denomination, I quickly absorbed the dissolution of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) and recall decomposing the Apostles creed that we recited in chapel at the Episcopal summer camp I attended from ages 11 to 13. My father who wert in Wayland, however, dismissed the second U, Universalism, as too grounded in emotion, which was the very element that the “oracles of concord,” such as Emerson and Thoreau rejected during the Trinitarian Great Awakening of their era. Only much later did I learn about the class distinctions that informed these two pillars of our faith traditions, both of which had taken a foothold in our country in New England.
I recently asked my program mentor, Reverend Steven Protzmann, a born and raised Midwesterner, what he saw as the differences between UUs of New England and the Midwest, he answered with an anecdote which I rephrase as “New Englanders, in rejecting the divinity of Christ, see belief in Christ as optional; Midwesterners hold that Belief in God is optional, while West-Coasters contend that belief in clothes is optional.” Whatever system you choose, UU’s will enforce no dogma. Only in the church building itself do we enforce “no shirts, no shoes, no service.”
My first boyfriend in college, a lapsed Catholic, would parody the progressivistic hymns we sang in my home church “mankind is marching ooon-ward.” While I myself never accepted the idea of hell , I also had my doubts about progress and the perfectibility of the human spirit. (Enlightenment ideas), and my subsequent studies in Russian language, culture and Russian literature as well as lived experiences in the Soviet Union of the Cold War deepened my ambivalence.
My adult years have been spent meandering among faith traditions. My decision to accept a job at YSU in 1986 was at least in part influenced by my discovery of the UU church prominently located in the vicinity of the university. When I signed the book as an official member in 1988, as I walked back down the center aisle, then-Re. Steven Beall remarked, “joining a church is one of the most significant commitments one can make in one’s adult life,” I thought “uh-oh, what have I gotten myself into?”
For most of my membership life at UUYO, I have been involved in the planning of worship services, either as a co-chair of the so-called “alternative/alternate services committee” (planning for the summer, or for one Sunday per month that the minister as off), or as member of what is now known as the “worship associates” committee. At meetings we begin by tossing around ideas we associate with the theme of the month,. I shared the reading from Howard Thurman today as an appropriate thought stimulator with Reverend Joseph when it came to me as part of my “First Light Meditation” subscription December 13, 2020. (I discovered this subscription at the UUA General Assembly I attended virtually last summer.)
Which brings me back to my opening questions. How can we reimagine ourselves into 2021? For this we offer our prayers. Mine today is dictated by a contemporary theologian, most familiar to us in song:
