Sermon – “Strength in the Storm”

Matt Alspaugh

Introduction
A storm is brewing. Some of you remember the days before weather apps on your phone, before 21 day forecasts, before even computerized weather prediction, maybe even before weather satellites. A time when the prediction from the weatherman was really no more than prophecy.
You’d read the sky for storms, red sky in the morning – sailor’s warning, or the green sky presaging hail or tornadoes. You’d watch the dial of the barometer on the wall, comparing the two needles to discern dropping air pressure. With flags flapping, trees beginning to move in freshets of wind, you might look apprehensively at the line of dark clouds, and do the very few things you could to prepare. For us, it was to put the lawn furniture and the garbage cans in the garage, and then just hunker down inside, to see if this one was just a typical storm, or ‘the big one’.
I think many of us are seeing the current presidency as just such a storm, one of unknown magnitude, one for which we have had little time to prepare, one for which we could not prepare in any meaningful way.

In trying to find historical parallels — at least in our own lives — many of us might compare these times to the times right after September 11, 2001. But we’d note differences. In the days after those attacks, we were remarkably united as a country, and we stayed united, until decisions about war and torture began to divide us as a people. Today, we start out divided as a people, a condition which does not bode well for us as a country.
A storm is brewing, and how do we get through it? How do we find strength in the storm? How do we find the strength to survive?

I’m convinced that we find our strength through our faith, that is through our understanding of the world, and our place in the world. It might be faith in God however God is interpreted, or faith in the innate evolved goodness of humanity that science is only now beginning to fully understand. It might be faith that it will all turn out all right, ultimately, and that it is simply enough for me to do my part. It might be a confidence that we, collectively have survived much worse, and we will survive this.
But I also know that this faith thing doesn’t just happen, it requires nurturing and tending. The spirit of the self must be attended to. And faith is particularly hard to nurture when you’re working alone.

It’s Easier in Community
I typically go to a group exercise class at the Jewish Community Center, three times a week. It is a reasonably strenuous mix of aerobics and weight training. More than anything, it is what keeps me in shape — well, except for last Friday’s class, which was very strenuous, but which ended with the instructor pulling out boxes of donuts for us to share, as kind of a celebration. And like Homer Simpson, I cannot resist a sugar glazed donut! But I digress…
Now if I miss a class, or worse, a string of classes, I’m tempted to try to do similar exercises at home. I’ve learned over time that this is just impossible for me. I just don’t have the determination to work through a full set of exercises like we do together. I’m lucky if at home, I get through maybe a third of the reps we do in class.
In a similar way, when we do group meditations like we do here, or in Explorations, or in the biweekly meditation group, I’ve had people say how much easier it is to do meditation together than alone at home. I believe that this is true of a whole variety of religious and spiritual practices — from meditation to prayer to learning new theologies — these things are just more easily done together. We gain more, we have more uplifting experiences when we do them together.

Coyote and his Strange Friends
The story we heard of Coyote[1] points to this truth. Without our spiritual companions, we very likely can lose our spiritual way – our songs and our dances. Because our spirituality is bound up in our companions.
And so, even though sometimes we find our companions — these fellow congregants– a little annoying or strange, we put up with them. No, we don’t merely put up with them, we don’t merely tolerate them, we accept them. We love them. We recognize how valuable they are in our own lives. We recognize how rare those people are in this world, and we are glad they are here.

Acceptance and Encouragement to Spiritual Growth
Today’s is the third in a series of sermons exploring how we can use our seven principles as value touchstones in living our lives in these perilous times. Over these past three weeks, we’ve considered the first three principles.
We’ll have a break from the series for two weeks, returning to the series in February. Liz and I are headed off for two weeks of Spanish language immersion in Mexico. We thought we’d need to escape the cold, but here we are — who doesn’t believe in global warming now!

The third principle encourages us to “affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.”
Now the wording is a little odd, for the principles are a covenant among congregations, so this principle is directed toward congregations. But in practice, we’ve come to think of these principles as guide-stars for our own individual lives.

Bound Up – Strength in Community
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the noted writer and storyteller — a Cuentista — shared the story[2] we heard earlier, offered by the man she calls El Bulto. The dying man calls his family together, and hands them sticks, asking them to break them, which they can easily do. He tells them, “This is how it is when a soul is alone and without anyone. They can be easily broken.”
But in bundles of twos and threes, the sticks could not be broken. He says, “This is how I would like you to live after I pass. …We are strong when we stand with another soul. When we are with others, we cannot be broken.”

Indeed, the origin of the word religion is the latin, ligare, “to bind together.” We see the same root word in ligament, binding bones together, and even legato, music where the notes are played seamlessly, bound together, without intervals. So the act of doing religion is to be bound together. Religion is done in community.
But some of you already know what’s next. In Roman times, the symbol of power for a magistrate or leader was a group of bound up sticks. The Latin word for such a bundle of sticks is fasces. This is the origin of the word Fascism, that nationalistic, right-wing, authoritarian form of government of early 20th century Italy and Germany.

The very similarity of these word concepts points to an existential tension — how can we be together without having to be bound together in an authoritarian, hierarchical, even patriarchal system where only certain prescribed beliefs and actions are tolerated?
More bluntly, how can we get the benefits of binding together, like El Bulto’s sticks, without being bound up so closely and tightly that we lose our identities, our conscience, our freedom of thought?

Acceptance of Variety of Belief
As Unitarian Universalists, one of the unique qualities we claim as a faith tradition is a wide degree of tolerance for individual spiritual beliefs and practices. We rejoice that we are able to make space in one church community for Christians and Pagans and Jews, for Atheists and Theists and Nontheists, for people that believe in reincarnation and those that believe in heaven and those that believe in earth, and everything in between. It’s been a long fought battle in our history, probably not completely over, but we try to make room for as many as possible.

How Big a Circle
There’s a poem by Edwin Markham, that’s a favorite for many of us:
He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.[3] We strive to include everyone, to take them in our circle. I admit this poem is aspirational. We intentionally draw our circle large, to include as many as we can, to invite them into conversation, and into acceptance. But there are limits to how wide we can go.
For there are limits to belief in our churches. The most obvious is if you believe that your own beliefs are correct and everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, and you believe it is your obligation to compel everyone else to change their beliefs to be like yours, well… you won’t get very far here.
Think of it — especially in these times of a post-truth world — of fake news, and false facts, and tweet leadership, we must look beliefs squarely in the eye and divide truth — that which can be verifiable — from opinion claiming to be truth. We must expect people to bring a degree of humility about their beliefs and experiences. We must recognize that there are degrees of certainty, especially with respect to religious ideas and spiritual experiences.
Especially spiritual experiences, because they can be so personal and intimate.

My Own Experiences
I think of my own spiritual experiences — mystical experiences, as some of you might call them. Some of these mystical experiences came in the form of remembered dreams, some as deep meditations, and one or two might even have been what some would call numinous experiences. These mystical experiences have offered me clues about the deep meaning of the world. They are pivotal points in my life. I’m grateful for these gifts of learning.
But I’m also humble with such mystical observations. I have been careful to consider how they align with our own deep religious ideals — that all people do have inherent worth and dignity, for example, that we are indeed a part of a larger web of life.
I’m respectful that the particularities of my spiritual experience do not overwhelm the underlying foundational meaning contained in these experiences. I know it is easy to get hung up on the surface level — who showed up in a dream, doing what, — for that matter, was the dream in color or not, or did you, falling, wake up from the dream before hitting the ground. It’s easy to get focused on all that and miss the deep message, one that might be urging you toward something noble and true in your life.

Other Paths for Spiritual Growth
For others, spiritual experience might be accessed in vastly different ways. Some of you might have a vibrant prayer life, in which prayer is an active conversation with the embodied eternal, with words going both ways, and silence only as silence is needed.
For others, silence is the starting point, because for you, to “pray is to listen to the revelations of nature, to the meaning of events”[4], as we read earlier. Some of you may prefer the spirituality of the researcher, as you draw on secondary sources for your understanding, reading the vetted and time-proven stories of mystics and teachers.
For others still, the spiritual experience comes on your feet, doing the work, as many of you did, out on the streets at the Women’s March in DC and Pittsburgh and Columbus and elsewhere, yesterday. I salute you, who participated in those incredible marches.

Spirituality is Everyday Life
But let’s be honest. For most of us most of the time, “our daily life is our temple and our religion.”, to borrow a line from Kahlil Gibran[5]. That great Lebanese poet tells us to make the mundane sacred; to consider how all the things that make up our life help form us as spiritual beings. For Gibran, it was the plough and the forge and the lute, for us, it might be the cubicle and the hedge fund and the Netflix account, but it amounts to the same thing.
If we can see past the surface level, and peer deeper into even the modest glimmer in our day to day, ordinary existence — if we can see a hint of hope, we find ourselves taking a step on the path of spiritual growth. And the path will wind and ultimately carry us into communion with all people, and their hopes and their despairs. The path leads toward unity.

Conclusion
Last week, I played a minor part at the Martin Luther King community worship service, held at Greater Friendship Baptist Church, one of the larger black churches in town. A few of you were there with me.
It was an amazing worship experience. A young preacher, still in seminary, Devante Hudson, delivered an impressive sermon. Touching on the current situation, the storm brewing, he still had hope. He reminded the people, his people, that they have already been through far worse: the Middle Passage, slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, mass incarceration. Do not despair, he said, we know how to survive, we know to carry the load we are called to carry now.

I reflected on the despair that I have felt, and realized that if there was a community of people who could really feel despair, it would be that community — and here they were finding a way not just to cope, but to persevere.
Could we not do the same, in solidarity with them? Could we not do the same, in solidarity with all the communities hunkered down in the storm? Could we not work together with them to bind together as communities of difference, diverse, varied, yet forming into one strong, unbreakable bundle? These are rhetorical questions — to which the answer is Yes.

Let me end by reclaiming for Unitarianism the words of one of our great prophets, Rev. Theodore Parker. In a sermon published in 1853, he wrote this.
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.[6]

Deep down inside, that is what gives me hope. While my eye — this eye — sees only a little way, I am certain that the arc of the moral universe, however long, bends towards justice.

Notes:
1 http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/welcome/session6/118305.shtml
2 from “Women Who Run With the Wolves” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes, p. 45.
3 https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edwin_Markham
4 http://4umi.com/gibran/prophet/26
5 ibid.
6 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/