First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
A Sermon by Ms. Deanna Vandiver, Ministerial Aspirant
I have prayed out loud more in the past six months than I have in all the years between now and when I was a five year old singing prayers on a daily basis under the guidance of my beloved Sunday school teacher Sister Sharon. I have a confession – praying out loud feels strange after all these years. I have another confession – it feels so right. As a Chaplain Resident at a community hospital, I have actually heard these words come out of my mouth – “Do you mind if we pray?” I have felt anxiety lessened, more peaceful states achieved, seen grace abound after prayer. And the patients and their families often feel better too.
As the only Chaplain Resident of the seven in my Clinical Pastoral Education program who does not identify as Christian, the past few months have led me to intensely examine my own spiritual practices and try to figure out what prayer means within my own faith tradition. Like many Unitarian Universalists, I came to our faith as an adult. When in doubt, I often turn to our Principles & Purposes for a sense of grounding within the beloved community. Because our UU Association of Congregations consciously revisits our Principles & Purposes every few years, I find them to be a good starting point for understanding our Living Tradition.
Here I found the third Unitarian Universalist principle which we affirm: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Encouragement of spiritual growth – that could include exploring prayer and other spiritual practices. And then I found more. The living tradition which we share draws from many sources, including “the source of direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” Wow. “A renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” Now that’s something a UU chaplain can work with. In fact, that’s something all Unitarian Universalists have within their living tradition to call upon, to delve into, to experience.
Rev. Sinkford’s letter, read to us this morning by Worship Associate Gerry Goar, described the magical moment when the UU ministers involved in his study group suddenly realized that they were naming a powerful truth about our living tradition: “we nurture the human spirit. We encourage and help people to get in contact with the holy in their lives. And we help heal the world.” For all the UU jokes and the discomfort many UUs feel with the language of reverence, at our core, as a faith community, we are called to encourage each other to name and honor that which is holy in our lives.
Unitarian Universalist ministerss Wayne Arnason and Kathleen Rolenz, from whose article our morning meditation reading came, have named this UU paradox. They write:
When it comes to understanding the form and meaning of prayerful moments in Unitarian Universalist worship, the first practical question we encounter is our dilemma with the language of reverence. Ministers are keenly aware that if they were simply to say “Dear God . . .” some members of their congregation would flinch in the moment or protest later. We strive to be as theologically inclusive as possible. We ask ourselves, what about the pagans in our midst? How do we include them in a spoken prayer? How about the atheists in our congregation, for whom the word God or the mention of a deity outside of human knowledge is meaningless?... How can we pray with integrity, grace, power, and purpose, when we struggle with the question of to whom we are praying?
Our fourth principle calls each one of us to “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Many UU’s describe their faith as a journey, a quest. While there are confirmed Pagans and confirmed Atheists and confirmed Christians in our community, more of us seem to be on search for an understanding of the divine that stretches these theological categories beyond their historical foundations. Rev. Sinkford says that Unitarian Universalism pitches “a very big theological tent.” Our Principles & Purposes demand an extraordinarily expansive tent to hold our individual understanding of the divine.
And how do we find that understanding, to whom are we praying, from within our non-doctrinal, non-creedal, living Unitarian Universalist faith tradition? Raised in a fundamentalist Pentacostal Church, I found the theology of my childhood to be far too restrictive and small to contain my experience of the holy in the world. I knew what did not work for me, but had no new spiritual practice to replace what had been a core part of my life when I left the church of my family of origin.
Finding the very large theological tent of Unitarian Universalism was a wonderful gift for me. I soon discovered, however, that my spiritual journey had only begun. I was now no longer a part of a faith tradition that demanded I follow a rigid understanding of the holy. Instead, I am now a part of a faith tradition that demands that I build my own theology within a community of people committed to doing the same. The expectation of our living tradition is that we do not have the same experience of the divine, but that we will “encourage and help [each other] to get in contact with the holy in [our] lives.
But how do we do that? In 2005, Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom, a UU minister, wrote a small and useful text called Simply Pray: A modern spritual practice to deepen your life. From within our very big theological tent, he offers the following wisdom:
If you have given up on an anthropomorphic diety—the old white guy with the long white beard or any of his stand-ins—yet can’t figure out what to put in its place, stop looking for something and start simply looking around you. Notice those places in your life where you have felt yourself in the presence of the Holy, remember those experiences in which you have heard your connectedness; seek in your own life—your own feelings, your own moments—those places where you have encountered, or are encountering, the Sacred. In other words, simply pray. Pray without any preconceived notion of what you’re doing or why. Simply do it and see what happens (Wikstrom, Simply Pray, 5).
This instruction confounds many of us UUs who go after the Divine with our heads and not our hearts. Wikstrom lets us know that it isn’t an either/or – it is a both/and. We cannot encounter the holy in our lives simply through our heads - we must experience the sacred with our beings. But unlike some faith tradtions, Unitarian Universalism doesn’t leave us there, in an unexamined and uncritiquable place. As Rev. Wikstrom explains:
After you pray, then begin to think. Think about what your experiences tell you about the holy. Think about what those experiences tell you about the way the world works and the spirit moves. Build your theology on your experience, rather than the other way around. Define the divine for yourself through your own experiences rather than seeking experiences that match someone else’s definition (Wikstrom, Simply Pray, 5).
In 1914, Reverend John H. Applebee, preaching at the May Memorial Church in Syracus, NY, declared:
So I cannot tell definitely all that Unitarianism is to me. Who of us has not experienced the futility of attempting to put a vital experience into words? What is really essential escapes. The letter kills the spirit. And there is just the point. Unitarianism is a spirit. It is not a text book, nor a formula; it is a spirit. And being so, it eludes definition. In every attempted definition of religion, there is something left out…. That something is the soul's personal spiritual experience. It is just so with Unitarianism. ... It is the individual soul's spiritual experience when left free to live its own life on its own terms.
In almost a hundred years, the language of our living tradition may have changed, but the message has remained surprisingly the same. We are a community of faith with a call to both experience the holy and to live our individually experienced truths within the context of congregations that nurture our spirit and help heal the world. It is no easy task. It demands spiritual discipline, spiritual practice.
In 1989, our UUA published a curriculum called "On the Path: Spirituality for Youth and Adults." This curriculum explains what spiritual discipline can mean within a Unitarian Universalist context.
A spiritual discipline is a way that you organize yourself to be open and available to your own spirituality on a regular basis. Spirituality is an experience of a depth dimension to life—beyond the physical, the obvious, the provable, and the universally shared. It involves the relationship between one’s being and the universe. Discipline means that you choose to explore the spiritual part of yourself, and you choose to do this regularly… When you work with a spiritual discipline, you do this activity, whatever it is, not just when you feel like it, but according to whatever agreement you’ve made with yourself. For UUs, the most common spiritual practice is collective worship. The common elements of worship are: sacred space, opening words, chalice lighting, music, sermon, prayer, and closing words. Other common forms of spiritual practice for UUs include physical exercises [like yoga], or ascetic practices like fasting, journal writing, or meditation.
And here I am, praying out loud again for the first time in a long time, engaged in a spiritual discipline that nourishes my soul, that reflects my experience of the divine, that honors and names my relationship with the Universe.
Arnason and Rolenz write:
Prayer can cut through our intellectual barriers and touch our hearts, enabling us to feel truly held and embraced by community and by love. At its best, prayer is a conversation between people and their minister, their community, the [universe], or their God.
Today I invite you, as your body and spirit allow, to consciously spend time with the sacred. Your very presence here, in our collective worship service, is a spiritual practice, a spiritual discipline. As you explore your relationship with the holy within our faith community and within every aspect of your life, you breathe the very breath of life into our living faith tradition.
“Until the sun burns out and the stars grow cold.” Amen. Namaste. Blessed be.
Sermon Sources:
Applebee, Rev. John H., Sermon: “UNITARIANISM: What It Is Not, and What It Is,” May Memorial Church, 1914. Published by the Woman's Alliance of May Memorial Church, Syracuse, NY.
Arnason, Wayne & Rolenz, Kathleen, “Praying as Unitarian Universalists -How can we pray with integrity, grace, power, and purpose?” UU World, Spring 2008.
Sinkford, By William G., (President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations), “Nurture the spirit, help heal the world,” UU World, Summer 2008.
UUA Curriculum, "On the Path: Spirituality for Youth and Adults," 1989.
Wikstrom, Erik Walker. Simply Pray: A modern spritual practice to deepen your life. Skinner House Books: Boston, 2005.
READING: "Nurture the spirit, help heal the world”
By William G. Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
The more I travel around the country, meeting so many of you and our wonderful congregations, the more I appreciate that Unitarian Universalism pitches a very big theological tent. This is not news, I know, but it is an amazing thing to try to wrap your mind around. Theists and humanists, Buddhists and Christians, all worshipping together on Sunday mornings. Pluralism is a hallmark of our tradition.
Still, some have sought to find the “center” of our faith. I understand the impulse — the desire for something to grasp, even in the midst of the beauty and mystery we experience in one another’s presence Sunday after Sunday. On the other hand, when we set aside the notion of a center around which faith revolves, and instead talk about what holds us together and strengthens this faith, the result can be deeply inspiring.
Recently, I had just such an experience when the UUA’s Growth Team gathered twelve ministers from some of our fastest growing congregations. For two and a half days, these successful, growth-oriented ministers sat in an inner circle surrounded by the Growth Team. We listened as they responded to provocative questions from the facilitator. Her first question was brilliant: What is the saving message of your congregation? It was fascinating to listen as — in various theological languages, and in just two or three sentences — they all said the same thing.
What they said, one after another, was this: The saving message of my congregation is that we nurture the human spirit. We encourage and help people to get in contact with the holy in their lives. And we help heal the world. From then on, “nurture the spirit and help heal the world” became a kind of mantra that ran through our time together, shifting us away from any preoccupation with finding a center of belief, and into thinking about what our congregations are called to do. This experience affirmed that our mission as a faith community includes preparing the way for a different kind of growth as well: spiritual growth.
How can we help one another to deepen our spiritual lives, encouraging one another to spiritual depth? For this, too, helps heal the world. And out of the place of nurture, what are we called to do to help heal the world? Tradition, action, and care for the soul are of one cloth. What is the saving message of your congregation?
Just as Unitarian Universalism encompasses much diversity, so also there will be many ways in which we “nurture the spirit, and help heal the world.” …
MEDITATION
Today’s reading for meditation comes from an article by Unitarian Universalists Wayne Arnason and Kathleen Rolenz titled, “Praying as Unitarian Universalists -How can we pray with integrity, grace, power, and purpose?” (UU World, Spring 2008)
The power of silence cannot be overestimated, and yet it is one of the aspects of liturgy most lacking in [UU] worship. Perhaps this is because most of us are uncomfortable with silence. Our discomfort may come from our rebelling against having to be silent in church as children, or perhaps it is the awareness that when we enter silence together, we really aren’t completely silent. [A] stomach rumbles. A child cries... Someone coughs… [Perhaps, however] the more compelling reason that Unitarian Universalists tend to shun silence is that it invites us to enter deep waters of the spirit, and we do not know if we have the buoyancy to swim.
“Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist writes… To sit together in silence requires confronting the inner workings of our own minds. In silence, we see more clearly our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and losses. We can shut them out by compiling our to-do lists or fretting about the crying baby, but if we continue with the silence, we feel the tug of the spirit calling us to a larger life. For some, these feelings are strange and unsettling. There is nothing to do in that silence but “be.” There are no landmarks, …, no GPS systems to guide us, save for the rhythm of our own heartbeat and the rise and fall of our own breath.
When a congregation enters a deeper silence together, the feeling in the room is palpable. The silence is rich and dense… It is here, in this space, that the knowing comes, that the insight is seen and the healing witnessed.
Herein ends our reading and begins our time together as a congregation bravely entering into a time of silent meditation. I invite you to find a comfortable position and with eyes opened or closed as you prefer, begin to pay attention to the rise and fall of your own breath. We will spend time together in silent communal medition, exploring a spiritual practice that is found in many of the Sources we draw upon in our living tradition.
BENEDICTION:
GERRY: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name
DEANNA: O Spirit that dwells within us all—may you be known and loved.
GERRY: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
DEANNA: May your insight guide us, may your compassion fill us, until this world is holy and whole.
GERRY: Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
DEANNA: May we receive the things we need most for body and soul, and may we never stray from our heart’s true path.
GERRY: For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
DEANNA: Until the sun burns out and the stars grow cold.
GERRY: Amen.
DEANNA: AMEN. Go forth in peace to nurture your own and each other’s spirits and to help heal the world.
