for First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Like John Buehrens and Barbara Rohde in this morning’s Readings, I too am a former Catholic, and like them, part of the reason I became a Unitarian Universalist is that I could not be a good Catholic. Becoming a religious liberal was one of the best decisions I ever made, and I’ve never regretted it. But in becoming a UU, I did not stop admiring and being inspired some important aspects of the Christian faith – the faith that is the foundation and basis of ours.
Lent, the season that follows Mardi Gras, is the lead-in on the Christian liturgical calendar to Easter. Although its name references the lengthening of days in the Spring (“lent” comes from an Old German word for “length”), traditionally, Lent has come to imply a time of penitence, relinquishment, and prayer for practicing Christians as preparation for Easter.
“Penitence, relinquishment, and prayer” – you have to admit, you just don’t hear those words a lot in UU churches; these are not terms that are often associated with liberal religion. Many UUs, like John Buehrens and me, are at first delighted to leave behind the trappings of our former faiths, things that we felt were too stringent, too imposing, and too rigorous. Sometimes it felt like anything that made you happy or gave you pleasure was considered to be a sin. For many of us, myself included, Unitarian Universalism felt like a faith that let you freely make all your own choices and decisions, and did not impose or force anything on you. This is all too the good – but, contrary to Mae West’s famous saying, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
A religion that tells you you can do anything you want is not much of a religion; a faith that does not ask much of you cannot command a deep commitment from you. Maybe Unitarian Universalism could use a little Lent, a little of that penitence, relin-quishment, and prayer.
While there have been periods in Unitarian Universalism when nearly all vestiges of our Christian heritage have been suppressed or denied or hotly contested, happily, this is no longer true. There are UU congregations that have Ash Wednesday services, UU congregations that offer weekly Lenten vespers, and UU congregations that have Lenten rituals on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. The congregation I served in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for 9 nine years held an annual Ash Wednesday service that was shared with a local African-American congregation. I suspect that most of the Chattanooga UUs who regularly attended that service were originally more drawn by the chance to worship in an inter-racial setting than by an inner need to mark Lent – but I also suspect that the motivations may have shifted over time.
It’s never a good idea to throw the baby out with the bath water. Even Unitarian Universalsists sometimes need times of penitence, relinquishment, and prayer; the staunchest religious liberals can find that it’s good to have opportunities for reflection, to see what in our lives needs to be repented, what behaviors, habits of thought, and destructive tendencies we ought to give up, and how prayer and meditation might play a role in our spiritual lives.
While in my Catholic childhood, giving something up for Lent meant depriving yourself of something you liked and enjoyed, but wasn't necessarily bad for you, such as chocolate or other dessert items, for today’s religious liberals, it might mean giving up an addiction to smoking, drugs, or alcohol; or it might mean learning to undo an unhealthy habit, like overeating or overspending. You could train yourself to give up worrying about all the things you can’t change, or you could give up nagging your partner or whining to your co-workers. You could work on destructive personal habits, like explosive anger or name-calling or keeping your emotions bottled up and unexpressed. John Buehrens suggests relinquishing your sense of control (it’s useless anyway), or your denial of death (that’s useless too). You might find that the spiritual discipline of doing this for Lent makes it easier to do it all the time. At the very least, this kind of spiritual spring cleaning will be a healthy practice.
Lent can be a good time for discovering a paradoxical but essential spiritual truth – that giving something up allows space for something else, that letting something go opens up room to let something else in. But it takes courage to let go – you have to feel confident that the new thing, whatever it is, will come along in time, like a swinging trapeze bar in a circus act. Daanan Perry wrote in Warriors of the Heart:
Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I’m either hanging onto a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments in my life, I’m hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.
Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I’m in control of my life. I know most of the right questions and even some of the right answers. But once in a while, as I’m merrily (or not so merrily) swinging along, I look out ahead of me into the distance, and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging towards me. It’s empty, and I know that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness, coming to get me. In my heart of hearts I know that for me to grow, I must release my grip on this present, well-known bar, to move to the new one.
Each time it happens, I hope I won’t have to grab the new one. But I know I must totally release my grasp on my old bar, and for some moment in time I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar. Each time I am filled with terror. It doesn’t matter that in all my previous hurtles across the void I have always made it. Each time I am afraid that I will miss, that I will be crushed on unseen rocks in the bottomless chasm between bars. But I do it anyway.
…Transforming our need to grab that new bar, any bar, is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where real change happens. It can be terrifying. It can also be en-lightening. Hurtling through the void, we just may learn to fly.
We New Orleanians have had more practice than we ever wanted in relinquishment and giving things up – and spending lots of time in that scary in-between space in the middle of flying trapeze bars. Maybe it’s time we learned to fly.
Lent can be good practice in learning to let go of what we ought to let go of, learning to relinquish what holds us back from growth, opening ourselves for transformation. When we let go, as John Buehrens reminds us, we can find that we discover what is real, what abides, what sustains. I recommend that we take this opportunity. AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
