“THE ART OF COMMUNITY”

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger for the
Greater New Orleans UU Shared Service: Hot Art in a Cool Space at
North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, August 8, 2010

When I was a little girl, paint-by-numbers kits were very popular. In our house we had several framed paintings that my mother had painstakingly completed on our dining room table, carefully filling each space in according to the number on the little paint containers. Some of the finished paintings were attractive, most of them were colorful, but not a single one of them was art.

Around that same period, there was a black-and-white show on TV with a guy named Jon Nagy who taught viewers how to draw. In a way, I guess he did, but it turned out that by closely following his instructions, you could learn to draw just like Jon Nagy. You might have been making a drawing of a recognizable object with realistic shadings, but it wasn’t art.

You can’t make art by the numbers or by slavishly copying someone else. Sure, you can learn certain techniques, certain media, such as oils or watercolors or clay, the use of perspective, and theories of color and shading and shaping. But there’s a certain something that cannot be taught or shown that must be present to make Art with a capital A. There must be genuine creativity, a spark of genius, flashes of imagination to be able to make something that could be recognized as art. The true artist has to trust in a force greater than themselves.

These are all things that cannot be given or even taught. They certainly can’t be forced. Building a community is similar. You can learn certain rules or guidelines, and you can find out how another community gathered and formed itself, but there’s another, more ineffable, ingredient that’s needed for a group to grow into a community. In other words, building a true community, like creating a work of fine art, is less of a science and more of an art.

Surrounded by all this creativity and beauty from the annual Hot Art in a Cool Space show, in a gathered congregation that consists of people from all 3 area UU congregations, some UUs from elsewhere who are staying at the New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer center, and some folks form the wider community, we are in an appropriate setting to compare art and community, and to see what they have in common.
My mother had fun with her paint-by-numbers kits and the finished products decorated our home, but she was only following a preset pattern designed by someone else, just as I was when I slavishly copied the techniques taught by Jon Nagy. Even if she had completed a kit perfectly and even if I had copied Nagy precisely, we wouldn’t have made works of art. Community is the same way – it can’t be imposed or forced or designed by someone from the outside.

Almost 5 years ago, after Katrina, good folks from the UUA, with the best of intentions, came into greater New Orleans and spoke with the ministers and leaders of all 3 area UU churches. At the very beginning, they had some ideas about the near-forcible merger of all 3 or at least 2 of the local UU churches. To the UUA’s credit, when they ran up against considerable opposition, they backed off, but they did encourage us to work more closely together than had happened pre-Katrina.

If anyone had said to us 8 or even 6 years ago, that the UU churches of greater New Orleans would be holding regular shared services, raising money together, doing social service projects together, and speaking with one voice to the wider UUA, there would have been loud derisive laughter. Many, if not most, of us would have bet heavily against the proposition. (I would have been one of them.) But here we are, continuing our new practice of sharing services several times a year, having come nearly to the end of the Greater New Orleans UU cluster’s shared capital campaign, which was very successful especially given the recession, and with the consortium of congregations sharing ministers to help each other out. As congregations and leaders, we know each other better than we ever have before, and in less than 5 years, we have done more things together than we did in all the years before the Storm. And while we have not reached perfect covenanted community among the 3 congregations, and haven't yet within each of the congregations either!, we are further along that path than most of us ever thought possible.

No one could have made us do it, we had to want to, and we had to do the work of community ourselves. There were things we could learn from other UU groups and congregations, but since what we were creating had never been done before, there were almost no examples to draw on. We had to use our imaginations, we had to be creative, we had to step bravely forward into the unknown together. We had to welcome each other into our different church homes and welcome the diversity of outlooks that otherwise would not be present in our deliberations. Most of all, we had to trust – trust each other and trust the process.

Growing each of our congregations is much the same. We can learn how other UU congregations – especially those the UUA designates as “Breakthrough Congregations” – do outreach and incorporate new members; we can even learn from each other’s best practices. But in the end, each of our 3 congregations is different enough that not everything will translate. What works in Uptown New Orleans on the border of the University neighborhood and Broadmoor might not work in Lakeview or across the Lake, and vice versa. First Church, North Shore, and Community Church still have to rely on their own imagination and creativity; we each still have to be courageous and welcoming. And we still need to trust – trust in some force greater than all of us, trust in the saving message of Unitarian Universalism, trust that growing and changing is worth the discomfort they so often bring.

Let us learn from these beautiful works of talent and creativity that surround us this morning. Community, like art, is so much more than following certain rules. Let us continue to build our own strength so that we can be of help to people in need the community around us. Let us rededicate ourselves to welcoming now people and new insights, building up our Greater New Orleans UU cluster, bringing the saving message of our liberal faith to more and more people in the parishes of St. Tammany, Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard, and to folks on the border with Mississippi. Let us use all that we have and all that we are to accomplish the great task set before us.
So might this be! AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!