Sermon

Connecting/Passages

March 25, 2007

First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org

Rev. Paul Beckel

LIGHTING THE CHALICE

We light the chalice today in remembrance of Neal Seegert. Neal was the father of Barb Seegert and was a church member here in the 1950s and 60s. He died this week at the age of 87. Neal was fallible and persevering. And Barb is deeply appreciative of you, her lifelong church community, for being with her through this and many such life passages.

GATHERING SONG Spirit of Life #123

Today we celebrate life and passages and the connecting threads between them. The connecting threads being: ourselves, our relationships, and the lessons to be received from one another.

Today we celebrate being born and having to die...and everything in between. We celebrate the wisdom available from transitions, and from those who pass into our lives and pass again away from us.

We celebrate the lessons of age and the aged, the lessons of childhood and of children.
We acknowledge life’s spiral [hand motion]... this reciprocal engine of goodness and hope and challenge to which we contribute both our questions and our failings and all of our aspirations.

We acknowledge and celebrate this spirit of life: each of us passing on bits of ourselves to
one another...while receiving from one another wisdom, support, and the challenge to live up to our own ideals... and in that spirit I invite...

CHILD DEDICATION

Josh and Mandy, what a weekend we are sharing! From yesterday’s wedding to this child dedication, the fullness of love expressed by family and friends who celebrate with you the rituals that span and link the generations.

You also celebrated a baptism yesterday! Ruby and Sylvia, my wish is that both the Catholic and the Unitarian Universalist traditions will be useful guides and supports as your life unfolds to serve a Love which transcends us all.

May these religious traditions be like good parents -- challenging you enough that you’ll want to rebel, and supporting you enough that you’ll choose to return.

Ruby and Sylvia, your parents hope that you will sit at the feet of teachers from many traditions. We pray that both prophets and fools will be your teachers, along with astonishment, and the pain of making your own mistakes... May you allow every experience to open your eyes to new understandings.

But you’re not quite ready to make decisions about who and what experiences will shape your unfolding. So at this stage you parents want you to have the benefit of many caregivers: people who will listen to your questions and share their own struggles. Grandparents to guide another generation through the night, and complete what they’ve begun. And Godparents: Ryan and Melissa and Andi. What did Josh and Mandy mean when they asked you to be Godparents? What did it mean when you said yes? [they speak]

And you, their UU congregation: Ruby and Sylvia will be a reminder to you of every child who has come before, every child you see around town, and every child you see in the news around the globe. They are all ours. Ruby and Sylvia remind us of our old promise to work to make this a safer, happier world for all of them. Josh and Mandy turn to you now and in the years ahead for your respectful guidance of Ruby and Sylvia’s development.

As we contemplate the miracle of birth, we renew in our hearts a sense of wonder and joy. May we be stirred to a fresh awareness of the sacredness of life and of the divine promise of our childhood. May we so live that our children may acquire our best virtues and leave behind our worst failings. May we pass on the light of courage

and compassion and the questing spirit.

Josh and Mandy, you will be urging Sylvia and Ruby to drink deeply of life, to pursue their own questions, their own passions, their own doubts. This is easier said than done. But I’ll ask you now to state publicly as you did yesterday, not that you will be perfect in this relationship, but that you will be honest, that you will acknowledge your limits without bitterness, and that you will do your very best to bring forth the best that is within them by showing them the best that is within you?

REFLECTIONS & READINGS I

When I first visited this church as a ministerial candidate, I asked many of you the question, what does this church have going for it? One of the younger people replied: we have cool old people. I have found this to be the case. I have found that the liberal and liberating spirit of this congregation has been nurtured over many generations and comes now to Ruby and Sylvia with deep foundations of lifelong learning and caring.

For some insight into how such learning and caring might pass from one generation to the next, I found a wise and touching book called Tuesdays with Morrie. It is the true story of a sports writer who discovers that his college professor, with whom he had been very close many years earlier, is dying of ALS -- Lou Gherig’s disease -- which slowly causes him to lose control of his body, bit by bit, from his feet upward... until, eventually, he will no longer be able to breathe.

The writer, Mitch Albom, is drawn back to his professor, in part out of guilt for having lost contact with a mentor who had seen his hidden potential, someone who had seen him as a human being, and cared for him on a personal level. The professor, Morrie Schwartz, is drawn to Mitch because he recognizes his own dying as one last teaching opportunity.

Mitch begins to visit Morrie, traveling from Detroit to Boston every Tuesday. And as Morrie’s disease progresses on its predictable course, they explore together a curriculum of Fear, Aging, Family, Society, Forgiveness, and the meaning of life and death.

I believe that their relationship offers a good model for the reciprocal style of teaching and learning that can take place between the generations.

Here’s an excerpt: It was clear that I was not the only one interested in visiting my old professor--the Nightline appearance had made him something of a celebrity--but I was impressed with, perhaps even a bit envious of, all the friends that Morrie seemed to have. I thought about my ‘buddies’ back in college. Where had they gone?

‘You know Mitch, now that I’m dying, I’ve become much more interesting to people.’
You were always interesting.
‘Ho.’ Morrie smiled. ‘You’re kind.’
No, I’m not, I thought.
‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘People see me as a bridge. I’m not as alive as I used to be, but I’m not yet dead. I’m sort of...in-between.’
He coughed, then regained his smile. ‘I’m on the last great journey here--and people want me to tell them what to pack.’

Morrie had appeared on Nightline with Ted Koppel in order to get a wider audience for his last class in life. He found it understandable that people had become more interested in him now that he was hanging between life and death. But he also found it ironic.

The lesson from this experience that he tries to impress upon Mitch is that it is a waste of life to wait until the end to make peace with death. He urges Mitch to recognize that death is always right around the corner... for all of us... and we cannot begin to live fully until we
acknowledge the presence and the possibility of death every day.

Morrie adds that there is much to be learned from death, and not so much to be afraid of, and we might all be better off if we would realize this sooner rather than later.
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Hanging between life and death...and knowing that we are so poised...this is much in keeping with UU minister Forrest Church’s definition of religion. Religion, he says, is the human response to the dual mystery of being alive and having to die. Religion is the human response to the dual mystery of being alive and having to die.

Each of us faces the same mystery. But based on our individual strengths and needs we encounter and interpret the mystery in different ways. As a congregation, you have demonstrated to me how we are all teachers. You have offered to me your wide range of perspectives on the mysteries of life... and perhaps more importantly, you have offered me a model of community, by listening to and accepting each others’ differing perspectives.

So now I invite you to join me in the spirit of meditation. Close your eyes, if you wish, breathe deeply, stretch out your legs... breathe deeply...

The Buddha once said, ‘Imagine that everyone in the world is enlightened – except you. Everyone. They are all your teachers, each doing just the right things to help you learn patience, perfect wisdom, perfect compassion.’

Call to mind those in line ahead of you at the bank... Can you accept them as your teachers of perfect patience?

Call to mind those who have received unearned luxury in life, or unearned recognition... Can they teach us the futility of striving after luxury, or recognition?

Call to mind the antagonists in your life.
What insights have we gained, what strengths have we developed, from encounters with those who seem to make our lives more difficult?

Call to mind strangers who are suffering.
Suffering because of choices they have made...
Suffering due to choices made by others...
and those hanging upon the whims of fate...
Can these strangers be our teachers
of perfect compassion?

Now call to mind a beloved teacher, a parent, an inspirational mentor... Place the lessons that you have learned from your beloved teachers
on your own private altar next to the lessons about fear and death and anger and disappointment...

May I receive from my every encounter with you, the lesson that I most need to learn. And may my own fullness spill over into your need. May I receive from my every encounter with you, the lesson that I most need to learn. And may my own fullness spill over into your need.

RESPONSIVE READING #468 ‘We Need One Another’

OFFERTORY
REFLECTIONS & READINGS II

Morrie had his good days and bad days. Some full of passion, some when he was almost too exhausted to talk. Mitch, who was uncomfortable being this close to death, found himself in the ambiguous role of friend, student, and reporter chronicling this semi-public drama. He writes:

I looked at the tape recorder, feeling guilty, as if I were stealing what was left of his precious speaking time. ‘Should we skip it?’ I asked. ‘Will it make you too tired?’
Morrie shut his eyes and shook his head. He seemed to be waiting for some silent pain to pass. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘You and I have to go on.’
‘This is our last thesis together, you know.’
Our last thesis. ‘We want to get it right.’

I thought about our first thesis together, in college. It was Morrie’s idea, of course. He told me I was good enough to write an honors project -- something I had never considered.
Now here we were, doing the same thing once more. Starting with an idea. Dying man talks to living man, tells him what he should know.
This time, I was in less of a hurry to finish.

SINGING TOGETHER The Potter’s Wheel by Mary Grigolia

1. We are the clay on the potter’s floor (2x)

2. Ours are the hands on the potter’s wheel

3. We are the bowl in the potter’s hand

4. We are the tear in the potter’s eye

5. We are the clay on the potter’s floor

¼ Dreaming molding, guiding holding, loving letting go

REFLECTIONS & READINGS III

Congregational life is filled with the inevitable disintegration of life: dissent, divorce, disease, death, dysfunctional group dynamics. To choose to face these conditions of life together is an unusual commitment that offers unusual rewards... including an intimacy which, for me, provides the deepest possible view into the mystery of our being.

I invite you now to reflect upon the name of a teacher who has touched you...someone who may no longer be with you in body, but whose inspiration was such that you carry their spirit forward and continue to pass it on through those you now touch.

If you wish you may share the name of this person at this time. [pause]

How had all of this begun? Mitch had not seen Morrie for almost twenty years, when, flipping through the channels one evening, he saw him being interviewed by Ted Koppel. Part of the appeal of this story, I think, is that, unlike many of us, Mitch takes the opportunity to reconnect with his teacher, and to say thank you, before it is too late.

In their last days together, Mitch learned to lift Morrie from his wheelchair, to encounter him with an intimacy which was at once frightening, and overwhelmingly beautiful.

I thank you, now, for having taken the risk to share such intimacy with one another, knowing that our time here together is brief.
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Koppel did a second interview with Morrie because the reception of the first show had been so strong.

‘You look fine,’ Koppel said when the tape began to roll.
‘That’s what everybody tells me,’ Morrie said.
‘You sound fine.’
‘That’s what everybody tells me.’
‘So how do you know things are going downhill?’
Morrie sighed. ‘Nobody can know it but me, Ted. But I know it.’
And as he spoke, it became obvious. He was not
waving his hands to make a point as freely as he had in their first conversation. He had trouble pronouncing certain words.... In a few more months, he might no longer speak at all.
‘Here’s how my emotions go,’ Morrie told Koppel. ‘When I have people and friends here, I’m very up. The loving relationships maintain me. ‘But there are days when I am depressed. Let me not deceive you. I see certain things going and I feel a sense of dread. What am I going to do without my hands? What happens when I can’t speak? Swallowing, I don’t care so much about -- so they feed me through a tube, so what? But my voice? My hands? They’re such an essential part of me. I talk with my voice. I gesture with my hands. This is how I give to people.

‘How will you give when you can no longer speak?’ Koppel asked.
Morrie shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll have everyone ask me yes or no questions.’
It was such a simple answer that Koppel had to smile. He asked Morrie about silence. He mentioned a dear friend Morrie had...who was going deaf. Koppel imagined the two men together one day, one unable to speak, the other unable to hear. What would that be like?

‘We’ll hold hands,’ Morrie said. ‘And there will be a lot of love passing between us....’

SENDING SONG We Laugh, We Cry v.1-3 #354