In the drizzle, inspiration

What burns in this chalice, this sacred bowl, this cup o'erflowing with welcome and promise? What means this religion of ours, this attempt of humans, temporal and finite, to express the eternal and infinite? How do we discover the larger truths out of our smaller selves? How shape we symbols which inspire?

I stood, last night, in drizzle-rain, stood near UAW Region 1-C. We were leaving the hall, friends of a fallen comrade, leaving a time when we sought to be together to comfort brother and son after death of sister and mother. We had had a moment together to celebrate one of our own, and to accept the challenges of keepin' on without her in our midst.

I stood in the drizzle-rain and walked on the slick bricks around the Sitdowners Memorial. I saw there all those who struggled for human progress in all the ways we have and do. My dad was present in my ruminations, telling me and my brothers that we weren't welcome around the shop when he was on strike. "We get rough sometimes," he said, and he didn't want to scare us if the men on the picket line felt they needed to jostle (or overturn?) a car.

I felt the presence of Mother Jones, too Mother whose grave I discovered on the ride from Flint to St. Louis a few years ago. Imagined the friends from 'round the world whose names I had seen on the visitor register that day--people I hadn't spoken to in years, but whose visit to that memorial was held closely in the little daily register barely kept safe from the elements.

I stood a few years ago before the Rosa Luxemburg-Karl Liebknecht  memorial in Berlin. A flame burns there, too, and the stones bear a motto: "The Dead Remind Us." That flame reminds me of all those who have struggled that I might enjoy the prosperity and freedom that I so take for granted.

"If I stood out in the rain-night, my only light a candle, a million miles away, would you lay down your fire as I lift mine? Will you not kill again?" Cindy Kallet sees in tiny fires of all our candlelit vigils the possibility of the end of all the fires of war.

And I see, now, in the Sitdowners' Flame something of the possibility, for all of us, of a day when we all might know work that bears dignity, leisure that restores, community that heals and builds, creativity that liberates imagination unto the infinite.

I stood in the drizzle-rain, and was blessed.

Unitarian Universalism

Today I will host the monthly meeting of the Steering Committee/Sponsoring Committee of Flint Area Congregations Together, the congregation-based community organization we are creating in Genesee County among a couple of dozen congregations. The organization is overwhelmingly Christian, as one would expect, and in my faith reflection today I want to think about our work tohether from the UU perspective of my people.

Largely, then, I need to reflect our pluralism. But I think that that needs to be done less by listing a number of hyphenated UU identities. I'm thinking, rather, of a brilliant presentation (lengthy, quite academic, surely Orthodox) by Archbishop Demetrios, where he made reference to Christian thought from the first, third, eighth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries (of the Common Era). This broad approach to what it means to be "the Church" was pluralistic, charitable, breathtaking.

What I can say in four or five minutes will contain nothing of Demetrios's impact. But it is his intention that I look toward, and I too hope to display charity, pluralism and a little movement of the soul.

My "impromptu" speech about Unitarian Universalism (not my twenty-five second elevator speech, but my "a couple of sentences" remarks) usually says something like this:

Our Unitarian ancestors may have been obsessed with the question of Unity. The unity of God has been a very important question for our Unitarian Christian forbears; but the unity of the human family, the unity of the one planet we inhabit, the unity of experience in the one cycle of life we are called to share; these perhaps are the Unity that now animates our unitarianism.

Our Universalist ancestors gave us a faith that says that God is Love, and their Christian faith knew a Love so powerful that all will be reconciled: in history, that all souls will be saved, yes; but in our work with one another, that each soul is precious, that each person is inherently worthy, each has inherent dignity; and that the living into Love that we are graced to exhibit happens as each of us responds to "the Love that will not let us go, that will not let us down, that will not let us off" (R. Hardies).

Unitarian Universalism calls us, in society, to make real the ethic of the interconnectedness of all existence, knowing that all we do has effects in the real world, and the inherent worth and dignity of each person, including ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods. Thus we act in the world to raise up all of us, and to build together a more blessed and beloved community.

The morning, after an evening of loud and bright thunderstorms, is clear, crisp. Humidity remains, and clouds overhead. But how green the grass! How red the tomatoes!

Good morning.