Rev. Julie Stoneberg
Roots hold me close, wings set me free. Our annual theme this year is designed to help us more deeply understand and connect with our roots in order that we might be prepared to fly. Don’t miss this introductory exploration.
Religious Exploration: Registration and Ingathering
Opening Words
At One - Rev. Victoria Safford
Imagine this.
On the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, every fall, every year, the people make their peace with anyone they have wronged or slighted or injured or in any way neglected in the past twelve months. The task is not to patch things up, smooth things over, reach a compromise, or sweep mistakes and uneasy memories under the rug; the task is not to feel better. The task is ownership. The goal is truth, for its own redemptive sake. I did this. I said this to you, and it was wrong. I neglected this. I botched this. I betrayed you thusly.
I demeaned you, whether you ever knew it or not.
This is the truth in which both of us are living. I ask you to forgive me.
Imagine how many deep breaths you would need to take. Imagine how many doors you'd have to knock on, how many phone calls you'd have to make, how many letters, how many lunches and coffees, how many awkward moments with your children and your parents, and with strangers (that cashier to whom you spoke so sharply). Awkward is irrelevant. The task is not about comfort.
It is about truth, about wholeness and holiness. Restoration.
Imagine this.
Come, imagine who we can be, as one, together, whole, restored.
Story For All Ages
The North Star - Peter H. Reynolds
Prayer And Meditation
Prayer Song of Ghana
Journeying god,
pitch your tent with mine
so that I may not become deterred
by hardship, strangeness, doubt.
Show me the movement I must make
toward a wealth not dependent on possessions,
toward a wisdom not based on books,
toward a strength not bolstered by might,
toward a god not confined to heaven.
Help me to find myself as I walk in other's shoes.
Reflection
Ruth Strunz
It is a dilemma, this business of where we have come from, and where we are going....not to mention the sensitive issue of WHAT we are doing on the way. Are we present, and awake, between the coming and the going? The truth is, we WILL come and we WILL go, but MOST of our time happens in between – we wouldn’t want to miss it!
I have come and gone many times in my life, and am likely to continue thus. While it is easy to change our direction or our destination, we can wave goodbye to the question of where we have come from. It is as it is – and it’s not going to change. We may wish we were coming from elsewhere – from another family, another place or time, another idea or belief...but the story is told. We only have options regarding what happens next.
I struggle with the facts of my early life – I was born in Ireland in the late 60’s; it was a brutal place and time to grow up. Brutal. Everyone was frightened all the time; as kids we didn’t get it. It seemed to us that adults were always angry, and we were awfully well behaved in response. THAT is where I come from.
I also come from a religious cocktail! On my Dads side, my Grannie was Jewish, Grandpa was Catholic. They were Austrian war refugees, en route to Canada when my grandmother became ill and the Irish Quakers rescued them....there they stayed, and my father was raised a Quaker.
On my Mums side, Grandad was an atheist from the Republic of Ireland, and Grandma a Presbyterian from the North – a MOST unlikely couple in Ireland in the 1920’s! My Grandma was excommunicated from her family for marrying a non-believer, and she didn’t see her 5 siblings for the next 30 years. My Mother gladly rejected that story, and adopted Quakerism when she married Dad. It was mostly for the chance to have one sweet, silent hour in the week when no kids were demanding anything of her, and we were well taken care of at Sunday School. THAT is where I come from.
And then are the many varieties of work to which I have come, and gone. I was a nurse, and a carpet layer. I’ve been a nanny, worked in stores, cleaned toilets, run a school, managed offices and supervised people. I have educated profoundly able and profoundly disabled children, and supported their parents...THAT is where I come from.
At this stage, I probably know more than ever before about where I am going, or at least where I’d like to be going, in my life. Although some pieces of the puzzle are rather fuzzy, it is a rainbow of possibilities, and there are a few things I am sure of.
On the way to where I am going, I will NOT be as very well-behaved as I once was! While I journey, I will warmly embrace ALL of my story, knowing that I can hold all of it, with more to come! And best of all, when I get there, as far as I can tell from where I stand today, you will be there with me, either in body or in spirit. I bless you, and I thank you.
Message
Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? - Rev. Julie Stoneberg
On Thursday afternoon, with a soaking rain falling outdoors, I sat in my newly configured office in our new UFP multi-purpose gathering room, and I re-read the “Act of Installation”...a covenant that we spoke together nearly three years ago shortly after I began my ministry here. I can’t speak for any of you, but for me, that act, that covenant marked a significant commitment in my life...a life-changing commitment...and it will always be a part of where I come from.
The words we spoke are incredibly grand...they call us to walk together on the paths of truth, compassion, faith and justice. They name our agreement to share a quest toward greater understanding and love. They speak our commitment to strive to actualize our deepest values. By speaking those words, we agreed to urge one another toward the great promise that our faith offers, so that we might do justice in our congregation, our community and our world.
Truly grand words, these.
(Before we go on, notice that this covenant says nothing specific about where we’ve come from, nor does it pay much attention to where we are. Rather than standing still, it speaks of walking together. Just notice that. We’ll come back to it.)
For a while, I’ve been hinting around that we might use narrative and story to understand who we are as well as to influence where we are going. I was first taken with the idea of story in seminary when I studied narrative counselling. A narrative approach to counselling maintains that who we are, how we relate to various power systems in our culture, and what our past experiences have been, all shape the way we understand reality...this is how we construct the stories of our lives.
But, it also affirms that the potential to generate new language and new interpretive lenses always exists,[1] and that by re-storying or lives, we can create new realities. This applies to congregations just as well as it applies to individuals.
Late in August, I was privileged to attend a clergy workshop that was the best I’ve ever attended. Or perhaps it miraculously met my specific needs at this specific time...at any rate, it was really good. It was sponsored by both the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, so clergy from both UU and UCC churches were in attendance. It was specifically designed for ministers in the first ten years of their ministry. (I’m smack in the middle of that.) It was led by Larry Peers, who is a senior consultant with the Alban Institute, whose mission is to build up congregations and their leaders. And, it was held on Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire...a breathtakingly beautiful setting....an ancient resort on a rock with sea on all sides...a place that has long and deep Unitarian roots. (I put a couple of picture postcards from Star Island on the Welcome Table for you to see.) And, coincidentally, this workshop focused on the use of story to understand and to ‘vision’ – how to re-compose one’s ministry....our ministry together.
Peers introduced a model that moves us along a continuum, one that is fluid and moving in both directions, a continuum that moves between reviewing, re-visioning, and re-composing. It recognizes that at all times we stand on the threshold of what comes next. From one place on that continuum we review...without judgment...the stories from which we live. From other place, a slightly different perspective, we can re-vision and imagine how things might be different...what we would like to change. And then from another place, we can start to re-compose our stories in ways that we believe will bring the results we desire. And wherever we stand on this continuum, out in front of us, about where you are sitting, lie all the possibilities...all of the potential futures...all that could be. You are sitting in possibility.
Okay, here’s the first piece I want to make REALLY clear. In reviewing, we are not judging all that has been as bad or undesirable. We are simply observing...naming the stories that we live by in order that we might see how those stories create our reality. If all is working well for us, we may not want to change one single thing. Or, alternatively, we may want to crumple up our paper and start over on page one. Or, more likely, we will keep some things and want to change others.
Sylvia Payne shared a YouTube video with me, one called “My Culture,”
[2] which is an interesting mix of music and talk. One of the speakers says that while we of course love our parents, we must also dislike or even hate them in some part in order that we can take further steps in our growth and evolution. If we were all exactly like our parents, if we continued to do and be exactly like where we’ve come from, nothing would change. There will always be those places from which we come. They will always inform who we are. It is what we do with them that matters.
I had the opportunity recently to sit with a group of people...all people who I respect and whose paths I admire...and we talked about where we come from. Specifically, we told the stories of our maternal grandmothers. There were seven of us in the circle. Five of us had grandmothers whose negative influence outweighed the positive. One had a rather neutral memory. Only one...one in seven...had been blessed with the iconic doting grandmother who offered unconditional love. And yet, here sat all of these beautiful people...loving, compassionate people all...who had learned something from their grandmothers... something that helped them write the story of who they wanted to be.
Now I doubt that any one in that circle had used Peers’ model to re-compose their lives. I doubt that any one of them sat down and went methodically through the steps...from reviewing to re-visioning to re-composing....to see how they could make their lives stories of love rather than stories of fear or stinginess. And yet, I wanted to introduce this model to you today, because I hope we will use it intentionally this year...so that we might become aware the stories we’re telling, the results we’re getting, and to imagine if there are other stories that might better serve us.
So let’s return to that ‘act of installation’ I mentioned earlier. The story told in this installation is one of a preferred vision. We know how we want our story to unfold. We want to create a beloved community of inclusion, understanding, justice and faith. We want to grow toward greater love and compassion. We want our lives to be a true reflection of our values. We want to use ourselves fully toward those goals. And, we want to carry all of that beyond our congregation to the wider community and the world. We have a known destination, and we continue to search for the paths that will lead us there...through swamps, in the company of bird and rabbit, guided by the signposts and stars. That’s the path we want to walk.
Over this next church year, we are going to celebrate where we’ve come from, as a faith, as a community, as individuals. We are going to name and observe the stories we’ve created to inform who we are. We are going to express our gratitude for how those stories have served us. We are going to consider if those stories continue to serve the results we desire. If they don’t, and if they do, we are going to look out at all the possibilities that lie in front of us, in order to re-compose the story of this Fellowship in a way that best serves our vision.
Over the summer I read Thomas King’s book...a book that is a compilation of his Massey Lectures...”The Truth About Stories.” I loved that little book. He tells stories of his life and his community with keenly developed skills of observation, and at the end of each chapter King repeats, “Take this story, it’s yours. Do with it what you will. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”
I want us to hear our story. I want us to be able to tell our story. And I want us to know what we are going to do with that story. I don’t want us to say, in years to come, that we would have done it differently if we had only known our story. Moreover, I want us to be able to re-compose our story in ways that will help to bring about the transformation we seek.
So what are the stories you tell about this Fellowship? What are the stories you know about this faith? Stories, in this context, needn’t be fully developed plots with characters and events. Sometimes they are simply statements about who we are.
Here’s one example...in last year’s State of the Fellowship address I told a story I’ve often heard here. The story is that we don’t have enough. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough volunteers. We simply don’t have enough. I reminded you that one of the founding stories of this congregation is that we were one person shy of the minimum numbers of members to get our congregational charter, and that we were given an exception. That story could be told as an example of not having enough, but what if it were told as an example of the feisty resolve our founders had to make this congregation happen. Which story better serves us?
Here’s another example...a common story about Unitarians is that we can believe whatever we want to believe. This story suggests that we have no values, no scruples, no conscience that guides us. Worded slightly differently, it could say that Unitarian Universalists are urged to form, claim and edit their own beliefs through an ongoing process of education, reflection, and experience, all in the service of greater love, inclusion, and justice. And, from that process, one that is both personal and communal, we each arrive at well-examined beliefs, beliefs that inform our choices and our actions. Which story serves us? I prefer the latter...that we are a people whose personal spiritual journeys have led us to beliefs that help us to make meaning in our lives and to transform the world.
So what are the stories that you know about this Fellowship? What are the stories you’ve learned about this faith? What do these stories say about who we are? Are they useful? Are they true? If we believe these stories, and tell these stories, how do they live in us? What thoughts do they engender? What do they feel like in our bodies? What actions to they lead us to, and what results do they offer? Think on this, really. Think on this and call me or email me with the stories you know, especially the ones you’ve heard over and over. During the year ahead, I want to use this model...reviewing, re-visioning, re-composing...to examine where we come from and where we are going. You can help by telling me the stories you know.
We already know what the possibilities are. We can already name our vision of the beloved community. We know who our beliefs call us to be. With that vision in hand, and when we become aware of the stories that hold us back, we can begin to tell new stories, re-vised stories that will move us toward preferred outcomes.
AGAIN, let me say that I am not suggesting that all of our stories are bad or harmful. Just look where we are today! We are on the verge of celebrating fifty years as a Fellowship in this community, a congregation that has survived all odds, and that by many measurements is thriving. Our stories have served us well. Many of our stories, just as they are, will continue to nurture and guide us. But some of our stories, the stories that hold us back and don’t serve our values, need to be re-composed. These latter stories are what Peers calls our ‘mat’ stories.
‘Mat stories’ are a concept based on something in the Christian Testament
[3]...a story about an invalided man who is lying near a pool. Jesus sees him there and asked him if he wants to get well. The man replies with excuses... he has no one to help him...he cannot get into the pool...he’s stuck. He has a mat story...a story that keeps him stuck on his mat. Note that Jesus did not ask him why he’s not getting up. Rather, he asked, do you want to get well? And Jesus’ reply to his excuses was this: ‘Get up. Pick up your mat and walk.’ Pick up your mat and walk. Don’t focus on the mat, focus on the possibility.
We are always standing on the edge of the pool, on the threshold of possibility, with the path before us. Let’s take the advice: pick up your mat and walk. You and me together... into a new story.
Amen.
Closing Words
Where do we come from? Out of the stars we have come.
What are we? We are one part of a host of religious progressives who believe that revelation is not sealed, that we each hold a piece of the truth, that all are worthy, and that we are not alone.
Where are we going? Together, we are on the move, toward greater wholeness, toward restoration, toward justice. We go, always, with a song in our heart that we live. We live.
Amen and blessed be.
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYoprzNKmM
