Growing Panes
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 7, 2017
by The Reverend Craig M. Nowak
When I first started attending a Unitarian Universalist Church I was very excited. It resonated with me deeply. It felt like I had found something new…but not quite, because there was something also familiar about it. But what?
I struggled to answer, “But what?” for a long time. I remember one time in particular talking with a relative about my new found church home and how the sermons drew from various religious and even secular sources, how there were interfaith couples and families who attended and that on Sunday mornings people who believed in God sat along side people who weren’t so sure about God or didn’t believe in God at all. To which he responded, “That sounds weird.” And before I had a chance to respond further added, “How does that even work?”
Again, I struggled to explain, let alone, understand myself how it works. “I don’t know”, I said, somewhat defensively, “It just does.”
Now with many years in and… sometimes to my surprise even to this day… having become a Unitarian Universalist minister, I can say quite confidently, it doesn’t just work on its own. In fact, it takes a lot of work to live with the creative tension of multiplicity in unity. Indeed it takes a deep understanding and commitment to something akin to what our very nation once subscribed to and seems, at this time in history unwilling or unable to tolerate, “E pluribus unum”…Out of many, one.
You see, modern day Unitarian Universalism, as the two words that make up the name suggest, is about recognizing and affirming diversity contained within the whole…be it our congregation, our nation…or our world.
Theologically, this is the reason we do not ask our members to assent to a single creed, for our diversity as human being extends beyond our gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age, or whom or how many we love to our religious experience and expression.
Thus Forrest Church’s metaphor of the cathedral of the world, in which he notes, “there are countless windows, each telling its own story of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, each illustrating life’s meaning. Every religious, philosophical, even scientific worldview has a window, or many windows, through which the one Light shines, refracting Truth, bringing illumination to worshipers and seekers.”
Simply knowing this at the intellectual level, of course, is not enough to hold a community, let alone a planet of roughly seven and half billion people, together.
I don’t know about you but when I hear Forrest Church talk about windows in a cathedral, I picture windows with multi-colored panes of glass, like the ones that grace our own building here. We commonly refer to these as stained glass windows. But they are sometimes known by another name. Leaded glass windows. And that’s because of the leading, that gray metal outline that buffers and holds the smaller individual panes of glass within the larger window frame. Without this the individual panes would have no way to relate to one other, that is no framework in which they might co-exist let alone form something more beautiful together than either one might alone.
In our congregations the leading, if you will, is our covenant. The one we read today when we welcomed Joanne, Kirk, Julie and Tim as members. It is a promise, a sacred promise we make to one another about how we will be, in all our diversity, with one another as a people.
As part of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations or UUA, we are also held with other UU congregations through our association’s covenant which includes the seven principles you’re either familiar with or perhaps heard references to. (If not, ask about them after the service) as well as our sources, some of which were lifted up by our narrators and choir during the second musical offering, “All Lifted Hearts”, this morning.
Together these give our faith and our faith community the structure and support necessary to not only hold, but embrace the diversity of humanity and the multiplicity of life and religious experience as one people.
If it seems “weird”, as my relative once stated, it is because it is not how humans have tended to cope with growing pains (PAINS)…those inevitable challenges and changes we face as social creatures sharing an increasingly shrinking planet. The tendency instead has been to crowd around a single pane of glass in the cathedral of the world which in time leads some to equate “their pane” with the Light that shines through it, and others put off by this, as Forrest Church reminds us, to “conclude there is no light.”
At our best, Unitarian Universalist have, and indeed are called, to seek wisdom and solace in the face of life’s growing pains by growing panes (PANES) that is by acknowledging and seeking to learn from and deepen our appreciation of the Light as experienced through many panes.
Unitarian Universalism, then, is not so much weird, or as some have suggested, “an alternative to religion”, but as Forrest Church once noted, “an alternative to being religious or irreligious in absolute ways.”
As it turns out, this is the answer to, “but what?”. My question that arose in response to experiencing both the sense of discovering something new and recovering something familiar in coming to Unitarian Universalism. I had found a religion in which I could practice in community, what I strived to live alone, a faith without certainty…which is to say, a faith to engage thoughtfully and authentically rather than a faith to defend or deny.
This really hit home for me when, some years ago, I was a seminarian enrolled in my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. My peer group and I were assigned the task of writing and presenting our theologies. That is, we were asked to think about and then share our understanding of things like the reality or unreality of God, human nature, life’s meaning and purpose, including things like birth and death, evil, suffering and so forth. I happened to be one of two Unitarian Universalists in our peer group, the others were all adherents of one mainline Christian denomination or another.
The day arrived to present our theologies to one another. And, as one might expect, given Christianity’s long tradition of systematic theology, my Christian colleagues each presented very similar theologies. It was all very neat and tidy…so much so, in fact, it almost took on the quality of a technical manual. - And I want to be clear, I’m not saying this to poke fun at or deride their presentations - but to simply to note it seemed they weren’t so much presenting what they had come to understand about God and the rest as much as they were telling us what their tradition and, further, their denomination says (or perhaps says they have to say) about these things.
My Unitarian Universalist (UU) colleague and I were much more at liberty to speak from our personal religious experience, one of the sources of religious authority our tradition has long affirmed, and share the product of our own intuition and reasoning on such matters, tempered, of course, with learning and engagement in religious community.
The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) does not provide ministers, churches or members a systematic theology. Instead it asks that we promise to faithfully engage in a free and responsible search for truth an meaning. Thus, what my UU colleague presented, influenced by elements of the Jewish tradition and her own religious experience, differed not only from that our of Christian colleagues, but from mine too. Which, for that matter, is informed and refined from my own experience and the various mystical or non-dualistic strands of the world’s religions, even before I had ever heard of mysticism, let alone the great Christian mystics, Buddhist philosophy, Sufism or Daoism.
I recall closing my presentation by stating it is essential we remember the world’s religions are but fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself, a commonly used poetic metaphor in mystical writings across religious traditions. This remark initially confused one of my peers who asked, “So you think the moon is God?” After a good laugh and further explanation, it became clear, I hope, that, as Forrest Church wrote, “We are far more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. All we surely know is this: the same sun sets on each of our horizons; the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another. In the only ways that finally matter, we are truly one.”
“In the only ways that finally matter, we are truly one.” Therein lies an essential teaching, which, while not directly stated, can nonetheless be drawn from Church’s metaphor of the cathedral of the world. It is an insight into the human condition which calls to meet the growing pains (PAINS) of this world- the myriad challenges we face- with growing and deepening panes (PANES) of wisdom and understanding.
In the end what this says to me is one of the prime aims of our Unitarian Universalist faith is to bridge the mind’s ability to understand claims of our unity with the heart’s capacity to know and act upon it. That as many we might be one…with all hearts lifted…and free… able not merely to think about, but to live as humbly and beautifully whatever words, poetry or prose, we might use to describe our oneness. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 7, 2017
by The Reverend Craig M. Nowak
When I first started attending a Unitarian Universalist Church I was very excited. It resonated with me deeply. It felt like I had found something new…but not quite, because there was something also familiar about it. But what?
I struggled to answer, “But what?” for a long time. I remember one time in particular talking with a relative about my new found church home and how the sermons drew from various religious and even secular sources, how there were interfaith couples and families who attended and that on Sunday mornings people who believed in God sat along side people who weren’t so sure about God or didn’t believe in God at all. To which he responded, “That sounds weird.” And before I had a chance to respond further added, “How does that even work?”
Again, I struggled to explain, let alone, understand myself how it works. “I don’t know”, I said, somewhat defensively, “It just does.”
Now with many years in and… sometimes to my surprise even to this day… having become a Unitarian Universalist minister, I can say quite confidently, it doesn’t just work on its own. In fact, it takes a lot of work to live with the creative tension of multiplicity in unity. Indeed it takes a deep understanding and commitment to something akin to what our very nation once subscribed to and seems, at this time in history unwilling or unable to tolerate, “E pluribus unum”…Out of many, one.
You see, modern day Unitarian Universalism, as the two words that make up the name suggest, is about recognizing and affirming diversity contained within the whole…be it our congregation, our nation…or our world.
Theologically, this is the reason we do not ask our members to assent to a single creed, for our diversity as human being extends beyond our gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age, or whom or how many we love to our religious experience and expression.
Thus Forrest Church’s metaphor of the cathedral of the world, in which he notes, “there are countless windows, each telling its own story of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, each illustrating life’s meaning. Every religious, philosophical, even scientific worldview has a window, or many windows, through which the one Light shines, refracting Truth, bringing illumination to worshipers and seekers.”
Simply knowing this at the intellectual level, of course, is not enough to hold a community, let alone a planet of roughly seven and half billion people, together.
I don’t know about you but when I hear Forrest Church talk about windows in a cathedral, I picture windows with multi-colored panes of glass, like the ones that grace our own building here. We commonly refer to these as stained glass windows. But they are sometimes known by another name. Leaded glass windows. And that’s because of the leading, that gray metal outline that buffers and holds the smaller individual panes of glass within the larger window frame. Without this the individual panes would have no way to relate to one other, that is no framework in which they might co-exist let alone form something more beautiful together than either one might alone.
In our congregations the leading, if you will, is our covenant. The one we read today when we welcomed Joanne, Kirk, Julie and Tim as members. It is a promise, a sacred promise we make to one another about how we will be, in all our diversity, with one another as a people.
As part of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations or UUA, we are also held with other UU congregations through our association’s covenant which includes the seven principles you’re either familiar with or perhaps heard references to. (If not, ask about them after the service) as well as our sources, some of which were lifted up by our narrators and choir during the second musical offering, “All Lifted Hearts”, this morning.
Together these give our faith and our faith community the structure and support necessary to not only hold, but embrace the diversity of humanity and the multiplicity of life and religious experience as one people.
If it seems “weird”, as my relative once stated, it is because it is not how humans have tended to cope with growing pains (PAINS)…those inevitable challenges and changes we face as social creatures sharing an increasingly shrinking planet. The tendency instead has been to crowd around a single pane of glass in the cathedral of the world which in time leads some to equate “their pane” with the Light that shines through it, and others put off by this, as Forrest Church reminds us, to “conclude there is no light.”
At our best, Unitarian Universalist have, and indeed are called, to seek wisdom and solace in the face of life’s growing pains by growing panes (PANES) that is by acknowledging and seeking to learn from and deepen our appreciation of the Light as experienced through many panes.
Unitarian Universalism, then, is not so much weird, or as some have suggested, “an alternative to religion”, but as Forrest Church once noted, “an alternative to being religious or irreligious in absolute ways.”
As it turns out, this is the answer to, “but what?”. My question that arose in response to experiencing both the sense of discovering something new and recovering something familiar in coming to Unitarian Universalism. I had found a religion in which I could practice in community, what I strived to live alone, a faith without certainty…which is to say, a faith to engage thoughtfully and authentically rather than a faith to defend or deny.
This really hit home for me when, some years ago, I was a seminarian enrolled in my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. My peer group and I were assigned the task of writing and presenting our theologies. That is, we were asked to think about and then share our understanding of things like the reality or unreality of God, human nature, life’s meaning and purpose, including things like birth and death, evil, suffering and so forth. I happened to be one of two Unitarian Universalists in our peer group, the others were all adherents of one mainline Christian denomination or another.
The day arrived to present our theologies to one another. And, as one might expect, given Christianity’s long tradition of systematic theology, my Christian colleagues each presented very similar theologies. It was all very neat and tidy…so much so, in fact, it almost took on the quality of a technical manual. - And I want to be clear, I’m not saying this to poke fun at or deride their presentations - but to simply to note it seemed they weren’t so much presenting what they had come to understand about God and the rest as much as they were telling us what their tradition and, further, their denomination says (or perhaps says they have to say) about these things.
My Unitarian Universalist (UU) colleague and I were much more at liberty to speak from our personal religious experience, one of the sources of religious authority our tradition has long affirmed, and share the product of our own intuition and reasoning on such matters, tempered, of course, with learning and engagement in religious community.
The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) does not provide ministers, churches or members a systematic theology. Instead it asks that we promise to faithfully engage in a free and responsible search for truth an meaning. Thus, what my UU colleague presented, influenced by elements of the Jewish tradition and her own religious experience, differed not only from that our of Christian colleagues, but from mine too. Which, for that matter, is informed and refined from my own experience and the various mystical or non-dualistic strands of the world’s religions, even before I had ever heard of mysticism, let alone the great Christian mystics, Buddhist philosophy, Sufism or Daoism.
I recall closing my presentation by stating it is essential we remember the world’s religions are but fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself, a commonly used poetic metaphor in mystical writings across religious traditions. This remark initially confused one of my peers who asked, “So you think the moon is God?” After a good laugh and further explanation, it became clear, I hope, that, as Forrest Church wrote, “We are far more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. All we surely know is this: the same sun sets on each of our horizons; the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another. In the only ways that finally matter, we are truly one.”
“In the only ways that finally matter, we are truly one.” Therein lies an essential teaching, which, while not directly stated, can nonetheless be drawn from Church’s metaphor of the cathedral of the world. It is an insight into the human condition which calls to meet the growing pains (PAINS) of this world- the myriad challenges we face- with growing and deepening panes (PANES) of wisdom and understanding.
In the end what this says to me is one of the prime aims of our Unitarian Universalist faith is to bridge the mind’s ability to understand claims of our unity with the heart’s capacity to know and act upon it. That as many we might be one…with all hearts lifted…and free… able not merely to think about, but to live as humbly and beautifully whatever words, poetry or prose, we might use to describe our oneness. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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