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  • BUUC Home
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  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
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  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

Spiritual Engineering
 Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 4, 2020
 The Rev. Craig M. Nowak

 
April 15, 2019, 6:20pm, an alarm sounds during mass at Paris’ iconic Notre Dame cathedral. Though initially assumed a false alarm, worshippers are evacuated as a precaution. By 7:10pm a plume of smoke is visible from afar. The social media posts begin. Soon the 850 year old building is aglow and an army of fire fighters struggle to control the raging fire. People around the globe watch in shock and horror; world leaders issue statements of support.
 
It won’t be until 9:30am the next morning, some fifteen hours from the time the first alarm sounded, that the fire is entirely extinguished. Although the structure still stands, two-thirds of the roof is gone, the towering spire having collapsed into the nave, leaving a gaping hole, and large parts of one transept have collapsed. Remarkably, no one died, although three people were seriously injured.
 
Just a few months earlier, I sat in the nave of Notre Dame de Paris. I was in Paris for New Years and arrived at the cathedral just after the start of Vespers. During the service I divided my time between trying to keep up with the Latin text and looking up and around, marveling at the soaring arches, delighting in the shadowy effect of the candlelight on the cavernous interior, and observing the darkening of the massive stained glass windows as the daylight outside transitioned to night.
 
To say it was magical would be a gross understatement. It was sublime. Following the service, my husband and I walked the perimeter of the exterior, pausing frequently in awe of the flying buttresses and other Gothic era innovations that made the creation of such massive churches with their towering walls of windows possible. Indeed, it appeared simultaneously delicate and strong, offering no suggestion of vulnerability.
 
I read afterwards that at one point during the fire, French Interior Minister Franck Reister, aware of the destruction unfolding in real time, commented, “Everything’s very fragile.” He may have been talking about the condition of the cathedral, but his comment speaks to a broader reality.
 
Notre Dame is not the oldest, nor the largest, most beautiful or even architecturally significant cathedral in the world and yet its potential ruin spurred fear, mourning and sympathy worldwide, and not just from the estimated 1.2 billion catholics scattered around the globe or religious people, but countless others who have never set foot inside a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple and may never do so. Notre Dame was constructed as a Catholic church, but it is, in many ways, an international symbol of a broader faith of sorts whose diverse adherents share one inseverable bond: the human condition.
 
In contemplating this well known symbol’s physical qualities: scale, solidity, aesthetics, purpose, we’re connected to our own spiritual hunger for something larger than ourselves, a sense of stability in an otherwise hurried or chaotic world, beauty, and meaning beyond the daily routines to which we have been consigned, fallen into or even willingly chosen. Contemplating the potential destruction or loss of the cathedral, we are confronted with the reality of our condition as human beings in a very personal way and feel more keenly the pangs, or depth, if you will, of our spiritual hunger.
 
Visiting Notre Dame or looking at pictures of it before and after the fire, we may admire the structural engineering that has held the building up for eight centuries and likely played a part, along with the efforts of firefighters, in preventing its total destruction during the fire in 2019. Still, we might be better served to take the opportunity to consider the condition of the spiritual engineering upholding us today.
 
By spiritual engineering I simply mean that which supports our spiritual life. Which, broadly speaking, encompasses our exploration and response to the human condition and our need/hunger for things like connection, stability, beauty, meaning, and so forth.
 
Like an ancient cathedral our spiritual lives require maintenance. The structures that support it can weaken and become unbalanced leaving us feeling stuck or dissatisfied no matter what we do. Our readings this morning offer some insight as to where we might show up, that is, where we might direct our attention and effort when we suspect support for our spiritual life needs some shoring up.
 
John Ormond’s witty poem, “The Cathedral Builders” focuses on the builders of community rather than the building which houses it. As the builders climb “sketchy ladders towards God”, Ormond touches on our need to know we are not alone and our collective urge and power to create meaning, describing it as defying gravity and deifying stone.
 
At the same time he reminds us of life lived on the ground with “suppers and small beer” and time spent with family and friends.  But this is no dreamy utopian vision. It is grounded firmly in human experience where people lie, spit, sing, get or escape illness. People who, like us, experience days when we are at our best and when we leave a lot to be desired. Of lives alternately happy and unhappy.
 
At the end of the poem, though the cathedral is not yet finished and the builders decide to “leave the spire to others.”, Ormond invites us to revel knowingly in the achievement and ownership of their effort, “I bloody did that”, they say. An expression which speaks to an awareness that one’s engagement in community, in collective effort, in service to something larger than one’s self, nevertheless carries personal significance that feeds and satisfies our spiritual hunger.
 
Ormond’s poem is a call to community to those of us whose overindulgence in the promises and pitfalls of hyper-individualism leave us spiritually malnourished no matter how much effort we expend attempting to quell our hunger.
 
In the “Peace of Wild Things”, Wendell Berry offers a different call. A call for, “When despair for the world grows” in us and we, “wake in the night at the least sound in fear,” of what our lives and our children’s lives may be. It is a call to quiet, to inner stillness, to solitude.
 
Solitude, which is sometimes described as being alone without being lonely, is essential to spiritual life. It gives us a chance to step back, take both a wider and deeper view, and helps us reconnect to the grander rhythms of life and flow of time, beyond human activity and schedules and deadlines that we might “rest in the grace of the world”, and be free. (Or, as in our second hymn today) “Nada te turbe, nada te espante”, nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten.
 
How much solitude one may need varies from person to person. The pace and volume of modern life is not conducive to solitude and yet so often it is this pace and volume that increases our hunger or need for it. Berry’s poem is a call to solitude to those of us who find ourselves awakened by or trying to shut down, “despair for the world” despite, or more often, because we have tried every manner of distraction to no avail.
 
Like Ormond’s call to community, Berry’s call to solitude is intended to usher us toward a deeper exploration and appreciation of the fullness and mystery of life. But whereas Ormond’s call directs us outward to engage and develop a communal life, Berry’s draws us inward to engage and develop our interior lives. Yet, when it comes to spiritual engineering, the call to community and the call to solitude is not an either/or decision as is sometimes implied by the assertion one is spiritual but not religious.
  
We in fact need both community and solitude to support our spiritual lives. And we need them in balance. Indeed, just as the structural integrity of a great cathedral depends on the careful distribution of support, so too does the integrity of our spiritual engineering.
 
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian famous for both his writings and active opposition to the Nazis (He was executed by the Nazis in 1945), wrote, “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community.  Let him who is not in community beware of being alone… Each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils.  One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair.”
 
Reports indicate investigators believe the fire at Notre Dame de Paris was started by either a cigarette or a short circuit in the electrical system. That’s it; a tiny ember or spark, so small as to easily escape casual observance and yet so potentially destructive. Risks to our spiritual wellbeing are sometimes obvious, as is what we need to do in the short term in response. In the wake of national tragedies, for example, people flock to houses of worship, vigils and other gatherings just to be together. And we know the times in which we live demand spiritual strength and fortitude.
 
But what about the myriad tiny embers and sparks beyond the big, obvious events or that will follow the turn of our current page in history? Those everyday embers and sparks that will push against and test the integrity of our spiritual engineering?
 
How sound is your spiritual support against these?
 
Where might you need to show up in order to shore up that support?
 
Amen and Blessed Be
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