Journeys
Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, March 14, 2010

An Inward Journey
Readings From The Divinity School Address
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.

In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? …The test of the true faith, certainly, should be its power to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of the hands, — so commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers.

From Franz Kafka

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Homily Inner Seeking, Reaching In, and Searching

In Delphi, in Ancient Greece,
there was a temple,
a temple dedicated to Apollo.
Apollo is the god of music, poetry, and truth.
And over the temple there were these words:
Know Thyself.
Know Thyself.

And Socrates cites these words as the instruction of philosophy:
know who you are.
Socrates goes around town,
asking people about themselves.

What do they really think?
Does it make sense, or do they contradict themselves?
What, really, do they love?
What, really, is true?
Socrates believed that the answer to many of these questions
could be found inside yourself,
if we knew ourselves we could be wise.
Socrates always said, “I am not wise.
If I appear wiser than others,” he said,
“it is only because I do not pretend to know things which I do not know.”

Know thyself.

In the Renaissance, the reformation, and the early humanist movement
of the 14th and 15th century,
this was again the charge to humankind.
The artists said, let us celebrate art and beauty and the power of our own imagination,
the reformers said, God speaks to your own heart and not through some official,
the humanists said, let us celebrate human possibility,
let us know ourselves.

This is the journey of the enlightenment:
from Descrates’ “I think therefore I am”
to Kant’s notion that space and time are categories of our own mind,
and the arguments of John Locke, Unitarian,
that people should be self-governing,
have rights to their own bodies and properties and religious freedoms.

Know thyself –
it is out of this sentiment that Unitarianism was born and reborn.
We, each person, said our foremothers and forefathers,
each person is an incarnation of the holy,
each person is a child of the one loving god,
and so, to know yourself is to know god.
This is the argument of Emerson,
that which shows God in me, fortifies me,
that which shows God out of me, makes me a wart.

And, really, who wants to be a wart?
Not me.

Through the humanism of the 20th century
and today’s emphasis on spirituality,
this theme echoes:
know thyself.

Inner Seeking,
Reaching In,
Searching,

this is an essential part of faith.
The journey inward.
You are holy and wondrous.
You know, in your heart, what is true.
You know, in your mind, what makes sense.

Unitarian Universalists believe in the inward journey,
the voyage of self-discovery.
We celebrate the free mind.
Some of us grew up as Unitarian Universalists,
me included,
and what most of us cherish about this faith
is the freedom to explore, to seek, to search.
Not just freedom: obligation.
We are asked to constantly evolve and grow,
to become persons of more insight and integrity.

In my life as a member of this faith tradition,
I’ve been an agnostic, an atheist, and a theist.
I’ve been inspired by Taoism and Paganism and Christianity and Islam and Buddhism
and art and poetry and philosophy and nature
and human community and human striving.

For those of you who come to this faith from somewhere else,
I know that many of you come for exactly this reason:
that you wanted to search, to be true to yourself,
to have a faith that matched, or at least permitted,
what you thought, in your own heart and mind, was true.

We search.
We seek.
We reach in, seeing what is true for us this day.
This is who we are.

Know thyself.
So begins the inward journey.
You do not have to leave your room.
You do not have to listen,
or even wait.

The world will offer itself to you,
it will.
You do not have to leave your room.
But you do have to open your heart.
Open your heart to what you seek:
seek truth, open yourself to truth.
reach in for love, open yourself to love.
search for beauty, open yourself to the beauty
which surrounds you
and is always already in you.
Let us seek and search and reach in,
and let us sing.

An Outward Journey
Milestones
Readings From Guiding Principles for a Free Faith
by James Luther Adams

The community of justice and love is not an ethereal fellowship that is above the conflicts and turmoils of the world. It is one that takes shape in nature and history, one that requires the achievement of freedom with respect to material resources as well as with respect to spiritual resources. Indeed, the one kind of freedom is not fully authentic without the other. Freedom, justice, and love require a body as well as a spirit. We do not live by spirit alone. A purely spiritual religion is a purely spurious religion; it is one that exempts it 's believers from surrender to the sustaining, transforming reality that demands the community of justice and love.

To Be Of Use by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Homily Outward Reaching, Reaching Out, and Serving

A person cries for work that is real.
To do what has to be done.

Outward reaching, reaching out, serving,
this is what we’re talking about.

A few centuries after Socrates went around asking people
to know themselves,
a carpenter’s child and itinerant preacher,
a few hundred miles away,
less by sea,
preached about loving your neighbor,
about how you will know the false prophets and the true ones
by their fruits,
about how you should give everything you own to the poor,
and sit down to eat with the outcasts,
and so on.

And this thread winds its way through the history of our faith.
The Unitarian communities in Poland,
who practiced common ownership, pacifism,
who had no rule book but the ten commandments,
until they were crushed by the Jesuits.


William Ellery Channing, the founder of Unitarianism in America,
proclaiming that salvation was
neither through works – the ritual acts of traditional faith
nor through faith – the holding of particular ideas about God and Christ
but instead salvation was by character –
by ethics,
by living well and justly.

Who are our Unitarian and Universalist heroes?
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fighting for suffrage.
Abolitionists Thomas Starr King, William Lloyd Garrison,
John Quincy Adams, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper
James Reeb, who gave his life in Selma for the right to vote for people of every color.
Dorothea Dix and Benjamin Rush, who treated mental illness as illness
and not criminality.
The list is long. It continues to this day.
Unitarian Universalists are on the front lines.
A lot of us are fighting for marriage equality
and other rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks.
Others are fighting for dignity for immigrants.
Some are working on health care for all people.
People are working for economic justice, to prevent violence near and far,
to mitigate climate change.

This is a faith where you walk the talk.
Or, at least, you are supposed to.
This is a faith where we are called to be people of use,
people who do work that is real.

A purely spiritual religion is a purely spurious religion,
so says James Luther Adams,
and we have always agreed.
We serve.
We reach out.

This is what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.
Maybe you will help build a house this summer,
or pick up trash with the adopt-a-road crew.
Maybe you will make ice-packs for school nurses
or help buy uniforms for homeless kids.

Maybe you’ll march.
Maybe you’ll write a letter, make a phone call.
Maybe you’ll register some voters.

Maybe you’ll raise some money for a worthy cause.
Maybe you’ll give up meat,
trade in your car, walk.

Maybe you will begin a friendship with someone who doesn’t look like you.
Maybe you will say, “that’s not funny.”
Maybe you will stand on the side of love.

Our faith is lived.
It is lived out in the world.
It is a faith of service and justice,
it is a faith of reaching out,
making connections,
building bridges.

I know times are hard.
I know a lot of us are dispirited by the traga-comedy
that is our national and, especially, our state politics.
I know that it feels hard to make a difference.

But you know what?
Spring is coming,
and it is time to get out of the ground.
It is time to shed our anxiety and our fear,
and reach out, keep reaching out.
It is time.
Now is the time.
This moment for vision and courage.
This is the day.
Let’s reach out.

Putting it Together
Responsive Reading: Strange and Foolish Walls

The years of all of us are short, our lives precarious.
Our days and nights go hurrying on and there is scarcely time to do the little that we might.
Yet we find time for bitterness, for petty treason and evasion.
What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness?
Here we are – all of us – all upon this planet, bound together in a common destiny,
Living our lives between the briefness of the daylight and the dark.
Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life, how does it happen that we are not kindred in all things else?
How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!

Message: Journeys

You want to know a secret?
I’ll tell you, but don’t tell anyone,
especially anyone who you are thinking of inviting to come worship with us.
OK,
this is just between us.
You don’t need church for the inward journey.
To search, seek, reach in.
To know yourself,
to reflect on who you are and what is true.
To make yourself present to your own soul.
You don’t need church for that.

You can take up a mediation practice.
You can write in your journal.
You can start a self-study course in philosophy.
You can take a walk in the woods.
You do not even need to leave your room,
says Kafka,
and I have to tell you, he’s right.

But that’s our secret, OK.
Don’t tell anyone.

You don’t need church for the inward journey.
In fact, church sometimes gets in the way!
More to do, less time to center yourself.
Having to spend time with other people.
Emerson, after all, left the ministry for exactly this reason.

Of course, the church can also be a help for your inward journey.
An idea you hear resonates.
You are centered and renewed by worship.
Conversation with a covenant group helps you understand something about yourself.
But it isn’t necessary.

You want to know a secret?
I’ll tell you, but don’t tell anyone,
especially anyone who might be interested in this church
because they want to do some good in the world.

You don’t need the church to do good in the world.
To reach out, to serve, to connect.

There are a lot of worthwhile organizations
who are fully committed to justice and compassion.
You can give your money to the United Way
or the ACLU or Rockford Urban Ministries
or the Sierra Club.

Yes, the church has a Habitat for Humanity group
and some of our folks help as a group at the food pantry,
but you can volunteer for those things directly.

You don’t need the church to reach out.
That’s our secret, OK?
Just between us.

If fact, the church sometimes gets in the way.
Not everyone agrees on what should be done,
the focus is more disbursed,
and although the church provides some money for justice work,
it’s not like the whole institution’s budget is devoted to those ends.
Plus, there are all these IRS rules about electoral activity,
when standing up for candidates you agree with
is often the best way to affect outcomes.

James Luther Adams loved the church,
but he organized the Independent Voters of Illinois
outside of the church, not in it.

Yes, the church can help with justice work.
You can get a group together through the church.
Sometimes, other coalition partners take you more seriously
when you say, “I’m with a church group.”
There are denominational resources.
But the church isn’t necessary to reach out and serve the world.

You don’t need the church to reach inward.
You don’t need the church to reach outward.

Here is what the church is for:
Doing both, together.
The church is the comma, or the backslash, or the colon,
however you imagined these vision statements written out:
the church is where these things are connected,
integrated.

It is where we put it together.
What can we do to help our hearts stretch and lose their littleness?

Church is the place where the inward journey is joined by the outward journey.

Maybe you reach in,
know yourself,
and come to terms with your pain and anger
about how you were excluded, ridiculed, beat up
when you were a kid,
and then you volunteer for the middle school class
and love those kids,
tell them they are holy and worthy and that they should never hide their brilliance or their soul
so they can fit in.
Reaching in, reaching out.

Maybe you search your heart,
and feel the presence of love,
the grace of the universe,
or of God, or whatever you call it,
you feel love,
and so you smile at someone you don’t know,
waiting in line somewhere,
and you say please and thank you
and how can I help

and little by little you make the world better,
just your little corner,
but that’s a pebble with big ripples,
and that’s how you serve the spirit of love.
Searching and serving.

Maybe you, in the process of inner seeking,
feel the vibrations of the cosmos
and the lifeblood of the earth in your own veins,
and you realize how much a part of everything you are
and always have been,
and so you plant a garden
and you fight for open space
and you reduce your carbon footprint
and you tell everyone about what they can do.
and in this way, you reach outward to the great wide world.
Inner seeking, outward reaching.

I suppose you can do these things without church, too,
but church is about making the connection.

It is about the journey back and forth,
about how when you do reach out,
then you need,
like the tide,
to return to yourself again,
and then back out and back in,
forever in a dance.

This is what I hope this church will be out,
about the journey,
inward and outward and between,
the journey to a life of beauty, integrity, and truth
for ourselves and for others,
the journey to a world of love, justice, and compassion
for everyone else
and for ourselves.

We journey inward,
and our minds and souls blaze
Where our hunger and passion meet,
we reach out to another.
This is when our future can begin.