In Fellowship

We ate in silence. At seven-thirty sharp we had filed down the stairs for breakfast. There were about sixty of us, sitting in a cramped refectory at pressboard tables in plastic chairs. The sisters had prepared nutritious food, which was primarily intended for the elderly nuns who lived in the Notre Dame Mission Center’s nursing home, where we were having our retreat. You could hear the sounds of serving spoons against chafing dishes, and coffee slurping into ceramic mugs. No one spoke. It was the second day of our retreat, and the first in full silence.

I signed up for this retreat in February, when I was casting about for things to do on my sabbatical. It was hosted by an organization called the Shalem Institute, which provides spiritual deepening and formation for laypeople and clergy in Christian, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist congregations. They run a fifteen-month spiritual deepening program for ministers and rabbis beginning every July. A friend of mine did this program and got a lot out of it. However, it requires several weeks of residency at Shalem’s Baltimore campus, spread out over the fifteen months. Since my baby was due in August, this didn’t seem like the summer to apply to the long program. A short retreat on the North Shore seemed like a perfect way to dip my toes in to the work of Shalem for the time being.

When I signed up for the retreat, it was advertised as a retreat for spiritual deepening, with times for silence and conversation. When I got further details after I registered, about a month before the retreat began, I discovered that most of the three day retreat would be spent in silence, with some guidance from a contemplative leader at the beginning and end.

Now, self-awareness is an ongoing spiritual discipline for all of us, and I, like anyone, often fall short. But I am fairly confident that I am not, by nature or by practice, a silent person.

There are different ways to accomplish ministry. For me, the talking, preaching, conversational part of ministry has always come more easily, and the part of ministry and spiritual life that takes stillness and listening has always been harder. When I learned that my retreat would be largely silent, I seriously considered whether or not I should still go. Finally I decided that I had often benefitted from taking risks, and this would probably be no different. And, after all, it was only three days.

I often feel that I am in a minority of spiritual seekers when it comes to appreciating silence. Some of our greatest spiritual leaders, in both the western and eastern traditions, have been grounded in the intentional practice of silence. My retreat, as an example, was over-registered almost instantly–I registered months before the retreat and still had to find lodging in Ipswich, because the rooms at the retreat center were filled.

One contemplative leader from the western monastic tradition whose spirit thrived in silence was Thomas Merton, a writer and Trappist monk. As a young man, Merton was a libertine, drinking heavily and spending freely during his first year of college at Cambridge University. Most scholars now think that Merton fathered a child while at Cambridge, although the Trappists have been oblique on this issue. Merton had first encountered silence in faith when he worshipped with a Quaker congregation in Flushing, New York as a teenager (“Thomas” 1.5). But it was not until he was a grown man that he was able to leave the world behind him and enter into the silence as a way of life.

At the outbreak of World War II, Merton, a pacifist, found himself at a crossroads in his life. He knew that the United States army would shortly summon him as a draftee to fight in a way he could not support. He had tried to join the Franciscans some years before, but had been asked to withdraw his application because he was seen as unsuitable, possibly because of his out-of-wedlock child (Merton 455, n. 11). He was then, in the fall and winter of 1941, living in Olean, New York, and teaching English at St. Bonaventure University. He felt he could not continue in that secular work, but was unsure about which of two paths to follow: to move to Friendship House in Harlem, New York to work with the poor; or to apply as a novitiate at the Trappist monastery Gethsemani in Kentucky (“Thomas” 3.2). Finally he was convinced of his vocation as a monk, and had to wait for the Trappists to accept him; and in the meantime, the threat of the draft loomed over him. He wrote, “I can’t think of desiring anything else but the cloister, or of doing anything else but praying and striving to get there, and suffering in patience every trial, everything there is to be suffered, everything that makes the vocation seem hopeless (Merton 466)!” Gethsemani accepted him in December 1941, seven days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

The Trappists are a cloistered order, which means they live apart from the world. They are also a silent order, not speaking aloud to each other at all, but rather communicating through sign language. When Merton entered the monastery, he entered a world of silence. To him, this was part of his calling, and part of his desire as a young man to live completely apart from the raucous world he had known as a youth. Silencing speech does not mean living without sound or meaning. The monks sang their prayers and masses at the appointed hours of the day, and heard scripture read and sung in chapel. Merton himself was a prolific writer, committing to paper the many words he did not say aloud. Although he at first felt unsure about continuing his work as a writer once he had become a monk, his superior in the monastery encouraged him. The silence of the monastery became the fertile earth for the poetry, autobiography and journals of Thomas Merton.

When we exercise our spirituality in a realm of silence, other dimensions emerge. I did not realize how intrusive speech could be until I went a few days without it. At my spiritual retreat, there were no expectations of how we would spend our time in the silence. I had brought some reading and my journal, as well as my knitting, which had reached a difficult spot. I found in the silence freedom to do whatever I wanted: to knit without interruption or questions about what I was making; to write in my journal whenever I felt moved or to go be by myself without being rude to anyone else. I did not expect anything social of my fellow retreaters and could feel confident they had no expectations of me. In the late afternoon I began to feel that the large room we were all sharing was getting too dark, and I realized that I would have to decide to turn on the lights without asking anyone else. There was no way to ask anyone else to share responsibility with me for my actions.

In the writing I did over that retreat, I found new images and depths occurring to my mind. I imagined the world of faith as a deep sea on which I had only been floating, and felt invited to go deeper. I felt that the comforting presence I have called God was with me on my journey. I felt free from the need to plan my day in advance. I walked up a hill to the garden and cemetery, and down behind the retreat center, along a disused path to the marshes which lead out to the sea. A woman led a group of us in body prayer, instructing us to chant and move our bodies in certain ways to allow the spirit to flow through us. She spoke to instruct us, but all of us participants–moving and chanting together–did not speak. I attended mass with the sisters on the morning of the third day and delighted in the singing and sounds of mass. There were riches in the silence which I could never have imagined.

The silence was also exhausting. Not having a room at the retreat center, I could not find anywhere to be truly alone during the days. I felt handicapped, as though tool as indispensable as a thumb or an elbow had been taken from me. I did not get to know anyone I met at the retreat. I even reconnected with a man I had gone to divinity school with, but now can’t remember anything about him (not his name, not his denomination) except that he is married and has children. When I returned to my bed and breakfast in the evenings, it was a relief to sit and have a cup of tea with the innkeepers, and to walk down to the corner store to get a newspaper to read. I had on purpose found a room without a television, and I had not brought my computer, so that I wouldn’t be tempted by the lure of electronics. As it turned out, I was so tired every night that I just wanted to go back to my room–which, of course, was silent and solitary–and go to sleep.

Silence is a part of certain Christian communities, like the Trappists and the Cistercians, but it is a large part of Buddhist practice. Some Buddhists, whether exploring being monks or nuns or studying in a cloistered community, live for days in silence. The Dalai Lama told the story in the reading we heard this morning of a monk who remained silent six days of every week, and spoke only on Saturdays. But even Buddhists who do not commit their lives to silence practice silence as a spiritual discipline. Meditation, the central Buddhist act of piety, is done in silence, or with chanting (but without conversation). I once spent a year attending a weekly Buddhist meditation at the First Parish in Cambridge (Unitarian Universalist), led by a Buddhist man who had spent several years living in a monastery. Just as I did with my more recent silent retreat, I signed up without really knowing what I was getting myself in to. We started by beginning and ending each session by sitting in meditation for ten minutes. Our teacher told us we would, by the end of the class, be sitting for twenty minutes or more. I was very skeptical. How could I sit still and count my breaths for ten minutes, let alone twenty? Yet I was surprised, even on that first day, that I could not feel the time going by as I quieted my mind and counted my inhalations and exhalations.

In Buddhist practice, I learned, not only should I remain physically silent during meditation, I should also allow my mind to become quiet. This doesn’t mean forcing down all the things your mind flings up at you when you give it a chance. It means allowing thoughts and distractions to arise, and then to let them go, and return to the focus of the breath. Enlightenment comes, when it does, out of this profound spiritual silence.

Our world is full of noise. The noise of electronics, the noise of the television and the radio, the noise of automobiles and airplanes, the noise of the marketplace and the noise of endless complaint. We can even use these noises to keep us from the work of faith which we know waits for us in quietude. Complete silence is almost impossible to come by. Seeking out silence as a spiritual practice reconnects us to a deeper and greater source of our own spirits. The Spirit is in the silence, waiting for our attention.

I’d like to end this sermon with a longer period of silence than usual. We’ll take about five minutes to sit in quiet together. If you wish, you may follow the Buddhist practice of following your breath, counting each inhalation and exhalation. If you become distracted or lose count, begin again at one. I will ring the bell to bring us out of our silence together.

Sources

Dalai Lama. Spiritual Advice for Buddhists and Christians. Ed. Donald W. Mitchell. New York: Continuum, 1998.

Merton, Thomas. Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The Journals of Thomas Merton. New York: Harper, 1996.

“Thomas Merton.” Wikipedia. 11 Dec. 2009. 1-11. Accessed 11 Dec. 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton.

We are born in water, we are made of water, we will be washed with water when we die. Humans need water to drink and to keep clean. We come into the world in a rush of water, and we wash our dead in clear water. Water constitutes most of our bodies and our planet. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, water symbolizes death (in the danger of drowning) and rebirth. The oceans are a mystery whose depths we cannot fully explore or fathom, even with all our modern technology. In some creation myths, the gods formed the rivers and seas of the world with the sacred waters of their bodies. In others, gods created dry land in the midst of the waters, or did battle with the ocean and sea monsters to bring dry land to the surface. Water is necessary to our survival and one of the most destructive forces on earth. Like birth itself, and death, like the sustenance of life and the warmth of families, water is present in almost all human religions.

I was baptized soon after I was born. My parents attended a small Episcopal church where a man they liked and admired served as rector. My father’s parents were my godparents. I can imagine them standing in the sanctuary that smelled of oiled wood, repeating the Elizabethan language of the vows: “Dost thou, therefore, in the name of this Child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?” I wore the woolen gown my mother’s father had been christened in, and in which my son was baptized this morning.

Those words, said on my behalf when I was only a few months old, changed my relationship to the Christian church forever. Because of those words, I may come to communion in Christian churches. Children cannot make religious commitments for themselves, and even the religious understandings they come to as young people cannot carry them through their adulthood. Many religious traditions ask parents to make one set of vows for their children soon after birth, and then ask those children to make their own commitments when they are adolescents. These then open the pathways teens follow into the religious development of their adulthoods.

By the time I was twelve and should have begun confirmation class, my family had moved away from that small church in Ohio and to a much bigger, more impersonal church in the suburbs of Detroit. When my parents said they wanted to try out a Unitarian Universalist church, I was at first dead set against it. Although I did not like the girls in my Sunday school class, I loved the music and liturgy of the worship service. Also, since we had just moved from Ohio, I was probably resistant to further change. When our Episcopal church sent a letter saying I would have to begin confirmation classes, and thereby spend more time with classmates whom I did not like, I thought maybe I would try Unitarian Universalism with my parents after all. We visited one or two churches, and finally made our way to Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church in Southfield, Michigan, which, as it turned out, was home to much nicer Sunday school kids. That church became our home. I went through that church’s coming of age program, parallel to the Episcopal church’s confirmation class. In high school, I joined the Religious Education committee, became an official member of the church, voted to call our new minister, and first felt the call to ministry myself.

During that same time, in the safe environs of my Unitarian Universalist church, I pushed and pulled, tangled and untangled the Christianity of my birth. I discovered the worship of the divine feminine. I discovered atheism. I struggled to define my beliefs. I continued to cherish the practices of our broadly tolerant Christian home. When I went off to college, I decided not to decide, to let my mind relax from this struggle to know and just see what came. When I was in divinity school I began the process again of naming what I believed, and I am still engaged in that process. I have discovered that belief requires practice as a prerequisite, and for me, that practice has been to engage with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in study and prayer.

So what has my baptism done for me? I do take communion from time to time, when I am in a congregation where I feel that my beliefs are included there, and where I feel that taking communion would not violate my beliefs or the covenant of the congregation. I believe that Jesus was a prophet and a teacher of God’s word, but not that he was divine or unique. I believe that he had the presence of God within him, and I believe he taught people to recognize that same presence with themselves, that divinity in all of us. To me, since I still orient my faith toward Jesus and his teachings, my journey is still within the Christian tradition, if a very liberal part of it. Many more orthodox Christians, who confess belief in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and who believe that Jesus is the Christ and the sole, or the most important, pathway to God, would disagree with me. I might be a heretic at best, or a heathen at worst. But as a Unitarian Universalist, affirming the necessity of spiritual growth and the responsible search for truth and meaning, I claim my right to stand within the tradition of Jesus and argue against aspects of it at the same time.

When John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the River Jordan on the border of Judea and Galilee, in or around the year 33 C.E., he was challenging the Judaism of his birth in a similar way. The Torah establishes several circumstances under which people must wash to cleanse themselves. Some of these ablutions require “living water”–that is, water from a river or spring–such as recovering from skin diseases, touching a dead body, or involvement with the genitals (Koester 168). Faithful Jews in the first century would have used water daily to remain physically and ritually clean. What John, and Jesus after him, offered was a single baptism that brought the faithful into a new relationship with the God of Abraham. Both John and Jesus stood firmly within their Jewish tradition and did not necessarily think they were creating a new religion. They lived and led in a time of upheaval in the Jewish tradition, when many different communities were exploring their Judaism against the backdrop and under the control of the Roman empire. They were exploring the possibilities present in using Jewish cleansing rituals in a new way.

People in the Christian tradition are not the only people who practice baptism today. There is still extant today an ancient sect called Mandaeism, whose adherents follow the teachings of John the Baptist. This group, which was once primarily located in Baghdad, but has now fled to Jordan and Syria because of the war, can trace its history back to the first century, and remained unconverted by the sweep of Christianity and Islam. It is a tiny community, thought to number no more than 60,000 worldwide. Mandaeists are Gnostics for whom baptism of adults is the central practice of their religion. They baptize in the name of God, and not (since they do not revere Jesus) in the name of the Son or the Holy Spirit.

Every time I, as a baptized Christian, take communion, I must evaluate what that ritual means to me. I am sometimes with friends or family in their churches when communion is served. I have been to communion ceremonies where the priest said that taking communion meant standing up on the side of the poor. I have been invited by ministers who called all people who wished to share that sacred meal together. In those times and places, I have taken communion. On the other hand, I have worshiped in congregations where the minister invited forward all who accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and in those times and places, I have respectfully remained seated. The invitation was heart-felt, and it did not offend me, but I could not include myself within it.

In all our religious rituals, we face the question of how well we fit within the traditions the rituals come from. Almost all Christians would agree that baptism and communion are the two fundamental sacraments initiated by Jesus’ ministry, but they vary widely in how they practice them. Here, in this congregation, where we are part of a movement which has its roots in liberal Christianity but has spread its branches into the liberal practice of many religious traditions, and of none, I am open to calling the blessing of a new baby in God’s name “baptism.” If this word reflects the tradition of the family, as is the case for my family, then it can be a legitimate part of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. If it is not part of a family’s practice, I use the words “blessing and dedication.” The ritual of welcoming a new child with water is universal enough, and durable enough, to allow our struggles with what it means.

In some traditions, baptism is a ritual undertaken by an adult or an older child to symbolize their mature acceptance of the Christian faith. This is the case with Baptist churches, which trace their heritage to the Protestant reformation and disagreement with the Catholic church over the validity of infant baptism. Jesus, after all, was baptized as an adult and shared baptism with other adults. This is one more example of people of faith struggling and wrestling with their inherited traditions, seeing if they can remain within them while trying to move beyond some aspects of them.

The religious traditions we grew up in and participate in now are the same way. They have been with humanity for hundreds of years. Think of those Mandaeists, clinging to their faith even as they have been exiled from Iraq by violence and war. Their faith will change and withstand change, live with them and through them, as they learn to worship in a new place. Our traditions are strong enough for us to wrestle with them, and love them, and continue them and change them over time. This is, after all, what John the Baptist and Jesus were doing when they instituted baptism, and it is what Baptists were doing when they insisted on full immersion baptism fifteen hundred years later. It is what all of us do, as we grow up, and grow in our faith as adults. We may leave behind the faith of our childhood, or we may embrace it even more fully, yet we continue the journey of faith always. We trust the larger embrace of the Spirit as we grow and live together in fellowship.

Please join me in prayer.

Spirit of Life, which moves within us as water flows through the earth in streams, bring us energy and vision this morning. Keep us on the path of our spiritual journeys. Help us find the meaning and depth in each moment of that journey, being fully present in it.

Give us the comfort of our childhood faiths. Remind us of the smells of our sanctuaries, the melodies of our hymns, the ringing silences, the repeated prayer. Give us permission to love what we have loved, even if that tradition is no longer ours.

Give us the courage of our convictions. Help us claim what we believe even in the face of disagreement or censure. Help us stand up not only for our beliefs, but for the right of everyone the world over to worship in her own way. Help us build up an ethic of tolerance and right relations among people of different beliefs.

Give us the restlessness to look forward on our journeys, to hear the call of your Spirit out of our comforting homes and into new vistas of being and faith. Help us know that our own Spirits will not fail us as we journey together by faith. Bind us together in this congregation in love and fellowship, even as our journeys blaze many different paths up the holy mountain.

Amen.

Sources

Koester, Craig R. Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.