Behind the Scenes, 2002-2003

Davidson Loehr and Cathy Harrington

8 June 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

(On the cover of the orders of service appeared a drawing and poem by the Danish poet Piet Hein, which serves as a leit-motif in the sermon. The poem is called “Circumscripture.” The drawing is of a priest in long flowing robe walking along with a glowing halo hovering around his head a little below eye level.

The poem says:

“As pastor X steps out of bed

he slips a neat disguise on..

That halo ’round his priestly head

is really his horizon.”)

Intro

We decided to try something very different today. Cathy’s ministerial student internship was completed the end of May. And while she’ll be here through July, preaching several more times, she is now here as our summer minister. Her student days here are over.

During this year, we have had a lot of communication behind the scenes, about ministry, religion, preaching, all the things involved in the business of being a liberal minister. These interchanges have all happened behind the scenes, things you didn’t see or hear. We have met for about an hour a week of one-on-one supervision, but most of our interchanges have happened by e-mail.

Some of them have been pretty heated. We have never attacked the other person, but have often disagreed about important issues, and sometimes it’s been pretty heated.

Cathy, shockingly, was rude enough to keep all these e-mails! And when she wrote her final theological reflection paper for her seminary a couple weeks ago, she showed me some of these e-mails – there are well over thirty pages of them. She put a lot of them in her final paper, which she shared with her classmates. And we decided there were some good things in these behind-the-scenes exchanges that might make a good sermon, and that would have a lot of topics to which many of you could relate from your own lives.

So we will bring you – not the whole thirty pages, thankfully – but some excerpts from the discussions about religion and ministry that have been going on since last August, behind the scenes.

PRAYER

To give thanks is to have needed, and to have received, a gift for which we are too grateful to remain silent.

To give thanks is to acknowledge that we have been given something precious that we did not earn.

To give thanks is to use all five of our senses, but in new ways:

It is to see the invisible things around us, and to rejoice in them:

like the glow of warmth from those who care for us,

the sparkle of laughter and love which surprise us with joy,

or the glimpse of a fuller life, and a better world.

To give thanks is to hear the silent things, and to learn their melodies by heart:

like the quiet understanding of friends,

or the sound of caring

To give thanks is to smell of gratitude,

or even to reek of it!

— it is to taste the immediate,

seasoned with a dash of the infinite.

To give thanks is to touch the deep and undoubtable presence of things which could not possibly exist:

it is like grasping the most hopeful of possibilities,

or feeling life itself passing through us, and blessing us as it passes,

or holding and being held by memories still warm to the touch.

To give thanks is to have learned how to say YES to life, in all the languages of the heart, mind, body and spirit. And more: it is finally to hear the YES of life, a YES which can unite all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings of life itself into you, into me, into each of us.

A medieval theologian named Meister Eckhart once wrote that if the only prayer we ever say in thank you, it will be sufficient. Let us give thanks for the manifold miracles of our lives. Amen.

Sermon

Cathy:

My internship in Austin has been all that it should be, and then some. I was told that internships should be kind of like the “flowering” of a minister, and in my case it has not been without some painful pruning and “heading” (you know, when you pinch off blossoms so the plant can grow larger. It seems so cruel but necessary for growth.) I can still remember how nervous I was when I started in August, the sleepless nights and debilitating doubts. What was I thinking accepting an internship in this huge church with this reputedly brilliant intellectual as my supervisor?

I wanted my mentor to be someone with a Ph.D. in religion because I needed to prove to myself (and the Ministerial Fellowship Committee) that I could cut the muster. If I wasn’t “enough” for a large congregation of highly (over) educated UUs, then I wanted to know ASAP.

Davidson had read some of my papers and sermons before offering me the internship and he was aware of my beliefs, and that I considered myself a UU Christian. He didn’t seem to think there would be a problem, in spite of the largely humanist population at First UU. It was with anticipation and no shortage of anxiety that I made the1800 mile move, pulling that UHaul trailer to Austin.

My first couple of weeks were so daunting that I wondered if I would make it. And August was so HOT in Texas! I had meetings almost every night with this committee and that committee, and Davidson asked for a schedule of sermon topics through December. The adjustment of moving and missing my friends and school were harder than I anticipated and a slew of mishaps such a car accident that wasn’t my fault, a dead battery, and a major mistake in an automatic deposit in my checking account put me $1000 in arrears with the bank, and it was so HOT ! How do these people live like this?

It felt like my life was spinning out of control and I had somehow landed in a Woody Allen movie.

My first meeting to plan sermon topics with Andrea and Davidson was so intimidating that it left me feeling like my mind was nothing more than a huge void. They both seemed energized and creatively in sync while I sat on the sidelines wondering what the hell I was thinking putting myself out there as a minister.

Fortunately, the congregation went out of their way to make me feel at home and welcome. Thank goodness, the people in this church are so friendly and nice.

Davidson:

After agreeing to be a mentor for a ministerial intern, I wondered, What have I got myself in for? This is a big responsibility. We have a year in which this woman is trusting us to help her prepare as a liberal religious minister, to help fill in the gaps that seminary educations always leave. It’s intimidating.

I’m not worried about the church. It’s a good healthy church, the people here will be good to and for her. I’m worried about me. How do I help teach someone what I think she needs to know about religion in a year? Can this be done? The tendency in seminaries and in most of our society is to act as though religion is just whatever you happen to believe, as though there were no deeper subject matter. It isn’t true, of course. There are fervently-held beliefs that are foolish, self-absorbed, unwise or unhealthy. Some beliefs are good, some are bad. Good religion is about good beliefs, and ministers are supposed to know the difference.

I want to help Cathy find her own personal authority, which comes from her own authenticity, and help her understand that religious jargon isn’t to be trusted unless we can also explain in ordinary language what we mean by these loaded words.

But there is so much else to cover: weddings, memorial services, creating an attitude of seriousness and worship, understanding some of the politics of churches, and budgets, and trying to manage the time so you still have space for a personal life. I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself in for, and I don’t want to fail. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it well.

Cathy:

I had written three new sermons and preached four times and had only been on the job for six weeks! Writing two newsletter columns a month and coming up with sermon blurbs before the sermon is even written was challenging, but I would have to say that my biggest challenge occurred at the Sunday Night Live service when my prayer and then my sermon were preceded by a very talented belly dancer. Trying to create a sacred space after a belly dancer was NOT an easy task. What on earth had I gotten myself into?

I was scheduled to preach all three services on October 13, the evening service Oct 27, and preach in two area UU churches in November and share the pulpit with Davidson on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. In December I was scheduled to preach three times and do both Christmas Eve services with Davidson. Add Evensong, quilting group, baking classes, pastoral care, committee meetings… Whew! I’ll either be a veteran when this is over or dead. Goodness. Did I say I wanted to be a parish minister?

My first few sermons were fairly well received. Nobody threw stones or rotten tomatoes, anyway. I talked about my background in Christian Science, and my reasons for leaving the religion of my childhood, and my past careers as a hairdresser and a baker. But, when I presented my sermon called Rediscovering Prayer, I revealed that I think of myself as a Unitarian Universalist Christian. As a result of that sermon I received several calls and emails from church members interested in talking more about UU Christianity. I decided it would be a good idea to form a group to explore this together and so I wrote a blurb for the newsletter and then emailed Davidson to tell him my plans.

“I’m going to start a UU Christian Group at church, do you think I’ll be tarred and feathered?”

Well, yes, actually as it turned out. By Davidson. He went ballistic. Said it was the flakiest idea I’d had yet. He acted like it was a disease he didn’t want spread in his church. He asked me if I thought I was more spiritually sensitive than the 600+ members of this church who would not want Christian language or structure!

“Where is your authority for this?”

“We can talk about this, Cathy, but you won’t win this argument.”

I wrote back, “What? Where did that come from? I never said that. Damn it, Davidson, you insulted me.”

“Good grief, I don’t want to win this one.

“Boy, this is proof certain that Unitarians are least tolerant of Christians. We are supposed to be inclusive in this denomination. I told you that you might want to send me packing to one of those liberal Christian churches. I can call the group something else, jeez.”

“NO,” he wrote back, “You are going to examine your beliefs to a degree I don’t think you’ve been forced to.” Then he used an analogy to studying the guitar and how Klondike is changing my technique. Forcing me to pay attention to aspects of the music and my hand and finger positions in ways I had never been asked to do. I had to give up all of my favorite pieces and begin again.

My goodness, how on earth did I end up with two Ph.D. “task masters” for mentors? Great, just great! This is going to be a very long year.

Behind the scenes, intense emails are flying. I argued, “My myth, my story has been Jesus all my life. Why do we have to throw him away? Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom of God is what I strive for in my life. Jesus was a teacher of wisdom. His parables and aphorisms are insightful and evocative. I’m tired of having to defend myself for choosing to follow Jesus, for calling myself a Christian.”

I often closed my emails, to soften things a bit, Your humble student.

Davidson wrote back, “Why Jesus? Why not Buddha or Socrates?”

You know, I told him, the Buddha abandoned his wife and child to go off and become enlightened. How enlightened is that? I think I prefer Jesus.

So he writes back, “The Buddha would have made a lousy father, Cathy, why wish that on any kid.”

I obviously can’t win this argument.

Then he throws in, “It’s understandable that as a single mother who her worked her butt off, you’d carry this grudge, but it might be time to shelve it? Just a thought.”

“If you want to yell and vent,” he says, “we can make time for that.”

“That’s pretty hard to do over email,” I tell him, ” But, I will always tell you when you make me angry or insult me. This time you did by accusing me of arrogance, ignorance, and self-righteousness. I didn’t deserve that.”

“Keep reacting honestly, Cathy, you don’t have to be nice, you have to be real. Arrogance, ignorance, and self-righteousness? Well, don’t ever be sure they don’t fit. I’m speaking to you, me, and everyone. I see you wanting to exalt your unexamined beliefs. I ask on what authority? What IS the authority for your beliefs? That’s an important question, and we need to know how to answer it.”

“So much stuff in UU churches stops at the lower level, where people want to take sides for theism or atheism. What a waste of time! Get beyond that and talk about what in life is deeply true and life giving, don’t let the idioms of expression distract you, Cathy.”

Hmmm…

Davidson:

It’s so important for preachers to know that religious words are idioms of expression, not the names of supernatural things. Now that I’ve talked with her and heard her preach, I think I want to work on two things with Cathy this year. One is just craft, how to put a sermon together with a beginning, a theme and development, and a good ending. It’s like music in that way. Little things like articulation mean a lot. Unless we enunciate clearly, people who don’t hear well won’t be able to understand us. It’s a matter of technique, but also a matter of respect for those who have honored us with their presence and trust. She also has trouble writing endings. I’ll read through the drafts of her sermons and think “This is a fine sermon, but don’t blow the ending, don’t just end it in mid-air.” At first, I wrote a lot of her endings. Sermons can end in different ways, but they are bringing a fairly intimate relationship with a congregation to a close for a week, so they need some care. I don’t know why she has such trouble writing endings. Maybe she doesn’t like for things to end.

I’m also getting to learn more about her own religious beliefs, a combination of very spiritual Christian Science teachings with some Jesus and God stories thrown in. She calls herself a Christian. I don’t know what she means by that. I don’t think she does, either. But if she’s going to use the word in a liberal pulpit, it’s her job to be clear about it, so anyone who’s listening can understand her.

It’s certainly an odd collection of beliefs she is labeling “Christian”! A Jesus without miracles, who didn’t die for anyone’s sins, a religion without a heaven or hell, with a God that is not a being but is a series of poetic and symbolic things like love, truth, mind and the rest. Throughout most of Christian history, 99% of Christians would have burned her at the stake for these beliefs. I don’t think “Christian” describes her beliefs, and don’t think she knows what she means by words like Jesus, Christ, God and the rest.

She wrote me last October that she wanted to start a “UU Christian” group at church, and she got angry and hurt when I told her it was a flaky idea and she couldn’t do it because she doesn’t know what those words mean. Then she wrote “call me crazy, but I love Jesus.” That makes me nuts. She doesn’t love Jesus. Jesus is dead. She loves something else and I want her to know what it is.

What I think she loves is a picture of life lived in simple and direct service to others, and she loves the parts of the Jesus tradition that tell stories about simple and direct service to others, like the foot-washing story she likes so much. But if she can say it that way, then everyone in the room can understand her, including those who have no particular interest in Jesus.

When preachers wrap themselves in religious words like God, Christ, Buddha, Allah, sin, salvation, revelation, prophecy and the rest of it, the aura around those words can make us feel very special. It creates a kind of halo around us. It feels marvelous to use such powerful words, even if we don’t know what we mean by them. Think about it. You have your opinions, we speak for God’s opinions. You speak of stocks and bonds, we speak of salvation. Ministers can get dipped in this vocabulary of special and vague words so far that they actually think they’re living in and speaking from that so-called eternal world. You better believe that creates a sense of a halo!

But that halo is a trap, for it becomes our horizon – like the cartoon and poem on the cover of your order of service. When people are allowed to use religious language they don’t understand, they don’t so much communicate meanings as they cast a kind of spell over themselves and others. Using those special words can become addictive, can permanently blind you. I know ministers who have been in this business for forty years who can not tell you what they believe if they can’t use words like God, but they can’t tell you what they mean by those words either. That’s not an integrated belief. It isn’t a belief at all. It’s more like an unexamined pious habit that some believers, and some ministers, use to mesmerize themselves. It can’t help us become more whole, it only gets us into a certain kind of club, where people talk like that, and have agreed not to ask what on earth those words mean. That’s not what liberal religion, or any honest religion, is about.

It’s like taking medications. We users don’t have to know the meaning or effects of words like insulin, valium, ritalin, codein, or all the rest of them. But the professionals who give those things to us had better know their meanings and their effects, or they are being unprofessional and we are at risk of being abused. In that way, religion is like medicine. If ministers don’t know what such powerful words mean, we shouldn’t be allowed to use them. We’re not paid to cast spells, we’re paid to help people understand their own lives in light of the kind of insights the best religions have always offered.

This sounds so academic, so intellectual, and it is. But that’s my own bias, my own halo – and if I’m not careful, my own horizon. And the good and bad news is that my bias, my limitations, are going to be part of Cathy’s internship experience. She’s stuck with both my gifts and my blindnesses. I don’t apologize for them. We don’t need to be perfect, we need to be human. That’s enough. And part of my approach to life is that I think we need to know what we believe before we can ask whether it is worth believing, and worth prescribing to others.

Cathy already has everything she needs to be a very good minister. She’s as intelligent, as perceptive, as loving as anyone needs to be, and has more common sense than most. But too many ministers, even Unitarians, think that preaching should be done only in terms of their personal beliefs, and that it is somehow rude to question anyone else’s beliefs – as though our unexamined beliefs deserved respect. Nonsense! People deserve respect, beliefs have to earn it.

Cathy:

I can’t tell you what it was like to send a sermon to Davidson for approval late on a Saturday night and have his response be, “About that ending, or lack thereof. But the rest is fine, just fine.”

“Davidson, you need to add “fine” to the list of words not to use when speaking to a very tired woman with a hormone imbalance.”

What is the authority for my belief? A lifetime of learning how to live and love, experiences of grace and transformation when I thought I wouldn’t survive, and ten months of dueling with this Wise Old Theologian.

Davidson was relentless, patient (mostly), and generous with his time and tutoring. I am beginning to understand. What he is talking about is what Paul Tillich referred to as “the ground of all being.” This is just a way of expressing what is deeply true and permanent about life.

“God” isn’t a big enough word. No single religion can provide adequate or enduring idioms of expression that can define or express the Ultimate Concern.

Poetry, the myths, great art and music created over the centuries hold but a fragment of the permanent. Nothing can contain all that is enduringly true about life. I still contend that Jesus was one of the few human beings who walked the earth that understood this core truth. His teachings are simple and pure and we don’t have to discard them.

“Jesus had been as deeply and remarkably human as anyone his disciples had ever known; The two things-his profound humanity, and his intense closeness to God-were bound together inextricably, and at the heart of the mystery of that bond was love, a light that never went out. [1]

Jesus was connected to the rhythm of restoration and hope that flows from the core of Ultimate Reality and washes over us when we willingly open our hearts or, at times when life crack us wide open. In those moments of pain, we are most receptive to this quenching mist and then courage, compassion, justice, and wholeness are all possible. This is what Jesus tried to teach, what he hoped for humanity.

Davidson:

There: did you hear that? You understood every word she said. The words were true, they were anchored in life lived with depth and awareness. She was absolutely clear about what she believed and how it was connected to life.

And there was more to it than just truth and clarity. There was also a lot of poetry there: poetry that spoke from the heart of life, and everyone hear both heard it and felt it.

There was also an edge to it, a very distinctive kind of strength and power, her own very strong personality coming through and tying her insights and her poetry together in a kind of prophetic voice that everyone here could understand and relate to. Folks, it doesn’t get much better than that. That’s preaching, and it’s good preaching. You could hear it in the pulpit of almost any church, and know you had heard words of truth, depth, passion and power. That’s about as good as it gets.

I think I first saw all these parts come together in the Easter service we did together. It was good. We dealt with the Christian Easter story from our very different directions. Two different beliefs, each expressed clearly. I like having a second minister with beliefs very different from mine, it makes the tent bigger. Afterwards, people complemented us on our “tag team” service. On Easter, Cathy didn’t seem like a student. She seemed like a colleague. What a perfect day for the ending of an old role and the birth of a new one! I think her internship is about over.

We’ll always differ on some of our beliefs, but it doesn’t matter. I think she’s using her religious language now, rather than being used by it, and everyone can understand what she’s saying. Her endings are getting better, too.

OK, I think we’re done. Say Amen, Cathy.

Cathy:

No, Davidson, your not-so-humble student has more to say!

This is my new language for the ground of all being, the Rhythm of Restoration and Hope. This is how I refer to God these days. God is love, as I have said before, but God is so much more than that.

My guitar lesson this week was devoted largely to understanding rhythm. Klondike, without knowing it, gave me a new metaphor. When I complained, “I don’t think I have any rhythm, he said, “Of course you have rhythm, everybody has rhythm, otherwise they would walk like this. And he demonstrated what no rhythm would look like. It looked ridiculous, but I understood.

“You think you don’t have rhythm because you aren’t paying attention to it. You must be intentional, settle into your body, and feel yourself move with the beat. A conductor will always cue the orchestra with the beat, and they don’t begin until they have had that moment of getting in sync with the rhythm.”

The sacred center of all being surrounds us in mystery and pulsates with the rhythm of life-giving restoration and hope. It is up to us to take the time to get in sync with this life-sustaining tempo. Meditation, prayer, or chants are the tuning forks or metronomes that can usher in those moments of grace when we experience connectedness that will quench our spirits and offer transcendence.

Yes, rhythm is natural. Everything we need has been given to us. The catch is that we must pay attention to the “conductor.” It is necessary to align ourselves with the sacred center in which we have our being.

And then we must carefully listen. Listen with our hearts and minds to the rhythms of restoration and hope that we might dare to dance with our common dreams of a more perfect world.

This is what I believe.

OK, Davidson, now you can say “Amen,” and try not to blow the ending!

Davidson:

I’m quitting while we’re ahead. Amen.

—————

[1] Bawer, Bruce. Stealing Jesus. New York, NY. Three Rivers Press. 1997. P. 44-45.