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Youth Service
Reflections from Megan Blau, Patrick McVeety-Mill and Karen Farmer
Worship Leader: Davidson Loehr
24 April 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.
INTRODUCTION:
Like most churches, we have struggled with learning how to understand and structure “youth services” so they are enjoyable for both adults and our youth. In the past, there were youth services at which attendance would drop below fifty. Adults were not attracted to them, and the youth dreaded doing them.
A couple years ago, I decided the failure was mine, not theirs. We changed the structure of the service to one in which the youth work with me and our intern to plan the service, where the intern and I have the responsibility for approving all parts of the service and arranging their order.
We also changed the philosophy of the service, and I think this change has made most of the difference. When I meet with our youth, I explain that once they are standing in front of the congregation, the rules change. It is no longer about them; it is always about the people sitting in front of them. Whatever they offer must be a gift to people of all ages. And to do that, their offerings need to feed the minds and souls of all the people there. Our congregation wants to see how teenagers wrestle with the questions that make us most human. It’s a serious assignment, and we treat it as such.
At first, this news seems to shock our kids, who can easily – like adults – slip into thinking it’s a time to do their own thing, and that it’s about them rather than the congregation.
They submit drafts of their statements to the intern and me, and we make suggestions as to how they could be strengthened and made more effective. In return, I try to remember they are teenagers rather than graduate students, and keep criticisms pretty gentle.
I then write a homily to weave their reflections into a message that can bring out their strengths and help others see how they relate to the existential questions of everyone in the room.
We still need to do more work in helping them speak loudly, clearly and slowly – when we get nervous, we often speak fast and softly. But we think the general philosophy and approach have solved nearly all the problems with which we’ve struggled in the past, so offer this service as a model for others to consider.
— Davidson Loehr
REFLECTION #1,
by Megan Blau
I am not a gardener. Plants wilt after a few days in my house, I have managed to kill cacti and Aloe Vera plants, I have a brown thumb. So last year, when I acquired four plants for a science project, I feared for their lives. Yet, after well over a year, they are not only alive but thriving. And when, during last month’s hail storm (which I’m sure you all remember), all their pretty yellow flowers were broken off, I was kind of upset, but I realized that while I was not a gardener, I did enjoy it a little. I found a small piece of myself, and it was nice. I know that’s not surprising; at my current age it’s hardly uncommon to be finding yourself.
But what about later? Growing up is usually thought of as a process throughout your childhood and teenage years, but I doubt any of you would tell me we just hit 21 and stagnate. So what is growing up? A physical, mental, or emotional thing? Sure, but these things are changing all our lives, not just in childhood, for better or worse. I want to keep growing up throughout my whole life, no matter what it means. I don’t want to get complacent in the imagined knowledge that I know everything. I would like to keep discovering myself, no matter who I may find. I don’t know much about plants, I’m not very good with them, and yet I was able, though all I did was leave them outside and water them every few days, to make them live and flower. And there is a very definite satisfaction in knowing that I was part of something like that.
This experience has also left me with the knowledge that I may be able to do something even if I don’t think I’ll be good at it. There’s just no way of knowing beforehand, and an attitude of self-doubt tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Though the hail broke off their flowers, the plants remained green and healthy, and already have a few buds. If I can keep this in mind most of the time, then maybe I’ll be able to blossom, too.
REFLECTION #2,
by Patrick McVeety-Mill
Growing up is a difficult process that we all must go through. It stretches from the second you are born to your last moment of life. This is against what some people believe, that as soon as you become an ‘adult’ you’re done growing up and can rest for the rest of your life, we all grow up at various times in our life and each bit of growing gets us closer to know what it’s all about. Right now, our seniors are selecting which college they will go to for the next few years of their life. This can greatly effect what happens to them past here.
It is the decisions that take place growing up that will effect and change our lives and get us closer to finding ourselves. Getting married, having kids, getting promoted, getting fired. The list of experiences goes on for quite some time.
I found that my first time really growing up was right here in this very church taking part in the coming of age program. I got to talk about how I felt about things, I felt like I was older, like I had stepped up a notch on the course of my life. I had to sit and think about what I believed, what I wanted in life, and what I had to do to get there. The decisions I made will change what’s going to happen from here on out. I feel that they serve an important purpose in our life. Growing up, learning, finding your true self, all of this is so important, and I know that I’ll have to think about what I do before I get to it. It’s quite the experience.
Even other creatures have places and times where they grow up, like dragons. Yes, dragons, just stick with me for a second. They must go through steps that will set the course for the rest of their lives. They breath their first fire, soar into the heavens, and let out their first, blood chilling roar. Each of these effects them, will they be the terrible dragon that destroys cities and eats knights for breakfast or the gentle one that sits in the forest and helps lost travelers.
The same thing happens with us. I recently had to choose between two high schools, a fine arts and a liberal arts and science one. This may effect how the rest of my life goes. I’m having different experiences, meeting different people, and taking different classes than if I made the other choice. Several years from now, I might be a completely different person because of this decision. Who knows? All we can do is wait and see.
If one is lucky enough to choose between two or more well paying jobs after college, each one will lead them down another path. Or what to do if someone (or thing) close to you has passed on, what you do next can change the path of your life. Life is like a giant board game. We shape ourselves with every move of the piece, every roll of the die. Draw a card: you’re fired! What now? Stick with unemployment, angry and depressed, or go out and find a new job. Or maybe you’re happy about it!
Each part of growing up has a different effect on everyone that can lead to finding oneself in the end. The end to this board game is different for everyone. Where you finally stop growing and find your true self is all a matter of the decisions we make. Thank you.
REFLECTION #3,
by Karen Farmer
Preface: When I was about 5, my father was working off the gulf coast, counting birds on small islands for a nature conservancy group. One day, he decided to take me with him to one of these islands, and I was deeply impressed by the birds. I had no idea that this day would change the girl I have become. My father and the birds inspired such an awe at their power, beauty and independence, that I came to admire and often expect these same qualities in the people around me, as well as myself. I would like to tell you about that day.
That morning we jumped in the motorboat. It doesn’t matter which morning, for I was young enough then that each morning seemed the same, and the color of the sky and the worth of the day still meant little. The thick sea air engulfed us and then dumped us onto the dock of Green Island, an island that to me, never fit in the real world and never needed to. It just floated as a point in an endless desert of anonymous shifting water. Here, I stomped over the dock to wait for my father as he carried the day’s lunch and a pair of binoculars, to meet me and grasp my hand. I carried the look of my father’s steps, confident and firm, while his distracted eyes urged me to be silent.
Among the whisping ghosts of birds, we climbed the ladder to the blind, a wooden creature, a shack on stilts, and sat inside, the slats crisscrossing to make little windows that framed the chaotic, asymmetrical and beautiful movement of the shorebirds. They yelled like mad to each other, the sounds of their clicks and claps lost in the cacophony, individuals, calling to her chicks or calling his mate. My father treated them like human beings, admiring their cascading wedding plumage, their striking color, their sound. And my father carried these memories. This was his job.
He was paid to count them, to learn them and to understand them. I heard the sounds of birds come out of his mouth so many times it seemed that he spoke like the birds even when he spoke to me. In my mind, they both chattered in the same esoteric language I admired but could never touch. Without thought, I carried their sound. I preened my feathers, learned to dive and fly in the gulf wind, and tried to speak with the paradoxical complexity and simplicity of their vital and pointed speech. I did these things so my father would see me that way, wanting him to watch me and to speak to me. I wanted to carry their language so I could learn the only language my father ever knew, the language of their confidence, their dress, their dance.
Like me, each bird danced for another, sky pointing, their paired dipping beaks and necks, making careful interpretive inkblots on a backdrop of smooth blue. In their excitement, they ruffled their wedding plumage, accentuating the curving vines of their necks, ruffling brilliant feathers, carrying a few away by the violent wind. Feathers whipped around and around the island, performing pirouettes like stumbling children, falling everywhere and settling cool in the shade of a restless Mesquite. Sometimes, their wide wings carried them in the wind as well, dipping and swooping low into the brush to nudge a chick or high in the air to spot a fish in the shallow gulf. As a birdwatcher, my father followed their eyes with his eyes with weighty black binoculars, his body rigid and insistent. In the mornings, he just watched, observing color and size, and carried silent imprints of the day in his mind. Not permitted to speak, I squirmed and tossed around in the blind, restless from waiting. I did not yet know why I liked being there, as the sun beat mad looping patterns of heat into my skin and cells which carried the boredom heavily, making me wild.
In the sparse shade, we stopped to eat lunch. And here, chin on my knees, between bites of a ham and cheese sandwich, crust strewn across the ground, I felt that the ants must be more free. I imagined them sleeping under a dark virgin sky, lit with the cold light of crisp stars. I imagined them sitting back in little restaurants the size of leaves and chatting about their tans and the feast of crust, retrieved earlier at lunch.
The birds were like Greek gods, bickering about space and food as a hobby, as they watched and flew, like creators, proud and contented, over their kingdom. Every bird carried its young to maturity with lazy, comfortable guidance. The only limit was space; they used every inch. Feathered shoulders almost touched and every thorny branch provided a place to land. And yet these shorebirds didn’t ever care about birds of any other species. Great Egrets defended their territory against other Great Egrets, making threatening gestures with their long white necks, but a Roseate Spoonbill was virtually invisible to them. Each one seemed to carry the isolation of city people, with apartments like tiny, stacked houses, separate and easily overlooked by other tenants.
In the afternoon, after lunch, I ran down to the beach and sifted through the seaweed, soggy and ripe with salt, on the shore. Plovers and Sanderlings wandered here as outcasts, tiny gray birds, with short pointed beaks and plump bodies. They seemed like regional deities on such an island. Rushing in and out in a childish, passionate, giddy play, they carried the routine of water, a simple in and out of tides, with no need to watch or to observe. I’d never been one of these birds; I’d never loved one. I could only watch them as a child, fascinated but detached, eyes wide and distracted from the cool stick in my hand and the foaming seaweed.
Meanwhile, as shadows fell across the island, my father watched as the birds came back from fishing and flight, to roost, and he counted them. Hurrying back up the trail, I again sat next to him in the blind, sun soaked and windblown, to watch the last of the settling birds. Their concave wings curved into a feathered embrace, into the relative harmony of sleep. Their chicks, awkward with newness, closed large eyes in a woven stick nest in the undergrowth. I marked our footsteps in the rich dirt and then sand as we reach the dock, little feet and big making a two-part rhythm on the wet wood. We carried our trash and belongings in a hush, for the noises of the birds negated our own. Even as night came, those creatures chattered on and it made me wonder what they were talking about.
Stepping back on the boat was the hardest part. The way it swayed in the shallow water as I put a foot in made it seem like it didn’t want me back. The feeling was mutual. But as a chore, as a ritual, I stepped in, one foot and then the other, balancing and glancing back at the island. My father joined me and started the motor, cutting the shallow, salty gulf and then the Intercostal Waterway, slicing the sea in half. Streaming towards shore, I carried the smell that is so recognizable there, so unique. I’ve always thought it comes from the smell of birds, millions of birds living close, the smell of salt, crystallized on everything, and the strange smell of rot, taking the seaweed, the fish, and the birds. Off the boat and home, everything seemed so grounded. Just the grackles eating scattered dog food in the driveway. Just the ants following the same line in the dirt. No restaurants the size of leaves. No sleeping under the stars.
Away from that place, the idea coats me like a filter on a camera, not inventing color, but intensifying it, all reds and greens and blues saturated and brilliant. Something happened within me on that day that changed me. Now, in my heart, everyone is a bird. Because every bird is different, there must be, it seems, one match for every human; one that tends to cock its head, one that sings a complex tune. My father is the Great Blue Heron, an intelligent and lanky shorebird, dressed in lovely blues and whites and blacks. And I am the Green Jay, a solitary, timid bird of the woods, who wears tropical blues and greens.
Now, I carry that day everywhere. I carry the washed out bleach of the sun, the harsh sea wind, the screeching cry that birds make like humans, yelling at the summit of a mountain, yelling for something undefined, yelling for defiance and beauty and power. And whenever I’m alone, I carry my father’s voice, whispering their names in the morning heat; I carry the taste of the shadows, delicate and crucial under a great speckled egg.
SERMON: Growing Up and Finding Ourselves
It’s hard enough to have to read an original piece you write about yourself in front of a lot of people. But I made it harder for our three high school students, by saying I wanted them to write something that could be a gift to you, because standing up here on this stage is always about serving the people sitting in the pews.
In working with these students, I was reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s poem on children, where he said “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” All children are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come with their own personalities, their own styles, just as we did. And they seek ways to find a home in life, to serve it, to serve this grand sense of a Life that longs for itself – just as we do.
I see these annual youth services as a chance for the grown-ups to look into both our future and our past. Our children struggle with the same questions and challenges that we once did. And hearing from them as we have this morning can remind us how much like them we are, how much like us they are. We are also manifestations of Life’s longing for itself, and we also look for ways to find the dynamic and creative powers of life in and around us, to become a part of them, a part of this vast and transcendent Life that cradles us all.
You can see this in all three of their statements. Megan began with an innate sense of honor for Life, and a reluctance to take on responsibility for it because she had decided she had a brown thumb. Well, if you don’t think you can care for life well, you won’t want to.
It reminded me of something I read this week in Tikkun magazine. On the surface, it has nothing at all to do with Megan’s piece, but you’ll see the connection. These were two articles by women who are working to reframe the abortion debate, to get it out of the “individual rights” and “a woman’s right to choose” boundaries that aren’t likely to work any more. They are looking for a framework that is more honest, more accurate, and they write that choosing life or choosing abortion aren’t primarily choices about the new life. They’re choices about whether we feel that we can do honor and justice to the new life.
For instance, during Bill Clinton’s very liberal presidency, abortion rates in the U.S. fell by nearly 17%. Yet during George W. Bush’s very conservative presidency, abortion rates have risen by over 14%. Why? Because young women and young couples are embedded in our national economy. When the economy is better, they believe they can serve and honor life, so they have fewer abortions. When the economy is unfair, when it beggars most workers, people don’t feel that they can do justice to life, so they get more abortions. Abortion is about the economy and a deep respect for the sanctity of life, not about a hatred of life.
And there were seeds of this way of thinking in Megan’s piece. When she felt she couldn’t serve life, she didn’t want to take it on. When she began to believe she could, then she did. And that sense of life’s sanctity, and the conditions that need to exist before we encourage it – that sense seems to lie deep within us, and to be trustworthy.
Megan was talking about plants, not babies. And her point was about gaining faith in her abilities, faith that can give her more courage to engage more fully. But its implications are far-reaching. Her piece could inspire a whole book of sermons.
Patrick has a very different style from Megan. If he were a Hindu, I’d say his path is the path of Jnana Yoga, the path of trying to relate ourselves to life through understanding it more fully. You heard him working to figure it out, to understand how the choices we make have far-reaching effects, how they’re connected to life.
He also brought in another wonderful dimension: the dimension of mythology as a source for creative understanding of ourselves and our options. There are good dragons and bad dragons, and some of the difference comes from their choices. The good ones sit in the woods to help lost travelers; the bad ones just eat them. And as it is with dragons, so it is with us. How will the decisions Patrick makes help direct his life toward helping others rather than devouring them? How will ours? Is there ever a time in our lives when we aren’t trying to sort things out like Patrick is?
This is really what myths are for: religions, too. It’s also what good stories, movies and comics are for, because they are our modern forms of myth-making. We create the dragons, princes and princesses, the action heroes; we create sages like Yoda in “Star Wars,” as imaginative projections of our own strong sense of duty, courage, whimsy or wisdom. We create our dragons in much the same way as we create our deities. The distance between gods and dragons isn’t as far as you might think.
Gods and demons come from the world where dragons also live. And we often miss the point, miss mining them for the insights they offer into ourselves and our own lives. Patrick’s reflections could also be the inspiration for a whole host of sermons.
And think about Karen’s piece. While she isn’t referring to mythology – except in noting that the birds bickered like Greek gods – her poetic sense has described our world as a mythic stage on which life’s grandness struts in all its many forms. She studied the birds the way Patrick looks at dragons and Megan sees some plants surviving a hail storm, reading them like tea leaves, for insights into the deep structures of life, including hers.
Karen kept the magic of the associations she made a dozen years ago, the patterns she saw in birds and people, the wondrous variety and vitality of life in all its forms. Whenever these moments of revelation happen, they become part of our sacred foundation, and are always as present to us as they were at the moment of the revelation.
All three of these teen-agers have sensed something of the awe-inspiring magical powers of life. They are all trying to find places within life, to serve it, to honor and do justice to the spirit of life in the world around them, and the spirit of life within them. They’re grappling with the same deep callings, sensitivities, and needs that we are, aren’t they?
And let’s take it into another area beyond this room and this time. Here are three people who are part of our future, trying to relate themselves and their decisions to causes and ideals that best serve the wonder and creativity of life. What if those considerations are taken into the way we look at our world? What if we ask whether our economy serves life or stifles and batters it, both here and abroad? And what if we said the only choices we could be proud of making were choices that honored those life-giving forces rather than the choices that devoured them like a dragon devouring knights? What if we looked at our international policies of war from this perspective?
You may say, “Oh no, religion can’t consider any of those things. It’s not about the outside world; it’s only about personal things that stay inside of our individual souls!” But not one of these three kids was talking only about themselves. They were talking about how they can most creatively and proudly interact with all the world around them to honor the kind of life forces they are already aware of.
What if we encouraged our children to bring those considerations into every single decision they made in their lives? To encourage only economic policies that empower and enrich the greatest number of people? To sanction only wars that are absolutely necessary, and never to sanction wars undertaken to seize another nation’s assets, or use it as a launching pad for yet another war on its neighbor? And to insist that the pictures of the dead and wounded from our wars are always kept before our eyes by the media, so that we can see and feel the cost of our wars, so we might weep together? What if we encouraged our children to think of every decision, large and small, as one that must be kept in harmony with these fragile and miraculous forces of life they are all learning to honor, trying to serve?
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. What if we encouraged them to insure that their life paths and life decisions also honored Life’s longing for itself?
Friday night about eight people came to our monthly movie night, and one of the movies we saw was a 45-minute film by Canadian scientist David Suzuki, on the interrelatedness of ourselves with all life on earth (“Suzuki Speaks”). At one point, he showed a film clip of his teen-aged daughter addressing an international assembly, assailing the adults gathered there for not having made choices that served life. Afterwards, he said some adults came up to her to admit their failures, and said they were counting on her generation to fix things. She responded in two ways. First, she said “So that’s your excuse for not doing anything?” And then she asked how her generation was to do any better, when the adults had been their role models.
These awarenesses of life and our responsibilities to become responsible parts of it – these awarenesses start very early in our lives. They are the questions whose pursuit makes us most human. You have heard them in the reflections of all three of the teenagers who shared their reflections with you.
We hold these youth services once a year because we say we want to honor our children. But it might be worth our while to listen to them. They are reminding us of the great idealism we once had about life, remember?
Remember when you first discovered that you could actually serve life, and that doing so not only helped plants blossom, but also helped you blossom? Remember that?
Remember when you were awed by the implications of the choices you could make, how they would affect your life, and how you wanted to become like the good dragons rather than the bad ones?
Remember when you entered so easily and often into the world of birds and bunnies, horses and dogs, when you marveled at the great variety of life, when you affirmed your own style, your own gifts, and knew for a fact that you were a precious part of life – just as everything else was? Remember that?
Then do you remember how you looked forward to a whole life ahead of you, looked forward to being a bigger part of life, or serving it, of loving it, and of blossoming?
Remember? Do you remember?
