Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault
THE GOOD, THE TRUE, THE TENDER: COMING HOME
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
September 11, 2005
OPENING WORDS: "What is it?"
I brought children into this lousy, mixed-up world because when you love someone and they love you back, the world doesn't look that lousy or seem that mixed-up.
Erma Bombeck
MEDITATION READING: "Comes the Dawn"
What is it
That keeps us going -
You, me, the first timer, the long timer?What gathers us together
In this quiet place?
This fervent place?
This place of inspiration
And activation?It is spirit -
Human spark and spunk,
Tears and toil,
Distress and hope.We gather because we are called to do so -
Each in a particular way,
To weave an intricate design.The quiet ones, the exuberant, too,
The nonplused and the calm.We come to electrify one another -
Some politically passionate
Seeking revolution;
Some desiring inner peace, surcease from pain,
Clarity of direction,
Stillness in community.We come for beauty,
Or tradition,
Or awakening from the familiar.We come to learn, to question,
To agree,
To respectfully disagree.We gather beyond judgment
Of those who think, feel,
And live differently from us.All these things
Keep us going as this community,
Distinctive of time and place and people.We are a church
Gathered in fleeting forms
Each of us sharing the path for a brief moment
Before moving on.So may we use this gathering place well -
As a place to nurture spirit,
Knowing that time is too brief not to do so.Knowing that here we may come home.
Don Beaudreault
MEDITATION READING (for the Water Communion Service): "Water" (adapted) from Everyday Tao
Water is flowing. Water never fears being divided, because it knows it will flow back together in time. It is eternal.
Water is powerful. Although it can be soothing, comforting, and cleansing, it can also be enormous, mighty, and overpowering. Its nature is constant. It is true to itself at any extreme.
Water is profound. In the depths of the lakes, in the darkness of the oceans, it holds all secrets. It is dangerous. It is mysterious. Yet life came from those depths.
Water is unafraid. From any height, it will plunge fearlessly down. It will fall and not be injured.
Water is balanced. No matter what the situation is, water will seek its own level as soon as it is left alone. Water will always flow downward to the most stable level. It conforms to any situation in a balanced way.
Water is nourishing. Without water, no plant and no living creature could survive.
Water is still. It can be completely still, and in its stillness, mirror heaven perfectly.
Water is pure. It is transparent, clear, needing neither adornment nor augmentation.
For all these features - to be flowing, powerful, profound, unafraid, balanced, nourishing, still, and pure, we need only emulate water in every way.
Deng Ming-Dao
SERMON: "The Good, The True, The Tender: Coming Home"
In celebrating the ingathering of this beloved church community at the start of our "regular season," we symbolized this event of "home-coming" by creating a common bowl of life-sustaining water - water whose individual sources have come from various places on the planet we recently have visited.
In doing this, we held up the universality of the human experience, not just our particular adventures - but that which all humans have in common: the need for water, assuredly, but beyond this and beyond those other basic needs to sustain our physical life, are the needs to wonder, to be amazed, to ask questions, to receive a modicum of answers; the needs for emotional connection with other living creations and with insensate things, a sense of purpose, a feeling of security and safety, a chance to be responsive in creative fashion, a satisfaction achieved in helping make the world a little better, a call to a higher purpose transcending ourselves; the needs for freedom, justice, equality, and love.
These and other needs are, in various combinations and permutations, basic to being alive as human beings.
The waters we have gathered together today in our common bowl, waters from the corners and crevices of the world, symbolize the universality of the common human experience.
It is, therefore, a good and holy thing we have done with this bit of ritual.
The act is, most certainly, a metaphor for coming home, for being home, for knowing home. Home - an image, a feeling, a deeper sense of awareness of that which is "The Good, The True, The Tender" - these are needs, desired to be fulfilled as part of the human condition.
Consider the following thought about the meaning of "home."
Real estate ads offer houses for sale, not homes. A house is a garment, easily put off or on, casually bought and sold; a home is skin. Merely change houses and you will be disoriented; change homes and you bleed. When the shell you live in has taken on the savor of your love, when your dwelling has become a taproot, then your house is a home. (from Staying Put by Scott Russell Sanders)
So, welcome home, sister-brother-voyager! Welcome to this church home, where you have the opportunity to feel comfortable in your particular "skin"; where you might discover your special "taproot" to meaning and purpose.
And yet, in thinking about "home," at this time in our nation's history, many of us move beyond consideration of the subject in regard to merely ourselves and think of those who are the so-called "homeless" - particularly those who have personally faced the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
Undoubtedly, in participating this morning in this ritual of Water Communion along with many Unitarian Universalists in other congregations, we have had our thoughts turn to the destructive nature of water, not just to its life-sustaining quality.
The images of suffering caused by Katrina - and too, let me add, by the lack of immediate human response - bring forth tears, confusion, and anger.
Where is "home" then, we ask, for those whose homes no longer exist?
Here is a little story that might help us answer the question for those who have survived this tragedy but who now are questioning where their particular "skin" or "taproot" might be:
A caravan of travelers crossed a desert and reached a place where they expected to find water. Instead they found only a hole going deep into the earth. They lowered bucket after bucket into the hole, but the rope each time came back empty - no bucket and no water. They then began to lower people into the hole, but the people, too, disappeared off the end of the rope. Finally, a wise person among the party volunteered to go down into the hole in search of water.
When the wise person reached the bottom of the hole, s/he found her/himself face to face with a horrible monster. The wise one thought, "I can't hope to escape from this place, but I can at least remain aware of everything I am experiencing." The monster said, "I will let you go only if you answer my question."
The wise one said, "Ask your question."
The monster asked, "Where is the best place to be?"
The wise person thought, "I don't want to hurt his feelings. If I name some beautiful city, he may think I'm disparaging his hometown. Or maybe this hole is the place he thinks is best." So to the monster he said, "The best place to be is wherever you feel at home - even if it's a hole in the ground."
The monster said, "You are so wise that I will not only let you go, but I will also free the foolish people who came down before you. And I will release the water in this well." (from The Way of Woman - revised, Helen M. Luke
What a wise man, indeed, when he answered: The best place to be is wherever you feel at home - even if it's a hole in the ground."
The people affected by the great hurricane stand in sharp contrast in most ways to the people seeking water in the desert. Still, in common was an initial lack of potable or drinkable water.
Without question, some of Katrina's survivors have made a home for themselves wherever they have landed. Being with their family and friends has been the determining factor of whether or not they have been at home. Children clutching a favorite stuffed toy, a parent holding the hand of a child, a revered elder having a cool hand laid on her fevered brow.
Home. Connection - human to human. Hand to hand. Images on the television.
Home: stories of heroism, as rescuers attempt to save others - the police, national guard, military, firefighters, health workers, ordinary folk - doing what they could to be there for others, to make them feel "at home" - in a shelter, in a hospital, aboard a bus, in an ambulance.
The "houses" are gone - and with them the "things" of "home" - but the essence of "home" will always be there: the memories; and loved ones. And this eventually will help to create a new home for those who are currently without a house in which to grow a new skin.
Ellen Gilchrist speaks of the southern experience of "home" in the following words:
This is my home. This is where I was born. This is the bayou that runs in my dreams, this is the bayou bank that taught me to love water; where I spent endless summer hours alone or with my cousins. This is where I learned to swim, where mud first oozed up between my toes.
This is my world, where I was formed, where I came from, who I am. This is where my sandpile was. I have spent a thousand hours alone beneath this tree making forts for the fairies to dance on in the moonlight. At night, after I was asleep, my mother would come out here and dance her fingers all over my sand forts so that in the morning I would see the prints and believe that fairies danced at night in the sand. (from Falling Through Space)
Here is the river contained, an object of adoration and awe. The healing aspect of water.
Well, many of us have lived in many places. We come to this town now, to this congregation - trailing clouds of memories from past homes, past communities, past relationships.
The newly arrived among you - whether to this city or to this church or with new people (including love dealings) - are probably having some adjustment "situations."
Where then is the center of your being? Where then, do you feel comfortable? Where is the best place for you? Where is that "home"?
An aspect of my experience this summer was to make yet a further attempt to try to answer those questions about myself to myself. I did something that some of you might have done or will do around this age. I drove 4,600 miles alone, stopping off here and there to greet family and friends, but also to go to familiar places, including 3 of the homes of the some 56 homes I have lived in - not just visited!
You know, a kind of purely ego-oriented, "nostalgic" thing to do! What fun! What a gift to give to one's self! You should try it sometime, if you haven't already. It might put things into perspective for you, as it did for me.
By the way that word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek word meaning "to come home."
So, the three homes included the one where my mother and her 6 siblings were born, the one where I lived from 6 months of age until 12 years of age (when the house burned down), and the one I lived in from 12 until 18 years of age, and then again for part of my 25th year (because I couldn't find a steady job and had no rent money).
Nostalgia. Trying to find "home" - but not finding anyone I knew at "home" (since most everyone is deceased who used to live with me in those three places, and the few that are left, have moved into their own homes).
Still, these are "homes" to me - in my memory's eye. They are not merely "houses" because the people I knew and loved, although gone, are still very much alive in my heart and mind.
And yet, literally they are only "houses" to me now. They are "homes" to others now.
I also tried to find "home" by visiting the Evangelical United Brethren Church where I was christened as an infant. Too, I went "home" by seeing the ancestral home - a house going back to the time of my great-great-grandparents. The house is on the edge of the family cemetery, where my mother's family is buried - and my mother and father and just about the entire rural town that I knew as a kid when, during the summers and on holidays, I was the visiting city-slicker cousin.
The point, here, too, is that the people are gone, that their grave markers merely state what was, not what is. For what is, lies deeply within me. Their images, their voices, their stories, the joys, the sorrows. Those are "home" - not the graves. The graves merely "house" the shells of those I loved. I wear their "skins" still. They are very much alive within me.
This is not a morbid thing for me, but something necessary, like one of those basic needs I was referring to earlier. The family graveyard symbolizes for me the sense of "home" - again, not in any literal way - but as a place to reflect, to bring back to life, all that was good, true, and tender.
So, let us honor our "homes" wherever and whatever they might mean to us. And let us honor yet another place called "home." The "homes" of those on the Gulf Coast that are now only memories, in some cases, merely graves to the structures that once stood.
Let us close with this thought of a specific "home" - a place some of you might always think of as "home"; one of the 56 that I have had as well; a home for me for five years, the place where my children were born; the place where I served my first Unitarian Universalist Church - now 15 feet under water; the place from whence most people have fled - that beautiful old enchantress, the Crescent City: New Orleans.
Here is a poem I wrote about her:
A Tourist Guide to New Orleans:
New Orleans!
Home of jazz funerals (only place in the universe where people look forward to dyin' so they can have an excuse for a party);
The "my mouth is havin' a party" town;
The place where you can get a drink or get into trouble 24 hours a day.
It's home to Fat Tuesday (beads and doubloons)
followed by Skinny Wednesday (ashes and more ashes);
It's the Macho-seductress place.
New Orleans!
Home of writers, southern belles, drunks, big time gamblers, city slickers, low-down drifters, grabbers, blues-note chanteuses, gospel choristers;
Home of experimenters, rebels (Southern and Northern varieties), boundary pushers, drug pushers.
New Orleans!
Home of class consciousness, debutante balls,
Official corruption, expected confusion, horrible driving,
Crimes of passion (it's etiquette to have a least one murder over something sexual in your family every generation),
Catastrophic floods.
New Orleans!
Home of cobblestones, streetcars, dampness, bogs, salt-marsh mosquitoes, pages and pages of "Boudreaux's" (with an "x") in the phone book;
Slave quarters, shotgun houses, cornstalk fences, uptown mansions,
Jambalaya, Popeye's extra spicy fried chicken, gumbo, crayfish etoufette, shrimp remoulade, alligator stew, Tabasco!
New Orleans!
Home of Creoles, Cajuns, quadroons, casquette girls, nuns (still in habits), riverboats, pirates, priests, street artists, pale-faced tourists looking for the deeper side of their humanity,
Zydico, vertigo, the variegated sacred-profanity of it all:
New Orleans!
Sleep in peace, dear city of magic, until we help you reach your resurrection day, until your family literally can come "home" to you, again!
CLOSING WORDS: a collection of thoughts about "Home"
Wherever you live is your temple if you treat it like one.
The Buddha
I want to remind myself and others that our homes can become sacred places, filled with life and meaning. We do not need cathedrals to remind ourselves to experience the sacred.
Gunilla Norris
There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
Jane Austen