Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault
Meum et Teum: Mine and Yours - It’s All About Perspective
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
March 26, 2006
OPENING WORDS: “Wild Geese”
You do not have to be good, You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
MEDITATION READING: “To live in this world…” (Read three times)
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your whole life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
SERMON: “Meum et Teum – Mine and Yours: It’s All About Perspective”
I want to start with a joke.
It seems there was this accordion player who had had enough of people making fun of the fact that he was an accordion player. So he decided to change his particular image and give up his beloved instrument. He first tried to sell it to his friends (and even to his enemies) – but no one wanted it. He put an ad in the newspaper and on E-bay. Still, no buyers. He reduced the price – repeatedly doing so. Yet, there were no takers. “What to do?” he thought. “I’ll give it away.”
So he strapped it on, walked out of his house and through town, beautifully playing all the standard accordion pieces: “Lady of Spain,” “Carnival of Venice,” “Malaguena” and the like. “Please, take this accordion! It’s Free! I’ll even throw in lessons!” he shouted between arpeggios, trills, and bellow shakings. Still, nobody was interested.
“To heck with this!” he thought as he went home, put his adored instrument in the back seat of his car, and drove to a Wal Mart parking lot. He rolled down all the car’s windows. Next, he wrote a note on a piece of paper proclaiming: FREE ACCORDION - PLEASE, TAKE IT! Then he attached it on his windshield by putting it under the wipers.
“That should do it!” he thought, and walked into Wal Mart, expecting to spend an hour or so attempting not to buy anything, but presuming he would. Then as he was about to enter the store, he remembered that he had left his wallet on the front seat of the car – and that all the windows were open.
Hurrying back, he happily saw that his wallet was still there.
But much to his utter amazement – and despair – so were: TWO accordions!
Talk about presuming one thing and discovering something else!
Well, this is MY perspective on this church, coming here as your minister nearly seven years ago to phase into a kind of pre-retirement aspect in my professional career, but having something else happen. Voila! Our congregation increased in activity.
Truly, we are now at the “two-accordion stage” in our development as a church community.
Let me expand this idea of one’s having a presumed perspective or assumption but having to adjust it to meet the challenges that time and circumstance bring.
*****
Almost trite, now, the expression used by commentators on events of significant note: “History will reveal…”
Of significant note, truly, at least from my perspective, the ministry I have had with this congregation since the fall of 1999.
“History will reveal…”
What?
What comes to mind for you? What is your perspective on the time we have shared together?
9-11 is the first thing that I think of.
You know, we were just getting to know each other as minister and congregation, and we were looking forward to a brand new century with guarded optimism but lots of curiosity, when the towers collapsed, the Pentagon was ruptured, that field in PA was set ablaze; when the planes screamed, falling form the skies, and with them the rather naïve perspective of our nation that we were, despite the events that have occurred to us during the 20th century: the wars with which we have been engaged, the economic collapses, the assassinations of our leaders, the racial strife, the disagreements of a host of social agendas – you fill in the blanks – that we, as a nation were somehow invincible.
But 9-11 happened. And our lives changed. Our innocence – and sense of “self-entitlement” on the world stage was dashed. The sermons I had been planning for the future before 9-11 were thrown aside, and Sunday after Sunday, the sermonic topics dealt with who we were as a people – our fears and wants and hopes and dreams. We mourned together – and we are still morning. 9-11 is very much a part of who we are today, given the repercussions in this country following that horrific date: a government that proclaims we must not trust our neighbors – next door or in the next country. We have become an insular entity on the world stage, ridiculed by other nations, distrusted by them, feared by them. We have become even more materialistic than we were before – and less civil to one another. The promise of a melting pot nation where if you worked hard and lived an ethical existence, you could get somewhere – you could be a success – has shown itself to be an ideal whose time has yet to come for many these days, and might never come at all. Corporations control our thinking and our laws; and religion for some seems to be more corporate than spiritual as it infuses its agenda into the political spectrum. The liberal social platform – meaning the hope to allow each individual freedom of choice in how she or he will live (with normal safeguards for the safety and welfare of others), has been abridged. Authoritarian governance that has little regard for who you or I might be as individuals has usurped what we had hoped for concerning this egalitarian lifestyle.
We have been through a lot together – as a nation, as a community, and as a church family. And if this entire socio-political conflagration were not enough, nature decided to deal our world a nasty blow, one that most experts believe, was precipitated by the greed of some of our own species. So, with the fast erosion of our planetary resources due to the corporate, worldwide toxification of our land, sea, air, and water, have come devastations on a massive scale: the tsunami, mudslides, earthquakes, Katrina. “Natural” horror upon “natural” horror – as if earth, our personified mother-father – is manifesting a terminal malady.
And still, land developers develop, quaint towns of local note and elsewhere around the world transmogrify into cities of concrete and steel canyons and anonymity – and of homeless men, women, and children. And people – generally – have become so very self absorbed (here, there, everywhere), that the old-fashioned notion of “civility” has been devalued, in favor of self-advancement and self-aggrandizement; the historic and human indicator of exactly how advanced a civilization really is – the idea of “noblesse oblige” (where the haves gladly and voluntarily share a bit of their wealth with those who are less fortunate) has been eroding. This is an example of “Meum et Teum” at work, but in a bad sense of the concept of “Mine and Yours” – meaning, “I have mine, now you go get yours” or, to be even less polite: “I’ve got mine, to hell with yours!”
As I have said in various sermons – and I still believe it – our post (even post-post) modern society has held up the icon of “image” rather than “substance” as that which should be deified.
According to this way of thinking, what you are has become paramount: who you are has been usurped of its one-time importance.
The “resume scam” has won out. This has become true throughout industrialized society – and we as a faith movement of liberating thinkers have been sucked into that particular vortex. Our Unitarian Universalist movement must resist even further homogenization, where the handlers of the media steer the course, rather than listening to the people – and to our opinions, our wants, and our needs. The right of the people to determine who they are and what they shall be – whether that is within the theological or socio-political realm – should be upheld. The corporation mindset that believes that simply because it can “package” an idea and “sell” it means that this is how it is or should be for the UU community nationwide and worldwide is anathema to me, one who entered this incredible faith believing that it touts freedom of or from belief – of any kind; which eschews lemming-like thinking and action.
Part of this “corporate mindset” is a desire from those with such a perspective to be waylaid from addressing the real reasons why a spiritual community exists in the first place (and do not call it something other than what it is – a community of spirituality – meaning a place where we come to deal with the deeper questions of life and mean; where we come, if we have not other place to go, to be in utter amazement at the tragic and comic and in-between dimensions of the human experience). Truly, throughout religious institutions today some think a congregation is more of a business than a place of worship (meaning a place “to find worth” in something beyond one’s ego); they think that this is a place where people are objectified rather than sanctified. But what the ideal of this place is, I sincerely believe as an individual Unitarian Universalists, is a place where people – you and I – are made one (put on the level playing field of life, beyond our financial situation, education, race, ethnicity, age, physical ability, sexual orientation or gender).
Don’t ever think – you who are the current leaders in this or any other church – or the future leaders of said churches – that you and you alone have the answers to what a Unitarian Universalist individual or a community should be. And I apologize literally “up front” to you today, if I have ever given you the sense that I think I have such answers. I do not!
All I do know from my experience is that we as a movement – including we as this individual church – have yet to live up to our potential as a “spiritual community” – not to deny the fact that we are a marvelous, sophisticated group of Unitarian Universalists! But still: my fear is that instead of moving forward and being a community of fierce and unquenchable thinkers and feelers and doers, that we will become merely a social club, a debate society, a corporate entity of micro-managers rather than grand and true leaders of noble and just causes.
So I say to you today: stay the course! Be fearless in the face of adversity; when the negative critics attack; when some would forget that our faith movement was established because there were those freethinkers who were not afraid to speak out for what they believed – and who were willing to be imprisoned or even to die for their principles.
DO NOT TRIVIALIZE THIS RELIGION!
RESPECT IT BY LEARNING ITS HISTORY AND MOVING INTO THE FUTURE BY UPHOLDING THE PROUD PRINCIPLES FOR WHICH OUR FOREBEARS SUFFERED AND DIED!
You know, Unitarian Universalism as a religious movement has been called into question these days by the fervor of the Religious Right. How do we address our differences with them, when we are a people of liberal-liberating thought – meaning, for one thing, that we weight the opposites of a situation before deciding which one to choose as our position? How to dialogue with those who are decidedly monolinear in their thinking and practice; who know without a doubt that they are “right” and all others are “wrong”?
Again, sad to say, some within our won ranks – including our professional religious leaders – seek to hide from the concerns of the world, believing that our movement has been one of historic disregard for addressing the real problems in a real world.
But that was not our history – nor should it be our present reality or future intention. We have not and should not be a people who sugar coat the evils of the world by using abstruse terms for outdated, abstract theological constructs. Historically, we have been a people of reason and understanding, of pragmatic effort and nurturance – in an attempt to rectify the sorrows in the world, the sadness of a humanity that seems intent on destroying itself with greed, arrogance, and malicious acts.
But do not misunderstand me. We revere the world, the universe, and the cosmos. We stand in awe and mystery of whatever creative forces – scientifically explained or not – that brought forth life and this beautiful but environmentally challenged planet. We marvel at human intelligence, intuitive knowledge, and instinctive perception. We do not believe as a people of reason, that we must eschew wonder – or faith. And yet, we do believe that we must work in concert with the good and natural intentions of this world in which we find our self – meaning that we will work to discover truth – ever expanding truth; that we will cultivate our intelligence and feeling – believing that potential power for good must be turned into kinetic, workable change to make this world a better place.
For too many years, our movement has been misunderstood by too many as some kind of “everything goes” community center. True, we are a place of communal dialogue and education (sometimes of more opinion than fact, unfortunately); true, we are a place of social gathering where we play off each other in joyful ways – art, music, dance, culinary experiences; true, we are a place of sanctuary, where we can turn inward to listen to our individual and collective still, small voice, that meditative presence within us; and true, we are – as we most certainly should be – a place whose center is a caring heart that seeks to reach out in love to one and all at times of great joy and sorrow, and throughout the journey of life.
True, we are all these things. But we are not a place that turns away from the world. We seek to engage it – in all its tragic and comedic dimensions. We do not speak here in this place in abstractions or pre-digested ways but in real, authentic terms – beyond formula religion, creedal assurance, or dogmatic prescription.
We must continue to speak – today and into the future – minister or non-minister – the “truth as we see it ” – holding up the precept: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
May ours be such a place; a community providing balm for those who suffer, and a conscience for those who must go beyond their own concerns.
You know, together, long before most of us arrived on these particular Gulf shores, there were Unitarian Universalists who sought to address the world with this slant to it. That was their perspective as they dealt with the particular concerns of their day. And we have our own. But never forget that we are heirs to all that have gone before, and we must maintain the heritage of free inquiry and activism in the world - caring for each person, animal plant, and natural resource.
WE MUST CONTINUE THE HERITAGE OF BEING A SANCTUARY OF REALITY IN A VERY REAL WORLD.
So together, over these nearly seven years, we have shared joy and sadness personally and globally; we have socialized and debated; sung and danced; welcomed new babies and honored our newly deceased.
And all the while, the world around us went on, time ticking away in its inexorable way – with no concern for our opinion. And yet, we are part of that world all around us – not separated from it, but integral to its workings – each of us a hologram of that post-modern world of complexity, post 9-11 and into the future.
Now you must continue as a beloved community without me.
So, what I want to leave you with, dear friends – as I give this rather “in-house” kind of message today, the day I shall preach the very last words to you as your “settled minister” is this: as you embark on a new adventure with a new minister, but a familiar one to many of you (The Reverend Janet Newman), I wish for you these things:
CLARITY: a wonderfully Quakerish concept where each individual strives without striving to gain the sense of a situation; to see beneath the veiled surface, to the heart of the matter.
PASSION: the energy of the universal life force that resides in each of us; that moves us out of enervation and apathy toward right and ethical meaning and deed.
EQUANIMITY: the presence of being centered, focused, calm in order to be serviceable to the wants and needs of a diverse community.
PURPOSE: the ability to set forth reasons for accomplishing objectives and to be inclusive of the great variety of opinion, so that each has a chance to be heard.
OPENNESS: the trait of listening, being pro-active, embracing ever new knowledge and experience; to be ever re-creative, reshaping who you are.
PATIENCE: the quality of being humble in understanding, that what you as a community want, might take time and rethinking; re-modeling and refashioning.
VISION: the principle of higher purpose beyond the limited momentary picture; a common intention linking you each to each, and beyond to the larger movement of Unitarian Universalism and to the web of all existence.
I bring this hope to you all, my beloved community.
Thank you for allowing me the privilege to serve you during these last, incredible years.
CLOSING WORDS: “The Larger Circle” – read by Janet Newman, Interim Minister
We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other’s arms
And the larger circle of lovers, whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no one hears it,
Except in fragments.Wendell Berry