Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
Art of Living Fully (A Homily)
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
June 10, 2007
Life, especially as inquiring, seeking, caring persons would live it, seems to be largely a process of asking questions. It has become a truism that, in the long run (at least in our liberal religious circles), it is not the answers one finds but the questions one asks that are the most instructive. No one has demonstrated this better than Walt Whitman in his great poem,
The Song of the Open Road, some words of which we have just heard in this morning's reading. Whitman perfected what I think of as
"the art of questioning life". Questions such as he asks have much to do with keeping our hearts and minds limber enough and light enough that they can, in Whitman's manner of speech, be effluent - so that they can flow out of us and encounter the mystery and ecstasy of our surrounding world with its warm men and women, its melodious "thought-causing" trees, its strangers, its good-will, and its roads upon which we walk.
But our capacity to ask such questions is not all there is, profound and fulfilling though these questions may be. Something more, which is just as basic, is required. What this something is often escapes us but, ultimately, it is what validates our questions. That "something" is: how we receive the answers to our questions that come back to us. Will we take whatever answers we get as a kind of payoff for our inquisitiveness, as the biblical injunction, "seek and you shall find" suggests -- to use or reject them as our whim or bias directs? Or will we take the answers we get as a new question now directed at us? -- as a challenge to our capacity to accept answers we did not anticipate or did not want? That is, are we able to accept unexpected answers whose sincerity and authenticity challenge our own sincerity and authenticity?
If we really mean our questions, we must be open to and accepting of true answers. But, telling what is a true answer is often a problem. Ordinarily, we are so deeply immersed in our learned behavior and inherited illusions (and delusions) about life that the true answer often is rejected. But, to live fully, recognizing and accepting an answer that actually satisfies the question we ask, is crucial. That, after all, is how we learn about life and how we enrich it. And, what is a "true" answer? I believe it to be that which reinforces and widens our highest conception of what it is to be human. It is that which enables us to minimize conflict and injustice and to enhance our cooperation and compassion.
This morning I want to acknowledge that twenty years ago the Unitarian Universalist Association asked a hard question about the nature of our congregations, received a discomfiting and challenging answer, and creatively and earnestly responded to that answer. In 1987 a UU study commission determined that, despite our affirmation of the integrity of the individual person and the fundamental importance of diversity, our congregations were still afflicted with homophobia. Our study commission knocked on Unitarian Universalism's collective doors and received a disturbing answer. However, our congregations have been able to acknowledge that this answer was a question about our own integrity and, then, do something about it. We decided to accept the hard, negative reality that we were not fully and truly respecting individuals and diversity and the Welcoming Congregation Program was born.
Over the past twenty years, many UU congregations have conducted the workshops that this program provides and that have enabled congregations to be as inclusive and respectful of individuals as those congregations had thought they were all along - but were not. During this past year, this congregation has gone through the Welcoming Congregation Program successfully and we are assembled here today to receive a symbol that recognizes that fact.
It is truly a heartwarming, encouraging experience to be part of a process that enables us minimize conflict and injustice, enhance cooperation and compassion and widens our highest conception of what it is to be human. This congregation is to be congratulated.