White Bear Unitarian Universalist ChurchWhite Bear Unitarian Universalist ChurchWhite Bear Unitarian Universalist ChurchWhite Bear Unitarian Universalist Church

These Hallowed Walls

The Reverend Victoria Safford

with remembrances from Bill Bushnell and the Reverend Charles Grady

Sunday 17 November 2013

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WHITE BEAR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCHWHITE BEAR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCHWHITE BEAR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCHWHITE BEAR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

328 MAPL328 MAPL328 MAPL328 MAPLE STREET MAHTOMEDI, MINNESOTA 55115E STREET MAHTOMEDI, MINNESOTA 55115E STREET MAHTOMEDI, MINNESOTA 55115E STREET MAHTOMEDI, MINNESOTA 55115

651651651651.426.2369.426.2369.426.2369.426.2369 vsafford@wbuuc.orgvsafford@wbuuc.orgvsafford@wbuuc.orgvsafford@wbuuc.org

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This service included the dedication of the congregation’s recently-restored Membership Book, and these remembrances from long-time member Bill Bushnell and former minister, the Reverend Charles Grady. Remembrance from Bill Bushnell

The bronze plaque you see here commemorates one of the most important events in the history of this church. It reads ‘White Bear Unitarian Church, Dedicated 1990’ and then at the bottom ‘Home of Lake Drive Methodist Church, 1959-1989.’ The plaque was attached to a cornerstone at the church entrance. It indicates when the congregation moved from a very small church building on Mahtomedi Avenue to where the church is now The small church we left had no room for expansion and no off-street parking. At the time we moved, this building consisted only of what is now the social hall and a few R.E. rooms but it initiated the growth of the congregation that continues today. It was an ambitious move. We had to have courage and faith that we could pay the bills and attract effective ministers. I’m wondering now how many of you were members back in 1990. Please hold up your hands. You represent the pioneers who made the move. The plaque and cornerstone were removed when this sanctuary was built. They were put outdoors in the Gathering Circle behind the church. Over time, the plaque became corroded, hard to read, and mostly neglected. Recently, with the help of the Men’s Group, the plaque was brought in and, with Victoria’s help, a decision was made to restore it. Deane Reichow undertook this task and did a beautiful job, as you can see. Thanks, Deane. The plan is to display the plaque permanently on an interior wall near the church entrance. We hope you will enjoy seeing it there.

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FIRST READING from Matthew Fox, Catholic theologian

Look about you at the starry heavens and at the deep, deep sea.

Look at the amazing history that has birthed a home for you on this planet:

at the surprise and joy of your existence.

Gather together- you and your community-

in the context of this great, cosmic community,

to rejoice and give thanks.

Gather together to heal and to let go.

Gather to enter the dark and deep mysteries,

to share the news,

to break the bread of the universe and drink the blood of the cosmos itself in all its divinity.

Be brave.

Let your worship make you strong and great again.

Never be bored again.

Create yourselves, re-create your world, by the news you share and the vision you celebrate.

Bring your sense of being microcosm in a vast macrocosm;

bring your bodies, such as they are, and wonderful.

Bring your play. Bring adventure.

Bring your pain, and bring terror.

Gather together and do not scatter.

Learn not to take for granted anyone or anything, and learn this together.

Gather together, worship together.

Become a people.

SECOND READING from Martin Luther King, Baptist minister

The church is still the one familiar landmark where the weary traveler by midnight comes. It

gives the one hour which stands there as it has always stood, the house to which the traveler

either comes or refuses to come. Some decide to go away. But the many who come and knock

are desperately seeking just a little bread to tide them over.

THIRD READING from the Board of Directors here, in 2009

We are here to grow our souls and serve the world.

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THESE HALLOWED WALLS

The church is still the one familiar landmark where the weary traveler by midnight comes. It

gives the one hour which stands there as it has always stood, and the many who come and knock

are desperately seeking a just little bread to tide them over.

These are words from a young pastor who was, of course, better known as a prophet, larger than

life, the leader of a sweeping historical movement for radical social change - but at his core, in

his heart, and by training and vocation, Martin Luther King was a minister. This is a pastoral

image, of a stranger knocking on the door for bread, the church door. He said that people come,

desperate sometimes, seeking the bread of faith (something to believe in), the bread of hope and

the bread of love, and he described how churches rise to that request, and sometimes fail. The

traveler comes in the dark night of the soul, and could be any one of us, at any time, on any

Sunday morning. And then he does go on to say, perhaps in tones that we’d expect of him, that

just as it can feel like midnight in a person’s spirit, so can a whole society be shadowed in a

midnight hour or a midnight age. He was talking about the role of the church in society, the

liberal church in the world (with a small l and a small c: the progressive congregation, be it

Christian, Unitarian, Jewish) and he said society comes knocking, and just as the individual

seeks the bread of faith and hope and love, the broken, weary world hopes to find within the

institution the bread of social justice (and here he did mean leadership on civil rights), the bread

of peace in times of war (he said, What more appallingly reveals the irrelevancy of the church in

our present-day world than its appalling silence regarding war? And you might say well, that

was then, and times have changed; he didn’t know about the war on terror and what we’re up

against today – but I think he would have said the same. The church should stand for peace and

take up the challenge of radical imagination.). He said society knocks on the door of the liberal

church or synagogue hoping for the bread of economic justice, but often the church has so

aligned itself with privilege and so defends the status quo that it has been unwilling to answer

the door. The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state. It is

the conscience of the state. It must recover its great historic mission, to provide light and bread

– faith, love, hope, peace and justice- in the darkest hour of our spirit or our time.

He was one of a wave of progressive ministers and theologians in the middle of the 20th

century,

the 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, struggling to define the role of the liberal church, the free church in a

changing modern world. Walter Brueggemann, a renowned professor of Hebrew scripture, still

teaching, wrote: the task of the prophetic church is to nurture, nourish and evoke a

consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant

culture around us. The progressive congregation should not only be responding to various

public crises, social action issues, but should understand itself as something rare and radical, that

stands apart from and in opposition to the dominant culture in which it dwells. Like King and

like others, he called the liberal church, the free congregation, to see itself as Old Testament

prophets saw themselves, speaking a poetic language in a world of flattened prose; unabashedly

idealistic, though not naïve; speaking without hesitation or caution of injustice and justice;

despair and hope; love and love’s opposite, which is fear. These writers, teachers, theologians,

ministers in public pulpits, could see at mid-century how easily the conservative churches (the

emerging “religious right”) and even the Protestant mainline would capitulate to convention, to

the American secular gospel of materialism, militarism and apathy, and they called the liberal

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churches to account. What on earth is your purpose, our purpose, if not to redeem a violent

world, and offer weary travelers the bread of love, and faith and serious, radical hope?

At that very same time, the middle of the century, the middle of the 1950’s, this little church was

founded, a satellite of Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, where Arthur Foote was preaching this

same social gospel, so successfully that they were overcrowded and thought they could establish

a new outpost in the wilderness of the northern suburbs. A few pioneers, young families mostly,

met in someone’s living room, and then in the basement of Wildwood school, and on November

18, 1956, 35 founding members signed their names into the red book dedicated here this

morning. What did they think they were doing?

__________________________

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Two years ago, when we were in the search process for

an Assistant Minister, the process which resulted, happily, in extending our hands to Luke

Stevens-Royer, we were tasked by the UUA with filling out a form and noting a few of the most

important moments in the congregation’s history, to give our candidates some sense of the story.

I thought of the old hymn we sang just now

Ours the years’ memorial store / honored days and names we reckon

Days of comrades gone before / lives that speak and deeds that beckon…

There were many things we could have lifted up. Someone mentioned the founding; the purchase

of the first building, a Methodist chapel on Mahtomedi Avenue; the move to this building;

raising the money to build the RE wing and then doing so, by hand; buying the piano; dreaming

a new sanctuary, then funding it and making it… Some noted the successful survival through

ministry transitions, both rocky and smooth; the hire of our Youth Director; Thaxter leading the

choir. One person said this: “I think the most important moment in our congregation’s history

happens every time we dedicate a child here, or a baby.” The form had space for only a few

things, and we put that one in, because it’s poetic and it’s true. A church holds both history and

hope with equal reverence, its accomplishments and its calling. The old hymn sings of how we

all blow in from the four winds gathered hither, and the hallowed walls demand, “whence we

come, and how, and whither?” Where have we come from, and where are we going, as a people,

as an institution, and why? What for? What is this place for? The babies remind us to ask: what

bread will we offer to the weary traveler, and to the broken world? The babies remind us: this is

an eternal question, constant, beautiful, demanding, clarifying. It is an urgent question always

for the church and it will outlive us. The children here now will carry it forward and they will

answer with their lives, as we are doing now.

___________________________

You could tell the history of this church through the stands you have taken on human rights and

civil rights, a proud history most of the time: voting out loud to be a congregation welcoming to

all, regardless of sexual orientation, or voting no to constitutional amendments and no to the war

in Iraq, all of which meant really saying yes to love and justice.

You could recount the pounds of food collected for the food shelf over 57 years; or letters and

petitions written; mittens made and given, shelter beds provided.

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You could tell it in terms of the tenure of past Presidents, each of whom represents dozens,

hundreds of devoted volunteers, or the tenure of ministers: from Arthur Foote and Richard

Sykes, to Charles Grady, Ted Tollefson and Gail Seavey, right on up to the gospel according to

Luke;

You could speak of candles, burning bright through demonstrations over Vietnam, and all

through September 2001, vigils in the driveway (which was here, where we’re all sitting) filled

with neighbors in the dark, and vigils after the death of Paul Wellstone and before the start of the

war, and in solidarity with immigrants at the Detention Center and on the Arizona border; and

other candles, every Christmas Eve, to illuminate the snowy silent night, and on the Day of the

Dead to bring our loved ones in, and every Sunday morning when someone lights the chalice and

shows us a snapshot of their heart- you could count the candles;

We could mark the history by weddings, dedications, memorials and funerals, coming of age, all

the public rituals and all the private, silent markings also, of divorce, sobriety, healing and loss;

the gathering of hope in here, the scattering of memories and ashes.

We could tell of sharing circles, drumming circles, singing circles, Circles of Lament, circle

suppers, Wednesday suppers, the great wheel of the year which holds the seasons of our little

lives, the liturgical cycle, which anchors us within the swirl of everything.

This is the story held between the covers of the Membership Book, among the many names. It’s

why we put the dedicated baby on the Search Committee form: because all the other formal

markers, the founding, the moving, the buying and building of concrete and steel, the coming

and going of clergy – those are all means to an end. All of that makes possible the real story,

flowing like a river, steady as a heartbeat, the real purpose of the church, which in recent years

we’ve said is very simple: to grow our souls and serve the world. The real story here is about

bread for the traveler, and bread for the world.

To me, “grow your soul, serve the world” is a rough translation of something spoken long ago by

someone else: You shall love the Lord your God with heart, mind, soul and strength, and your

neighbor as yourself. It is about standing apart from the dominant culture of self-interest and the

myth of self-reliance. Serve the world, love your neighbor: who may in fact be your real

neighbor, annoying as he is, or your partner, your colleague at work, your boss, your child,

parent, friend, enemy. Your neighbor will often be a stranger, a name in the spoken meditation,

or the person behind you whispering the name; the neighbor always is a person far away from

here, in Syria or in the Philippines, or in Minneapolis; it’s someone - anyone – in prison or the

hospital. The neighbor you are called to love could be anybody, and that’s the point. That’s the

point of Universalism; it’s the core of Christian teaching and the heart of Jewish law, the great

old tree trunks that our tradition branched from. It breathes through every holy teaching, this

radical love, this radical hospitality. That’s partly what the church is for: to make love articulate

and tangible, to give it power and muscle in the real world, when we go out there on our own, or

go out as a body, standing on love’s side.

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Love the neighbor, and also love your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, which to

me means attend to the state of your spirit. Practice. Pray. Remember who you are, what you

love and what you fear, and choose which will guide your feet. Grow your soul in the deep soil

of deep eternal questions: forgiveness, mortality, gratitude, grace, salvation, sin, and Sabbath, all

these themes we put before you every month. Unpack them in private and test your findings in

community, speaking, hearing, round and round.

The purpose of the church is to help us grow our souls, which sounds like solitary work but it is

not. You cannot be a person by yourself. We’re tribal as a species. We run in packs. We are

aching to belong, to intentional communities, to good work, small groups, to narratives and

stories that are older, deeper, more eternal than our own, to be known by our names and called

by something larger. James Luther Adams, a Unitarian theologian and teacher (contemporary of

Martin Luther King and all those upstarts in the church), wrote, “There is no such thing as

goodness as such, no such thing as a good man or a good woman. There is only the good spouse,

the good worker, the good employer, the good churchperson, the good citizen.” All goodness is

relational. “We live not by spirit alone. A purely spiritual religion is a purely spurious religion.

It is a dangerous sham, exempting its believer from surrender to …. the community of justice

and love.”

Another writer, Pierro Ferruci, a philosopher and therapist, speaks of it more plainly, writing of

his little town in Italy:

I moved to the country from the city, he says, and I have to drive along a few back roads before I

reach the highway that takes me to work. These tranquil roads are often a little slow. One

summer morning I find myself behind a man on a tractor. Every twenty or thirty meters, he

stops to chat with someone. I cannot overtake him on such a narrow road. The conversations

take only a few seconds – the time to say hello and exchange news – but they are enough to make

me nervous. I do not know what he could be talking about with the people he meets at the

roadside, but clearly it is nothing urgent. And here I am behind him, in a hurry to get to work,

fuming as I wait for all these conversations. I cannot toot the horn (here that would be

considered rude, or an act of lunacy). All I can do is churn out angry thoughts.

Then suddenly I realize… it is not anger I feel, but envy. This person in front of me has

something I do not: besides a tranquility that sharply contrasts with my commuter’s haste, he has

also the privilege of belonging to a local web of relationships with many, many people in this

small village, all bound to the same customs, not merely for one lifetime but for generations.

They know each other, through fortune and misfortune, hopes and disappointments. I do not

have this [at least, not yet], and though I am always greeted with courtesy, I do not feel I really

belong. It is the difference between, on the one hand, a centuries-old oak with roots deep and

wide that interweave with other roots and know the soil in which they thrive, and on the other

hand, a recently transplanted exotic sapling. The man who stopped every few meters was not

being discourteous to me. He was affirming his sense of belonging.

It is a basic need from our ancestral past. Always still we ask, “What am I part of?” which helps

answer “Who am I?” Our affiliations define us.

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Imagine what it’s like for someone who first joined this church in 1966, or 1986, or 1996, when

the church was small and intimate, and everyone knew everyone and each one had a place, a

role, a name that everybody knew, a committee of the whole - imagine what it feels like now.

Exciting, probably – the big, chaotic crowd- but maybe also lonely.

Imagine what it’s like for someone who has just arrived, who shows up maybe with a broken

heart, a weary spirit, lonely, grieving, lost, or maybe, simply curious, even looking forward

because someone told them or they read somewhere that this might be a good place for them. It

feels exciting probably- this lively group where everyone seems to know everybody else- but

maybe also lonely.

The new person has not come to push the old one out, any more than the longtime person wants

to shut the new one out. But it can feel that way to both. The person who’s been sitting here for

20 minutes and one who’s come for 20 years are equally worthy, equally welcome. Each longs

for the same thing: belonging and connection. Neither holds more ownership, or less, than the

other. Each one’s life is already a chapter in the story. Either one may say, with equivalent

authority, This is my home, my spiritual home, and each one would be right, simply by virtue of

wanting it. You sign your name to the deed here and it is yours, this whole community and

building, its history and future. Walk around as if you own the place, I say when people sign the

Membership Book, because in fact you do – and all we ask is that you hold all the others in your

mind and heart, and imagine how they feel. Hold them all, hold us all, as fellow travelers seeking

bread, and trust that they are holding you in compassionate imagination. And side by side with

those you know and those you don’t yet know and those you might not ever know because the

circle’s large, and that’s okay – side by side with all of them, hold in place your corner of the

house. Offer, as you’re able, your gifts of time, talent, money, care, and most of all your

presence, which makes the whole thing holy. There’s nothing else, by the way, to hold this whole

thing up, except the love, the gifts and the imagination of members here and friends. Everybody

in the room – member, visitor, friend - holds a portion of the weight. That’s how community is

made. A congregation can never be an audience.

_________________________________

Rewind back 50 years.

In the middle of the twentieth century, right around when this congregation started, Unitarianism

in America (and then, after the merger in 1961, Unitarian Universalism) began to see itself and

express itself in a kind of feisty way, as an alternative to religion - not every congregation, but

many, and the smaller ones especially. The mainline churches, Catholic and Protestant, and the

religious landscape generally, were ever more conservative and conventional, just like the whole

culture of the 1950’s. There was a kind of reaction to that in our churches, an allergic reaction to

tradition, to religious language of any kind, to spiritual practice, old forms and institutional

authority. Humanism found its footing, which was good in many ways, but sometimes it was

hostile, intolerant, scornful, superior, even fundamentalist. I remember someone in the church I

served out east telling a visitor – and this was in the 1990’s – that the difference between our

congregation (founded in 1825) and the Congregational church across the street (from which

they had split off) was that “they do God over there and we don’t. We’re more like a club.” A

600-member club! And my heart sank to hear that narrow definition of our history and future,

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our purpose and our potential power in the world. The liberal church exists to offer bread to

weary travelers, and to a broken world, light and hope when all around seems midnight.

Universalism and Unitarianism from their earliest beginnings, wherever you start

from (the 14th

century in Europe, the 17th

century here), were never alternatives to religion. They

were, and we are, an alternative to the dominant secular culture of materialism, militarism and

apathy. In this we stand side by side with other liberal religious institutions, the religious left. In

certain, absolutely essential ways, we are different from them, just as they are different from

each other. We require allegiance to no creed, but demand instead that you articulate your own.

We believe that revelation is not sealed, that wisdom evolves, and mystery –everything we do

not know – is vast. We believe, therefore, in humility. We believe that faith can never be

coerced, can only be discovered in the human heart, then nurtured in community.

Most of all, and hardest maybe, we believe in hope – or else we could not dedicate a child here

with integrity. The prophetic liberal church believes in hope. With what James Luther Adams

called “all the realism and tough-mindedness we can muster,” we choose beauty and love,

laughter, grace, and hope.

Look about you at the starry heavens and at the deep, deep sea,

said Matthew Fox, a fellow traveler.

Look at the amazing history that has birthed a home for you on this planet:

at the surprise and joy of your existence.

Gather together- you and your community-

to rejoice and give thanks.

Gather together to heal and to let go.

Gather to enter the dark and deep mysteries,

to share the news,

to break the bread of the universe

and drink the blood of the cosmos itself in all its divinity.

Be brave.

Let your worship make you strong and great…

Create yourselves, re-create your world,

by the news you share and the vision you celebrate.

Bring your sense of being microcosm in a vast macrocosm;

bring your bodies, such as they are, and wonderful.

Bring your play. Bring adventure.

Bring your pain, and bring terror.

Gather together and do not scatter.

Gather together.

Become a people.