Sermon given by Intern Minister Tori Rosati on June 5, 2022.
There are certain creaturely features of spring’s transition into summer that catch my breath every year. The return of the snowy egrets to the marsh, the barn swallows that build nests in the gutters around our front porch, and the butterflies. When my kids were little, we’d all get excited when we first saw them and wildly exclaim – hi friends! – delighted by these familiar, expected, yet still utterly surprising and miraculous arrivals that yesterday weren’t here and today are. I sometimes still do this when I see them only now the girls roll their eyes at my silly excitement!
The landscape feels transformed with their arrivals and here I often wonder at what it took for them to get here. What transformations did they go through individually to arrive -of course here the butterfly is certainly the standout. As we know, one day, the caterpillar stops all its eating and hangs upside down a leaf and begins spinning a chrysalis out which it will one day emerge transformed into a butterfly. But here is where the interesting stuff happens. Inside, the caterpillar begins digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues – it literally turns into oozing soup. But…not everything inside the chrysalis is goop – there are these highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs that survive the digestive process. As a lover of words, I have to just say here, how much I love that they are called imaginal discs!
These cells were formed by the caterpillar at its birth as larva – each the building block for the parts the new butterfly form will need (an eye, wing, legs, etc.). The soupy inside of the chrysalis offers proteins and nourishment to fuel the growth of these imaginal discs to form what we welcome every June when my girls and I exclaim – hi friends!
I invite us to pause here to wonder at how miraculous this is. This creature moves from caterpillar to muck and mess to butterfly – three completely different states of being but with this lineage of build blocks, these layers of history that it carries with it from before its birth. Some studies have even suggested that moths and butterflies remember what they learned as caterpillars in their later winged forms. They remember through the ooze and the goop.
I can’t help but make connections between the butterfly’s journey and our own. As we have moved through the last two years, tucked away in our various cocoons and chrysalis’, witness to a global pandemic, racial reckoning, our world breaking down turning to mush – I don’t think I am alone here in wondering what comes out of it all? A particularly poignant question in this last month of the church year, two years out from our shutdown still wearing masks, holding vigils for the destruction of mass shootings and white supremacy, war... What does this transformation business have to say to our days – what new forms emerge out of all this muck and mess? And if they do – what will they be? And what are we called to do in the wake of it all?
I am remembering a rich conversation I had in my UU Polity class – this is a class that explored the way UU churches operate and govern themselves. We were talking about worship and the function it plays in a faith community. A number of us were sharing about transformative power of worship – that it is a time in the life of a congregation to open ourselves up to transformation – to stretch us, give us new ways of looking at ourselves and our lives, to offer something to take with us that will bring newness and depth to the rest of the week. It was all very aspirational!
After a few moments, someone in the class said, “Sometimes I wonder, though, if people actually come to church to be transformed.” The reality of the comment sat in the center of our space bringing us all back down to the ground. I can appreciate this question. I hear in it this fatigue in a world that is changing all around us – in both life-giving and life denying ways and everything in between. Can we just sit with what is? Can we pause amidst the bustle and hurry of a world that is full of shoulds, shoudlnts, dos and don’ts can we rest in the wholeness of who we are in this moment. As the butterfly can attest to – transformation is a messy, exhausting business.
So before I continue, I invite us all to take a deep breath. We are ok, just the way we are. There is an inner wholeness in each one of you that is already all the things we are trying to become.
And yet…
What this time has taught us, is that the only constant in this world is change. As much as we try to stay still, to pause and stop time’s incessant unfolding, our world turns, seasons change, our cells die and regenerate – we can’t stop this. Science fiction writer, Octavia Butler, in her novel Parable of the Sower, writes, “All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.” But if Butler is correct, that the only lasting truth is change,” well then, we can’t get out of the ways that life is moving, stretching, and forming us all along the way. Maybe the instinct of the caterpillar to stop eating and attached to the underside of a leaf is not unlike our instinct to come here each week. Something lures us out of our daily appetites and whispers – something is possible here.
As many of you may have heard, our larger denomination has been grappling with its own call for transformation with the work to adopt an 8th Principle. This work began after a series of events within our denomination around unfair and racist hiring practices led to our own reckoning on the ways that white supremacy culture work in our institutions. Some of us gathered together a few weeks ago in the Parlor to learn more about the history of this work. The proposed 8th Principle developed through the work of Paula Cole Jones and Bruce Pollack-Johnson is a:
“journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”
Now, there is so much to say about this – the explicit centering of our anti-racism and oppression work, the fact that it is the only principle to call on the reality of love in our midst - a month of sermons and we will hopefully explore more of this in the year to come– but what feels significant this morning to me is this linkage between dismantling oppression and our journey to spiritual wholeness. This requires a breaking down, a dismantling, a digesting if you will, as we move toward the potential of what we can become – this journey toward spiritual wholeness and a Beloved and liberative Community.
One way we are already doing some of this work comes from the newly formed Indigenous Land Acknowledgment Task Force that convened this year to research and draft an Indigenous Land Acknowledgement that honor’s and tells the history of the first people’s of this land – the Pentucket and Pennacook – a history that has been buried and erased by the influence of a historical narrative that centered the colonist’s lens. This is also a story that connects to our earliest history as a church. Did you know that the original name of this land – Pentucket – was changed to Haverhill by our first minister, John Ward on the Unitarian side to signify his birthplace in England? This is our lineage.
In many ways this work has been a kind of breaking down, a turning to mush, the histories that we take for granted, particularly the ones that are uncomfortable, and in this process added layers of complexity and nuance, and our group has had to wrestle with, sit in the discomfort, and try to make sense of events and truths that trouble the waters of our long held assumptions. This work of liberation and truth telling is messy.
But, it is also the seat of transformation. Here, our butterfly friends give us hope. Amidst all this muck and mess – there lies within us – both as individuals and a collective church body – the building blocks for what comes next. Remember, it’s not all soup and I ask us what are our imaginal cells – what seeds of transformation have been with us all along that will grow and flourish in the process of becoming something new?
While, I haven’t been along this ride with you all since the beginning of this pandemic, it is certainly visible to me the seeds that this congregation carries with it as it experiences the cycles of change that are part of this faith life that we share. Seeds of radical hospitality and deep care-taking. Seeds of Love and commitment to the wider community and world. Seeds of presence and holding. Fellowship and joy. Forgiveness and hope.
For the Land Acknowledgement work – as we have navigated its twists and turns – seeds of humility, commitment, and Love have remained within the piles of history that have been uncovered – these seeds have inspired the work, urged it on, and grown into an acknowledgement statement, ideas and commitments for future programs and collaborations - these new and transformative forms it will take in the year ahead.
In fact, as I reflect on this past church year, our worship themes point to many seeds and cells of transformation – themes of home, vulnerability, imagination, wholeness, interdependence, vocation, acceptance, embodiment, and creativity are all features, building blocks, and practices that lead us on our way toward transformation.
You see when things dismantle, deconstruct, turn to mush in our midst – we get to experience those primordial imaginings that have been with us the whole time, waiting to be uncovered, nurtured and fed – these seeds that often get buried and our hard to see in the daily anxieties and stresses of our lives – we get to experience and renew ourselves in their steadfast presence - layered amongst the things that change is potential of our next venture, our newest becoming, our future iteration as individuals and a people.
And here is, I think, how we balance our need to rest in who we are, to know that we are enough, AND to stretch and grow at the same time. Like the arrival of the birds and butterflies every spring they are both familiar and expected and surprising and miraculous – we move through the changing seasons of our lives carrying with us a familiar and steady foundational wholeness that keeps us present, grounded and connected all along the way. Yes, the only lasting truth is change, but that change is in relation to these core features of who we are that do not waiver, that we carry with us into each new moment, hold the possibility of a world a transformed by our actions and care.
So, I think it is fitting that we started the church year with this theme of home (if you will remember) and are now invited to reflect on transformation. Because, maybe then, our transformation brings us back to where we started, to those imaginal cells that have companioned us all along – they bring us home… like the egrets, the barn swallows, and the butterflies – our journey of transformation brings us here – this place in here and out there – these places we call home.
And knowing this, I think helps with the exhaustion and fatigue of a world that is constantly telling us to change, that we are not enough, to do and be more…in this way, the journey of transformation is a journey home. I invite us in the coming month to reflect on our own imaginal cells – as individuals and a community. What stays constant and true and how can those seeds germinate and generate renewal – move us from what wasn’t here yesterday toward what could be tomorrow. I invite us to see how what has broken down around us can become the nourishment, create the space, and foster the generation and renewal of these seeds. For, after our lives and the world have been digested, we arrive at the beginning, those cells of our true selves that remain – the departure point for who or what new thing we will become. For as the poets said… “one day, one day/ you emerge from the wreck/ embracing both the immense dawn/ and the dusk of the body,/ glistening, beautiful/ just as you are.”