Sermon given by Clare Fortune-Lad, October 1, 2023.
Travel with me, now, to a winter’s night sometime in 2021. It is pitch black outside, and I am at my dining room table, zooming with our youth group. Our middle schoolers take turns checking in, and answering the question of the day, “How do you describe our church to your friends?” One young person is having internet difficulties at home, so we can’t see his face or hear his voice, but he types into the chat box his response to my question. We all see it pop up at the same time, and read along:
“I say to my friends that it is a church the likes of which they have never seen.”
And, we laughed the way you all just laughed, and man did we need it that night.
Can I possibly describe the pride I also felt when I read his statement, though? Maybe it makes you proud too:
I say to my friends that it is a church the likes of which they have never seen.
That’s one way to deliver an elevator speech. I’ve heard many of you lamenting about how difficult it can be to try to put into words what UUCH is, what Unitarian Universalism tries to do. What struck me most as I wrote those words was the way I phrased that, “What Unitarian Universalism tries to do.”
And I think I am ready to admit the truth that we’re never going to do all the things we set out to do. We are mortal, and unfinished business is just part of the human condition. But that also doesn’t mean we have permission to become stagnant.
One of the proposed 6 values that may soon nationally replace our 7 principles of Unitarian Universalism is Transformation. The proposed language about transformation that, true to form, is still being edited: “We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”
We’re taught the cinematic model of transformation where you’re born, you eat a bunch of good food, you go into your cocoon, and then one day you’re just done because look - what is more beautiful than that rainbow-hued butterfly? And then, we learn, that transformation looks a lot more like a muddy, bumpy road that stretches before you for eternity, and you never actually reach your destination.
After listening to Zan’s incredible sermon in August entitled “Between Hope and Lamentation,” I felt noticeably lighter. Zie referenced brand new climate science that provides a picture of our planetary prospects that isn’t nearly as bleak as we thought even a year ago. Zan’s words about forgiving ourselves for putting our heads in the sand about climate change were a balm to my soul that I didn’t realize I needed until after I heard them. This validation helped me to be brave and pick up the first book I’ve read about environmentalism since I was a teenager. I remember it, it was 2007, and it scared me, a lot. So I tried to put a lot of distance between myself and any talk of impending global disaster, but, turns out, that didn’t make the existential dread go away, either.
When a friend recommended Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s book, Active Hope, it was the subtitle that actually drew me in. It reads: “How to face the mess we’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power.” The authors highlight three different strains of stories humans seem to be telling themselves these days about the state of our planet. On one end of the spectrum is “Business as usual,” whereas way over here at the other end is “the great unraveling.”
To get through the day, often we are on one of the two edges of this binary - it’s all totally hopeless, there’s nothing I can do so I’m not going to think about it, or way on the other end, where things are going along just as they should, to paraphrase a christmas card I almost sent out last year: “we’re fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine.”
But if we liberate ourselves to live in the in -between, accepting that the real truth of our times is not on either end of this binary, we can lean into a third story that this book calls “The Great Turning.” In the Great Turning, we become protagonists of our own adventure stories, and remember the truth that doing some things will always be better than doing no things.
Because it’s not true that everything is fine. And it’s also not true that there’s nothing we can do. And I don't know about you, but there’s a weight that lifts off my heart when I calibrate myself back somewhere into the middle between those two statements. No, we will never be done, but we have to continue on. Never complete, never perfect.
Do my kids share their toys? Absolutely not. But, I tell myself, we’re getting there. Has my parenting reached the grand zenith of exactly where I want it to be? No. No, no no no. And I am so uncomfortable with that a lot of the time. But I’m ready to start getting more used to that discomfort.
I preached in February about scarcity and abundance, and probably the subtitle of that sermon could have been “I’m tired, are you?” One of you compassionately approached me afterward with a wonderful book recommendation. It was called How to keep house while drowning by KC Davis helped me reframe domesticity in a huge way. What if, the author asks, care tasks like cooking, dishes and laundry are morally neutral? Our culture has attached so much weight and shame and so many labels to things like messy houses, unfolded laundry, sinks full of dishes. The giant sigh of relief that this book gave me was to remember that the toys all over my living room floor are just objects, perhaps not yet in their most organized and pristine state, but objects that say nothing about who my family is or what we are worth. Crusty dishes that have sat out for days are not good, but they are also not bad, they just are.
This really energized me. When you can separate what you do from who you are, things don’t feel quite so dire. I hear what Unitarian Universalism has been trying to tell me since I was a quirky kid in what felt like an even quirkier religion. UUism tells me about inherent worth and dignity. I look around and think, sure, you have it, and you have it, and I can even squint and see how my political arch nemeses have it. But at least for me, in my day-to-day self talk, the hardest hurdle of all is to admit to myself that I, too, have inherent worth and dignity. And I suspect I might not be the only one who feels this way.
This morning’s reading was hard to hear, right? We know these things about our history, and yet we do not think about them as much as we think we ought to. We have heard some of these stories, but maybe not put quite so plainly or directly. We are, many of us, descended from a people who caused great harm. Who continue to cause great harm. And how do we explain that to our kids? We begin, and know that we are getting there.
There is something so straightforward about the voice with which we are telling the story of Pentucket to our young people today. As opposed to these two extremes that we’ve been talking about, it presents some information and lets them think through what it means to them. There’s something empowering about hearing the story this way, isn’t there? Like, when we learn difficult history we can face the future with a transformed sense of being informed, delivered in a way that it hasn’t been delivered before, at least not in public school.
Today after church, our 5th-12th graders will be going on a local hike. Nancy Lebar from our UUCH Land Acknowledgement Task Force will be showing them different sites where Penacook and Pentucket people lived, fished, hunted and loved before John Ward and his peers arrived on the scene. Their explorations will conclude at the Buttonwoods Museum, where they will get to look at a variety of artifacts found in this area that teach us about what life was like for the many centuries before 1642. Stay tuned this spring for an opportunity for church adults to make this journey!
This group was formed just two years ago, around this time of year, and they have been pretty quietly doing a lot of incredible research, relationship-building, and truth-telling. You’ve heard the beginning of their statement during the start to our worship here from time to time, right? But there’s more, so I want to read you all of it:
The land now called Haverhill sits on the original homelands of the Pennacook and Pentucket, Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Wabanaki Confederacy.
We acknowledge that our Universalist Unitarian Church of Haverhill forebears prospered due to the appropriation of land from people who were indigenous to this area - a legacy that we hold to this day.
We honor and respect the enduring presence of the diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land.
We promise to research and personally acknowledge these legacies, retell our history honestly, and build relationships with and support contemporary Indigenous communities in actionable ways.
Our Land Acknowledgement team is an example of how we can transform together, over the course of many years, and I hope you’ll become involved if you’re interested in learning more about their work.
We’re never going to do anything if we think we’re already doomed, already totally beyond redemption, just broken and the worst. We’re never going to do anything if we think what we do has to be perfect, and done quickly, according to impossible cultural standards.
What has been done is not okay. The past haunts us, and we have a lot to think about. But we are moving forward in a direction informed by truth and we are getting there. We do not know exactly where that is, but we start.
That’s what UUism is in my life. I’m still doing all that messy worthiness work, wondering what I’m doing, how I’m going to do it, whether it is enough, whether I am okay, whether it’s all going to be okay. But when we know we still have to change, and we don’t have to change alone, change becomes a little less scary. And we also are here to remind each other that we don’t have a choice. We have to change.
The other night my kids and I were looking out at the sunset from our front steps. something about the sunset always makes me think of others who stood in that spot and looked at it before me, but also of what it’s going to look like when my babies are old and grey, and all the baggage that comes with those wonderings. Rory must have fallen asleep and dreamt about it because when he woke up the next morning, the first declaration he made from his crib was “A a a a mo-wah sunset!”
And as I lay in my bed, blinking, about to put my feet on the floor for another seemingly impossible day, I thought… the only thing harder than change is imagining everything in our beautiful, terrible world staying the same way it is right now, forever. And so we link arms, look at one another, and we take the next step. And while we do it, we sing.
May it be so.