II: Too Full to be Filled

Thursday afternoon, right after the environmental workshops, I attended a communion service put on by the UU Christian Fellowship. It was the first communion service, or Christian worship or fellowship of any kind, I’ve taken part in in the 8 years since I left L.A.

The Rev. Alma Faith Crawford, a woman of color herself new to UU, preached from her own experience of the Christian faith and UU traditions. I’ve been waiting for a very long time to hear the message she delivered, speaking as it did to the heart of my own concerns.

She first spoke of “hoarders”: people with an obsessive-compulsive need to hang onto things, who can’t throw out or give anything away, even when it takes over their living space, crowds out everything else in their lives, and alienates their friends and family. “No, I can’t throw that out; I might need it!” Rooms stacked to the ceiling with things they’ll never actually use, but “might need someday.” A scarcity mentality masked, or rather compensated by a façade of abundance. An apt metaphor for consumerist culture in general; for all those habits of thinking and feeling, greed and clinging, which most stand in the way of the changes needed if we’re ever to build an equitable and sustainable economy. A just world.

But she took it even further: There’s also a kind of intellectual hoarding, a spiritual greed if you will, which she cited as typical of our own tradition: We don’t just hoard material things, we hoard ideas, “principles”, spiritual beliefs and practices. We gather them from all over the world, from other traditions, throw in more from secular, academic, and scientific disciplines, top it off with a little Thoreau and King and Gandhi, some Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, and… well, you get the idea. We’ve got rooms on rooms on mental rooms, whole libraries of things we like to quote and hang onto, and wouldn’t dream of prioritizing or thinning out because, well, “we might need this someday”. Someday, when we finally get around to making up our minds what it is we really believe and stand for, and are prepared to do something about. An actual choice as to which path to follow. (If you follow one, the reasoning goes, you might lose the benefit of all the others…! What would I be missing out on?)
So we lock ourselves in, and lock spirit out. From a Christian perspective, lock God out; lock Christ out. Or stifle their inner presence and witness. Too many voices, not enough inner witness. Too many opinions, not enough inner listening. (What was that joke: UU’s are “Quakers with attention deficit disorder”!) We’re too full to be empty. Too full to be filled. Because you can’t fill a cup that’s already full.

I think it goes even farther, emotionally: we’re not attentive to, and often don’t even know what we’re actually feeling, let alone what anyone else is feeling. And what we’re all deep-down feeling now is just the kind of guilt, shame, and disgust at the personal and collective failings, inadequacies, and complacencies, that came up for me as I attended and reflected on these workshops. Especially the guilt: for what I/we have done, but more for what I/we have failed to do, even in the midst of boldly stating and holding onto our “principles”. The inner tension just gets to be too much. We fall into denial, depression, despair, anxiety, and other symptoms (exacerbated by our personal histories and our peculiar brain chemistries). And until or unless we can face all that, get honest with ourselves about it, and begin to find forgiveness for it -- forgiving OURSELVES being the hardest part-- it all just stays in there, and we remain stuck, individually and collectively. As go the individual members and congretations, goes UU as a whole. We’re stuck, and we’re trying to get un-stuck.

The thing about the Christian faith-tradition from which the Rev. Alma spoke, and from which I come and so often write, is that it gives us a path to becoming unstuck: through the confession and forgiveness of those felt-guilts and shortcomings which have traditionally been referred to as “sin”. A process, an inner transaction whereby you acknowledge rather than deny what’s going on inside; name and ask forgiveness for the source of guilt, rather than rationalizing or excusing it, or compensating through over-work or hyper-activism, as so often happens in a humanistic, social justice-conscious movement. You just lay it bare before God and ask that it be taken away, and that one’s true divine identity be restored in its place, along with the love and freedom and acceptance that naturally flows from that. With experiencing the reality of your own inner beauty, as revealed in God, through Christ (the inner divine) and the Holy Spirit (that which connects through the heart, through compassion.)

--It works! It’s often worked for me. It worked for me again at GA. So, why doesn’t it seem to work for most traditional Christians, those who stay within the regular denominations and their various creeds and orthodoxies? Well… because they never REALLY dealt with the guilt; that’s the only answer I can see. They never really opened up or emptied out; they just went through the statements and the motions, and nothing really changed, and over the years and centuries they only grew more locked in, not freed up. Their theology, and all too much of their social, economic, political, and “moral” ideology, reflects just that unhealed inner division, and projects it onto other people (gays, for example) and onto society as a whole. And believes in and calls down divine wrath and judgment on the whole thing. –The tradition that I, like many of us, have spent my life trying to get away from; only to find that I’ve carried it with me in other forms. Like, wanting to call down fire and brimstone on the entire State of Texas (starting with George W), or at the very least, on BP corporate headquarters. “In wrath, remember mercy”…

How do we become empty, that we may be filled? And re-filled, and refilled to overflowing: with beauty, with grace, with compassion? That seems to me to be the real challenge facing Unitarian Universalism/ists. Our UUA President, Peter Morales, just puts it differently: he states it in terms of how do we open ourselves to others to whom we’ve previously been closed? Be they gay, latino, some other minority, or whatever. To my mind it’s basically the “social justice” (or extrovert) way of stating the same question. And it’s a spiritual question; though one can easily lose sight of this amid the recent fervor for and heated discussions of social justice, inclusion, and the need for institutional reform that we I at this GA; much of it an attempt to assuage guilt for the sins and omissions of our own past. A step in the right direction, no doubt, but I’m still not sure it’s getting to the root of the problem.

In trying to get to the root of my own inner conflicts and divisions, and to a place where healing can happen, I’ve tried meditation (inner silence/mind-emptying), with but limited success. I’ve tried getting out of my shell a little more with people, but it seems that I’m close to being a “congenital introvert”. There’s only so much of my inner space that I want to, or know how to share person-to-person. I share, and open up sharing-spaces, more through writing or outdoor activities like gardening and birding. We can’t entirely change the way we’re made; though if we’re open to the leading of the Spirit, and respond to the call according to the gifts and leadings that we do have, that will eventually change us from the inside.

But in all honesty, I’ve not yet found in UU, even with all the open sharing and fellowship that we do have, what to say freedom of ideas and expression, anything that helps me the way Christian worship and communion once did. And if there are other KUUFers who come from the same background that I do, I’d guess that they haven’t found that in UU, either. It may be time for us to get together and see what we can do about it. All of us who feel that humanism and agnosticism are not enough. Who want to be emptied in order to be filled, and haven’t yet found a way to do that.


Broken Bread

We are wielded as one by divine orchestration,
comrades in arms in a war of liberation;
a struggle for freedom and inner release,
for light of His face and depths of His peace;

That our eyes may be opened to see things afresh,
that these hearts of stone may become living flesh;
that our reason and vision be Spirit-befriended;
that the nightmare of hell in our minds might be ended;

For victory in battles gone on for years,
we lift up our prayers, groanings, and tears,
to grace and to mercy together appealing,
become broken bread for each other's healing.

In conclusion, the real heart of the Gospel isn’t moral perfection, it’s freedom. Perfection is not a goal to be morally striven for, but something -- a process – which happens from within as we cast off these external measures and values, and respond to the calling of Spirit’; which is basically the calling of Love. This, I think, sums up what Jesus REALLY taught. And lived. And died. And now rises again in you and me…if we will.

I conclude with a direct quote from her message that day: “They don’t need our perfection, they need our presence; our compassion.” Our brokenness, our emptiness, our transparency, through which alone God’s healing grace can pour.


Scarlet Cord

How often I’ve seen it: God’s secret servants,
guardian angels, some of them human;
the saving stroke, the outstretched hand,
the line flung to save the drowning man;
the cord strung across a Jericho doorway,
marking the ones set aside for protection;
the scarlet streak on Israel’s dwellings,
the five scarlet wounds flowing rivers of healing,
the signs of His covenant-love on the altar,
seals of betrothal, standing to witness:
“This one is mine, and noone may touch them!”

And there is a River faithfully flowing
down through the years of my life’s many seasons,
like a thread running through a tapestry, weaving,
binding the wounds and stitching the edges,
the ripped, ragged seams, the gaps in-between
these striving attempts and sad incompletions,
the things I did and my heart’s real intentions;
A touch of grace when I least expect it,
a song in the night, the words of a poet,
the music contained in a reddening sunset;
a face in the crowd, the smile of a sister,
the soft, secret force which binds us together.

And so I have found that it’s not by compulsion,
nor by decree, nor force of persuasion,
doctrines, religions, organizations
that a heart is redeemed and bound to another,
but by covenant-love, faithful, persistent,
the gentle betrothal of spirit to spirit.
Prophet of old, truly you saw it…

“Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit”,
says the Lord Almighty. Zech. 4:6