EMPTY PLACES

For sixty years, some portion of every Christmas for me has revolved around my parents. My father was notoriously hard to buy gifts for as he didn’t seem to like anything. My mother was especially vulnerable at Christmas and she always seemed for find something that hurt her feelings. But they both loved Christmas and from my earliest memories, they did a hundred things to try to make it special and memorable for me. They were Christmas people. (Yes, there are Christmas people, who love, look forward to, revel in, and sentimentalize everything about Christmas. Just the sight of a fake Santa Claus brings a tear to their eyes. And there are people who just don’t relate to Christmas, who do their duties but never feel the magic. Alas.)

This year, of course, for the first time, they are gone. The result is a little aura of sadness around the whole holiday for me. The holiday will have some empty places this year. I realize more poignantly now why so many people find the Christmas season difficult. This season has the year’s highest suicide rates. It creates the most hospital admissions for depression and other mental/emotional problems (not to mention alcohol abuse). As our culture layers on the sentimentality about families, giving and love, for many, this becomes a harsh reminder of how much those things are missing from their lives. Christmas is so much about memories. It brings back so many memories of loved ones lost. The empty places in our lives ache all the more vividly when we are forced to recall what we are missing. There are also people who have nothing but painful memories to look back on that are such a stark contrast to the images that we see all around us. At a time when everyone seems to be basking in celebrations family joys, so many of our families just don’t seem to measure up. There are so many reasons why the Christmas season can be difficult indeed.

Of course, all of this fits the story so perfectly. The Christmas celebration has the resources necessary to cope built right into it. It is a story, first of all, about the darkness. It’s about a couple, lost and alone, cold and forsaken, cut off from family and friends. It’s about a time, grim and harsh, uncertain and unforgiving, (talk about a recession, we have no idea). It’s about the difficult realities of life, with no sentimentality, no warmth, no comfort.

And the message is that, it is into such darkness that the light shines. It is into such lives that the miracle comes. It is into such times that the presence of God’s love is born that can make all the difference. The Christmas celebration is not about how the world is all cozy, comfortable and sweet. It is not about how warm and wonderful our families are. It is not about memories of Christmas’ past that are like visions of sugarplums dancing in our wee little heads. It is about the very kind of emptiness that we often feel being filled up. It is about the bad memories being redeemed somehow. It is about the lost loved ones being born again in our hearts and minds for a while, a little wistful and sad, but powerfully real. It is about the Christ child who comes into such times as ours, such lives as we have, such dysfunctional moments as we experience, with a word of hope and a touch of love and a flood of grace.

And so, bring on the sadness, open up the grief, let the memories come; for in this season, God’s grace will touch and bless it all. The power of Christ’s love is active and abroad in the world and we have nothing to fear. “Watchmen, tell us of the night…” For we know that the light is coming, and shining in every dark place. That is the miracle of Christmas. May you find a merriness in that this season.

All Christmas cheer be with you,

The Dilemmas of a Progressive Church

In the best of times, the fall season is a little worrying to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the weather, I love getting back to the activities and real work of the church, I even love the oncoming feel of winter creeping into the air. It is the church that worries me each fall. Like most New England churches, First Parish goes into a kind of hiatus during the summer, almost a hibernation. People’s lives get very active, but most of that activity is directed elsewhere. I’m used to that. But when September arrives, every year I worry about whether everyone will come back. Will people discover that they don’t really need the church? Will they have gotten out of the habit? Will they have found better things to do with their Sunday mornings?

A few years ago, those worries used to be quelled instantly with a big crowd arriving ready for the new church year on Rally Sunday. Now, not so much. Things are changing in our culture and in our church’s culture. Now, the church year seems to build, ever so slowly, week by week, as people drift back to winter routines reluctantly. This year has been the worst.

We know the reason for some of this. These days, Sunday morning has become the epicenter of the travel sports team schedule. Most of the kids that might normally be coming to Sunday School have more athletic things to do on Sunday mornings and many of their parents go off the watch their kids kick a soccer ball or play football or whatever. It’s worse in the fall, but that trend now continues in every sports season. In the world of pre-high school culture, sports loom large and church is often an afterthought. For years we have fought the battle of trying to compete with the Sunday sports scene, and we have clearly lost. Every year it gets a little worse.

But that’s not the only problem. It becomes harder every year for us to find adult volunteers to fill committees and to do the work of the church. People will make short-term commitments here and there, but few want to commit to a board term of three years or even one year. People volunteer to do a job, but are afraid to take on an ongoing responsibility. Many church activities simply cannot be sustained for lack of full participation. We are not alone in this. Most of our fellow congregational churches struggle far more than we do, but we are now beginning to struggle more and more.

Even on Sunday morning, attendance is increasingly irregular. Often we get the same over-all numbers as in past years, but most people’s church-going patterns have become more sporadic. People that used to come every week now might come twice a month. People that used to come twice a month, now come just once, etc. I don’t think our worship services are less exciting or compelling or beautiful, quite the contrary. When I run into people that I haven’t seen in church for a while, the answer is always the same: “O we’ve just been so busy. We just haven’t gotten a moment to spare.” And then comes the list of activities or events or whatever that seems dauntingly long indeed.

I worry because I can sense a slow erosion in the life of our church community. We have plenty of people involved in the church, but the level of involvement, the level of commitment has changed. Across our denomination and our region, I hear the same story: People’s lives have become so busy and hectic. Children’s lives are over programmed and increasingly frantic. Families feel stretched too far and don’t have enough time together. Church is less and less of a priority in people’s lives which are already too full.

I have no doubt that these things are true. The culture around us is changing. Some young parents have talked to me about the lives of their kids being so different now than they were just five years ago. “Screen time” has become so important, social media has mushroomed into such a dominant thing, and sports, sports, sports, sports.

There is another element that is especially true of our particular part of the Christian culture. We are a progressive church and part of a progressive denomination. I believe that our understanding of Christian faith is the real hope for the future of the church and that our area is filled with people who would be comfortable here and would agree with most of our interpretation of the Christian message. And yet, those very people are less interested in going to church or supporting the church. Members of more conservative or evangelical churches feel the need to band together to sustain a system of belief that is at odds with an increasingly secular culture. Our natural constituency is more at peace with the secular ethos. They are increasingly secular people looking for a spiritual dimension in their lives, but not looking for some radical alternative. While our faith is well anchored, our beliefs are more open, more accepting, more provisional. Hence we don’t have the passion and commitment of a narrower mind or a more judgmental kind of belief. The ideas that make us more open and accepting, ironically make us less zealous. Our members don’t all feel as much “need” for church quite as often as some others.

All this speaks well of our church community, but makes it harder to sustain our life together. Now, I’m not writing this as a form of public hand-wringing. I don’t want to scold you all into being more committed. I want, instead, to provoke us all into some fresh thinking about who we are and what our future might look like. We need to be creative in figuring out how to adapt to these times and how to meet the needs of our people. Maybe we need to do Sunday school completely differently or even at a different time of the day or week. Maybe we need to be more creative in linking our church community together using social media. Maybe our structure needs to be even more “ad hoc” and “organic.” Maybe we need to find other ways to touch the lives of our community outside of Sunday morning. I don’t yet know the answers, but we need to think it through more intentionally and more boldly.

At the request of the Board of Deacons, this winter we will be engaging in an envisioning process. We don’t yet know what form it will take, but we are bringing in an outside facilitator to help us to design the process and lead us through it. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it over the next couple of months. We will attempt to articulate more clearly, who we are and what makes our church community unique and compelling. We will try to diagnose our problems and challenges more clearly. We will try to get to the very heart of how we see our mission and purpose in people’s lives. And then we will bring our creativity to bear on re-envisioning how we go about the work, worship, and fun of being the church.

I hope that we can together become a church for the next generation and revitalize our sense of who we are and why what we do is important. In the meantime, give all this some thought. Talk about it to others. Let your imagination loose. Let’s begin to get excited about a new chapter in this communities life. We are still a very vibrant and healthy church. Our message is more important that ever and our outreach more crucial than ever. Lets turn our future into a time of engaging challenges to be embraced and well met. If we can do this together, we can all stop worrying each fall. And, by the way, if we haven’t yet seen you in church this fall, come and make everybody feel better.

Arsenic and Old Churches

You might remember a church incident a number of years ago in New Sweden, Maine. A number of people were poisoned by arsenic that someone put into the coffee during coffee hour. What motivated the crime was never made completely clear, but investigators eventually came to the conclusion that it all might have had to do with the passions of church politics. I remember how shocked and bemused most commentators seemed at the time, that the little issues of church life could provoke such murderous rage. After having spent my life around churches, oddly enough, the whole case did not seem all that surprising to me. It seems it may have been some group angry at the church council or one member of the council angry at the others. It is, at least, not hard to identify with a certain amount of frustration with a church council from time to time. But it continues to amaze, how heated the passions become and how badly some people in churches sometimes behave. I have, occasionally, been on the receiving end of the anger of a group of church people behaving badly, and even though there has never been any arsenic involved, they were still pretty devastating times. But come to think of it, most of those times, I was probably behaving pretty badly myself.

Church is that place in most of our lives where we try our best to be good, polite, respectful, moral people. In church, we are asked to reflect on what kind of people we feel called to be, and so we become more conscious of trying to “be good,” at least on the surface. We don’t use bad language in church, we speak more politely, we think about the church’s life in more “moral” terms, we try to hold ourselves and the whole church community to a higher standard. But amazingly, the result is so often just the opposite. In our eagerness to display our best behavior, we tend to become more judgmental and more self-righteous. As we struggle to suppress our own little foibles we become less tolerant of the foibles of others. As we strain to control our little irritations with others, we find deeper and uglier angers leaking out around the edges. And so, often church communities get torn asunder by passions that seem all out of proportion to what is actually at stake. Jesus knew about this. He told his followers about how religious people in his day were likely to be trying to remove a speck from someone else’s eye while having a log in their own eye (another, similar, joke was about straining out a flea only to swallow a camel). Feuds and schisms are as much a part of local church life as pot-luck dinners and bake sales.

This is not just true of our local churches. One of the members of our Confirmation class a few years ago wrote eloquently in explaining her decision not to be confirmed, that she felt that religions had caused more wars, more cruelty and more inhumanity over the course of history than almost anything else. It’s hard to argue with that. Most of the time, those of us on the inside of religious faiths tend to close our eyes to the grandly destructive results that our religious fervors have had on others on the outside. It’s hard not to be embarrassed by the history of Christianity. Whether we are thinking of religious wars, inquisitions, anti-Semitism, treatment of native peoples, colonialism, bigotry or any of the other horrors directly or indirectly attributable to the forbearers of our faith, it is hard to look at the truths of history honestly and square them with a faith meant to promote peace and teach love. Given the terrorism currently growing out of the fundamentalist version of one of our sister faiths, Christianity is not alone in this. Yes, there are many stories of generosity, courage and redemption that we can think of as well, but the balance sheet is still not clearly on our side.

If we have the courage and the boldness to face this issue honestly, how do we continue to feel good about the importance and the value of what we are doing in our churches? Is our confirmation class skeptic right in rejecting the whole religious enterprise?

Obviously, given what I am doing with my life, I don’t think so (but I don’t take the problem lightly). I continue to believe in the value of what we stand for, even if we don’t stand for it all that effectively. We continue to congregate in churches (even if our moral track record is mixed) because most of us need periodic (even weekly) reminders of what’s important in life. We need to reflect on why we do what we do and whether the deeper meaning of our life is consistent with how we are spending our days. Left to our own devices, most of us would skim along the surface of our routines in life and miss the bigger picture and the deeper meaning all together. We gather each week so that one of us can say “stop, reflect, listen to your life, hear the call of your spirit, touch the sacredness around you, wake up to the beauty, feel the pains of the world, know the urgency of justice, and live the depth of the meaning of life.” We all need the reminder. And we all need that reminder delivered to us in new and challenging ways if it is going to be able to get through our defenses and our complacency.

We also need the support. In the midst of the problems and tensions that are endemic to church communities, there are also great gifts. When the difficult or tragic circumstances of life push us unwillingly and terrifyingly into the depths, we need each other desperately. We need people to hang onto, to care, to listen to us, to love us, even sometimes to lecture us and shake us out of our nonsense. No, friends and family are not always enough. We need a community, a place where we belong, a group that would miss us if we were gone. Faith is too hard to hang onto alone during the dark times, we need to know that there are others who are on this hard road with us.

We also need, in our spiritual hunger, to find the face of God. Maybe we can find God on some mountaintop, or in the spectacle of a sunset, or in the music of a sky lark, but for most of us, the presence of God touches us in the touch of other lives. The quest for God is not a solo act. God comes to us in one another. God’s love comes in the love of a friend. God’s mercy comes in the forgiveness of someone that we’ve hurt. God’s humor comes in the comments of a child. God’s grace comes in the tears of someone sitting next to us in the pew. God’s face is somewhere there in every face around us. We need to gather in these broken and heart breaking little, desperately flawed, communities of faith because God comes to us in the lives of those others who are also longing and aching for that presence of God. And to ache and long for God’s presence is what it means to be truly and deeply alive.

Whatever the abuses, the failures, the pitfalls of our churches and our blemished faith history, we continue to try because our very lives are at stake. But we must do that trying with the careful humility of those who know how likely it is that we will fail and fall short and behave badly. So let us try and remember how much we need each other, how much we care for each other, but also how much we need to forgive each other and forgive the whole church. We are not very good at being good or virtuous or perfect, but that’s not what this is about. Let’s try instead to simply embrace one another for who we are and recognize our own needs and our own flaws. If we can do that we might even be able to trust the coffee.

History's Happening

Sometimes weeks can pass when one barely needs to pick up a newspaper. Often history seems to be a slow moving giant with the inertia of the status quo keeping the known parameters of our world firmly in place for decades at a time. And then, when you are not expecting it, change comes sweeping through the world at a gallop and news is something you need to follow daily or even hourly. These recent weeks have been troubling, exciting, horrifying, and exhilarating in turns. Demonstrations, revolutions, and civil war have spread across the Arab world like a virus. It was hard to tear oneself away from following the events in Tunis and Cairo unfolding at a thrilling pace. But no sooner did those headlines fade than another half-dozen countries seemed to be lurching toward revolutionary change. And then things turned truly ugly in Libya. Not to be outdone, once again, mother nature stole the show with the catastrophic disaster in Japan only to see the potential for nuclear disaster overshadowing even the worst of natural catastrophes. And all the while, here at home, political upheavals and economic travails go on apace. It’s been an extraordinary few weeks.

On the one hand, in times like these, when massive movements and events are happening, we are reminded of how small and even trivial most of our concerns and anxieties usually are. When hundreds of people are being swept out to sea or when unarmed crowds are risking lives standing up to tanks and armies, most of our usual preoccupations are dwarfed in comparison. It can be a much-needed perspective. Just a couple of years ago, when I accidentally smashed my little finger under a filing cabinet and my doctor raised the prospect of my losing part of the finger, I was upset and feeling sorry for myself. But when a sat in the surgeon’s office next to a man who had just had his right arm amputated, I got slapped in the face with some perspective. And that was a good thing. My pinky seemed literally not to matter all that much.

This need for perspective is not just a personal thing. In the larger scheme of things, our whole society is doing quite well and all of the anger and rancor that surrounds our national problems seem a little out of place when we turn on CNN and see what real problems and crises look like.

On the other hand, it can be important to realize that the big events that we see and read about are not just big; they are made up of a million little stories about people whose lives are not that dramatically different from ours. When we hear about the massive death tolls in Japan, we need to remember that it breaks down into individual families overcome with grief. These big stories too are just the amalgam of lots of little stories. Every life lost in Libya is someone’s father or son or wife or sister. Every little piece of the big picture is still about someone’s tears or hopes or broken heart or yearning to be free. All of the human family is one gigantic web of hopes and dreams and fears and faith. When part of that human family is plunged into a dark chaos or lifted by a transcendent moment, we all feel it. We are all changed by it. Our own prayers and empathies effect it and are effected by it. That human web is about the spirit of God of which we are all a part. These travails of others are a family affair. And so, perhaps, our spiritual lives are at stake as we ache and pray and cry and exult with others halfway around the world. We are them, and they are us, and our common spirit of God pulls at our souls when this great web is tugged by the seismic shifts of history. Our God is on the move, and so we are as well.

Majestic

Every once in a while I spend some time in our church’s sanctuary alone. Sometimes it’s late afternoon after the office is closed. Sometimes it’s at night after meetings are over. But my favorite times are in the early morning. I like to just sit there and feel the light. The light has a golden glow as it comes through the stained glass windows and reflects off the aged cherry wood of the pews and the wainscoting. It is a beautiful room. Most of you know that it was first built when George Washington was still the president. The people of this community lavished love and attention on the building and have continued to do that down through the years.

It is amazing to think about how it was built. Dozens of people gave hundreds of hours of incredibly hard work to the project. There were no professional builders then, just local farmers, after a week of hard physical labor around their own farmsteads, coming here and hewing and shaping the gigantic beams by hand. Everyone was involved; even the local physician was here hoisting beams in his spare time (we know this, of course, because when part of the structure of the church tower collapsed during construction, the local doctor was one of the two people killed).

They went through all of this work and attendant expense to meet what they thought was an important need. They wanted to create a space that would have the effect of lifting their thoughts from their everyday concerns to something more sublime, more meaningful, more important, more eternal. They wanted to be inspired. And so they didn’t just build a utilitarian building—they aimed for beauty. They went for a ceiling high enough to contain their dreams and their grandest thoughts. They wanted this golden light that lifts the heart. They wanted a place that would touch something in them that was hungry for touch. More important to them than getting their own houses fixed up, more important than just spending time with their families, more important than any of the pressing tasks of their own private concerns, was this communal act of faith: building a place that would sustain the meaning of their lives.

This is a beautiful thing and a human thing. When people on the edge of what seemed like a hostile wilderness were trying to carve out a life for themselves, one of the first things they did was build a church and call a minister. They banded together in a community and expressed their spiritual hopes or their dearest beliefs in a building that was nearly monumental in this place at that time. And, of course, almost every New England town can tell a similar story. Peoples all over the world can point to the same things in every different religion, we have only to think of Chartres Cathedral rising up in the midst of medieval hovels, or the Blue Mosque being labored on by people too poor to buy enough food. There is something in this that is absolutely essential to what it means to be fully human. There is this spiritual longing in most people. There is a need to look toward some higher loyalty, some deeper truth, some grander meaning than what we find evident in the everyday round of our living. That, at heart, is the religious impulse. We look for something behind or above or within the mundane realities of our days that makes sense of our stories or gives significance to our strivings or explains our sufferings.

The trouble is the life of our little community of faith also, so often, just gets bogged down in the mundane. Our time together can become dominated by budgets and building maintenance and committee structures and schedules. Our household of faith becomes just another household, trying to balance income and expenses and minimize the time it requires from our busy lives. It is easy to forget the transcendent nature of what we are about here.

Our Christian faith has a mixed record. Churches have often been on the wrong side of history, have been institutions of repression, have fostered intolerance, and have occasioned warfare. Maybe even worse, our churches have often just been dull, lifeless, bastions for the status quo. That’s why it is so important to remember what this whole enterprise is about.

Our tradition is also filled with beauty. There are stories of people making great sacrifices in the name of love. There are great works of art and some of our most extraordinary pieces of music. There are generations of charitable work and whole communities made better by the outreach of people of faith. There are beautiful moral aspirations and profound yet subtle ideas. Our life together is lifted out of the mundane if we truly believe that our best hope for changing our world’s injustices and evils lies within the power of our religious ideals to change hearts and minds. People worshipping a God of love must be able to live out that love in acts of kindness and grace. People worshipping a God whose love extends to all of humanity must be able to fight for justice and equality. People whose God is beyond all human borders and limitations must be able to transcend the lure of wars of nationalism. The stakes are high, the needs are great, and the task is positively majestic.

When you next sit in our sanctuary, take a moment to think about how extraordinary it is that people should create such a grand thing for us to pray in. Think about how deep and profound is the need and the mission that inspired the beauty, the grandeur and the sacrifices that made it possible. Allow yourself to be reawakened to the power and the promise of what we are about, the heritage that we have been given and the awe-filled purpose to which we have been called.

Memories

As I sat down this morning to write a few reflections for the newsletter, I suddenly remembered that I had to ask Sally to take my mother’s name off the mailing list. That’s what happens when somebody dies, there are a million little details that continue to come up weeks and even months later that remind you of the death. Our loved ones all leave this world with a lot of loose ends that need to be tied-up; a lot of unfinished business. I get reminders every day. I had to think of what to do with the Christmas gifts that we bought and were never able to give her. When I saw her great grandson this week and he said something particularly cute, I almost called to tell her. That’s what it’s like—a life ends but it continues to echo for a while in a thousand little ways.

Yes, my mother used to get the church newsletter. She didn’t get it to hear about First Parish or all of what goes on here. She asked to get it so that she could read these little messages that I write to you all at the beginning of each issue. Looking through her stuff after the funeral (Yes, death brings about this greatest invasion of privacy as everything that you own is pawed through by those left behind. I must remember to be careful about what I save.) I found a file that contained twenty-five years worth of these little essays. Every one, from four different churches, was carefully preserved and set aside. It was touching to find them, to know that they meant so much to her. I wondered why and for what she saved them. To read again some day? To show them to someone? It was probably just because she couldn’t bear to throw them away.

It’s an odd feeling today, to write these words and to know that for the first time in twenty-five years, she will not receive them or read them or tuck them away for safe keeping. Another little connection broken, and yet, because she treasured these messages writing this still feels strangely connected to her. And this is, at long last, what I want to share with you here.

I’ve been rediscovering the power and the endurance of that connection between us that we call love. My rediscovery has to do with memory. For the last few years, I’ve only seen my mother two or three times a year. We lived several hundred miles apart, and she and my father were getting too old to make the trip. So two or three times a year, Maureen and I would go down to New Jersey for a two or three day visit. I almost hate to say it now but the visits were not always good. As much love as there was between us, as is sometimes the case in families, there were also lots of complications in our relationship. And during our visits those complications seemed to sometimes take center stage. I might say some wrong thing that would upset her or she would make some manipulative or passive-aggressive comment that would anger me. She could sometimes be infuriating and (for me, at least) difficult. I’m sure she found me a little prickly as well. All of the little annoyances of the moment and her aggravating idiosyncrasies would often seem to push the better feelings into the background. Some visits we just endured. Often, we felt close but sometimes not.

When I was speaking about her during the funeral service, with a tight and gigantic lump in my throat, I suddenly realized how spiritually close I felt to her at that moment. When I could think about her life as a whole; the meaning, the overwhelming love she displayed, the traumas that she overcame, the spirit of her life—all of the other stuff disappeared. All of the annoyances of the moments faded as the whole pattern of her life became more clear. I could see her that day (and now) as a whole human being—beautiful, fragile, enduring, strong, full of love and grace. I felt closer to her that day than I had in years. She was absolutely “there” for me as the tapestry of memories revealed the whole of her spirit. I said things about her (and even to her) that I so wished I had said a hundred times when she was alive.

It wasn’t that I ever left her in any doubt that I loved her (she left me no doubts on that score either); it’s just that so many little things get in the way between all of us. We allow the trivial to trump the crucial so often in so many relationships. Another way of saying it is that we allow the temporal to obscure the spiritual. At heart, almost every one of us are extraordinary spirits, spirits to be celebrated, to be loved, to be treasured. And yet, so often, we let other things get in the way; our feelings get hurt, our opinions get challenged, our tastes get offended, our little certainties get threatened, our comfort is upset. And so we let spaces open up between us—spaces that can grow into chasms if we’re not careful. And we forget how precious we are or should be to one another. Every one of our relationships are filled with failures to see the “whole” of one another, failures to grasp the beauty of one another’s spirits, failures to treasure and to comfort and to reassure one another. And we all so much need that reassurance and that comfort.

My mother is very much with me these days. Yes, I know that will fade over the months and years to come, but it has been a great gift to see her, to truly “see her,” as a whole and real and graceful spirit right here and now in my life. My God, I hope I can learn the lesson that she taught me here at the end—to treasure all those other lives that are still with me in the flesh.

I’ll ask you to forgive my little personal reverie in these words. But I hope you will find here something meaningful and that I might have reflected on some feelings that may resonate with you as well.