In the week of All Saints Day, I’m standing in the sanctuary
of our old Congregational church. It’s a
space that it is hard not to love. The
light has a golden glow as it comes in through stained glass and reflects off
the aged cherry wood of the pews and wainscoting. It is a beautiful room. It was built back when George Washington was
still the President. The people of this
community lavished love and attention on this building back then just as we
have continued to over the succeeding generations. As we think about them, it hard not to be
awe-struck by their strength and resolve and by their gifts to us.
It is amazing to think about how this building was
built. Dozens of people gave hundreds of
hours to the project. There were no
professional builders then, just local farmers, after a week of hard physical
labor around their own primitive farmsteads, coming here and hewing and shaping
the beams by hand. Even the local
physician was here hoisting beams in his spare time (we know this 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 the attendant expense
to meet what was surely 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 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. Certainly, these people
were saints in their way.
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 to build a church.
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. They were trying to live
up to the legacy of faith that was left to them by their forbearers. And 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.
There is a need to stand in the context of some powerful tradition of
meaning that came before us and will live on after us. That, at heart, is the religious impulse. We look for something behind or above the
mundane realities of our days that makes sense of our stories or gives
significance to our striving or explains our sufferings. Our faith meets, or tries to meet, these deep
human needs that must find expression and can never be discounted for that
reason.
So much of what we have been given in our religious
tradition represents some of the best of our human history. Our religious tradition is 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. It is
hard not to be in awe of the sweep and grandeur of the whole tradition in which
we stand.
I have long been seduced by its power and promise. I have given much of my life to it. So much of what is good grows out of it. I have believed that our best hope for
changing our world’s injustices and evils must lie within the power of our
religious ideals and in the potential of our faith communities. Surely, people worshipping a God whose
primary attribute is supposed to be love must be able to live out that love in
acts of kindness and grace. Surely,
people worshipping a God whose love extends to all of humanity must be able to
fight for justice and equality. Surely,
people who’s God is beyond all human borders and limitations must be able to
transcend the dangers and wars of nationalism and the boundaries of race and
class.
But, of course, history doesn’t confirm all of this
hopefulness. Our religion has also been at the heart of some of the very worst
moments of our human story. Our
religious tradition carries with it superstitions that can make progress, both
moral and scientific, almost impossible.
Our religion has been used to rouse the most primitive and violent
emotions of whole peoples. The divisions
between religious traditions have subdivided humanity in even more dangerous
and volatile rivalries than tribalism or nationalism. Different visions of what is true and
ultimate, when seen as final and immutable, put people into separate and often
irreconcilable moral universes that exacerbate every possibility of
misunderstanding.
And so it is a mixed legacy that we have been handed. Our
saints from the past are broken saints.
And so we need to honor the gifts of our tradition. We need to remember the sacrifices and labors
of those who have given us this place that we share, the ideals that we
cherish, and the timeworn words and songs where we continue to find
inspiration. We stand in debt to all
those who worshipped here, built here, cried here, celebrated here and died
here. We are their legacy. Our community is simply the continuation of
theirs, and so, on it will go when we are gone.
But the legacy is mixed. And so
it needs our contributions as well. We
must seek to bend our tradition further in the direction of love and
understanding. We must be the witnesses
for God’s grace is our times beyond the limits of our forbearers understandings. We must be the ones who break down some of
the barriers and prejudice that our own faith tradition has created. We must leave our own legacy of faith behind
us—a faith that moves into God’s future.
Where we have been left a tradition that divides, we can help overcome
divisions. Where we have been left a set
of beliefs that excludes, we can open the doors of our community. Where we have found narrow prejudices, we can
stretch the limits of our souls. That
way, we become the broken saints that future generations can look back and both
admire and transcend. We too are
building something that we can proudly leave behind us.
