Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Gathering”

Rev. Rod Debs

September 9, 2007 
 

Story  ---Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from "Women Who Run with the Wolves" (adapted) 
 

"I once heard a story from an old African-American man in the mid-south.  He came out of an alley as I was sitting amidst the graffiti of the inner-city `park.'  Some people would call him crazy, for he spoke to anyone and no one.... This... kindly (old man) gave me this story.... He called the story `One Stick--Two Stick.' `This is the way of the old African kings,' he whispered. 
 

"In the story, an old man is dying, and calls his people to his side.  He gives a short, sturdy stick to each of his many offspring, wives and relatives. `Break the stick,' he instructs them.  With some effort, they all snap their sticks in half. 
 

"`This is how it is when a soul is alone without anyone.  They can be easily broken.' 
 

"The old man next gives each of his kin another stick, and says, `This is how I would like you to live after I pass.  Put your sticks together in bundles.... Now, break these bundles in half.' 
 

"No one can break the sticks when (they) are... in a bundle.  The old man smiles. `We are strong when we stand with (other souls).  When we are with (others), we cannot be broken.'" 
 

Message 
 

“How rare it is, and how lovely, this fellowship of those who meet together.” (from Psalm 133) 
 

How rare and how lovely!  I often hear members speak of the personal value they find in relationships here.  In the early days of this Fellowship almost fifty years ago, perhaps six or ten folks gathered on folding chairs in a circle on a Sunday.  Today, during Second Hour, there will be as many in the nursery, as many children with Ruthie learning about UU Super-heroes, and planting seeds for a UUFEC garden.  There will be as many in the Porch Swing circle here in front, and in Welcoming and UU101 groups in the Stage and Board Rooms. 
 

There were even more yesterday at the Free-Thinkers gathering and as many at Dinners for eight last night.  Women gather as WOW.  As many gather for Choir, for Lunch on the Town, our Standing Groups.  You can read about Friendship Circles and Social Justice Task/Interest Groups on the yellow insert in your Order of Service.  Voluntary associations gathering in mutual relationship. 
 

This morning I wish to celebrate the beauty and reality of “gathering” in community.  Starhawk celebrates gathering most eloquently when she writes:  “Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats.  Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done.  Arms to hold us when we falter.  A circle of healing.  A circle of friends.  Someplace where we can be   free.”   (Starhawk, in “Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life” by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, 1996) 
 

This morning I wish to suggest that “gathering” is fundamental to our lives.  We are our relationships.  “Gathering” in fellowship is the essence of our lives, as the African Ubuntu say:  “I am because you are, you are because I am.” (African Way of Being) 
 

On the other hand, if you see community as somehow less real than a world of isolated individuals, as Ayn Rand reduced reality to so many competing individual organisms, then perhaps the words of a hard-headed, reality-based scientist would be credible.  Albert Einstein wrote:  “A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness.  This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”  
 

As a member of this competitive, consumer society, I confess that I live in this “illusion” of separate individualism.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian, shaped much of our national world-view with his praise of self-reliance.  The language of individualism certainly dominates our economic system and has come to be common sense despite overwhelming scientific evidence of interconnectedness and interdependence. 
 

We live a lot like the two fishermen in a boat out in the Gulf.  One suddenly grinned and suppressed a laugh.  Straining to keep a straight face, the other fisherman started to eye him questioningly.  The first could hardly contain himself.  “What?” asked the second.  “What’s so funny?”  “Oh, nothing!” said the first as he stifled a giggle and tried his best to put on a straight face.  All to no avail.  He couldn’t keep from shaking in silent laughter.  “OK, what is so funny!” demanded the second fisherman.  The first could contain himself no longer.  Between side-splitting laughter he blurted:  “Your side of the boat… your side… has a hole in it!!  Ah-ha-ha-ha!!” 
 

Peter Coyote exposes the fallacy of separate individualism elegantly:  “The idea of absolute freedom is a fiction. It’s based on the idea of an independent self. But in fact, there’s no such thing. There’s no self without other people. There’s no self without sunlight. There’s no self without dew.  And water. And bees to pollinate the food that we eat…. So the idea of behaving in a way that doesn’t acknowledge those reciprocal relationships is not really freedom, it’s indulgence.”     
 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower challenged the illusion of individualism with his harsh critique of the consequences of this popular ideology.  Again this is President Eisenhower, OK?  Not me!  Ike wrote: “Self-reliance includes failure to fulfill the recognized responsibilities of citizenship.  It is the worst form of laziness and leads, inevitably, to centralization of power.”      
 

We are all in the same boat, the same blue-great boat of earth, sailing through space.  We breathe the earth’s limited supply of air and drink its limited water.  Some of us are insulated by privileges of geography and the accident of birth.  Yet, our world is one world.  We suffer the effects of the irresponsible privilege and illusory self-dependence. 
 

Contradicting the ideology of separate individualism, historian Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 described another reality of American culture in his book, Democracy in America.  These are his words:  “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or applied to a greater multitude of objects, than in America…. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”  (James Luther Adams, On Being Human Religiously, 1976) 
 

The Puritans forebears of the seventeenth century struggled to be “pure” from “the dictates of bishop, priest and king”---the Church of England and the British monarchy.  The English Reformation emerged after the Bible became available in the vernacular.  Though church attendance and tax paid to the local parish were required by English law, many “non-conforming” congregations “gathered” themselves into religious communities on their own authority:  Separatists, Independents or Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, Seekers, Quakers, and Unitarians. 
 

The “Protestant ethic” involved this freedom of religious association, a freedom to leave the established church, a freedom to criticize church and state, a freedom to bring about change or to resist change.  This Protestant ethic was present from the beginning of the American colonies. First transported from the Independent congregation in Scrooby, England, by the founders of the Plymouth Colony, Cotton Mather himself promoted the gathering of small groups “essaying to do good.”  (James Luther Adams: An Examined Faith, George K. Beach, editor, 1991) 
 

Generations later, Benjamin Franklin acknowledged his indebtedness to Cotton Mather when he organized the voluntary association of artisans called the “Leather Apron Club.” Together they founded Philadelphia’s first public library, first public hospital, first public fire-fighters, first insurance company and progressive taxes in the city. (Ibid.) 
 

The Protestant ethic of freedom of voluntary association found widespread expression in the United States when the Reverend Dr. Edward Everett Hale, Unitarian Chaplain to the United States Senate started voluntary “Lend a Hand” associations in the aftermath of the Civil War.  (Ibid.)  You remember Dr. Hale’s words:   
 

“I am only one

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything.

But still I can do something.

And because I cannot do everything

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” 
 

Unitarian Roger Baldwin who founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, wrote:  “Yes, I went to church very regularly.  I helped to teach Sunday School (in Wellesley Hills), and I even listened to the preacher.  In fact, as I look back I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church…. My grandmother’s pastor was Dr. Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian gentleman who was distinguished in Boston annals.  I knew him toward the end of his life.  He had started a society called `Lend a Hand’ to help people who couldn’t help themselves, and a group of us children banded together at our Unitarian Church to join the `Lend a Hand Society’ there.  I took it all quite seriously.” (Ibid.) 
 

“The ACLU (founded by Roger Baldwin) became a major source of appeal to the Bill of Rights, and especially to the First Amendment with its guarantee of the freedoms of speech, assembly, and (please note) freedom of association, as well as the separation of state and church.   In a fairly short time the ACLU branched out to oppose the deportation of aliens by reason of their opinions.  The ACLU promoted self-government for Indians, and also collective bargaining.  Formerly, Roger (Baldwin) reminds us, the struggle between employers and the unions caused the death of two hundred people a year; a great number also were killed by lynching.  Baldwin and the ACLU opposed violence, demanding the settlement of disputes on constitutional principles.  So the ACLU promoted the constitutional principle of due process and brought into service hundreds of volunteer lawyers.  Thus the ACLU defended the rights of blacks and other minorities.  Roger (Baldwin) was for years a supporter of the National Urban League.  Eventually, the National Labor Relations Board was established.”  (Ibid.) 
 

This information that I am sharing with you about our nation’s Protestant ethic and its demand for freedoms of speech and of assembly, freedom of association and the separation of state and church, come from a sermon to the Wellesley UU congregation by the late Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams.  As a theological student in Boston, I attended “teas” at his bungalow on Harvard campus. 
 

James Luther Adams wrote much about “voluntary association.” He had spent a year in Nazi Germany where, he writes:  “I became fully aware of the contribution of Roger Baldwin and of the importance of the ACLU in a democratic society.  One of the first things Hitler did was to abolish or suppress all associations independent of or critical of the state.”  While in Germany, Dr. Adams associated himself with the anti-Nazi underground of the Confessing Churches.  Despite the growing U.S. ideology of individualism, JLA focused on voluntary association, our historic Protestant ethic of free association in both religious community and in civic groups. (Ibid.) 
 

While other theologians argued abstract theological doctrines, James Luther Adams challenged our tendencies to get absorbed in mere ideas and ideologies, words and thoughts, reasonings and arguments.  He said, “if it does not incarnate (in the flesh), it will dissipate.”  Unless we embody our ideas in real life organizations, those ideas are so much hot air.  (James Luther Adams, On Being Human Religiously, 1976) 
 

The Quaker, Parker Palmer describes the “incarnational” nitty-gritty of “gathering” in voluntary association: “Community comes as a by-product of commitment and struggle. It comes when we step forward to right some wrong, to heal some hurt, to give some service.  Then we discover each other as allies in resisting the diminishments of life.” 
 

Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed claims that “voluntary associations,” our relational interconnections are what religion is really all about, not doctrinal beliefs:  “The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.  There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others.  Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice. 
 

“It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community.  The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must  be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done.  Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.” 
 

Listen to the testimony of those who have put their lives on the line for others’ sake:  Brazilian priest, Dom Helder Camara said, “When you dream alone, it is only a dream. When we dream together, it is the beginning of reality.”  Voluntary association. 
 

Margaret Mead makes the same point when she wrote, “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” 
 

Adrienne Rich wrote: "My heart is moved by all I cannot save / so much has been lost / I must cast my lot with those who, / age after age, / perversely / with no apparent power, / reconstitute the world.”                
 

Desmond Tutu wrote:  “Let us be united, let us be filled with hope, let us be those who respect one another.  Liberation is costly.  We must hold hands and refuse to be divided.” 
 

James Luther Adams wrote: “Basic changes take place slowly and primarily through group action, through organizations and movements within and outside the (religious community) supported by skill, courage, and persistence.” 
 

Rev. Daniel Hotchkiss wrote:  “We join today as raindrops join in rivulets, rivulets in streams, streams in rivers, and rivers in lakes and seas.  For we are not bounded by our skins:  our love, our perception, and our influence; these go beyond us.”    
 

Let me close with these thoughts. Rev. Wayne B. Arnason writes: “Take courage friends, the way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage, for deep down there is another truth: You are not alone.”  
 

Though our competitive, consumer culture tells you a thousand ways that you are alone in struggling to live and that you die alone, it is a lie.  You are never alone!  Wake up to this wonderful world of amazing inner experience; watch the “movie” that presents itself to your conscious mind!  You are never alone because you are surrounded by delightful companions of endless diversity!  Embraced in this beautiful, unfathomable ecosystem we call Earth, you are never alone!                    
 

Our Unitarian Universalist covenant Statement of Principles celebrates voluntary association in these, its final words: “Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision.  As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.”  Our relationships, here and in society at large are holy. 
 

Arlene Dahl (Always Ask a Man, 1965) writes: “Take each other for better or worse but not for granted.”  Precious relationships surround you and me, moment by moment if we but open our hearts in voluntary association.  “From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live.”  You are never alone.