Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Our Chalice Flame: The Energy of Action”
Rev. Rod Debs
September 21, 2003
Message: When Unitarian Universalist congregations across the continent light the Flaming Chalice, symbol of our religious tradition, we often hear these words spoken: “We light this chalice for the light of truth; we light this chalice for the warmth of community; we light this chalice for the energy of action.” The purpose of my message this morning is to focus each one of us individually on that energy for action, like a spark inside us, like a flame rising up within each one of us to make a difference in the world, to make the world a better place. But first¼ .
This is the two hundredth birth year of the Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the “Young Radicals” as Transcendentalist Unitarians were called by their Unitarian elders who had just founded American Unitarianism. Two hundred years ago most Americans lived on farms; there were only 5 million people as opposed to today’s 287 million people in the United States. It was a different America in which Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his essay entitled “Self-Reliance.” He wrote (Waldo, Free and True, 2002): “Be yourself…. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that.”
Waldo (as he liked to be called) preached respect for the God within every person, not the God of authority and tradition. And because every person has the inward voice of God regardless of station in life, Emerson did not consider himself to be superior to anyone. (The Living Legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, UUA, 2003)
A reporter for the Boston Transcript noticed that a washerwoman always went to hear Emerson’s lectures at Fanueil Hall in Boston. He asked if she understood Mr. Emerson. “Not a word,” she replied, “But I love to see him standing up there thinking everyone else is just as good as he is.” According to Elizabeth Peabody, a member of Emerson’s Unitarian congregation said of him, “we are a very simple people here; we cannot understand anybody but Mr. Emerson.” (“Emerson as a Preacher,” in The Genius and Character of Emerson, 1884)
The story is told that another minister stepped into the pulpit to offer the benediction after Mr. Emerson had just spoken, and he prayed, “We beseech thee, O lord, to deliver us from hearing any more such transcendental nonsense as we have just listened to from this sacred desk.” To his neighbor, Mr. Emerson gently commented, “He seemed a very conscientious, plain-spoken man.” Then Waldo went on his peaceful way. (Alexander Ireland, Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The “Young Radical” Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists had a lasting influence on our national identity in the United States as well as on Unitarian Universalism. So, I want to quote from his Journal how he defined religion. July 6, 1832, Emerson wrote: “Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.” Not one word about beliefs here, just action: to do right, to love, to serve, to think and to be humble. It seems that a strong part of our human reality is this religious energy rising up within us to make the world a better place, not simply to hold beliefs, but to do something that makes a difference in the world.
Consider Buddhism: In Buddhism the Four Noble Truths are all about dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of human life and that desire, that energy to make it better. The practice of Buddhism is to calm our dissatisfied reactivity, until we can wisely choose actions based on life’s realities rather than on our knee-jerk discontent. As Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Han writes, we should wait until the mud in our water-glass settles before we take action.
In observing children and adolescents we see a sense of fairness, a passion for justice that wells up into sometimes risky activism. Younger ones will voice this passion with their demand, “It’s not fair!”
Katrina, my daughter who is in college in Ohio, and I traveled to Palestine and Israel last year—actually, one week after the beginning of the war with Iraq. As part of a Sabeel Institute conference, we saw with our own eyes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories, the West Bank and Gaza. In Hebron we walked with Christian Peacemakers Teams escorting Palestinian children to school in areas under Israeli military closure, stepping in front of soldiers guns aimed at little children. The soldiers were rightly nervous when some children—eight and nine year olds who were not going to school—carried stones in their hands and tried to burn the camouflage netting at an outpost. Children are enflamed by the unfairness of Israeli tanks and soldiers laying siege of closure on whole communities like Old Hebron, uprooting thousands of olive trees, bulldozing homes and market-places, seizing Palestinian lands and building more and more Jewish settlements, and the unarmed children throw rocks at soldiers and even at tanks. It’s crazy. Families cannot stop the rage at injustice and keep their kids from striking out at soldiers and settlers. It’s suicide. The Israeli Defense Force is the fourth most powerful military in the world, yet Palestinians have waged a suicidal resistance.
There’s another side to this passion for justice. On Shuhada Street in Old Hebron, though we greeted the eight-year old settler-child with “Shabbot shalom,” as soon as we passed, the stone he had concealed in his hand hit my shoulder. Settlers and their children are grasped with rage at Palestinians (and sympathizers) who refuse to leave all of Greater Israel which they believe was promised by God as their Jewish homeland. Pre-schoolers carry shoe-box size gas masks. We passed a group of eight settlers teenagers, each carrying automatic weapons, as well as armed adults. In the Hebron countryside I had to jump away from settlers on a tractor who tried to run me down. I survived, but over 2000 Palestinians have been killed by passionate Israeli settlers and soldiers. That number now includes seventeen international observers and Rachel Cory, the American run over by an Israeli military bulldozer.
The “energy for action” of our chalice lighting is visible in humanity’s sense of fairness and justice on competing sides of many human concerns. And this passion for justice can be suicidal, it can be murderous, and it can be peacemaking.
I want to read the words of the UU theologian, Thandeka (Singing the Living Tradition, #666, an African American and a professor at our UU Meadville-Lombard Theological School in Chicago. Thandeka writes about the pain and rage coursing through our veins, and about our legacy of caring:
“Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
failed to do, failed to overcome.
Be still my inner self
let me rise to you,
let me reach down into your pain
and soothe you.
I turn to you to renew my life
I turn to the world, the streets of the city,
the worn tapestries of brokerage firms, drug dealers,
private estates, personal things in the bag lady’s cart
rage and pain in the faces that turn from me
afraid of their own inner worlds.
This common world I love anew,
as the life blood of generations
who refused to surrender their humanity
in an inhumane world,
courses through my veins.
From within this world
my despair is transformed to hope
and I begin anew the legacy of caring.”
From the depths of her despair at cruel unfairness and brutal injustices, Thandeka turns to the common world to renew her life. Thandeka points to “the life blood of generations who refused to surrender their humanity in an inhumane world.” This refusal to surrender one’s humanity in an inhumane world (that) courses through our veins she calls “a legacy of caring.”
Because of humanity’s “legacy of caring,” our passion for justice can be kept from falling into the cycle of violence, everyone a victim and every victim taking justice into their own hands, victimizing others. The life-blood of humanity’s generations, our legacy of caring is that we refuse to surrender our humanity no matter how inhumane the world.
Easy for us to say, here in the comfort of the United States with security to live our lives, day after day, without fear of atrocity. Or is it so easy for us to say? Are our national economic priorities, our foreign and domestic policies a refusal to surrender our humanity in an inhumane world? Are my private practices of consumerism and entertainment humane in the context of world-wide destitution? The most painful question that haunts me day after day is: How can I make my life more humane as a member of the wealthiest one percent in the world?
In her poem, Alice Walker speaks of humanity’s legacy of caring. She writes: “Love is not concerned with whom you pray or where you slept the night you ran away from home. Love is concerned that the beating of your heart should kill no one.”
The limits that Thandeka and Alice Walker put on our passion for justice, that we not surrender our humanity in an inhumane world, that the beating of our passionate heart should kill no one, are the negative limits to our “energy of action.” Beyond these negative limits is the positive legacy of caring, whereby we actively refuse to surrender our humanity in an inhumane world.
Mother Teresa said that love cannot remain by itself, within oneself, or it is meaningless, unreal. Love is real when it is active. She writes: “Love cannot remain by itself—it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action and that action is service.”
In the terrible years after the American Civil War, Unitarian Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale was Chaplain in the United States Congress. There is a humorous story about the Rev. Dr. Hale, that someone asked him whether he prays for Congress. The Rev. Dr. replied that, knowing Congress, he prays for the country. But what I wanted to tell you about Dr. Hale is this: In those years after the Civil War, he recognized that there was much suffering and depravation which common people have the resources to rectify. So Dr. Hale started what he called, Lend-a-Hand groups that soon spread across the country. These are his words calling common people to do something with their “energy of action.”
“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.”
The Lend-a-Hand groups started by Edward Everett Hale are known today as civic organizations: the Elks and Exchange Clubs, Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus, Lions, Masons, Quota, Rotary, United Sisters, and others.
The temptation of people in an individualistic society, is to feel inadequate before the huge problems that surround us: the AIDS pandemic untreated in Africa, global economic injustice and militarization, oppression of women and children, genocide and ethnic cleansing, terrorist resistance, displacement of huge populations as refugees, devolution of democratic governments by corporate interests, degradation of our global eco-system,—there is so much more inhumanity than individuals can ever hope to redress.
Margaret Mead encourages us with these well-known words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
A small group of committed citizens can make a difference. The goal is not to control the world, but to have positive influence. That we can do. The activist Dorothy Day wrote:
“People say, what is the sense of our small effort. They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.”
Though we educated, healthy, wealthy, well-fed and technologically advantaged Americans have a lot of power in our hands, and though we are used to accomplishing the tasks we take up to do, there are many great concerns we feel powerless to handle.
The Bhagavad Gita advises: “… abandon all attachment to the results of action and attain supreme peace…. those who are selfishly attached to the results of their work, are bound in everything they do.”
This is the wisdom which Quakers learned in their social action as a small religious movement. They claim no promise of success in their social activism for peace and justice. Rather, Quakers say they are not called to succeed; they say they are called to be faithful to the truth and to bear witness to what they knew. A Catholic Worker put it this way: “I have never asked myself if I was being effective, but only if I was being faithful.” (in Parker Palmer, The Active Life)
What a burden it takes off of our hearts in our efforts to make the world a better place. We need not force it, indeed we should not force on the world our individual or group vision of what is good and right and true. Rather, we are called to bear witness honestly, and listen to the testimony of others’ heartfelt understandings. Our goal is to be faithful, not to conquer.
As I come to this congregation as your Minister, I recognize that my role is not to recruit you to any social justice issue I might find compelling to me. You have within yourselves “energy for action” that grows out of your life and wisdom, and it would not be helpful if those passions were rooted up and replaced by my particular concerns, or if your passionate concerns were left unwatered, to wither and die.
Today I see Unitarian Universalist hearts longing for a better world, actively expressed in your occupations, in your voluntary work with community organizations, and in your personal relationships, each in your own way. There are many common practices of kindness and personal service that make up your every day presence in this community. I wish we had a way that we could all share our activities to make the world a better place, without embarrassment, because we need to know that we are not alone.
We are not alone. The flame of compassion, that energy for action making the world a better place, is strong in your lives and in lives all around us, each according to our light. The challenge to us is that we will each listen to and honor one another’s energy for action so that we might join our little lights together as UUs and with all those other folks in the community who will share their passion and vision with us. There are so many good people out there. We need to engage them and join efforts with them whenever we can. My colleague Wayne Arnason offers these words. He 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.”
In closing, let me offer this prayer of WEB DuBois:
“The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence; not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.”