Rev. Terry Davis

By Rev. Terry Davis

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on October 1, 2017

When each of us stepped through those front doors just beyond our Sanctuary for the very first time, I imagine that the word “calling” may not have crossed our minds. “Curiosity” perhaps. Or “seeking.” Or “hopeful.” But did something or someone really “call” us to a Unitarian Universalist congregation and this faith?

If I think of a calling as a beckoning, as Rev. Natalie Fenimore suggests in our first reading, then called to this faith we all may be.

For those of us who arrived to Unitarian Universalism from another faith tradition, perhaps we felt beckoned from within to find a community where we could be more theologically or philosophically authentic. Or, perhaps we were looking for a spiritual home that seemed to live into the ancient and timeless teaching to treat one another the way we wish to be treated.

And, so we arrived at the doorstep of Northwest and we crossed the threshold, hoping to find acceptance, connection, and a community we could celebrate.

For those of you like Christina who were born into this faith, I imagine your decision to remain here reflects a beckoning, too. It seems that Unitarian Universalism offers a lifelong invitation to develop your own understanding of what is most holy and to discover how it grounds your spirit and shapes your engagement with the world.

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No matter how we arrived at Unitarian Universalism – or why we stay – it seems that Rev. Rebecca Parker’s question “What will you do with your gifts?” is one that both our life and this faith tradition compels us to confront. And I believe Parker’s recommendation – that we “choose to bless the world” – provides not just guidance to our life’s purpose, but also offers insight into why our faith exists in the first place.

In short, if the best thing we can do is to choose bless the world with our gifts, then it seems that the highest purpose for Unitarian Universalism is to call us to do just that.  

Borrowing the words of Rebecca Parker, Unitarian Universalism can and does calls us “to feed the hungry, bind up wounds, welcome the stranger, praise what is sacred, do the work of justice, [and] offer love.”[ref]From “Choose to Bless the World,” by Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker.[/ref] And, at Northwest, we answer this call when we collect canned food for the hungry at our Hungry Ear concerts . . . when we donate money to our community partners who are binding up the wounds of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria . . . and when we open our doors on Sunday mornings to welcome the stranger, regardless of age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, abilities or theology.

We answer the call at Northwest when we praise the holiness we find in nature, when we work for social and eco justice, and when we practice compassion and forgiveness.

When we choose to bless the world with our gifts and with our participation in this faith community, we are choosing to help create the Beloved Community and the flourishing planet we dream about.

“None of us alone can save the world,” Parker says. “Together – that is another possibility, waiting.”[ref] Ibid.[/ref] Which brings me to Christina and Philip.

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Christina and Philip were called to this faith. They were called to serve it with their gifts of leadership. And, by doing so, I believe they bless the world.

In Philip’s case, he comes to Northwest as a Christian man who says he felt called to be with us. Music – that intangible, prized, “‘thingless’ thing”[ref]From The New York Times, “Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing,” by Robert J. Zatorre and Valerie N. Salimpoor.[/ref] that fires up our brains and moves our souls – is Philip’s passion. His ability to lead choirs and help individuals be their best singing selves are the gifts he brings.

When we first met, Philip told me when that he enjoyed trying new things with choirs, but never at the expense of helping others gain confidence in their abilities.

That comment made me think that Philip might be someone who has a heart for both excellence and for people. That seemed like a beautiful blessing to bring into Northwest’s music program.

In Christina’s case, I gather she is a lifelong UU who feels deeply called to pay her own deeply meaningful youth and young adult religious education experiences forward. Over the years, she has taught, led and coordinated RE programs for children of all ages, from the congregational to the district and national levels.

Christina also has a heart for social justice and has long acted on that passion both professionally and in her personal life. She’s bringing creativity, organization and other skills to Northwest’s RE program – and our increased student enrollment says that she’s doing something very right.

While both Philip and Christina have chosen to bless Northwest with their gifts, “None of us can save the world alone. Together – that is another possibility, waiting.”

Which is where you and I come in.

Today, I’m inviting you to answer the call to support their ministries, too.  I’m inviting you to say “yes” when Christina or Philip tap you on the shoulder and ask if you might be willing to help. And, I’m also asking you to approach them and let them know you would like to serve in some small way.

You can tell them in the receiving line right after today’s service.

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I believe we were each called to this faith to be affirmed and to grow. Unitarian Universalism offers us an opportunity to discover more deeply what we were made to give to this beautiful and broken world . . . and then challenges us to go out and give it!  

Let’s continue to answer the call in this faith community and in our lives with courage, hope and love.

May it be so. Amen.

 

by Rev. Terry Davis

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on September 17, 2017

 

My father was no Xiang Yu. But he was a stickler for pushing us to let go of things, namely pruning and discarding anything he deemed as useless clutter.

Growing up, a ritual in our house occurred every few months in my playroom, which was located in the basement of our townhouse. My father would methodically go through the shelves and toy boxes, pulling out books, a doll or a board game that he suspected were no longer on active duty while my sister and I stood anxiously by.

“This,” he would say, holding my Chrissy doll with the cool red hair that sprouted out of the top of her head by turning a plastic knob in her back. “This doll . . . when was the last time you played with it? Last week? Last month? When?”

If I didn’t have an immediate and airtight response to his inquiry – “Uh . . . Tuesday with Susan Schiedel!” – if I hemmed or hawed in any way . . . in the garbage. And, so it went. For my father, clearing out and moving on was more important than sentimental attachments.

Despite the trauma of those playroom purges, I nevertheless seem to have inherited my father’s attitude toward keeping old or unused things. Greeting cards from my spouse, goofy keepsakes from our travels, clothes, purses, jewelry – out they go to make space in a drawer or clean off a counter. And I can usually discard them without a tug on my heart. My two exceptions to this are books and, for some odd reason, paper bags.

I will admit to having a reverence for books. I also usually have underlined key passages in ink or written notes in the margins, so my books are mostly no good to anyone else. I suppose I also keep them for the reasons discussed in this morning’s reading: I want to keep my options open. I’ll never know, for instance, when I might want to thumb through The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a leftover book from a 1979 college course.

And, paper bags . . . well, I’m not sure about that idiosyncrasy. My grandmother used to collect paper bags – plain old grocery bags and nicely constructed retail shopping bags. So, perhaps my own habit is a genetic thing.

In our reading, writer John Tierney offers scientific proof that human beings like options. He says closing the door on them – even when they’re not working for us – is difficult because we don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of loss.

I can say that this is true for me. In my case, the pain of holding on often has to exceed my fear of the anticipated pain to come before I’m willing to let go, close the door and move on.

I imagine I’m not alone on this.

And, so, assuming that many of us struggle with closing doors on things in our lives that aren’t working so well, it seems that the familiar line, “When one door closes, another one opens” is meant to offer a measure of reassurance. It suggests that, while I may experience a painful end in one area of my life, a positive beginning is taking shape in another.

It’s a quote that I imagine has become popular for the hope it offers in the face of difficulty.

In case you’re wondering what wise prophet or religious leader gave us these words, the answer is none of the above. Instead, I was surprised to learn that they come from Alexander Graham Bell, the scientist, innovator and inventor.

His actual quote reads, “When one door closes, another opens, but we look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

Bell’s own life seems to be an illustration of what it can mean to move forward after great losses. He experienced many setbacks, including the death of two brothers in their youth to tuberculosis and the death of two sons in infancy. He also had many failures on his way to inventing the first patented telephone.

And, yet his life is also marked by much success, including a happy marriage, his developments in telecommunications and aeronautics, and his work with the deaf.

While John Tierney says that human beings avoid making endings because we want to avoid emotional pain, I believe Alexander Graham Bell’s words suggest that human beings struggle with the emotional loss that endings bring because we have forgotten that life is abundant.

When we’re in pain, we’ve forgotten that life is abundant.

His words remind me that there will come a day when I will, once again, be able to experience life’s joy, love and beauty. They remind me that, while I may live with pain of some losses for the rest of my life, it’s also possible to shift my focus away from my once-daily suffering. I can eventually turn my attention toward the new opportunities that exist and wait for me.

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As hopeful as I believe Bell’s words are, I’m also very reluctant to throw them in conversation like a lifeline to people who are deeply suffering. Sadness has its own timetable, and I believe it would be insensitive of me to suggest to a grieving parent or brokenhearted spouse that he or she look for the open doors in the midst of tragic loss.

Rather, it seems that the hope offered in Bell’s quote is one that I can find – that we can find – only through personal experiences. After the painful divorce, after the death of a loved one, after the difficult decision to leave a cherished home or job . . . perhaps only after experiencing these closed doors and letting our grief run its course . . . are we able to see signs of hope and know that there are doors opening upon a new life.

I was reminded of how unique and personal this process of experiencing loss and regaining hope is as I encountered the personal stories that emerged from our recent hurricanes.

For example, on the news one evening, I watched and listened to a husband and wife talk to a reporter about their home in south Florida, which had been completely destroyed by Hurricane Irma. It was the second time the couple was faced with rebuilding their house by the beach. The first time was following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, shortly after they married and moved to Florida to build their dream home and start a new life together.

The couple was being interviewed on the site where their home once stood, which had now been reduced to a pile of wet rubble. While the wife seemed mostly resigned, her husband’s grief was clearly evident in his cracked voice and uncontrollable tears.

When asked by the reporter if he thought he had the heart to rebuild and start over once again, the husband responded painfully, “We will rebuild, but not here. Not here. We’re going a long way from this place.”

That man who lost everything might find open doors one day, I thought, but not right now. His story right now was one of closed doors . . . of pain and personal tragedy.

By contrast, Romina Ruiz-Goiriena, a news journalist in Miami, tells a different story of her Irma experience. She writes:

I was a native Floridian, and that meant sucking it up and enjoying hurricane-watching parties. When Hurricane Irma began threatening South Florida’s eastern coast, I would have sworn on any relative’s grave I wasn’t going anywhere. So, you can imagine the sense of disbelief when I heard that Thursday’s mandatory evacuation for Miami-Dade County included my house. We packed up two cars, three dogs, a kid, baby, and hit the road, expecting price gouging, reckless driving and mass hysteria.

But what I discovered on the road amazed me.

She continues:

Growing up, most people in my neighborhood lost their homes in 1992 to Hurricane Andrew. It was ground zero on our block. I still remember when Gloria Estefan visited the tent city in Homestead, Florida, where my family would go eat hot meals in the aftermath of the storm as I played with displaced children my age. These things seemed rather minor to me at the time.

That’s because a few hours prior to Andrew making its landfall in Miami, my mom had cancelled my Barbie-themed birthday party. Instead, I woke up to destruction. I saw my immigrant-born dad cry. He went to fetch water all over Miami. Hours later, he arrived carrying bottled water and a cake.

That night as the city was under curfew, my six candles were the only light in our home. They sang happy birthday and we all had a piece of cake on paper napkins. “No importa cuantos ciclones pasen” – my dad said the number of hurricanes didn’t matter. “The most important thing is to be together.”

Ruiz-Goiriena then reflects on her different reaction as an adult to Hurricane Irma, writing:

When you train and live as a news reporter, you have no problem parachuting into any town and testing your luck in finding sleeping arrangements. [But] I wasn’t the intrepid solo reporter anymore. I was now married, had adopted my very first dog, was a stepparent and had a vivacious blended family that could be cast as the Latino version of the Brady Bunch.

For the first time ever, I was overrun with a sense of panic. I scoured Expedia. Every hotel room south of Chattanooga, Tennessee was booked. Airbnb was my last resort. I searched for five hours nonstop until a list listing appeared. It took 16 hours to get to our Airbnb outside Atlanta.

Usually I would have totally lost it. But we met people at gas stations and convenience stores that waved when they saw our license plates and stopped to wish us well.

Ruiz-Goiriena, it seems, had seen her first open door.

She says that she and her family enjoyed their weekend in Atlanta with friends they hadn’t seen in years, barbecued, and even went to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center. She received a tip that a local Atlanta pizza restaurant was inviting Florida evacuees to have a proper meal, pay what they could and eat the rest on the house. Even the restaurant’s patrons were getting involved, adding to their tip amounts in order to start a donation fund for evacuees.

More open doors.

Ruiz-Goiriena continues her story:

The morning after Irma destroyed my home state, we decided to head to South Carolina. About 40 minutes later, our Charleston Airbnb host inundated us with calls, telling us not to come because of the path of the storm.

We made a U-turn, parked the cars in the garage of the Georgia home where we are staying, and 30 minutes later the power was out. It’s been out ever since.

That was this past Monday. She concludes:

I’m currently filing the end of this piece over the phone with a gracious CNN editor. We are unclear when we will head home but two things are for sure – family sticks together, even if we’re eating cake off napkins. And wherever we go next, we’ll find kindness along the way.

Romina Ruiz-Goiriena’s beautiful story was her personal experience of closed and open doors. We don’t know the outcome of things for her and her family back in Miami . . . or whether she’ll be able to hold on to her hope when tragedy strikes again.

Yet, when I read her story, I found myself filled with hope. I found myself wishing that the broken man in South Florida who lost everything might also discover the kindness Ruiz-Goiriena experienced . . . and that he might know that doors are opening for him as he builds a new home and a new life.

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My guess is that we all have let go and closed doors on parts of our lives . . . and we’ve had doors unexpectedly close upon us. The pain we experience in these moments may crowd out life’s light for a little while or for a very long time.

But with time and kindness, my hope for you and for me is that it’s also possible for light to re-enter our lives through open doors . . . perhaps just a little at first, but also just enough for us to know that the light is always there.

May it be so. Amen.

by Rev. Terry Davis

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation

on August 27, 2017

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
 
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
 
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
 
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
 
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
 

—The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)

 

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Miss-iss-i-ppi.

In elementary school, that was the happy, little way I learned how to spell the big word Mississippi. Likewise, the stories I heard and read as a child about the big Mississippi River were happy, too, in an adventuresome sort of way. They were the stories of American exploration and progress . . . tales that reflected our nation’s 19^th century belief that we had a divine mission to expand westward,take land that wasn’t ours, and settle America’s wilderness.

What I didn’t hear or read about until I was much older were the Mississippi River’s stories of suffering . . . especially those about Native Americans, who were driven from its shores . . . and African Americans, who were bought and traded as slaves in its ports.

Standing at the window of my hotel room in New Orleans one morning this past June, I pulled back the curtain and peered down at that mighty rive with the rich and complicated past. Twenty-three stories below me, it cut and curved through the city like a big, brown snake.

As I watched its muddy waters slowly carry a giant barge downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico, I reflected on how familiar the Mississippi felt to me as a result of those stories and history lessons I learned as a child . . . and really how very little I knew about the river . . . sort of like that distant relative you’ve heard so much about but have never really met.

The poem Harry read this morning gave those of us who knew only a little about the Mississippi River a vivid introduction.

Even if we’ve never stepped in its waters or walked on its shores, the poet Philip Kolin nevertheless helps us find a place for the Mississippi in our souls when he writes:

I am the lutenist of the swamps
I am a road with infinite shores
a hideaway for ballads
a riddle on solitude
a slave’s ride south to hell
a graveyard for old tires . . .
the darkest place on earth.[ref][1] Philip C. Kolin, “The River’s Proclamation,” Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems About the Mississippi River, Philip C. Kolin & Jack B. Bedell, editors (Louisiana Literature Press, Hammond, LA: 2016), 105. [/ref]

While the Mississippi River may be muddy and complicated, perhaps reflecting on it can help us see clear to the bottom of our own human complexity. We might see that pain and promise will continue to flow like silt and sunlight through our own lives.

And we might see that all of our joys and struggles will continue to shift and change us, just as the shores of the Mississippi continue to shift and change over time.

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Langston Hughes’s poem about the Mississippi, which he wrote as a teenager in 1920 as the train he was riding crossed the river, honors the collective experience, suffering and triumph of African American people.

In an interview, Hughes recalls how the river reminded him of that powerful history:

Just outside of St. Louis, I looked out the window and saw this great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South. And, I began to think about what this river meant to the Negro people . . . how, in a sense, our history was linked to this river . . . how in slavery times, my grandmother told me that to be sold down the Mississippi was one of the worst things that could happen to a Negro slave.

And, then, I remembered I read about Abraham Lincoln going down the Mississippi as a young man. And, he went on a raft to New Orleans and he saw human beings bought and sold in the slave market there, and he was so horrified by this that he never forgot it. And, many years later we know that it was Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

And, so, as the train went into the gathering dusk –  because it had been about sunset when we crossed the river –  I took my father’s letter out of the back of my pocket and began to write on the back of the letter this poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers.

It seems that the train ride across the Mississippi invited Hughes to honor the flow of pain and promise experienced by African Americans, as well as his own deep wisdom.  

At our UUA General Assembly, which took place in New Orleans on the shores of the historic Mississippi, I received an invitation, too, of both a different and similar sort. There was much discussion this year about building greater awareness of the ways we unknowingly perpetuate systems of white supremacy within Unitarian Universalism. Congregations were asked to have courageous and beloved conversations about this so that we can discover where we are in our own awareness journey and what we might do to change and grow.

And, so, as I return to you today from the mighty Mississippi and from a summer rocked by the events of Charlottesville, I am asking you.

I am asking you to support our lay leaders in their discussions about what Northwest’s next steps might be to examine racism and any discomfort we may have in talking about it. I’m asking you to consider participating in any action for change within Northwest and any social justice work we might do in the wider community to dismantle white supremacy.

I’m asking you not to stand by, but to get involved, because I believe the blatant racism, bigotry and hatred we witnessed in Charlottesville, as well as the recent multiple resignations of UUA leaders over biased hiring practices, call for a loving and courageous response from the members of this congregation.

I hope you’ll join me in exploring what we might do together.

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The water we poured in our Community Water Bowl today comes down to us from our own Chattahoochee River. It will be purified and used throughout the year during Joys & Concerns and other water-based rituals.

As we use today’s water in the days ahead may it remind us of the preciousness of each life and of our beautiful and fragile planet. And, as we go from here, may we embrace the pain and promise that flows through our lives, trusting that it will shape and change us in ways that will make us wiser and make us stronger.

May we respond with love and courage, for our growth and well-being and so that we might be better able to contribute to the well-being of our hurting world.

May it be so. Amen.