Of Marble Lions And Imaginary Trees

A Sermon Delivered by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill, Delivered Sunday, February 17, 2008 at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY.I want to talk this morning about a Unitarian Universalist view of life, or what in theological terms is called a “faith vision.” This is a version of the sermon I preached for your Ministerial Search Committee - was it only a year ago in the Garden City church ? - and I wanted you all to hear it because its central notion is one that I tend to hearken back to fairly often in trying to explain Unitarian Universalist theology to newcomers. This is the notion that implies that all faith is based on a vision which precedes it. Or in other words, people believe the things they believe because first they see the things they see. In a metaphorical sense, our beliefs are directly tied to our angle of vision, the way we view the world and the people around us.And so it is with church communities. A church is primarily defined by the way it views the world and the people who inhabit the world.So, I wish to speak to you about the connection between faith and vision. And specifically I wish to share with you two kinds of visions that are descriptive of faithful living. I wish to tell of imaginary trees and marble lions.The first comes from a true story told by anthropologist Loren Eiseley in hisautobiography, The Night Country.In the final year of his life, the story goes, an old man dying of cancer, Eiseley dozed by the fire one autumn afternoon, and he half-remembered, half-dreamed of a day long ago when he was a young boy in a small Nebraska farm town. And he remembered his father planting a tree in the yard behind the picket fence, and he remembered his father’s words:

“When you are an old man, you might come back here someday, and you can sit with your back against this tree, and you can bask in its shade. And I hope you will remember that you planted it with your dad. And perhaps on that day you might even say a prayer for your old man.”

The vision remembered, nothing would do but that he make that journey - a dying man’s foolish pilgrimage - back to that small town on the Nebraska prairie, to that yard behind the picket fence, where by now, he imagined, that young sapling must surely be a great sheltering maple, or was it a spreading oak?He could scarce contain himself as the plane landed, and the bus finally brought him at length to the little town where he once lived, and yes, to the house with a picket fence (no doubt a new one) still out front. He rounded the corner, and he looked at the spot where his father had planted the tree, and he saw there…. nothing. No tree. No maple or oak.He walked to the spot where his father’s tree had failed to take root, and he sat down, and he leaned his back up against the air. And he began to weep. But not for long. For soon his tears turned to laughter, and his sorrow turned to joyful remembrance, and finally to gratitude. “For over sixty years,” he thought to himself, “I have sheltered in the real shade of an imaginary tree!”His father’s real gift to him was a metaphor, an image of a tree, an illusion. But for a lifetime of struggles and travels and journeys and pilgrimage, his father’s tree had served as a compass point for home, his True North, a reminder of who he was and where he came from. And there in that spot behind the picket fence where his own life had been rooted, he breathed a quiet prayer of blessing on his father, a prayer of blessing and of thanks.Were we able, each of us, to return to the picket fence yards of our youth, I wonder if we could do as Eiseley did - lean our backs up against the air, and give thanks for all the sheltering, shade-giving, protective illusions of the imaginary trees that grow there?Sometimes we discover at various points in our lives that the faith visions which once sustained and guided us, and around which we once established our values and our identities, prove to be inadequate or illusory. We change. We grow, we survive crises, we sustain wounds, we evolve into different persons over time. And as different persons, we come to see the world through new eyes, from different angles.And this sometimes requires us to let go of earlier, younger, more innocent visions of life. And sometimes that is a painful process that leaves people feeling resentful or bitter. The challenge as we move through life, of course, is to learn to bless the whole journey - to give thanks for the gifts and the graces we have received along the way, to forgive ourselves and others for those myopic moments when our vision proved too narrow; when we failed to see the best in others, when others failed to see the best in us.The past, of course, is often seen in distortion or in the light of romantic illusion. But upon discovering that the oak trees that grow there in the garden of memory are but a myth, the truth is that the shade they provided us was indeed real. To miss the trees - to fail to see them for lack of religious imagination - is to miss a vital dimension of religious maturity.Perhaps it is precisely because so many adult UU’s were raised in other traditions, given other faith visions by our birth families - visions we then had to adjust for ourselves over time - this notion of defining our faith vision is very sensitive to many of us.Our church has always come under criticism for resisting the easy pat formulas of Creedalism and the exclusionary doctrines it implies. We see a different kind of church community in this tradition. We have shaped and claimed for ourselves a broader idea of church within Unitarian Universalism. We operate on a different assumption of what a church ought to look like and what a church ought to be.If you assume that the purpose of a church is to lead all people to a single common understanding of God, this Unitarian Universalist church will not meet your definition. For we do not see the Sacred as being limited to any one expression or any one cultural idea or any single Scripture. You become a member of this community, not by conformity of creed but by affinity of spirit.We struggle in the Unitarian Universalist church, sometimes nobly and sometimes just out of sheer stubbornness, we struggle to live as successfully and gracefully as we can in that fine space of tension between maximum individual freedom, on the one hand, and mutual responsibility in community, on the other.We brook no interfering structure between ourselves and the God we might yet discover in the midst of this company of searchers. We can abide no limiting single expression of the truths we might yet encounter in each other. We hold hands lightly in this circle, allowing each other the space to come and go as our lives beckon, always making new space for those who only now have found us.We see our church as a connecting place, an intergenerational community, allowing us to be more than any of us can ever be by ourselves alone. A place for joining in company with others, young and old, women and men, who take seriously the search for greater meaning, greater truth, greater understanding. We see our church as a place for connecting us and imprinting upon our consciousness a world that is seriously wounded in so many places: wounded by injustice, by ethnic and racial divide, by war and oppression, by hatred and exploitation.Church is for getting clearer vision and deeper appreciation of all the blessings that we share in this privileged place where we live. And church is for reminding us that nine-tenths of all the other people in the world have a much harder road to climb every day of their lives.I see the Unitarian Universalist church as a place to grow our souls: to become more graceful, more loving, more generous and wise and joyful as we grow older.There will always be those who think that religion is about rigidity and formality and theological legalisms. There will always be religions who claim that they have the personal ear of God, that they alone possess the truth, that their Scriptures alone are the Word of God, and that they are the self-appointed enforcers of Divine law and order. That is not and never has been the Unitarian way or the Universalist way in religion. Although we bear the historical distinction of being one the few groups to be burned at the stake by both Catholic and Protestant courts of Inquisition, in 500 years as an organized religion Unitarian Universalists have never persecuted others or expelled a single member for heresy. That is not what this church has ever been about. We see religion has having higher purpose than that.We want our church to make us think, to help us change what we need to change about ourselves, to help us learn new things and new ways. We see our church as a place to celebrate our loves and our accomplishments, and a place to heal our hurts and confide our fears. Church is for friendship and community. Church is for giving the best that is in us to give. Church is for praying. Church is for singing new hymns every Sunday. Church is for changing the world.All this is our common purpose, as I see it. But it takes me more than a paragraph or a memorized Creed to say even this much. And next week, frankly, I would probably write an entirely different litany on what a UU church is for and about.I once heard the Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen at Harvard tell a story about Michaelangelo that I sometimes use to illustrate our UU faith vision. It seems an appropriate closing for today’s sermon.The story goes that a young boy once watched Michaelangelo as the great sculptor worked with his hammer and chisel on a huge block of marble. The little boy stood transfixed for hours every day watching the artist at work, but he saw nothing more than piece after piece of stone falling away left and right. The boy had no idea what the artist was doing.When the boy returned to the studio one day, he saw to his great surprise a great and powerful marble lion sitting in the place where the huge block once stood. With great excitement the boy ran to the sculptor and said, “Master, how did you know? How did you know there was a lion in the stone?” And the artist smiled and replied, “First, I only thought I could see him in there. And then I heard him roar.”There are many other ways to say it, I suppose, but I think Unitarian Universalism is a church that sees in every human soul a lion, strong, capable, proud, and worthy. And church, well, church is one place we come to do a little hammer and chisel work on ourselves, to chip away at all that imprisons and holds captive the best that is in us, to make visible the lion in us all!This is the vision that William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker first pronounced on Boston Common in the 1820’s and 30’s. This is the theology that guided Olympia Brown and Dorothea Dix and Susan B. Anthony in their leadership for justice and equity for all people. Here is the grounding for champions of dignity like John Haynes Holmes and A. Powell Davies and Whitney Young, for teachers of individual worth like Sophia Fahs.A theology of the lion! May it be our standard, too, in the 1100 Unitarian Universalist congregations across this country where this same form of free worship is celebrated this morning.