Speaker: Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
Good afternoon. My name is Kendyl Gibbons, and I am the senior minister of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. I grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church, with largely Humanist parents and religious educators, and for as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the concept of worship. I was intrigued and delighted, as well as honored, by the invitation from this year's G.A. Task Force to explore the connection between our covenantal polity and the practice of worship in the UU tradition. As I have considered this topic, it has appeared to me that there are some rather fundamental philosophical issues at stake in this question, and so the approach I offer you today is more intellectual than hands-on. Yet I am in agreement with the scientist who observed that "there is nothing so practical as a good theory," and so I am bold to hope that in suggesting some structures for thinking about worship as it expresses covenant, I may in the long run be facilitating the more intentional and effective design and practice of worship among us.
The story is told of a crusty old New England farmer, whose wife of many years complained that he never said "I love you" to her. "Listen," he replied, "I told you thirty years ago that I love you. If I ever change my mind, I'll let you know." I find this tale illuminating because the one covenant relationship of which we have some shared intuitive understanding in our culture in this era is marriage. Thus it is sometimes possible to see by analogy how covenant as it is expressed in marriage might guide us to a better understanding of other kinds of covenant, and their less obvious workings.
A similar analogical approach is proposed by Dennis O'Brien in his meditation on primary religious language. He writes, "Return to the New Haven Railroad, or any old commuter line on any painful Friday. One of the interesting customs which can be observed as the evening drags through a series of delays is the strange pattern of linguistic behavior. As long as the railroad vehicle is proceeding in some steady fashion, the members of the clan remain silent and composed. However, given some more noticeable breakdown, the silence is broken by low-pitched mumbling sounds which arise spontaneously throughout the vehicle. "My God, now what?" "Again?" "For Chrisesake!" "Damn it anyhow!" In addition to such verbalized utterances there will be a number of sighs, suspirations, and ritual gestures: rapid and repeated finger tapping, holding of the head in one hand, or two hands, and so forth. Mumbling of the type described is characteristic for individuals and groups faced with unfixable frustration. A commuter bothered by sunlight will pull down the shade without incantation. It is only when there is a deep belief that breakdowns are eternal verities that no practical response is made. The commuters utter these phrases and seem to derive considerable satisfaction from the performance - but the utterances are neither intended to describe anything, nor to accomplish anything. "Damn it!" trades in neither truth nor advice. What is the moral of this muttering? I suggest that "Damn it!" and its linguistic cousins are a fundamental, nontrivial, nonreplaceable part of human spirituality. My modest suggestion would be that if we look at the logic of cursing we might get somewhere on religion."
The first connection we may observe between these two stories is that what is funny about the taciturn New Englander is that we know his wife is not primarily seeking information. Like "Damn it!", "I love you" is rarely the conveyance of simple data. Yet we might agree that it, too, is a fundamental, nontrivial, nonreplaceable part, if not of human spirituality, at least of human relationship. In other words, the covenant of marriage is in some respects not a once-and-for-all proposition. If it is to endure over time, and if it is to bring the satisfactions hoped for by the participants, it must be nurtured and sustained, not only by reasoning and problem solving, but also by quite irrational expressions and acts that perform a nontrivial, nonreplaceable function in the nourishment of relationship.
All of which brings me to my first proposition regarding worship and covenant. I submit, and for the duration of this presentation I invite you to entertain the notion, that worship, properly understood, has more in common with cursing and with love-making than it does with conveying information. When we seek to understand the role of worship as an expression of covenant, we are dealing with human experience, both individual and collective, at multiple levels, perhaps the most significant of which are not concerned with acquiring new facts. The covenants that matter to us are something more than rational, instrumental bargains; rather they are commitments that help to define us and shape the meaning of our days.
The sociologist Peter Berger argues that not just our personal identities but our very conceptions of the universe are shaped by a process of implicit community covenant. According to Berger, every human society is an enterprise of world building. Human beings, born without a set of specific, instinctual responses to predetermined stimuli, must create for themselves ways of meeting and interacting with the environment that will effect the successful filling of their needs. That environment includes other human beings similarly engaged. Society is the result of this task being undertaken as a cooperative endeavor.
Society an individuals exist in a dialectical relationship. The society itself has no being outside the agreement and cooperation of its individual members. Yet human beings achieve their identities and their appropriations of the world within and as a result of their membership in society. While the social system is their own continuing creation, it affects them as a real, external fact.
Society is created in the continuous out-pouring of human activity, creation, and thought. Berger cites Marx to the effect that being human is impossible in the absence of this productive and modifying relationship to the environment. The making of tools, of language, of culture is inherently necessary to people, not only to survive in an indifferent environment, but because of the very kind of beast we are. We not only may but must create the nature of our relationship to the world, because it is not a biological given, and we cannot live without it.
In pouring themselves thus forth into their environment, human beings do alter the objective reality of the world which confronts them. These products, whether physical, intellectual or institutional, once created, have an existence quite apart from the imagination or control of their inventors. They become a part of the world with which humanity is confronted; this is objectification. Even language and social relations, which have no tangible reality outside the minds of those who use them, attain an objective character when they are shared. The person who invents a word does not have the power to change its meaning once it is in use among an entire society.
The dialectical relationship between individual and society comes full circle in the third step in this process, which is internalization. At this point the objective character of the human creation is appropriated by the individual as a normative aspect of the world. Not only are people confronted with a real experience, but they also affirm that this is the essential nature of things, the way that the world was meant to be, and should be. The human createdness of that world is 'forgotten'.
An example of this process may prove helpful. The story is told of an ethnographer who lived in a certain tribal community, where one of the tasks assigned to old women was to sweep the dirt floors of the huts. To accomplish this task, straw brooms had been fashioned, using straight reeds as broomsticks. The reeds which grew closest to hand attained a maximum height of about two feet, thus the brooms were short, which forced the old women to bend over in order to use them. Most of the women became stooped as a result, and endured pain in their backs. When the ethnographer questioned people about this, both the old women themselves and the other members of the community replied, "This is the way of life; old women are destined to become stooped, and to suffer pain." All were impassive to the ethnographer's protests, answering only with a shrug and fatalistic acceptance. Finally, the ethnographer herself brought a longer reed from an area a little distant, and made a broom to sweep her own hut. Gradually, brooms like hers began appearing throughout the village.
Here the world building process is clearly visible. The people of this village used available materials to create a tool in order to accomplish a certain task. This is externalization, the modification of the environment. Once this tool was created, however, it confronted the people as an external reality, and imposed its own nature and logic on their use of it. This is objectification. Finally, the people internalized the existence of the broom and its effects, attributing them to "the nature of the world." The ethnographer began the process again, by modifying a piece of the environment for her own purposes. Once created, its effects existed apart from her own purposes. It is worth noting that this would also have been true even had those effects been unintended. Had there been a scarcity of long reeds, for instance, and had fights over them ensued, the ethnographer would not necessarily have been in a position to stop them simply by virtue of having invented the longer broom.
Thus world-building, or the creation of society, is inherently a collective process, as Berger describes it. The objectiveness of artifacts is tangible, but the objectiveness of the non-material aspects of culture - language, values, social roles - exists solely in their internalization by the members of a community. Therefore, this socially constructed reality is fragile, continually at risk of losing its coherence of consent, in part simply because human memory is imperfect. But more significantly, the cosmic order projected upon the universe and internalized by the participants in human community, is constantly confronted by experiences which defy the ability of that order to account for and control them. Suffering and evil, the intuitive assertions of madness and dreams, the demands of prophets and artists, and above all, the inevitability of death, all challenge the success or the completion of the world-building project. It is in the face of this challenge, I would suggest, that the process of worship arises as a distinctive and central activity in human community. Its purpose is to reaffirm the challenged cosmic structure; to reiterate the process of creative invention, externalization, objectification, and internalization by which the shared world of order was originally founded. When famine or epidemic make the world seem unsafe; when the social identities of its members must change; when the danger of battle or hunt or childbirth looms; when evil has broken out and the rules have been transgressed, then the old stories need to be told, and the rules need to be recited, and the right way of things needs to be remembered. And not just told again in words, but acted out; made memorable in the body, literally "re-member-ed"; told with music and color, underlined with blood and pain and intentional ecstasies.
There is an implicit covenant in which we live all our human days; the covenant of a social structure by which we comprehend the universe and our place in it; a covenant we do not remember making, any more than we remember learning our first language. The philosopher John Dewey puts it this way:
Order cannot but be admirable in a world constantly threatened with disorder - in a world where living creatures can go on living only by taking advantage of whatever order exists about them, incorporating it into themselves… At every moment, the living creature is exposed to dangers from it surroundings, and at every moment, it must draw upon something in its surroundings to satisfy its needs… Only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation that is akin to the aesthetic.
I want to follow a path first pointed out to me by my colleague Alice Blair Wesley, in suggesting that worship is, ultimately, a form of artistic creation. Specifically, worship is the social drama of universe construction and identity creation self-consciously understood, using symbols of ritual value as its material, and seeking the quality that Dewey calls 'consumatory'. The quality of consummation is what differentiates the aesthetic experience as an integral unit from the random flow of experience in general. It is the conclusion which gathers, integrates and gives meaning to all the parts of the experience, and it does this not only when the consummation itself occurs, but as the prospective goal toward which each separate element is directed as it unfolds.
Art is the process by which human beings arrange the elements of their experience and action so as to create a consumatory integration. The experience of a work of art, or the creation of it, according to Dewey, is an alternation between "doing" and "undergoing"; that is, between action upon the environment, and perception of the environment as responsive to that action. The artist necessarily does not know at the beginning of the act of creation exactly what the product will ultimately be, for if it is to be consumatory, it will be in part determined by what the artist undergoes in the process of creating it. Thus the consumatory experience of a genuine work of art has the power to alter those who encounter it, and the way they view the world. Dewey says:
The world we have experienced becomes an integral part of the self (do you hear the echoes of Berger's description of the process of constructing the cosmos?)… In their physical occurrence, things and events experienced pass and are gone. But something of their meaning and value is retained as an integrated part of the self… How then can objects of experience avoid becoming expressive? Yet apathy and torpor conceal this expressiveness by building a shell around objects. Familiarity induces indifferences; prejudice blinds us; conceit looks through the wrong end of a telescope and minimizes the significance possessed by objects in favor of the alleged importance of the self. Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routines and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms. It intercepts every shade of expressiveness found in objets and orders them in a new experience of life.
The power of the artistic experience, then, lies in that combination of doing and undergoing which "throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things". By this Dewey does not mean to imply that particular objects, actions, colors, and so on have inherent, universal meanings "in themselves", but rather that they have an almost infinite capacity to absorb the meanings which human beings create for them, and then generally ignore. Placed in their proper context, before attentive and participating observers, they become transparent to all their accumulated meaning, as well as the new meaning that they take on as elements contributing to a unique consummation in that particular experience.
The true work of art places an object, event, relationship, or whatever its subject may be, before us, and demands, "Look at this; participate in it; really see it; experience its meanings," and offers us, if we do so, what Dewey calls "that moment of passage from disturbance to harmony which is that of intensest life… the fulfillment that reaches to the depths of our being - one that is an adjustment of our whole being with the conditions of existence." This is the purpose of both art and religion - the project of the saints and the poets - to enable us and force us, themselves included, to see the world as a consumatory experience, with each single word and tiny object and incidental act illuminated in its intensely meaningful truth.
We unite in worship in a dual role, as artists and perceivers. We create the experience at the same time we are affected by it. All art distorts reality in the service of meaning. That is precisely what art is; the struggle to eliminate the redundant, irrelevant and distracting elements of experience so as to be able to perceive. Objects of ritual value are pieces of our common life distorted in importance to serve as tools for indicating and perceiving meaning. These are the tools we use as artists in the creation of the worship experience, seeking to represent symbolically our struggle to deepen our apprehension of the meaning of life in its totality. The sacred moment is the paradigm of all moments; the community gathered for worship is the paradigm of all communities, including the cosmic community. In recognizing the significance of objects immediately experienced in worship, we stretch our ability to recognize the profound meaning of any moment and of all community. We affirm that our relationship to the world is fundamentally a consumatory one; that the moment when things are most transparent and when meaning is illuminated is the moment of most real vision.
If meaning is, as Berger's perspective would argue, a creation of human society, then worship is by necessity a communal effort. A person may worship in private, or even, as the anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown once pointed out, continue, as the last member of a tribe, the ritual observances of that tribe, but the symbols and meanings are learned in a worshipping community, and express the reality of that community.
This conception enables us to see the role of worship in the response of religion to experiences of anomic threat to the social order, such as death, suffering and transcendent religious experience. Dewey understands opposition to be essential for the creation of art. If the environment gratifies our every impulse at once, there is no tension created which can result in consummation. Undergoing requires resistance; the rock needs its heft in order for us to be able to experience it. This is equally true for society. The attempt to explain the unexplainable is what keeps us in conversation at a level more satisfying that mere utility. A world with no tragedy, in which every experience was neatly compatible with extant social structures, would be fixated; would have no propulsion to mature and to create. Yet a world with no answer for the questions posed by suffering and death is impotent, unable to help its members maintain their identity. What is required is a response that enables the conversation to continue in the face of our anguish, acknowledging it, but not overcome by it.
There is an important distinction between worship and the larger category of drama, which has to do with the raw material upon which it draws. Drama as an art form by definition uses imaginary situations in order to explore real emotions. It requires both the audience and the players to suspend disbelief, to imagine that a person is killed, that cardboard is wood, that three minutes are five years, that two people are in love. Drama begins with the syllogism, if these things were true (which we know they are not), then these feelings, reactions, structures, meanings would follow, and we judge it by how clearly those meanings are revealed. Worship is confined to the use of certain kinds of reality for its subject matter. In worship we say, If these things are true (and not just trivially true, but ultimately dependable, which we believe they are), then these are the feelings, the structures, the meanings which follow, and which therefore can be relied upon as guides in our living. Worship is a dramatic art form which takes as its raw material ultimate reality as we understand it, and enables us as participants to come into contact with that reality. At various times we may be challenged by its judgment, energized by its power, enlightened by its structure, comforted by its dependability, or gratified by its beauty. And for this reason, worship rightly conceived is never a performance for an audience. It is like a meal; the experience of watching someone cook is very different from the experience of eating. Or to return to our former analogy, overhearing somebody say to someone else, "I love you," is by no means the same as having it said to ones' self.
If worship is drama, then it is necessarily action; something being acted out. And if it has to do with the foundational structures of our cultural identity as human beings, then I would suggest that what is acted out is that which is central to our humanity, the quintessentially human act. Throughout history and around the world, one can find worship services founded upon a number of different actions, elemental expressions of what it fundamentally means to be human. Eating, drinking, having sex, giving birth, killing, dying, dancing or singing, suffering, giving gifts - each of these has been at some time the central action through which some religious community has expressed and experienced the ultimate realities of being. But what about us? Through what actions do we as Unitarian Universalists enter into contact with what is ultimately most real to us? What has become of all these rich and passionate religious dramas?
Let us consider for a moment our roots within the Protestant reformation. The early Christian tradition held up the sharing of table fellowship, nourishment and love, as the essential human act, and this became stylized into the communion service. Through the centuries, the Catholic church modified the drama of the shared meal to incorporate other rituals of authority and supplication which grew out of the cultures in which it found itself. As the economic and social structures of those cultures underwent rapid change, some of these old dramas were no longer satisfying, especially to the less humble and less credulous. Religious communities began to gather who found the essential act of human identity and world creation in the hearing of the word of God. For them, the danger and power of religion was in unmediated communication between the believer and God, without the intervention of priests, saints, or liturgical traditions. That hearing of the word of God was an active process, like listening to the voice of someone dear and far away over a faulty telephone line. For the believer in these communities, the central business of life was to be an active respondent to the will of God; to hear God's word and then perform it. The function of the preacher was to be an assistant in this process, clarifying and calling attention to what was central in the act of worship, which was direct contact with the creative power of the universe. As the liberal tradition has become less and less reliant upon the concept of God for its social construction of the cosmic order, the drama of being in the presence of the word of God has had less and less power as the central act of worship, to redeem our lives from the anxieties and despair of challenges to our own communities of world building. Where might that leave us?
I want to propose that for the theologically diverse religious community of Unitarian Universalism here at the turn of the century, the defining act of human identity may be precisely the creation and affirmation of covenant; the making of mutual promise that creates a shared and ordered space in the world. The real and powerful drama of our worship lies in the creation and recreation of our commitments to one another. If the theist understands that process as bringing those commitments and our attempts to fulfill them into the grace and judgment of a self-aware deity, well and good. If the pagan sees our covenants rooted in the divine energy of a provident earth, fine. If the humanist will have them as a defiant assertion of human dignity against an infinite indifference, that works too. What creates and sustains the community of human connection within which we live and move and have our being and our meaning is our capacity for covenant.
Now, there may be no accounting for taste, but everybody has his or her own matter of pretension. Some people are experts about wine, and if you try to serve them cheap blended table wine, they just look at you pityingly. Some people have musical taste, and suffer if you make them listen to Barry Manilow. Some people have a highly developed aesthetic sense, and feel distressed in the presence of red flocked wallpaper. Some people change the subject if you say that you cheer for the Dallas Cowboys. Everyone has some area of vanity, some subject upon which their expertise makes them impatient with the second-rate or the tasteless. I, personally, fancy myself as a connoisseur of liturgy. I love a good gooey Russian Orthodox Easter vigil, or the clean, spare quiet of a Quaker meeting, or the earthy ecstasies of a pagan maypole dance, or the ponderous dignity of an Anglican cathedral wedding, or the heirloom traditions of a Jewish seder. I have always despised anything shoddy, awkward or cheaply sentimental in corporate worship, and the conventional Midwestern Protestantism of my parents' youth seemed to me to typify that - until I saw the movie "Places in the Heart".
If you saw it also, you may remember that it is the story of haw a gallant sheriff's widow struggles to make ends meet and save her home and family after her husband is accidentally shot and killed my an intoxicated black teenager. Racial injustice cuts through the heart of what might have been a community; the dusty body of the lynched boy is dragged by the widow's door, so she can see that revenge has been taken, and the black vagrant who is instrumental in saving her farm is ultimately run out of town by the Ku Klux Klan. It is a touching though predictable story, well acted and beautifully filmed, but it didn't really grab me until the very last scene. In that scene, all the characters are gathered in the ornate brick church, which has been a visual symbol for the town. It is a warm day, the stained glass windows are tilted open, the children are squirming in the pews, and as communion is passed, the choir of about ten women and two men begins to sing "In the Garden", a song which has always irritated me as an example of hymnody. Communion consists of little crouton-sized cubes of bread, and individual thimbles of wine which rattle in their holder as they are passed from hand to hand. When they hand on the tray, the parishioners mutter, usually under their breath and as fast as the can, the phrase "Peace of God" to the person sitting next to them. Slowly the viewer becomes aware that this scene cannot be in chronological sequence, because there are people present who, by the end of the story, are gone; the unfaithful brother in law, the betrayed sister, the black farm hand, the KKK members, and finally, startlingly, just before the credits, the dead husband, handing the tray to the youth who shot or will shoot him, murmuring "Peace of God." And I realized, as I watched the credits through my tears, that that service, however unpolished it may have seemed to me, could have done for those people everything that the very best worship anywhere does for its participants, if only they had paid attention, and had truly meant what they were saying. I don't want to suggest that they were engaging in deliberate hypocrisy - they were not. It simply never occurred to most of them to let what they did and said on Sunday morning penetrate very deeply into the rest of their lives. They did not recognize that their worship invited them into a meaningful covenant with one another; that to say "Peace of God" to their neighbor in the pew, and to eat and drink those morsels together, was to both make and receive a promise, a promise that might have shaped for the better the way they would conduct themselves in community.
The renowned Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu once stated that "the church should be a laboratory to show how the world ought to look." He echoes the work of Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, who proposed that church congregations should be seen as places where religious values were put into practice, a sort of pilot project for what the rest of the world would be like if it were transformed as we keep suggesting it should be. If we can't run one small, voluntary association effectively according to the principles we continually advocate, then there is little reason for anyone to take us seriously about instituting those principles on any larger scale. In addition to the implicit covenant of our human existence as social beings, specific religious communities are founded upon explicit covenants concerning the particular values that they consciously affirm and by which they agree to conduct themselves. The seven principles of the UUA bylaws can easily be seen as such a covenant, and many of our congregations have a mission statement that articulates something about the covenant by which they are brought together. These overt and sometimes rather ponderous declarations are important, perhaps not so much for what they announce in their completed form, but more for the effort to discover and name the foundations of what we think we are doing together that goes into the process of formulating them. Nevertheless, it is a rare congregation whose members can call to mind any part of their own statement once the excitement of the composition process subsides. I would submit that there are other, less articulate, covenants operating in our congregations, and informing the practices of our worship. Let me describe a few of them, and see if any sound familiar to you.
The first is what I call the covenant of salt, borrowing from a wedding blessing which says "May there be such oneness between you that when one weeps, the other will taste salt." This is the covenant of mutual concern and care, that we will weep with those who mourn, and rejoice with those who are glad; that the high and low moments of our individual lives need not be borne alone, but will be shared. It is a covenant to stand together against the anomic challenges of suffering, disappointment, and loss, always drawing the estranged one back into the connections of world-ordering community. To participate in the acting out of this re-incorporation is to be assured that we, in our turn, will not be allowed to escape the gravitational field of the community's ordered cosmos in our own moments of distress.
Another foundation of our religious community is what I call the covenant of adventure. One of my British colleagues once defined 'faith' for religious liberals as meaning "not belief in spite of the evidence, but adventure in scorn of the consequences." This is the covenant of intellectual freedom and continuing revelation, which allows us to challenge received opinion in many matters without harmfully threatening the community's ordered cosmos, precisely because changing ideas of truth are understood as part of that cosmic structure. The covenant of adventure places questions within the framework of sustainable order rather than outside of it, affirming that world building is a continuing process, and that new truth can be integrated into universe of what is already known. We manage the anxiety of such transformations by recalling the history of emergent truth, and our consistent ability to reconstruct the image of an ordered universe in its wake.
A third basis of community might be named the covenant of acceptance. This is the heritage of our Universalist forbears, whose cosmic order did not need to include the division of the human race into the elected and the refused, the few saved into heaven, and the many condemned to eternal suffering. It is the covenant of those who taught that 'we need not think alike to love alike;' that does not define membership in the universe of meaning through narrow boundaries of sameness and exclusion. The covenant of acceptance promises that the whole of human life is a growth journey, that we are never all that we might be, that hope and transformation remain possible for everyone. To enact this covenant is to push the envelope of our comfortable prejudices and the ways in which we define other people, as well as to challenge our sentimental generalities about human nature. It calls us to abate our judgments, and push toward genuine encounter; to respond to others not indiscriminately, but on the basis of what we experience rather than what we suppose.
A more difficult covenant is that of accountability. When we enter into such a covenant, we acknowledge that to become the people we want to be, and to create transformation in the world, requires persistent effort over time. Because we forget, because we get tired and distracted and scared, we need others to remind us, to help us remember what we said we wanted to do and to be. In the covenant of accountability, we promise one another to speak the truth in love, to say what ideals we see being incarnated in each other's lived lives, and how that measures up against the values we have articulated together. This covenant only works in perfect freedom; it can never be imposed. Only when we truly want the help of others in seeing our own work more clearly, and only when we are responding to others out of the deepest care, can such a promise bring us closer together, and build community. Yet where such a trust is given, and cherished, in covenant, shared worship becomes an opportunity for profound recognition of who we are, and renewal of our visions of who we might yet become.
Not all covenants are necessarily for the good. I have known congregations, and communities within congregations, united by a covenant of changelessness. Here the mutual promise was that the meaning structures of their shared world would be safe, because nothing about it would ever be allowed to be different. Such a covenant has great power, and creates a place of nurture and comfort for the participants, but the tragedy is that it is founded upon a lie. For the truth was that those people were changing, and their lives were changing, and the world around them was changing, and in the end, change is not a force that can be excluded from our experience. So that eventually that project will fail, and that constructed world of meaning will inevitably fall apart, and those people will find their covenant betrayed. Another doomed covenant is that of opposition. People can come together intensely around the determination to get rid of a minister, or a board chair; to oppose a budget or a by-law or a bill in congress; to prevent a capital fund drive or a sexuality class or a parking lot, but these issues will not sustain genuine community in the long run. The covenants of real religious commitment provide for how we create order and live in the world over time, together encountering change and the manifold demands of our individual and institutional lives.
A final suggestion for covenant is that of thanksgiving and praise. This is the mutual promise by which we summon one another not to take our lives for granted, but to rejoice in whatever beauty or love, wisdom or justice we may discover amidst the tragedies and mundanities and mysteries of our days. It is possible for us, captured into the rationality that serves us so well so much of the time, to structure a world of utility and order that excludes the nontrivial and nonreplacable elements of wonder, gratitude, and celebration of human existence. The covenant of thanksgiving and praise creates a place where both our blessings and our curses - inextricably related, as Dennis O'Brien pointed out - are received. The particular dialect of our primary religious language is not so significant as the experiences toward which it points, experiences shared by those who with us seek a meaning beyond the efficient productivity of our toil, and would speak a response that incorporates grief and pain, as well as love, gladness and delight into the universe that we behold.
Earlier today, most of us participated in a worship service the reliable power of which has to do with its expression of covenant. The men and women who accept ongoing responsibility for religious leadership in community become the identified keepers of the covenant, and thus in themselves constitute objects of ritual value. We set them apart, and with that differentiated identity comes both power and constraint. We have identified as well as subliminal expectations of them, and we grant them certain overt and certain subtle privileges. The Service of the Living Tradition recalls both the implicit covenant, particularly in its formal acknowledgement of ministers who have died, and the explicit covenant values of our Associational community as it transcends the local congregation. Just as marriage is made a public ceremony rather than a private ritual between the two people involved, because it constitutes a change in those persons' social identity, so the identity of ministry is a matter in which the larger community of Unitarian Universalists is concerned. Ordination and call, the specifically congregational covenants, are not what is celebrated in the context of our General Assembly, but rather fellowshipping, the acceptance of ministers into a professional status recognized by representatives of their peers and of the UUA as a whole. The Service of the Living Tradition reveals and re-illuminates our common understanding of ministry, and the structures by which we create an identity onto which we can project the ancient and the modern qualities of spiritual leadership. It also reconnects us with the covenant of our institutional history, as we are called to remember those gone before, and as we replicate certain elements of the service from year to year. As a very personal example, when I stand in honor of the ministers who have died, there is always a part of my mind conjuring with the knowledge that "one day, my name will be read as part of this event." The terror of my death is in that realization, at the same time as the constructed answer to that terror, that this covenant community will stand, and speak my name, and remember; that who I have been will subsumed in who that community becomes, and not wholly lost.
We construct our knowledge of the world through the order of the social consensus that we receive and enact. We find our identity in the communities we build upon covenant. For religious liberals of our era, this is the foundational reality of who we are as human beings; we are the makers of covenant. Often distracted, unfaithful, chafing at its bondage and its demands upon us, but lost without it in an isolation devoid of purpose, help or joy. In worship we lift up the solemn promises that shape our being; we do not always remember making them, but they sound a chord within our depths that calls us to own them, to reveal and restore them, to be challenged and sustained by them, to receive them from our spiritual forbears, and hand them on in essentials unbroken to our children. We strive to articulate them, these covenants that make us who we are, touching their power in the shared drama of our common liturgical life. It is not enough, and we know that it is not enough, to say to one another, "I told you once, and if I ever change my mind, I'll let you know." If we want to thrive in the communities of our congregations, we must remember and affirm and celebrate the covenants that connect us; we must name our failures as well as our successes in them; we must renew and restore them; we must bring those who would unite with us into them; we must forever reclaim and recreate the ties that bind us, by choice and conviction, to this faith we share. Week by week we hunger to enact that solemn, joyful art in our worship together, fulfilling the promise that makes us more faithful, more human, and more whole.
