READING
from The Longing for Home, Frederick Buechner

I think about people I love and people I do not know how to love. I think about letters to write and things . . . to get fixed and old [griefs] and longings and regrets. I worry and dream about the future. That is to say, I get so lost in my own thoughts - and lost is just the word for it, as lost as you can get in a strange town where you don't know the way - that I have to struggle to see where I am, almost to be where I am. Much of the time I might as well be walking in the dark or sitting at home with my eyes closed, those eyes that keep me from recognizing what is happening around me.

But then every once in a while, by grace, I recognize at least some part of it. Every once in a while I recognize that I am walking in green pastures that call out to me to lie down them, and beside still waters where my feet lead me. Sometimes in the way the breeze stirs the [trees] or the way a bird circles over my head, I recognize that even in the valley of the shadow of my own tangled thoughts, there is something holy and unutterable seeking to restore my soul.

HOMILY

When I came here, I didn't ask for your love. No leader should ever ask for that. It's a prescription for failure. I asked simply for your respect. Though I didn't always deserve it, either for what I did or what I have left undone, you gave it. And last Thursday, at the farewell party, I realized that what I go away with is a deeper form of love than I could have. Last Thursday, at the farewell party, it was clear to me.

It must have been thirty years ago. After college, I had spent a year teaching public high school. An experience, as I often say, that soon drove me to religion. Or at least toward religious thinking, which is something different. By the time I found myself in Divinity School, I had carefully explained to myself that I wasn't really going to be a minister, except perhaps some sort of part-time university chaplain. My real vocation was to be a scholar, a teacher, a university professor. I was only there, like so many other males in the early '70s, to dodge the draft. Or so I said to myself. (Later I realized that the motto over the inner sanctum of thought of liberals who think too self-consciously should probably be, "Better living through rationalization."

God had other plans.

When I doubted the wisdom of such a step, I found myself asking my own grandmother, the most faithful churchgoer I then knew, why she bothered going back, week by week.

"Why I go to church?" she replied. "Oh, Janni, soul, you know, sometimes get very empty. Faith small, like mustard seed." My grandmother had been orphaned in Eastern Europe before she was ten. She came to America through Ellis Island with only an older sister to meet her in Chicago. There she met and married another orphan. They had four children. But by the end of the influenza epidemic of 1919, she and my grandfather had buried all four babies. Soul get very empty indeed.

That was when my grandfather stopped going to church -- when it seemed his wife was going to die as well and the priest wouldn't come to give her the last rites. Then, in the Great Depression, with three more children's mouths to feed, my granddad lost his factory job. The two had to try to scratch a living out of a patch of dry ground in Texas for two years. During World War II, nearly all their remaining family in Slovakia died or were killed.

"I go to church," said my grandmother, "and in my soul I have to be grateful, just to be alive. I am there with other people. So I don't think just about my own problems. Many have them, just like me. I pray with them and for them. My thoughts go wider, deeper, higher. Sometimes," she said to me, "it does not even matter if the priest's sermon is not so very good! None of us can see the future, but I pray for you and your cousins and for all young people. Then hope comes back. I pray for your grandfather, and love returns, too. I go home to show him -- not just by words -- that is no good in life to stay bitter. I get him to help me do something nice for a child or a neighbor. That's why I go back to church every week."

My grandmother, I now believe, knew intuitively what my chosen faith of Unitarian Universalism is free to proclaim more explicitly: Faith is not ultimately about believing something in spite of the evidence; it is more like living with courage, gratitude, and integrity in spite of life's inevitable losses. Hope is not a matter of thinking that everything will come out all right, either for yourself, or even for all of us together. It is more like pointing your life toward a point on the horizon beyond which none of us can see, but toward which we all have to face if there is going to be a worthwhile future for any. Finally, Love is not a mere Hallmark greeting sentiment; it is more like living here and now, serving justice, doing works of mercy, and walking humbly with one another before a Mystery that transcends us all.