"An Encounter with a Ghostly
Specter "
A Homily for New Member Sunday and All Souls Day
By Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
November 1, 2009
INSTALLATION OF NEW MEMBERS, Introductory Remarks:
New member installation is a special and rewarding time in the
life of the congregation. It's good for the new members to be recognized
and welcomed, and important for the older members to have the opportunity
to receive you into this community that together, we are becoming.
Together we will aspire to be: a religious community where trust
is in the potential, which resides in individuals and in the holy
process which works among people through caring and honest sharing
of perspectives; whose minds and hearts are opening to the deeper
spiritual significance of the ancient symbols, stories and texts;
who feel that there are many paths into the depths of the mystery
in which our lives are set, even as they seek the one path most
personally significant for them; who wish to walk together in company-for
mutual support and benefit toward the greater common good.
While there is much commonality in what brings many of us to this
faith community, our newcomers each arrive with their own unique
stories, and challenges, and gifts. Today, as these individuals
make their membership public, I would remind us all that joining
a Unitarian Universalist congregation may seem easy because all
you have to do is sign the book. But I ask you to recognize that
this is a most demanding step.
Joining this congregation is a covenant really. We covenant with
one another to be our best selves and to hold each other in high
expectation, to engage in life fully and lovingly - loving ourselves,
one another and the world. When you sign this membership book, you
make a promise, one that may sound simple but which, if you "keep
covenant," brings you into intimate companionship with others
who have also promised to live with all the integrity you and they
can together muster, in all the years of your lives.
And so we ask, as you sign this book, to covenant with us and to
submit to the most rigorous authority in religious and spiritual
matters-the authority of your own mind, heart, and conscience. We
ask that you sacrifice the security of unchallenged points of view,
and that you be open to change and growth. We ask that you be restless
in the pursuit of human rights, ecological justice, and world peace.
We ask you to remember that this is a community of aspiration, not
a congregation that has it all figured out. Part of being human
is the experience of failure, and part of being in religious com-munity
is being present - to pick each other up when we have stumbled.
We ask that you commit yourself to the service of this congregation
by your participation in it - with your love, and with your resources:
your talents, time and energies, your opinions, criticisms, and
your hopes. And more, we ask you to financially support this bold
religious venture. Together, we can continue to build a free religious
community in Montclair and in northern Essex County.
We know that you were attracted to this congregation because you
were already supportive of many of the things that it stands for.
And we know that you are volunteering to join with us because these
impulses and goals fit well with who you are. We are happy to welcome
you into the rich heritage of this congregation which is now in
its 112th year; into the rich heritage of our denominational organizations
which date back nearly 200 years; into the honorable tradition of
heresy (a word that comes from a Greek root meaning to choose),
a tradition that goes back some two thousand years; and into the
heritage of religious values that go all the way back to the earliest
days of human awareness, when clans gathered around the communal
fire to tell stories that would help to find and make meaning in
their lives. May your membership here be filled with meaning.
I would ask those of you who are becoming members to please come
forward, as our liturgist reads your name, and to sign our membership
book. You'll then be welcomed with the traditional right hand of
fellowship as it is presented by our Minister of Religious Education,
Judy Tomlinson, President, Nick Lewis, by the Co-Chairs of our Community
Development Committee, Courtney Allen and Sabine von Aulock, and
by myself. Please accept the gifts of a book on Unitarian Universalism
(and children's book) your official member nametags and a flower.
We hope that the beauty of the flower will symbolize your membership
here with us. Something new we will be adding this morning is that
as our liturgist reads the names of our new members, she will also
indicate aspects of our congregation life that the new members are
or plan to be involved in.
READINGS: ANCIENT & MODERN
Our Ancient reading today is from the Hebrew Book of the Prophet
Hosea:
Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from death?
O Death, where are your thorns?
O Sheol, where is your sting?
Compassion will be hidden from My sight.
Our modern reading is by country music star Charlie Daniels
and was written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van
Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
HOMILY:
Initially when I imagined a sermon theme for this morning I thought,
"Oh, great! It'll be All Souls Day, the day after Halloween.
We will be welcoming new members on that day. I can have a little
fun dealing with the lighter side of death and I can talk about,
"…all the saints who from their labors rest," and
kind of make a celebration of it all. Maybe I could throw in a bit
of wisdom from Carlos Castaneda's Yacqui Indian benefactor and teacher,
Don Juan, who taught Castaneda to look upon death always as a friend
who was just behind his left shoulder. Keeping death nearby would
remind him that he would inevitably one day die, and so he would
need to live each moment of every day with attention and purpose,
so that when death did call, Castaneda would be ready. "What
the heck!" I thought, "I might even throw in a ghostly
specter, or a monster or two. It will be a fun morning."
Not being clairvoyant, what I had not originally anticipated was
the kind of a week I would have leading up to this morning. If some
of you have already read my newsletter column, which was emailed
out this week and put up on the website, you might have an inkling
of what I'm talking about. There is evil afoot in this world and
it is a very frightening specter. There is goodness too, though,
and I suppose - as always - the sway of balance between good and
evil lies in our hands.
Halloween, in its earliest pagan manifestations, was a harvest
holiday intended to invoke the spirits of those who had died, to
engage with them (or the memories that the dead conjured among the
living) in order to honor the dead or to be instructed by them.
Our children are celebrating just such an observation upstairs,
just now, in their Dia de los Muertos activities. They're just having
some good, old-fashioned, pagan fun.
I don't suppose that the idea of horror and evil got put into the
All Hallows Eve mix, at least significantly, until the great Bubonic
Plagues swept across Europe in the 14th and 17th Centuries. Sure,
there were always the threats of the hell and damnation and of the
Devil before the time of the plagues. But many of the horrid monsters
of the underworld became attached to fears of mortality as kingdoms
and empires fell victim to the Black Death. Since then I suspect,
Halloween has been more about fear and monsters than it has been
about the veneration of faithfully departed souls. At least that
has been true of two the more recent introduction of action figure,
cartoon characters. I'll have to leave their influence to you to
factor into this equation.
Getting back to these past few days leading up to this morning,
I would have to report that there is indeed evil at work in the
world. There are monsters or people behaving monstrously - still
today, and they were about in New Jersey this past week. Let me
tell you about my experiences and then relate them to the themes
we're looking at this morning.
Towards the end of last week I received an email from our own Melissa
Allen who works at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) next door,
over in West Orange. "We are going to be picketed by the Westboro
Baptist Church next Tuesday," she said. "We are hoping
to get some clergy and other leaders from the community together,
to provide some kind of learning experience for our people inside
the building while the picketers are out front. Some of our folks
are feeling pretty intimidated and threatened at the prospect of
this visit."
I don't know if you are familiar with the Rev. Fred Phillips and
his Westboro Baptist Church out of Kansas. I would say this - there
is nothing reverent about Mr. Phillips. He is a hate-mongering bigot
who uses religion as a shield to protect himself while he and his
band of similarly lost souls use God as a weapon to inflict vicious
and malicious injury on those whom they hold prejudice against.
That would be namely: Jews, Gays and Lesbians, President Obama and
liberals of any cut. His were the same people who protested outside
of the Matthew Shepard's parents' home after Matthew was murdered.
I first encountered them a few years back when I was going up to
New Paltz, NY for the Gay/Lesbian Marriage Project. They people
carried signs and chanted menacing threats there, too. I would want
to be quick to point out that there is no Baptist Convention or
Denomination that recognizes the Westboro Baptist Church as a part
of its fold, or even as Baptist.
At the JCC the other day, the actions of Fred Phillips' people
were deemed legally to be non-violent protest. But make no mistake;
their actions would be included in any other definition of the word
violence. The placards they waved while yelling taunting threats
carried phrases like, "Rabbis Eat Babies," and "God
Hates Jews," and "God Hates Fag Enablers," and even
"God Hates America!"
Another event I participated in this week had many of the same
characteristics. Here on the Montclair State University campus last
week, a threatening hate letter was slipped under the door at the
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer office during the
darkness of night. The very next day, a transsexual student, who
had been speaking on LGBTQ rights, was physically beaten and left
behind by some homophobic students - whom I imagine felt quite strongly
that God was on their side.
When I made my comments to the one hundred plus students, faculty
and community members that were gathered, I couldn't help but to
share a piece of irony that I had found. Halfway around the world
young men and women, the same age as many of those students, are
fighting in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, whether we agree
or not that they should ever have been sent there, we all can agree
that their purpose for being there is to protect all of us from
terrorism back home. And here we were at the rally responding to
terrorism that had come from within. How do we protect each other
and ourselves from that?
A thought occurred to me, a feeling really, in response to the
persons responsible for the violence and the violations in both
of those incidents. How pathetic it must be for people to find so
little meaning in their own lives that they feel they have to direct
their emptiness, in the form of rage, at others in an attempt to
gain meaning for themselves, while creating misery for the other.
Rage is a curious phenomenon. It's something I trust that most,
if not all, of us have experienced first hand, at least on occasion.
Rage is a kind of monster that feeds on itself, growing in disproportionate
response to whatever might have been its catalyst. I spoke about
cultural rage, in a sermon just a few weeks ago, as being unresolved
anger that is a part of a grief process for some in the dominant
culture from the loss of privilege. I think that thought still holds
here.
I was speaking with our own former president Ruth Karr about these
things the other day. She shared how, as a psychologist, she sees
rage as a lonely place where a person goes that is even isolated
from their own ideas of goodness or God. Bereft of goodness is a
scary place for people to dwell. Monsters do grow in scary, isolated
places.
Another realization occurred to me in the midst of the experiences
that I had this week, though. When I was at the JCC in West Orange,
the place was packed inside with people from across the generational
spectrum. The feelings expressed in that space where we gathered,
and the feelings articulated by the speakers who spoke, were that
the hatred being aimed at us from those who paraded outside would
be met by resistance, but resistance based in love.
The same thing was true for the gathering at MSU. And the speakers
there all echoed the same sentiments. "We have been attacked
by ignorance, fear, hatred and violence. We will respond with resistance,
and restraint, and above all with love. It gives me great hope to
think that perhaps we are nearing an evolutionary threshold that
may yet be crossed."
How do we protect one another and ourselves from monsters, from
rage, from terrorism? I think we begin by standing on the side of
love. Hating the hater only creates more hate and increases chances
of injury and damage.
How do we stand on the side of love? I don't think we do it alone.
I know I can't do it alone. I need to be, I trust we need to be
with others who will refuse with us to respond to violence violently.
That doesn't mean we won't protect each other and ourselves. It
means we will use love, tough love when necessary, to stop the behavior
of the hater; to let them know that even though they may have lost
touch with the experience of goodness within themselves, that the
experience of goodness is still available to them. We can invite
them into our vision of tolerance and acceptance over and over until
that invitation has been answered.
We cannot convince those who are screaming that they are right,
by screaming that we are right even louder. We cannot tame a monster
by being a bigger monster ourselves. We cannot justifiably claim
that our religious path is for all the saints, for all souls unless
we are willing to at least reach out to all souls.
And maybe we will get hurt sometimes as a result of our efforts.
Getting hurt is not proof that we were wrong in those efforts. Being
hurt and getting up, rejoining forces and carrying on with a vision
of love toward inclusion, that is dedication.
On this Feast of All Souls Day, may we seek to replace the ghostly
specter of evil with the spirit of a loving specter. On this morning
of celebration of membership, may we dare to be so bold, to be so
dedicated, to be so religious. May we be strengthened by one another
in our convictions. And may we be dedicated and rededicated to our
vision of the beloved community, over and over again.
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