Unitarian Universalism Saves Lives

This sermon was offered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalism in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, February 15th, 2015.  If you'd to hear it, a recording will be posted here.

This is the morning we’re really giving our pledge drive a real push.  Oh, I know that Alex gave a stirring sermon last week, and that we’ve had announcements, testimonials, dinners, and brunches since the beginning of the month.  But this is “Generosity Sunday.”  And as such you’re probably expecting from me a traditional pledge drive sermon – the sermon we UU preachers call amongst ourselves, “The Sermon on the Amount.”  You probably expect me to have a prop that looks something like this:  an actual approved reproduction of Andy Warhol’s 1981 piece “dollar sign” … on a tote bag.  (I got this at the staff’s annual holiday party this year, and that’s all I’m going to say about it, so don’t ask.)

And that’s actually all I’m going to say about the pledge drive, and money, and why you should give generously to the church.

I've been thinking about someone I knew in Divinity School.  She'd come to Boston from Texas, and one day early on she decided to get the lay of the land by driving around a bit.  She told me that as she drove she kept crying.  She cried because her UU church in Texas -- the only one anywhere around -- met in the basement of a store in a strip mall.  Around Boston, though, every town had a UU church, and they were often in a place of honor -- at the end of the town green, or at the top of the highest hill.  She couldn't keep from crying to see this.

Some stories:

When the news spread about Leela Alcorn’s death by suicide on December 28^th of last year, one of my colleagues got to thinking.  Miss Alcorn is the 17 year old transgender girl whose death – she walked out into oncoming highway traffic – gained international attention.  Her death, and the suicide note she left on her Tumblr blog.  In that suicide note she talked about the challenges – the impossibilities – of being a trans kid in our country, with the biases and bigotry that exists.  Miss Alcorn had no support – not at home, not in the community around her.  She got no support, but also no end of grief simply because of who she was.  In the end, it was too much … or, maybe, too little.

So, as I said, when news about Leela Alcorn’s death by suicide spread, the Rev. Sarah Gibbs Milspaugh found herself thinking about a Christmas pageant she’d attended at the Boulder Valley UU fellowship just a few weeks before.  One of the co-narrators, whose role included not just reading a narration but acting and singing as well, one of the co-narrators was a strong, proud, self-confident teenage girl. A transgender teenage girl.  A teenage girl who could have been Leela Alcorn, accept that she was surrounded by love and acceptance.  No, let me correct that.  She is embraced as who she is, and because of who she is – another person of inherent worth and dignity, as are we all.

Friends, Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

Let me say that again:  Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities. 

This week I asked colleagues to send me stories.  So I heard about the lesbian teen who was suicidal when she began attending a UU church.  She is now thriving.  And I heard about a couple of Mormon parents who are eternally grateful to Unitarian Universalism because their gay son has found a place that loves and supports him in a way that their own faith communities could not.  I heard about the clergy person who called the pastor of the local black Baptist church in the days following the incidents in Ferguson to ask if there were any local responses planned who then heard a thankful sigh of relief because that Baptist pastor had thought no one else would care.

Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

That last story reminded me of one I experienced during my first pastorate up in Yarmouth, Maine.  This was back in the day when the only option for gay couples was civil unions, and one day I got a call from a couple who very tentatively, fearfully, asked if I’d be willing to perform their union service.  When I responded with enthusiasm the woman on the phone began to cry.  More than one of the other churches in town had actually hung up on her; the pastor of her own church had actually laughed at her when she’d asked.  Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

I’d like a show of hands – how many of you are what we call “birthright Unitarian Universalists?”  (That is, you were born into the Unitarian Universalist, Unitarian, or Universalist church.)  And how many are “come outers”?  (That’d be folks who’ve come out of some other tradition or, perhaps, no religious tradition, in your past.)  Of that number, how many have said that you’d wished you’d known that a faith like this existed long before you’d ever found it?  That you’d been looking for something like this?

In the days and weeks after the tragic slaughter at Columbine High School back in 1999, the Unitarian Universalist church there became a haven for the area’s teens – not just the members of the church, but for other hurting young people who didn’t want their grief answered by dogmas and creeds.  Unitarian Universalism at work saving lives and changing communities.

Our own young people, year after year, tell us in their Coming of Age service that this – this – is the place where they feel fully free to be their true and authentic selves.  High school is, well, high school, and families are families.  We all remember what it was like to be a teenager.  But here, in this Unitarian Universalist community, our youth find unconditional acceptance, support, and love.  Can you imagine the difference that makes?

I want to quote at length the email I received from one of my colleagues.  Shortly after he began a new ministry in one of our congregations one of his children, about to start her junior year at Yale, was killed in a car accident precipitated by a drunk drive.  This is what he wrote:

In the next days, weeks, months, I came to know that Unitarian Universalism was not just a good-time religion. My liberal religious, non-creedal faith sustained and saved.  Whether it was the presence at her Memorial Service of many area Unitarian Universalist colleagues I had not yet met, or the theological reassurance of the prevailing goodness of existence despite momentary times of suffering, or the abiding emphasis on the fact that there can be meaning on the other side of anything (and we are the agents of finding it), or the awareness that all of this was not either a judgment nor a infliction on us personally, or the quiet embracing community who offered no magic words others but rather their comforting care, we moved through the passage of deep loss.  Nothing was denied, nothing was explained away, nothing was converted into vengeance, nothing was made supernatural, nothing was done or said that would later linger as a vestigial remnant of either fear or doubt.

This all became all the more evident as the larger world, the world of the families of the fellow victims and the world of the larger community, tried to salve the wounds and bind up lives with pronouncements, prayers, judgments, and calls for retribution, all of which would have denied us our identities.  Yes, we had suffered a loss, a profound loss, a gut-wrenching loss, but our Unitarian Universalism helped us see that we did not have to also lose ourselves in the process.  We, life, existence, meaning, were all affirmed because our values and our community helped us walk the grief journey.

How many of us have walked our own grief journey with the help of this congregation?  (No hands needed.)  Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities

I’ve been saving this one for last because, well, it’s perhaps the hardest to believe.

One of our congregations began, more recently, as a fairly typical UU church comfortably ensconced in the suburbs.  But they realized that that really wasn’t who they were being called on to be, so they closed up shop and moved to an abandoned, derelict church building in, as they say, the zip code with the lowest life expectancy in the area.  Rather than put energy into fixing up their building – not even pausing to clean up the graffiti in the sanctuary – they began trying to make a difference.  In that same derelict building they established a free food store that serves over 1,000 people each month, a free bookstore, computer center, and laundry.  Until the Health Department set up shop they hosted a health clinic in their space.  They’ve also managed to buy a block of abandoned buildings and a trash dump and turned it into garden space and an orchard.  They’ve done all this in their seven year existence, with an average Sunday worship attendance – the gold standard of church success measures – and average Sunday worship attendance of three to twelve.

Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

PACEM, the Soup Kitchen, the Food Bank, IMPACT, the community groups we support with our monthly Social Justice collections, the 12 Step groups we host, our partnerships with other area congregations, the children and youth who are nurtured here, the adults who have found a place that is filled not only with like-minded people but, more importantly I think, with like-hearted people.  I know of people who not only chose to join this congregation but who chose to move to Charlottesville because of that marriage equality banner we so proudly fly.  This Unitarian Universalist church saves lives and changes our community.

I said I wasn’t going to talk about our pledge drive.  I lied.  Here goes:

We’re often told (as we even were earlier in this service) that as we consider our pledge we should think about what the church means to us.  I’m going to suggest that while that is important, perhaps even more important is what the church means to others.  What it can mean to others.  The lives it can save; the ways it can change our community.

So often we think about the things we get out of being a part of TJMC, and we do a kind of cost/benefit analysis – what do we get out of it and what should we, therefore, put into it.  But what does it mean that there is a Unitarian Universalist church here on the highest point in Charlottesville?  What does it mean to our town, and our region, that liberal religion has a champion? 

Please, don’t just think of what TJMC means to you.  And don’t even think about what it takes to support this congregation.  Think about the impact of Unitarian Universalism in other cities and states.  Think about the power of Unitarian Universalism across the country.  Think about how our faith – the faith that informs and infuses our own community here and so many, many more – think about how it truly saves lives and changes communities.  Think about how it can change the world.  Think on that, my friends.  Think about that.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Musings on Money

Last Sunday, Mother's Day, I noted that I'd much rather preach the annual canvas sermon to my congregation than the annual Mothers' Day sermon.  (I said, "Nobody wants to talk about money, but some people actually like their mothers . . ."  I said that on Mothers' Day it's harder to find the right balance.)

But that got me thinking about money and, specifically, the giving of money to the church.  That and the fact that last week we also announced to the congregation I serve that a goodly number of people have paid nothing on this year's pledge and that, two months out from the end of our fiscal year, if we were to add up all of the currently unpaid pledges from folks who've paid 50% or less of this year's pledge we'd be looking at approximately $100,000.  That's $100,000 that our community members have promised to one another, and that we've budgeted for, but that at least so far looks like won't be coming in.  (And if we add up all the pledges from folks who've pledged for this year but not yet for next year then we'd be looking at $200,000 of shortfall next year.)  And, yet, most of the folks I see on Sunday mornings seem to be feeling really good about our congregation; seem to be feeling really engaged and energized.  So something's not clicking; there's some kind of disconnect.

I know that a lot of people from Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist read this blog, yet a lot of folks from other UU churches (as well as from churches of other stripes and no churches at all) do too.  So I'm really not musing here about the fiscal foibles of the congregation I'm currently serving.  I really am thinking about money, and the giving of money to the church, in a wider context.  I'm really dancing with a pretty generalized question.

Why is it that so many faith communities have so much trouble raising the funds needed to do the things they do from the very people who are the primary beneficiaries of those things?  

It seems odd, and I know is frustrating to church leaders widely, that this is so.  In general congregations -- again, at least the liberal/progressive congregations I know the most about -- are almost always one small problem away from disaster.  No matter how excited their members are about what's happening in the church the annual budget process is always a matter of figuring out how to squeeze the most out of every last dollar.  Year after year congregations "muddle through," knowing how much more they could do if they were better funded, yet not being able to increase the congregation's financial offerings.  There's an old joke -- the minister ascends to the pulpit and says, "I have good news, and I have bad news.  The good news is that we have all the money we need to create the church of our dreams!  The bad news is that most of it is stuck in your wallets." 

I think that there are probably several reasons for this.  Here are three:

People no longer know what's appropriate to give.  This is a big one, especially in congregations in which a lot of folks grew up outside of "the church."  This is definitely true of a lot of Unitarian Universalist congregations -- where in many cases a majority of members grew up in other denominations or outside of any organized religion -- but it's increasingly true within all liberal faith communities. That institutional memory of just what it takes to keep a church alive -- and the institutional commitment needed to do it -- just hasn't been passed down efficiently from one generation to the next.  My parents, and even more my parents parents, knew and understood the meaning of the phrase "sacrificial giving."  They understood that the goal of giving -- especially giving to a church -- was not to try to get away with giving as little as you can, or to give only what one is comfortable giving, but to give to the point that you feel it.  To give to the extent that there's a little sacrifice in one's giving.  I'm afraid that this is a foreign concept to the majority of people in the majority of today's congregations.

I've known double-income couples where one is a doctor and the other a lawyer and yet whose annual pledge to their church was less than that made by a single-income elementary school teacher.  To be fair, the former probably also gave to other charities as well, and may have had other expenses like country club dues and marina fees for their boat that the teacher didn't have.  It really doesn't work to compare one person's donation to another's on a dollar-to-dollar basis.  It is fascinating, though, to think about our giving on a percentage-of-income basis.  (And, as my mentor was fond of saying, "if you're asking gross or net you're missing the point.)

So . . . my family and I give roughly 3% of our income to the church.  It's a stretch for us, yet one that feels really worth it to us.  We believe in what church, in general, and Unitarian Universalist churches, in particular, can do for individuals and for the community.  And while 3% is nowhere near the tradition of a tithe -- 10% -- I feel pretty good about.  In part that's because it's an amount that, as I said, is a stretch for us.  In part it's also because I know that I've heard the figure that the average Unitarian Universalist gives 1% or less.  (And if you add up all of their charitable giving it comes in at less than 3%.)  I know that there are plenty of people giving considerably more than that, but there are considerably more who are giving a whole lot less.  In fact, I've heard it said that if everyone in the average congregation were to give only 2% of their income to the church -- and that means both that the folks below that mark increase but also that those above decrease to it -- most congregations would be able to double, if not triple, their budgets.

Another reason for the challenges many churches have in this area is that churches never really learned how to ask for money.  If you think about the congregational appeals you may have received -- or participated in -- over the years I think you'd agree that the vast majority of them sound something like this:

Well!  We barely scraped by last year, and that only because we cut everything to the bare bones.  We'd really like to do some good things this year, so we really, really, really hope you'll give our church some money because otherwise we're going to be in serious trouble . . . again.

Right?  Yet have you ever received an appeal from any other non-profit that sounded like that?  No matter how tight things might have actually been, most non-profits frame their appeals for donations in terms of all the good they are doing and all the visions they have of the future.  Rather than begging you to solve their desperate problems they invite you to help create new solutions.

This observation comes from a wonderful new book that I recently discovered.  (Actually, I didn't discover it.  A colleague who's recommendations I greatly respect, Tandi Rogers, mentioned it on FaceBook a month or so ago, and I immediately ordered myself a copy!)  The book is Not Your Parents' Offering Plate: a new vision for financial stewardship by J. Clif Christopher.  Rev. Christopher, a long-time parish minister and now professional fundraising consultant for churches, challenges much of the conventional wisdom of congregations about how to ask for money and, for that matter, why we do it.  A bottom-line summary of the book might be this:  organizationally, the church is a non-profit, so it might be wise to heed the lessons learned by virtually every other non-profit when it comes to successfully soliciting donations.

Here's one practical ramification of this notion -- how many other institutions give each and every one of their potential donors their entire line-item budget?  Not many.  Pretty much none, actually.  That's because these other institutions realize that people don't give to support such a detailed description of costs incurred; nobody donates to ensure that an organization can buy more copy paper next year.  People donate to a vision and, even more, to a vision enacted -- people give their money (as well as their time and their energy) to people served, lives changes, impact made.  Yet it is the rare congregation that actually engages its constituents at this level come pledge time.  More often it's making a plaintive plea for folks to increase their pledges enough so that they might be able to make a minute adjustment to a budget that barely allowed them to scrape by this past year.  Not particularly inspiring.

There may be another, perhaps even more fundamental, reason than this.  Today I was listening to the TED Radio Hour on NPR and heard a wonderful program about giving.  One segment looked at Dan Pallotta, whose original TED Talk is below.  Pallotta asserts that even non-profits really don't understand what's needed when it comes to inspiring philanthropic giving and that, "the things we've been taught to think about giving, and about charity, and about the non-profit sector are actually undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world."  As I listened I thought about the situation at TJMC, and the situation in liberal/progressive faith communities generally, and I thought it worth sharing some of these musings.

I know I've been away from the blogosphere for a while, and I know that this is an awfully long re-introduction, but I hope that you'll give this topic just about 18 more minutes so that you can listen to what Dan Pallotta has to say.  I hope you'll find it as worthwhile as I have.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Gratitude – What Comes Next?

Preparation for the Sermon:  “From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live.” It’s true.

We’ve been sharing thoughts on gratitude this month. Today we’re exploring “What happens when ‘thank you’ becomes not just our continuous prayer but also our way of life?” I wish I could share with you my experiences as someone who has mastered thank you as my way of life, but I haven’t. Not even close.

I have been practicing gratitude more intentionally for the last few years. My partner Jamie introduced me to a gratitude game—one in which I remind myself how truly blessed my life is at those moments of frustration and annoyance—those times when I am feeling particularly un-blessed, ungrateful. It is a very good game, a good practice. I’d like to say I’m really good at it now, but I’m not. I guess that’s why they call it a practice. I know that’s one of the reasons I come to church. Being here, with all of you, helps me practice being my best self.

Our exploration of gratitude, though, has me thinking about the role of “thank you” in my life. When Meister Eckhart said, “If you can only manage one prayer in your life, and it is ‘thank you,’ it will suffice,” exactly WHO are you saying thank you to? Because it’s a prayer, I’m assuming he meant God. That makes sense when you are saying thank you for some great cosmic miracle—the incredible beauty of nature or the birth of a child. Thanking God doesn’t work for everyone, though, particularly the atheists among us.

Today, then, I want to talk about the more mundane, the quotidian events for which we are grateful. Take, for example, an omelet. I’m not talking about just any omelet, but the most amazing veggie omelet I had the other morning at Café Cubano. Hmm. I can taste it now—mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, garlic. This is an omelet to savor, which I was doing quite vocally. My dining partner also enjoyed his omelet, but he took his gratitude one step further, stopping the passing waiter to say, “Please tell the cook that this is one of the best omelets in Charlottesville.” I imagine the ensuing conversation between the waiter and cook, who might well have been grumbling about having to work on Thanksgiving morning, but who was cooking with great care and delicious results. At the very least, I imagine the compliment elicited a smile.

I can imagine her reaction because I’ve had it myself. When someone thanks me for doing something, especially for something I love to do, it reminds ME to be grateful. I think of the time a student said to me, “Ms. Philips, thank you for teaching us.” Really, a middle schooler said that. As you might imagine, this is one amazing kid, so my only response could be, “Thank you, it is an honor to teach you.” Which it really was. But his gratitude, and more especially his taking the time to share it with me, makes me want to be an even better teacher.

The same is true for the work I do in this church. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve filled a few roles in this church—serving on the board of trustees and a few other things. For the most part, these have not been thankless tasks. I’ve been stopped short after a meeting, a class, or a service—when one of you has come up to me and said thank you. I’ve especially appreciated those thank you’s that come at difficult times—when we’ve had to do the messy and hard work of being in community. The thing that I like most about those expressions of gratitude for what I do, though, is that they remind me how grateful I am. It truly is a gift to be able learn and grow within the embrace of this community.

Thank you.

“From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live.”—these words resonate deeply for me, because I know them to be true.    (Pam Phillips)

* * *

Thich Nhat Hanh – yes, another Tich Nhat Hanh reference, and I thought I’d get it in real early this time – tells the story of walking through the community in France where he lives and seeing a beautiful smile on a little boy who was also walking there.  “You have a beautiful smile,” the monk said to the boy.  “Thank you,” the boy said to the monk.  But reflecting on it later, Tich Nhat Hanh decided that the little boy shouldn’t have said, “thank you.”  He should have said, “you’re welcome.”  Because the smile had been a gift to him.

From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live.  Giving and receiving intertwined.  Gift and gratitude inseparable.  “Thank you” and “you’re welcome” as mirror images.

You know those visual tricks where the foreground and the background have been so designed that if you focus on one you see one thing and if you focus on the other you see something else?  There’s the two faces looking at each other and a candle stick or a goblet in between them.  There’s the old hawk-nosed woman with a headscarf who’s a vital young woman in a fur wrap if you change your focus. 

What if giving and receiving were like this, too?  What if gratitude and generosity were really the same thing with the difference being merely a difference in focus?

I want to take what might seem an odd tack here, but bear with me.  Okay?

Over the years I’ve heard people complain about God.  Oh boy have I heard people complain about God.  Lots of the folks who find their way to Unitarian Universalist churches – not all, of course, but quite a large number – have some serious issues with the religious tradition in which they were raised. 

And one of the things that a lot of these folks have a problem with is the idea that God – if there were such a thing – would require people to be good because they were afraid of being punished if they were bad.  That kind of God – the one that “puts the fear of God into you” – just doesn’t make sense to these folks.  And being good out of fear of what’ll happen to you if you’re bad just doesn’t seem right. 

This is the theme of Anthony Burgess’ fantastic 1961 novel A Clockwork Orange and the film adaptation Stanley Kubrick made ten years later.  For those who aren’t familiar with them, the main character, Alex, is the leader of a teen gang who engage in petty crimes and “ultra-violence.”  While in prison he is subjected to an extreme form of aversion therapy that makes him virtually incapable of any kind of negative behavior.  The prison chaplain reflects that this makes Alex’s apparent newfound goodness nothing more than a mechanistic response, like a clockwork orange that would look like the delicious fruit but would in reality be nothing more than a machine.  The book is, among other things, a meditation on the question of whether one is truly good if she or he is only good out of a fear of what will happen if they’re bad.

My only problem with this critique of God is that I don’t believe that this is really what God is all about.  Oh, for sure, there are people who’ll tell you that this is what God is like.  There are even churches that’ll teach this, but I don’t believe that this is what the idea of God is all about.

My reading – and I know that I’m not alone in this – is that, far from doing good out of fear of punishment, we’re supposed to look at the world we live in, to recognize all of the miraculously beautiful things that surround us – from sunsets, to smiling children who say “thank you,” to really great omelets, to great music in church on Sunday morning – and that we’re to respond to all of these gifts by giving gifts of our own.  It is our response to an awareness of how truly blessed we are – not a fear of how punished we might be – that is supposed to generate our goodness, our own giving.

From you I receive, to you I give . . .  Giving and receiving intertwined.  Gift and gratitude inseparable.

Like Pam, my gratitude practice is spotty at best.  Still, if I were to wait until I had perfected this practice before moving on to the next, well, then I don’t expect that I’d be moving on any time soon.  Yet the question comes up for many of us – what comes next?  After gratitude, then what?  Because it seems clear that if all we do is sit around and feel grateful for all the good things in our lives and in the world that that’d be a pretty dangerous practice.  After all, can’t you imagine that a continual focus on the all the good things in your life might well just lead to a sort of pride?  A sense of entitlement?  Of “more grateful than thou?”  (Come on, we know ourselves here; let’s be honest – it’s possible, right?)

That’s probably why pretty much all of the religious traditions I know anything about say that the remedy to such a take-over by pride is to respond to gratitude with generosity.  “Wow!  I’ve been given so much!  What can I give in return?  How can I share from my bounty?”

I’m jumping the gun a bit on our upcoming pledge campaign, I know, but I really can’t help myself because this is what I think those things are all about.  Oh, I’m sure we’ll be talking about numbers and needs – how much money the church needs to keep doing this and that – but I really don’t think that that’s why we should engage in a pledge drive each year.  If that were our real motivation then we’d be no different than NPR – “you know you listen so why not chip in?”

But just like everything else we do here I think that this, too, should be part of the tools and tips for spiritual practice that we offer our members.  The real question isn’t “how much has the cost of copier paper gone up in recent years?” or “how badly do we need increases in staffing or space?” but, “how grateful am I for what TJMC has brought into my life?  How grateful am I for these people and these experiences?”

The same is true of the Leadership Development Committee’s survey that they gave out last week and that’s in the Order of Service again this week.  It’s not really about “we have these holes in our leadership roster and need people to fill them.”  It’s really about offering each of us a myriad of opportunities to find ways to move our gratitude into generosity.

From you I receive, to you I give . . .  Giving and receiving intertwined.  Gift and gratitude inseparable.  “Thank you” and “you’re welcome” as mirror images.

Actually, this reminds me of something that one of my friends in Germany said tome.  She was always astounded that we, here, would respond to someone saying “thank you” with the words “you’re welcome.”  In German, the response to “Danke” is “Bitte” which, I’ve been told, really means “please.”  So really the mirror might be “thank you” and “please” – a different feel.

And the really cool thing is that when our response to a gift – the “thank you,” an act of receiving – is “please” – an invitation – then we magnify the spiritual benefits of our gratitude.  Some of the most grateful people are those who give much, whether they themselves have much.  Generosity increases gratitude.

And, of course, if we practice rightly, gratitude increases generosity.  From you I receive to you I give, together we share, and from this we live. 

The truth is that we can’t have one without the other.  Gratitude without generosity begets pride; generosity without gratitude begets paternalism.  But the two of them together?  That’s the key to creating the Beloved Community we dream about.

To The Least of These, part 2

Yesterday I wrote about a link that I've been thinking about for some time between the homeless people on our streets who beg for their livelihood and the monks and holy people in every religious traditions who have chosen poverty and begging as a way of life.  I said that I'd been reading about the life of St. Francis and found that even these holy beggars were often ridiculed and reviled.  The question I left hanging at the end was, why?

I suggested in an even earlier piece that one way of looking at the poor and homeless is that they have a job -- an incredibly difficult job.  They remind society that life isn't fair.  That, "there but for the Grace of God go I."  Or you.  That, in the words of the folksinger Greg Brown, "No matter how we plan and rehearse, we're at pink slip's mercy in a paper universe."  Or, as an old friend used to say, "that's why they call it life and not picnic."

Most of us walk around most of the time doing all that we can -- both consciously and unconsciously -- to ensure (or, at least, to convince ourselves) that things will be okay .  We want to believe that, like a fairy tale, there will be a happy ending and that, like a sitcom, even the most difficult situations will work themselves out in the end.  We want security, and we're willing to settle for the appearance of security.

But beggars threaten this.  Those who choose their life of poverty and want are a threat because they call into question my sense that I "need" to be so secure -- and, of course, can cause me to wonder about all the things that I give up to gain my semblance of security.  Those who have their poverty "thrust upon them," as it were, are threatening, too, because they show me that it may not actually be up to me -- one catastrophic illness, one layoff, one bad break and I could watch my carefully constructed house of cards come crashing down around me.

Now . . . the mystics and spiritual teachers who choose, as Francis called it, "Lady Poverty," do so because they believe that the rest of us need to see these facts -- that life isn't fair and that our so-called security isn't as secure as we work so hard to convince ourselves that it is.  They also want us to see that, if that's indeed true, perhaps we don't need to work so hard at building a house of cards but, rather, could put our energy into creating Beloved Community instead . . . something that is real, and enduring. 

Yet some of us are so afraid.  We hang on so tightly to the things we're afraid to lose and, so, must attack those who threaten us.  And so we mock (and worse) those who need us the most.  People like my friends Shaggy, Mike, Jim, and Brother John.  People like St. Francis, and St. Clare, and Brother Juniper.  But it might be worth remembering that in the Christian tradition, God identified himself with the poor and the homeless -- Jesus described himself as having "no place to lay his head," and taught that while all women and men should be seen as our kin, it is by our behavior to "the least of these" that we will be most truly judged.  (Matthew 25: 35-40)

In Gassho,

RevWik