Leaves. Branches, Trunk, and Roots

This is the text of the reflections I offered at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, October 21, 2018

You can find it in the myths and folklore of pretty much all Mesoamerican cultures; it shows up in lot's of other cultures, too.  Hungarians called it, “égig érő fa,” the Sky-High Tree, and “életfa,” the Tree of Life.  To the Norse it was, “Yggdrasil,” the World Tree.  At the base of which was the pool of the wise woman Mimir, on which Odin sacrificed himself to learn the secrets of the rune stones and of magic, and into which Lif and Lifthrasir will be hidden during Ragnarök so that after all the destruction they might emerge as the first man and first woman and start it all again.  The World Tree motif shows up in religious myths throughout the world.  It is an example of the axis mundi, the center, the pillar, of the world and the cosmos, and it connects the heaves – which rest on its canopy – the earth, and the underworld – into which its roots grow.  In his book Creation of theSacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions, scholar Walter Burket suggests that because our ancient primate ancestors living in trees for roughly 60 million years, the idea of a world sustaining, life sustaining tree was coded in our DNA.

Trees aren’t just cosmic symbols, either.  At a tree planting ceremony I attended some years ago, the worship leader noted that a remarkably large number of people, if asked, could name at least one tree that held a special place in their hearts.  We went around the circle, and sure enough — everyone had a story.  For one it was about a tree that one of their children planted when they were in elementary school, and how they watched that tree grow along with their child until it, too, became bigger than the house.  Another person spoke about a tree on their grandparents’ property, in which they climbed when they were little, played in a treehouse when they were older, snuck out for a smoke under when they were older still, and how personal and painful it felt when that tree eventually had to be cut down.  I remember someone else talking about how, while visiting Sequoia National Park, they were deeply moved by the realization of just how old those trees were, and how much of history they had witnessed.  “If only those trees could talk,” they said.  Maybe you can think of such a tree.

The Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Merton, once wrote, “Nothing has ever been said about God that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.”  (Nature has often been called “God’s other Bible.”)  Emerson talked about how being in the woods brought him to a profound spiritual place:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.  There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.  Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball.  I am nothing.  I see all.  The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

I’ve known many people who, when things are hard, find a tree to rest against, to feel through their backs its strength and stability.  Maybe you have, too.

This morning I want to explore this symbol, the tree, in an even more personal way.  But first, a little science:

There are five structures that make up a tree:  roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and seeds. 

Roots are usually the first part of a plant to emerge during germination, and they have two primary purposes:  to bring water and nutrients from the soil up into the tree, and to provide stability.  Some plants have roots that grow deep; others spread themselves wide.  In her poem “Connections Are MadeSlowly” (which is number #568 in our hymnal, and is also called, "The Seven of Pentacles"), the poet Marge Piercy reminds us that “more than half a tree is spread out under your feet.”

When I looked up the purpose of the tree trunk, what I found again and again was the simple statement that it’s what connects the roots to the canopy, the foliage at the very top of the tree.  It is the in-between.  You might be tempted, as I was, to think that this makes it the reason for a tree’s existence, since nutrients come down to it from the leaves, and up to it from the roots.  It is more accurate to say that the seed is the purpose of the tree, the continuation of the species, and so we come again to the role of the tree being that which connects the roots and the canopy.

There are four parts to the trunk – the bark, cambium, xylem, and heartwood.  The bark, we know, because it’s the part we see, the outermost part that, like our epithelial layer, serves to protect the more delicate parts inside.  And -- again, like our skin -- the outer bark is made up of dead cells.  I say “outer bark” because there’s an inner bark that’s quite a bit different.  It has its own name – phloem – yet it’s not consider a separate part of the tree.  The phloem is filled with, made up of, tubes, like drinking straws, and it is through these tubes that the water and nutrients the roots have taken from the soil pass up into the tree.

I’m going to skip over the cambium, the next layer, for a moment, and direct our attention to the xylem.  This is sort of like a reverse phloem.  The xylem is also made up of straw-like tubes, only these are what bring the food created by the leaves’ photosynthesis down to the rest of the tree.  Eventually, though, the cells of the xylem die, and it becomes part of the heartwood, the very center of the tree, a dead layer that provides the tree’s stability.

I skipped over the cambium, the layer between the phloem and the xylem, because, if I’ve understood what I read correctly, it’s made up of cells that can become either of those other two layers depending on the tree’s needs -- it can become phloem or xylem.  Like our stem cells, I suppose, the cells of the cambium become what’s needed of them, and in a very real sense they’re what makes the growth rings as the tree ages.

So that’s the roots and the trunk.  (And I promise, the science lesson will be over soon, but all of this is important background to get the most out of the tree’s symbolism as I want to talk about it this morning.)  The branches are the tree’s way of getting the leaves out into the sunlight.  That’s why they grow the way they do, twisting this way and that, growing around things, even getting entangled with other things.  Yet if you really look at them, they're always moving upward.  Branches are the vehicle the tree uses to move the leaves to the places where they'll get maximum exposure to the sun.  This makes it possible for leaves to work their magic of photosynthesis, turning sunlight, air, and water into sugar, the food the tree most needs.

And as I suggested earlier, you could say that the purpose of all of this – the reason for the roots, trunk, branches, and leaves – is so that the tree can produce seeds, whether in fruit, wings, cones, or husks.  The purpose of the tree is its propagation, the eternal perpetuation of itself, its species.

Okay.  So.  Here we go:

Let’s say that the trunk is us.  You, me; any of us.  We, like the trunk of the tree, live between the roots which go down (metaphorically, into the past), and upward to the leaves, the canopy (which can be seen as a metaphor for the future).

We draw on those who came before, drawing into us all the legacy they have left us: the strength, the wisdom, the foibles and follies, even the lessons we can gleam from their failures.  This inheritance nourishes us.  The image on the wall behind me [and above] may look like a traditional family tree, yet it is different.  It was designed with the special needs of adopted families in mind, because families created through adoption do not have a single path for their roots.  My children are connected to the ancestors of their birth parents, and even though we’re not related by blood, they are connected to my ancestors and those of my wife.  And their children, and their children’s children, will also have this wider lineage.  

Looking at the roots of a family tree in this way is good for non-adoptive families.  Each of us, all of us, have ancestors who support us, who provide us with sustenance, from whom we draw spiritual and emotional nourishment, who are not related to us by blood.  Next Sunday is our annual Ancestors Sunday service, a part of which is the creation of an ancestors altar onto which we place photographs, mementos, and other objects to recognize and honor these roots -- all of these roots.  (So remember to bring your objects with you!)

For us, today, we are the trunk.  We, too, have a layer of emotional and spiritual protection, and it’s often made up for the most part of assumptions, habits, and patterns of our past which no longer serve us.  Which, in a sense, are no longer really "alive."  This isn’t necessarily bad – these things have served us in the past, and they can still provide the protection we need.  But not always.  Sometimes we have to be like the Shagbark Hickory, certain varieties of Maple, and the White Birch, which shed their bark regularly.  It is a beautiful thing to come across these peelings which have exposed a new (and renewed) layer of protection for the tree.

It’s worth noting, too, that this outer layer largely made up of outmoded parts of our histories is intimately tied to the part of us which is drawing up the gifts of our ancestors.  They are not unrelated.  Together, they both help us to weather the … well … weather.

We also draw sustenance from our futures, odd as that might seem.  We, too, are here in large part for them, those who have not yet come.  I often say that our congregation must be strong and healthy now, not only for ourselves, but also for those who haven’t yet come.  Just as our ancestors planted this community 75 years ago, we, too, are preparing for future generations.

If we are wise, if we are grounded, then we also have a part of ourselves, a dimension of our consciousness, our hearts, our spirit, (call it what you will,) that adapts to the needs of the moment, helping us to discern what will feed us most, right here and right now.  Do we call upon our ancestors, our past, our inheritance, or in this instance do we really need to draw strength from the future?  Like the tree’s cambium, it is good to be able to adapt as needed.

Then there's the heartwood … perhaps that’s just what it sounds like, for in a very real sense it is our hearts which provide us with our greatest strength and stability.

Maybe you're already ahead of me.  Our branches are the ways we reach out to the warm glow of relationships.  We humans are a communal species; you and I were not built to go it alone.  Sometimes the route to real relationships is circuitous; sometimes we have to wend and wind our way to get there.  If we listen deeply and well, we will always be moving toward love.

Then there are the leaves, the interactions, the kindnesses done, the generosity shown, the gifts shared – these things make that love real, and make it possible for us to produce seeds that will live on.  A recurrent theme in virtually every memorial service I’ve ever officiated is that the person being remembered, mourned, and celebrated had lived a life that would live on in the memories, in the lives, of the people who remain.  Over and over again I’ve heard people say, essentially, that they intend to move forward from their loss with something of their loved one inside them, growing, shaping their futures.  And, of course, these same people talk about how they hope to pass these gifts on to their children, and their children’s children, and on through the generations to come.

Leaves, branches, trunk, and roots,
It takes all of the tree to be a tree.
If any part were missing,
Or different,
It could not be what is.

Neither can we.
Leaves, branches, trunk, and roots,
Where we came from,
Who we are,
And where we’re going
Is what makes us, us.

 May we learn the lessons of the trees.


Pax tecum,

RevWik

If Trees Could Talk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, January 7, 2018, at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Bare Tree" (© Erik Walker Wikstrom  2012)

During that tree planting ceremony I was talking about during the Story Time, when it got to my mentor and friend Ed Lane, he talked about spending time in Sequoia National Park, out in California.  He mentioned, in particular, one tree there – the largest and oldest tree in the Park – the General Sherman Tree.  (It was named after General Sherman in 1879 by naturalist James Wolverton, who had served as a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Cavalry under General William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War.)  This tree – not only the largest in Sequoia National Park, but in the world, I’ve learned – is estimated to be about 2,000 years old, and Ed mused on the stories that tree could tell, if only it could talk.

“That tree first grew around the time that Jesus was on the earth,” Ed said.  It would have been able to observe the thriving cultures of the Monachee and Potwisha peoples, the arrival, and eventual dissolution of the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, a experimental socialist colony established there in 1886 (which renamed the tree the Karl Marx Tree, and which is remembered in the name of the largest and most eco-featured residence at local Twin Oaks Community).  This tree would be able to tell of Colonel Charles Young and his company of the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, who served as caretakers of the, then, 13-year old national park.  And, of course, it could talk about the visit of Ed and Helen Lane, in more modern times.  Oh, the stories that tree could tell, if only it could talk.

The oldest tree in Virginia, until it’s death in 2008, was a bald cypress dating back 1,000 years or more which lived in a remote swamp 80 miles southeast of Richmond.  (I couldn’t find anything about the tree that claimed its title as the oldest tree in the Commonwealth today.)  Oh the stories that tree could tell; the things it witnessed. 

The oldest tree in the world, until 2013, the oldest individual tree in the world was Methuselah, a 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristlecone, in the White Mountains of California.  It didn’t give up its status because it died, but because an even older tree has been discovered – another Bristle Cone Pine, in the same region, that is 5,062 years old. 

By contrast, the oldest living animal on the planet – again, until recently – was Adwaita, an Aldabra giant tortoise, estimated to have been roughly 255-years old when it died.  The member of our own species with the longest lifespan was Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997, at the age of 122 years, 164 days. (She was born in 1875.  To put that in some perspective, she met Vincent van Gogh when she was 12 or 13.)  The oldest living person today is a woman from Jamaica named Violet Brown, who is 117 years old.

The oldest living person today could tell stories of our history over the past hundred years or so, but the oldest tree, if it could talk, could tell tales of the past 5,000 years.

Besides being, I hope, at least at least a little as interesting to you as it’s been to me to learn all of this, why am I spending time on a Sunday morning giving something of a biological history lesson?  Because I believe that trees can talk, and their collective longevity gives them more than a little perspective.

What do I mean when I say that trees can talk?  A member of the congregation emailed me this week, having seen today’s topic, and told the story of a very difficult year for his wife and himself.  While he was in the hospital, he was able to see a tree outside his window, and he was moved to write a poem:

Outside my window

Is a tree

Large, imposing, yet graceful.

It's arms extending

Reaching towards Heaven.

Though last month stripped of leaves

Its fingers left intact

Provide haven for perching

Flocks of dark starlings.

Hundreds flying and landing

In perfect unison

Against fall's backdrop

of

Clear, blue skies.

Years later, while sharing this poem, someone suggested to him that the tree he was looking at, the tree that inspired that poem, was a living metaphor for … him.  He concluded the email, “I wonder if perhaps, that tree, at that critical point in my life, did talk to me.”

And, as I said to our children earlier, every single person in that circle during that tree planting ceremony – almost 25 years ago now – had a story about a tree – or trees! – that had touched their lives and, it’s really not much of a stretch to say, taught them something important.

We’ve begun, this year, to order our liturgical cycle not only by monthly themes – and this month it’s the image of a bare tree, but seasonally as well, taking a category of life’s Big Questions.  For the winter it’s:  why is life so full of pain and struggle, and what can we do about it?  Why do people we love die?  What do dreams shatter?  Why do our dreams so often elude us?  Simply, why is it so often so hard between the twin realities of being born and having to die?

Those are questions which, ultimately, have no answers – no definitive nor, for most of us when we’re in the midst of the struggle, fully satisfying answers.  But the “what to do about it?” piece, does.  And I think – not surprisingly given what I’ve said so far – that one of the places we can go for those answers is, not surprisingly, trees.

Trees, as the examples I’ve given, are often long lived, so they take the long view.  If those trees could talk they would tell stories of joys and sorrows, loss and gain, celebrations and consternations, hard times and good times, and they would tell us that all of these things come and go.  No one experience of reality is eternal; no one experience lasts forever.  And so it is with us.  Our lives see this same rising and falling, ebb and flow, and whatever hard time we’re going through at the moment will pass.  It is as certain as the branches of the bare tree bringing forth new leaves in the springtime.

They would also remind us that even in those hard times all is not lost.  As the poet in our midst noted from his hospital bed, even the bare branches in wintertime, “provide haven for perching / flocks of dark starlings.”  And so, for us, even in the midst of our struggles, when it might appear to us that there is nothing good, there always is something to celebrate.  I do not mean this in a pollyanna-ish way, the so often too glib idea that “every cloud has a silver lining,” as if that should make everything “okay.”  As Monday’s page of my Grumpy Cat calendar said, “Don’t forget:  every silver lining is part of a larger, darker cloud.”  Yet without denying the reality of that cloud, trees tell us that even in the times of our own winter bareness we can be on the lookout for those starlings.

Trees put down roots.  Some have very shallow roots, and those are easily knocked down during powerful storms.  The ones that have roots that go deep can withstand the hardest winds.  Remember, as the poet Marge Piercy noted in a poem (that’s at #568 in our hymnals), “More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.”  If we listen well to the teachings of the trees we will sink our roots, too, deep into the soil of our lives, deep into what grounds us and nourishes us.

At the same time, as Taoist sages observed centuries ago, the winds of life can break a tree that is too rigid, too stiff.  Flexibility is a lesson we so often forget – the flexibility to bend with those winds, to resist the urge to fight them, to push back, but, rather, to accept them as they blow, knowing that the time will come when the winds end and we can rise again.

Three more teachings, quickly.  (There are so many more that I can’t mention before my time, and your patience, runs out … but which, perhaps, may give you a conversation starter during the time of fellowship in the social hall following the service.  Go up to someone and say, “Hey, what have trees taught you?”  And then, after listening to their answer, you can say, “Here’s something they taught me.”). 

First, after the first service someone on their way out told me that trees grow best in a diverse environment, with different species.  A grove which has only one kind of tree in it doesn’t do as well.  I don’t think I need to elaborate on the lesson there.

Second, those Bristlecone Pines I mentioned – Methuselah and its successor?  Again, someone on their way out of the first service asked me if I knew what else it needed to live so long, besides the obvious sun, water, nourishing soil:  fire.  It needs fire to survive.  This, too, is something I don’t need to expand on.

The lesson I want to offer you of the teachings of trees comes from a fact about trees that I haven’t mentioned yet.  Those long-lived trees I talked about earlier?  They are individual trees.  There is another type of tree, a tree that grows in colonies, which, though made up of individual trunks and branches, are considered to be one living organism, because they share genetic markers and grow from one root stock.  The oldest of these is not 1,000 years old, or 5,000 years old.  The oldest living colony tree is … wait for it … 80,000 years old. 

The lesson here, too, is obvious, but I will spell it out – don’t go it alone during the hard times.  Be part of a colony.  Remember the truth that if we are like trees, then we are colony trees, connected at our roots to one another, part of one another.  This faith community can help to us to have the lived experience of being part of a larger whole and, if this community does its job well, points us to the reality of our interconnectedness with all those who ever were, all those who will be, and the entirety of the earth and the cosmos on which and in which we live.

There is no avoiding the hard times we will unavoidably experience in this life, but the world abounds with lessons about how to cope with them.  As I said to our children, I hope that in this day (this week, this month, this year, this lifetime) you keep your eyes open to trees, and to the wisdom they offer.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Roots Run Deep and Wide

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If you have made castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.”

I cannot tell you how many people, over the years, have told me that they discovered Unitarian Universalism at some time in their adulthood, recognized it immediately as the spiritual home they had been searching for, and thought that it had to be something new, something that had come into being recently, bursting onto the religious scene, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  They are often shocked to know that modern Unitarian Universalism has roots that go back thousands of years.

At the Council of Nicea, in 325, a priest named Arius argued that Jesus was not eternal, that he was created by God at a particular point in history, and, therefore, that Jesus was not God.  This heresy is sometimes named after Arius – “Arianism” – and sometimes by its more technical name – “monarchism.”  By any name it is the theological position that the Christian God is not three persons, but one.  In other words, it is an anti-trinitarian theology.  In other words, it is unitarian theology.  The Unitarian roots of modern Unitarian Universalism go back to the beginning of the Christianity. 

So, too, the roots of the other parent of our faith, Universalism.  During the first 600 years of Christianity there were six major schools of Christianity, four of which were one or another form of universalism.   This was the belief that no soul would be condemned to eternal damnation; that all souls would, at least eventually, be reconciled with God.  In other words, four of the six earliest theological traditions within Christianity affirmed some form of universal salvation.

If you have ever thought that modern Unitarian Universalism was something new, an example of creation ex nihil (creation out of nothing), then you should know that there are actually some pretty solid foundations under this seeming cloud castle.  You should know that we have roots that go pretty deep. 

And the reason that it’s important to know about these roots is that it is hard to understand – or to understand fully – why we are as we are without knowing at least something about who we’ve been.  Roots – a person’s or an institution’s, no less than a plant’s – feed the organism, and as we all know, “you are what you eat.”

In the Polish Brethren of the 1500s in Rakow, Poland you can see the seeds of our commitment to the principle of the separation of church and state (a principle they advocated long before Jefferson opined that there should be a “wall” between them).  These early anti-trinitarians saw all people as kin to one another, and believed that within the religious sphere all people should be treated equally regardless of religious “rank.”  Our current affirmation of the “priest and prophethood of all people,” or the recognition of that both lay and ordained people are, truly, ministers with distinct but equal important callings, can be traced here.

Around this same time, King John Sigusmund of Transylvania was issuing his famous Edict of Toleration which declared that within the borders of his kingdom there would be no religious favoritism nor discrimination.  This was a big deal, because in other kingdoms during this period people were being burned at the stake for holding the wrong theology.  (Michael Servetus, for instance, was burned at the stake by John Calvin because of his book On The Errors of the Trinity, and Calvin had a copy of the book bound to Servetus's body so that when he arrived in hell they’d know why he’d come.)  But in Transylvania, there was an edict of the king affirming religious freedom.

…[I]n every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well. If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve […] no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone […] for faith is the gift of God ...

The “freedom of the pulpit” we affirm can be seen to have its roots here.  And while this no doubt was primarily focused on a freedom for anyone in the Christian traditions to be free to hold their views, it should be noted that King John was no doubt influenced by his mother, Queen Isabella who, when her reign was under attack, sought and found safe haven with the Muslim Emperor Saladin.  That experience must have affected young John, and most certainly affected his mother.  The value of religious freedom which we so cherish flows into us through our well-established roots.

I could go on, talking about educators, social reformers, artists, activists, pioneers and exemplars of much of the liberal religious and political perspectives that form our faith today.  They are legion, and their enumeration can be a source of real pride.  Google “famous Unitarian Universalists” and you’ll find a number of such lists.  Champions of abolition, women’s suffrage, humane treatment of people with mental illness, peace, the vision of a united world, humanism, universal literacy, religious freedom, civil rights for people of color and the LGBTQI communities … I could go on and on. 

And it’s important to know our roots because we cannot understand why we areas we are without knowing at least something about who we’ve been.  And we’ve been some very good things.

Yet those are not our only roots.  Rarely are one’s roots entirely healthy.  I have said here before that on my mother’s side of the family I can trace my roots back to Berowold, the first laird ofInnes, in 1160.  That’s something I sometimes puff my chest out a bit about.

In that same lineage, though, I have ancestors who owned slaves, and one, John Harper, according to a paper of the time, held on his property a “mock lynching.”  His brother and sister had been murdered, and although evidence seemed to point to one of his nephews, it was apparently easier to blame some of the black people who worked there, so he took them, put nooses around their necks, and said that he would hang them if they didn’t say what they knew.  He released them when it was clear that they knew nothing, but he did that, and that is one of my roots.

And while we as a faith tradition justly celebrate the pride of our past, it is important to remember that modern Unitarian Universalism has not just strong and lovely roots, but rotted and poisonous ones as well.

So we celebrate Theodore Parker, who preached with a gun in the pulpit because he knew that in the church basement there were runaway slaves, but we also have Millard Fillmore, the President who signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law.

And we have often been at the forefront of civil rights movements, it is also a part of our faith tradition’s history is that we very systematically undermined promising ministries by and among people of color.  We could be now growing in places we wish would could be, but we intentionally ripped those roots out.

And along with our embrace and affirmation of life-affirming humanism,  many of our ancestors also advocated for eugenics – the so-called science that assumed that some people were genetically superior and others inferior, and that measures should be taken to ensure the growth of the former and the decline of the later.

For some years now, it has been the practice at our General Assemblies to acknowledge that the land on which we meet once belonged to someone else.  And so we seek out representatives of the indigenous peoples of the area to ask for their welcome.  When we met in Boulder, Colorado, though, then President Bill Sinkford asked not only for a welcome from a Ute leader, but forgiveness as well.  A part of our history includes the 1870s, during which Unitarians were among the religious denominations that sent missionaries to “civilize” native peoples in that region. 

We cannot know why we are as we are without knowing the whole of who we have been … and who we have been has been a decidedly mixed bag. 

And who we are today – not just our movement, but also this congregation – is a decidedly mixed bag. When I stand here and praise Unitarian Universalism I always begin with the qualifier, “At our best …”  “At our best we are like this.  At our best we are like that.” 

In our faith tradition we affirm lay ministry, yet often – and even in this congregation – we distrust our leaders – religious professionals and lay leaders both – and we do not always affirm one another’s “inherent worth,” nor assume good intentions of one another.

And while embracing religious diversity is one of the cornerstone values we espouse, we can be as closed-minded about this as anyone else, and be convinced that some religious perspectives – particularly, perhaps, the ones we happen to hold – are better than others.  All too often, all too many of us believe this, and we demonstrate this belief with our actions.  In our movement – even within this congregation – there are people who won’t say what they believe because they believe that what they’d say wouldn’t be welcome, and that they, then, would be unwelcome.

We lift up as a virtue the freedom of thought and behavior that our roots carry to us from those earliest of days, yet this freedom can often lead to a lack of a sense of engagement.  Since this faith does not tell us what to believe or what should do, far too many of us – even in this congregation – far too often come when its convenient to do so, holding back from a full-on commitment to this congregation, in large part, because we do not feel compelled.  I think that one of the sources of the low level of the contributions of time, talent, and treasure so many have observed can be traced to this.

We cannot understand why we are as we are if we do not know – and own – all that we have been.  And while some of our roots have been deep and strong, others have been rotten and poisonous.

Yet my message this morning is not a condemnation.  For when we are not at our best we are not evil, we are simply as human, and our institutions are as human, as is so often true of anyone else.  To move forward, though, to live more often from our best, we can not ignore those roots we would prefer not to see.  If we do they will continue to exert their putrid and putrefying influence in ways we will not recognize, and might not even be able to imagine.

Our roots – both our powerful and our poisonous – affect who we are, yet they do not dictate who we will become.  That is entirely up to us.  From which roots we draw our nourishment is a choice, and we – as individuals, as a congregation, as a faith tradition, and as a society – must make that choice.

The good news is that our Unitarian roots remind us that we have the mind and the will to make such choices wisely, and our Universalist roots remind us that we will, in the end, always choose Love.

Pax tecum,

RevWik