I believe that it is fitting that today's service is focused on celebration. We have spent a week and a half in grief and anger, in despair and confusion. Let us break free for this moment, this morning. Let us breathe deeply of different air, the fresh, sweet air of joy. If we do this open heartedly, and simply, and with humility, we will not do the memory of those who died a disservice. And what grief remains, and it will remain among us a long, long time, will assert itself within us and among us in its own time and way.

Let us, that is, let us choose joy this morning. It will empower us to go on, to fight the good fights we are called to, to offer the succor and balm we must give.

"Oh World! I cannot hold thee close enough!"

Edna St. Vincent-Millay's words ring with joy from a heart bursting with the gladness of life. And the words of Paul Wollner, a lesser known poet shared a similar ecstasy writing at age seven. He called it, I Love the World: "I love you, Big World. / I wish I could call you / And tell you a secret: / That I love you, World."

It has ever been thus. The hearts of human beings have flooded with delight at the world, at being alive. Thirty-five hundred years ago, in the Sanskrit Vedantic literature, the Kena-Upanishads, there is this passage that refers to an "IT," the fundamental creative ground of all existence, the Brahman - the vital element that IS life, living. The passage speaks of how we respond to IT . . . how our expressive response sounds when we come face-to-face with IT . . . It, the wild beauty of the universe, alive in all the vastness of its power and mystery.

Listen, now to this literature from three thousand, five hundred years ago, the Kena-Upanishad: "This is the way IT is to be illustrated: / When lightnings have been loosened: / aaaah! / When that has made the eyes to be closed - / aaaaaah!" That fundamental life force, is something in whose presence we must exclaim: "Aaaah!" You remember - seeing a new born infant, perhaps your own, for the first time: "Aaaaaah!"

And then, when the sound of our voice trails away into silence, we can feel a deep yearning, to be embedded in such a response; to live in such awe, not just in that brief, ecstatic moment, but for moments extended into hours, extended, perhaps into our whole life time. Mary Oliver, one of our greatest nature poets, writes: "Once only, and then in a dream, / I watched while, secretly / and with the tenderness of any caring woman, / a cow gave birth / to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him / in a warm corner / of the clear night / in the fragrant grass / in the wild domains / of the prairie spring, and I asked them, / in my dream I knelt down and asked them / to make room for me."

I rewrote one of Oliver's poems, for my Installation Service as settled minister in Boulder, Colorado, where I served from 1996 to 2000. It brings the question of our desire for the wild fire of joy, when we are deeply, truly touched by life, it brings that question into the chalice of religious community. Her poem was called, A Summer Day. My rewriting is called, A Sunday Morning (she gave me permission to use my rewriting). Listen:

A Sunday Morning

Who made the world?
Who made the grown folk and the youth?
Who made the children?
This child, I mean, sitting here -
the one who has spun herself out of the pews,
the one who sits here, wiggling, yet so rapt and aware,
who listens with innocent ears and wide light-absorbing eyes.
Now she lifts her face as we speak.
Now she rises, skipping off to class as we sing.
I don't know exactly what it is to worship.
I do know how to sit attentively, how to enter here
into this sacred space, how to open my heart
with all the other hearts, how to let my mind sharpen
with the sometimes passionate, sometimes merciful, words.
It is how I spend this hour.
Tell me, how else shall I worship?
Doesn't every hour of worship end? and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious church?

The wonderfulness of color, of human contact, of the night sky, of achieving a hard-won goal, of the glory of the oceans, of realizing the pain is over and we have come back, once again, to good health . . . all of this touches us far deep inside, and we ache for its liberation, for it frees us to live more authentically, more fully, more wisely - both as individuals, and as members of a living community of care and justice, such as this one.

Within the secure and affirming walls of Unitarian Universalism, what we plan to do with our one wild and precious religious community is to open wide the doors of life in which joy has its dwelling. Together, we look into life and ask it to make room for us. And one of the most important places and times in which we do that is here on Sunday mornings. Over the course of a year, of course, we will have sad Sundays, and challenging, difficult Sundays; we will have Sundays in which we honor those who have volunteered; Sundays where we ask for your financial support (which is, in fact, very much needed now); and Sundays in which our intellects are sharpened by the stone of some vital human issue. Through all our Sundays, however, I believe, there runs a river of Gladness, of a Happiness with life, of a Joy that grows even from sorrow.

To Celebrate comes from the Latin, celebratus: to perform a ritual or ceremony, publicly and formally; to solemnize. Also, to honor or praise, especially publicly. That is the definition of Celebrate in its transitive form: we celebrate some one, or something. And we do it by having a party for them. In its intransitive form, the verb describes us Celebrating (simply) For The Joy Of It! The wide open, happy joy of it all.

And that is one of the two dynamics of celebration I want to lift up today, its wide openness. Our smiles are spread wide, just as our arms are. But we are an intelligent, savvy and compassionate people, and we now know that because we have historically been mostly white, heterosexual, temporarily able-bodied and adult, and that our leaders, historically, have been men - because of all of that defining history, we now know that we need to be intentional about making sure those of us who do not fit those categories truly feel at home, are truly at home here. It's why, for instance, you here at UUCPA are continuing to declare yourselves a Welcoming Congregation - that is, a congregation that is, in fact, not just intention, fully welcoming to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered folks. You have understood that it isn't enough just to say you are welcoming, and to smile warmly at those who arrive here; you need to do serious, strategic outreach; you need to continue to examine and to change your patterns of behavior and your means of communication; you need to continue to hear each others' stories far more deeply than our culture teaches or allows us; you need to grow your sensitivity so that the exclusion of anyone is as real to you as if each of you yourselves were being excluded. The writer Mary Gordon once said, "We all deserve happiness, or none of us does." And Helen Keller, that physically challenged savant whose own story has been repressively sterilized by popular culture (she was a radical Socialist), Helen Keller said, "No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it."

So there's a wideness to our celebration, a wideness that is inclusive. There is also, paradoxically, a narrowness. That is, there is a focus. The focus is on what carries us deeply into life, what engages us ever more authentically, every more fully. I have a story. It was written by Paul Gorman in a chapter in the book, Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as a Spiritual Path, edited by John Wellwood. There's a guy up on the roof, right at the edge, with his infant son in his arms; he's threatening to throw him off and then jump himself. Homicide-suicide - happens a lot with children. He's been having trouble with this wife - mother interfering, they lock him out, he's sleeping in the hallway, and it's gone to the edge. That's where he is, and I'm up there with him. I'm the final guy in the hostage recovery system we set up in New York City, which I've been working in for eight years. Now, if you're not able to see the whole picture - how he's reacting, where and who your backup forces are, what's on the street, how long it's been going on, your own past experience, the chance that this is a new kind, and certainly what's going on inside you from moment to moment - if your can't hold on to all of that and still be there listening to this guy in a way he can feel . . . chances are he's gonna' go over the edge. Some one is going to be killed. We've learned that.

And he's in this very intense, complex public situation. Several of us are up there - a net in the street below, a lot going on all around. To say nothing of what's going on in him: this lack of self-esteem and manliness, feeling pushed around by his family, no work. But I also can recognize this overriding love he has for his child, who he's convinced would be better off dead than with those two. Sounds crazy, but it was real to him. So there's a lot for all of us to take in.

So I'm helping him get a sense, an awareness of everything that's happening, just so he has the picture of it all. And the more he does, the more he is opening up to me. Turns out what concerns him most is that there be a hearing at family court to work out fair custody. He wants a hearing. But he won't accept a promise from me, or a signed note. He tells us we got to get a lawyer and have it on legal paper - which we send out a car and find a local lawyer and get for him. When he feels he's got support from the system, he hands us the child. At that point we have to jump him, because we know that's the crucial moment to prevent the suicide. He gets pissed at me, because we were talking together and now this. And I have to give him this look of "That's how it all is, kid." Some part of him understands. Funny thing is, I can't remember much of what I've been saying to people at the end of these episodes. I'm running very much on intuition from moment to moment. I've had special training, of course, but that becomes a part of you, and it's only a part of what you're calling on.

You have to be steady and quiet inside. You have to have a foundation of belief in the absolute value and beauty of life. You can't get too caught up in it all. You step back, get as much of the picture as possible, and you play it moment to moment. That's what I've learned from hundreds of these situations.

There are some very important spiritual/human principles that Paul Gorman is making here. Spiritual/human principles that tell us what it means to deeply experience a maturing spirituality - a growing and developing humanness. And what it means to celebrate authentically. Let me spell them out.