Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Community Ministry

A Reflection by Susan Owicki, Worship Associate
July 29, 2001
Palo Alto, CA

The theme of today's service is community ministry. For UUs, community ministry is available to both clergy and lay people. Jean will be speaking about the role of ordained community ministers, and I will ponder lay community ministry.

To minister is "to attend to the wants and needs of others." A community minister, then, attends to the wants and needs of the community, whether the community is Fuller's Spaceship Earth or your own neighborhood. But any community has many different wants and needs, and we have only finite abilities to help. How do we choose what to do? What will be our own community ministry?

Jon Kabat-Zinn poses this questions as "What is my job on the planet, with a capital J?" His essay proposes two ways to find an answer. The first is Buckminster Fuller's approach. Looking outward, he asks, "What does the Universe need me to do?" The other approach involves looking inward: "What is it that I care about so much I would pay to do it?"

It seems that these two approaches may lead to different answers. After all, the Universe may need me to serve the poor in Calcutta, while I feel called to be what Tom Lehrer calls "a doctor specializing in diseases of the rich."

However, Kabat-Zinn is suggesting that the two approaches, taken seriously, lead in the same direction. He believes, along with Fuller, that there is interconnectedness and order in the universe. That order and interconnectedness will bring the answers into alignment. It doesn't matter which question you start with - what the community needs, or what you are moved to do. Over time they both take you to the same place.

I don't know whether this is true, but it seems like it's worth trying. It is an approach that encourages us to see that the best ministry to others will also give us joy and meaning.

My late father-in-law, John Owicki, lived a life in which these two threads came together. Trees were John's community ministry. although as a lapsed Catholic he wouldn't have called it that. His employer was the Federal Aviation Agency, but his heart was invested in his family and his trees.

John grew up in Peru, Illinois, the son of a coal miner. As a boy, he loved to hike in the woods. In his thirties he took his family to Alaska (still working for the FAA) where he hunted and fished and reveled in the wilderness. In time the family moved to Southwest Michigan, a pleasant farming area that's short on wilderness and woodlands.

After that move, John began to put his energy into promoting trees and not just enjoying them. Gradually, he discovered that trees were his job with a capital J. It started with letters to all 50 governors, suggesting that the unemployed be paid to plant saplings along the country's roadsides. Before long, John decided that he needed to do the planting himself.

He planted trees everywhere - by the roadside, in parks, near public buildings, in his friends' yards. On his own 5-acre lot he had over 90 varieties of trees. One newspaper report called him a tree shepherd, constantly visiting his trees all over the county to check on their welfare. He drove around the area photographing and cataloging all the varieties he could find.

Once John discovered an old American chestnut tree, one that seemed to be resistant to the chestnut blight. He began to look for other surviving chestnut trees, and planted their seeds wherever he could. He hoped to keep the species alive until a cure for the blight was found.

People came to him for advice when their trees were ailing. He never charged for his help, and he usually gave away seeds or a sapling as part of the interaction.

John spoke about trees in schools all over his area. Over the years he gave away more than 10,000 seeds and saplings for the children to plant. He spearheaded the county's Arbor Day project, and helped school children plant trees that were later given to county residents.

John retired in his early 50's. He and my mother-in-law lived on a modest pension so that he had time for his trees, his true life's work. He died at 65. In his last months, while battling cancer, he appeared on local radio and TV to encourage people to build houses for owls, to replace their dwindling habitat.

John found a path that let him do his best for his part of the planet, while doing work that he cared about passionately. Near his death, he told my husband that he wouldn't change one thing he had done in his life. He was a fortunate man, as were those who knew him, and a true community minister.

---

Reading: What Is My Job on the Planet with a Capital J?

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

John Kabat-Zinn is a leader in the treatment of stress and chronic pain, as well as a teacher of mindfulness meditation. This essay is taken, nearly verbatim from his book Wherever You Go There You Are.

"What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. And what's more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination and maybe a prisoner of it as well.

Buckminster Fuller, the creator of the geodesic dome, at age thirty-two contemplated suicide for a few hours one night at the edge of Lake Michigan. As the story goes, a series of business failures left him feeling he had made a mess of his life. The best move would be for him to remove himself from the scene and make things simpler for his wife and infant daughter. Everything he touched had turned to dust, in spite of his incredible creativity and imagination. However, instead of ending his life, Fuller decided to live from then on as if he had died that night.

Being dead, he wouldn't have to worry about how things worked out for himself and would be free to devote himself to living as a representative of the universe. The rest of his life would be a gift. Instead of living for himself, he would devote himself to asking, "What is it on this planet (which he called Spaceship Earth) that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?" He decided he would just ask that question continuously and do what came to him, following his nose. In this way, working for humanity as an employee of the universe at large, you get to modify and contribute to your locale by who you are, how you are, and what you do. But it's no longer personal. It's just part of the totality of the universe expressing itself.

Rarely to we question and then contemplate with determination what our hearts are calling us to do and to be. I like to frame such efforts in question form: "What is my job on the planet with a capital J?" or, "What do I care about so much that I would pay to do it?" If I ask such a question and I don't come up with an answer, I just keep asking the question. If you start reflecting on such questions when you're in your twenties, by the time you are thirty-five or forty, or fifty, or sixty, the inquiry itself may have led you a few places that you would not have gone had you merely followed mainstream conventions, or your parents' expectations, or your own unexamined beliefs and expectations.

You can start asking this question any time, at any age. There is never a time of life when it would not have a profound effect on your view of things and the choices you make. But you do have to be patient. It takes time to grow this way of being in your life. The place to start of course is right here. The best time? How about now?