Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Lifeboating

Reverend Darcey Laine
November 5, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Remember that dot com bubble? Remember when everyone you knew was working for a start up? When I first came to serve this congregation, people were watching their retirement accounts triple in value. It felt like a good old fashioned gold rush, and people moved here from all over the world to be part of the swelling tide of tech growth. Sometimes here at the church we scratched our heads, wondering why we weren’t applying more of the principles to our church “business” that were rocketing start-ups into the ether. And then the tide went out. Start-ups closed their doors, more established companies issued massive layoffs.

But the church was still here. We started a Job Transition support group, a job networking e-mail list, and a job bulletin board. Members donated to the Minister’s Discretionary fund in case things got too tight for someone in our congregation and they might need a helping hand. Yes, the finance committee meetings got tense. We worried about our shrinking reserves which had been invested in the same funds where many of us had our retirement accounts. But every Sunday we opened our doors for worship, and gathered together in community to laugh and cry and remember what is enduring in this ever changing life.

On my Sabbatical I was introduced to the work of Richard Heinberg who wrote Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. Heinberg creates a compelling scenario for an end of Oil within 50 years, and has some disturbing predictions about how societies might collapse around that vacuum left by fossil fuels. His feeling is that it is too late to stop the sinking of the ship, but instead time to build life rafts to ensure that some of the best and most important aspects of our culture, of the species on the planet can survive. Lifeboats, he calls them, or quoting Robert Vacca, “Cultural Preservations Centers.”

Heinberg writes: “It is important to draw a distinction between the preservationist communities of service that I am advocating, and mere survivalist communities. The latter exist primarily for the benefit of their members. Such communities will be regarded with suspicion and envy by others, and will be perpetually on the defensive. Preservationist communities, by contrast, will persist through acts of service that will make them indispensable to the regional population. Members of such communities will teach important skills — food growing and storage, tool and clothing making … [provide] spiritual leadership and counseling, exchange depots for food and other commodities, seed banks, and more. Survivalist communities will need to protect themselves from the people around them; preservations communities will be protected by the people they serve.” (p. 160)

The Rev. Bill Sinkford, president of our UU Association, told a group of seminary students that “Church exists in part to preserve tradition. Change comes slowly” I can tell you that when you are fresh out of seminary this can be frustrating. You have so many great ideas for new creative things to try. But now that I have lived in the tide pools for a while, watching the tide come in and out, I understand the systemic wisdom that leads to caution and conservation in our religious community. But Sinkford was speaking to Seminary students of color when he said that. And the change he was speaking of was an end to oppression and racism, even in our own liberal churches. I think we’d all like to see that change come swiftly. With change swirling all around us, how do we make conscious what we preserve? What is left when the tide goes out? How do we choose to let go of the best we stand for, and let institutional racism, class-ism, sexism and the other toxins wash away?

I’m doing a lot of talking about lifeboats, but really I’ve never been on a boat for more than a few hours. So it might be a richer metaphor to imagine a carefully formed tradition something like a well-packed bag. I’m guessing we can all remember trips we took when we always had just the right thing, even in surprising situations, and other trips when we assumed it would be hot the whole week and neglected to bring a jacket for the chilly nights, or packed so much that we were exhausted lugging our bags around the airport.

I think that’s part of what we were doing a couple of years ago when we worked together to build a mission statement for the congregation, the two priorities that emerged were community and justice.

Community seems always to have been at the heart of what a church is, and so we work to preserve it. We care about this network of mutuality we have created. We like to see caring familiar faces when we come here each Sunday. And we love to welcome new people into our community and hear their unique and precious stories. We count on each other when we are going through tough times. Not like a social service agency- we have no services we promise. But like a family. If I know you, if I have been with you week after week, then you tell us you are in trouble, we feel moved from our hearts to wonder how we can help. Because this community is a living growing system, it requires constant nourishment to persist. If we lose our feeling of connection to you, we wouldn’t know if you need our help, or have something to celebrate.

As a church we seek also to expand our sense of community- how is it with the other UU churches on the Peninsula? How is it with the Ellen Thatcher Children’s Center and Stevenson House, both of whom we were involved in founding? How is it with the stunning pistachio trees over the visitor parking lot, or the squirrels who live in the Holly Oak by the peace poll?

We value Social Justice. Last week we gave kudos to elders who have been working in social justice and social action for a lifetime. We also teach our children that they can make a difference and that we value this work in our “cool deeds” days that happen several times each year. We refused to sign the loyalty oath in the 50s and lost our tax exempt status. We took in refugees from El Salvador in the 70s. We mobilized against prop 22 that would have outlawed same-gender marriage in California back in the 90s.

And we issued a congregation wide statement of conscience against the war in Iraq. Out on the patio right now I can see prop 89 signs right now, as our community works for campaign finance reform.

So we want to preserve and perpetuate the living community we have built, and the Justice work we do. We want to be reminded and to remember that our community is important, and worth preserving. We want to be reminded and to remember that we are hungry for justice, and that we are called to heal the world.

Beneath these senses of our mission are guiding principles. The 7 principles and purposes found in the by-laws of our association (and on the back of your order of service) are valuable to us because they help us find common ground in this diverse tradition. They provide some constant in a sea of change. They guide us like constellations in the night sky when we sail into new waters. We would do well to preserve these principles, to remember them, and to pass them on to others in our larger community and to the generations who follow.

But how do you preserve something? How do you hang on to anything through sea changes and storms. There’s a wonderful book called Shiva’s Fire that begins at the first moments of a massive flood in India. When Satya’s brother dies, Satya rushes to his brother’s wife to tell her of the death and to help her to flee. He is impatient when she pauses to lash a bag of rice to the side of their donkey. Of course it is this rice that feeds the village once the storm has abated. So taking time in periods of transition to choose what we will carry with us is important. But not all of us have such cool heads. This is why we have fire drills and have to renew our first aid certification from time to time.

We know as a culture, as a country, as a church we are in for some big changes even over the next 100 years. We worry about the depletion of resources like oil and water. We worry about the corrosion of our civil liberties. So how do we weave our relationship with the future, our legacy, the building of a lifeboat into our life as a church?

First, Institution Building: We care for our institution to make it seaworthy. We make sure we have capitol reserves, that our roof doesn’t leak, that we do regular fire drills, and make sure we know what our role would be in a natural disaster in Palo Alto or in the larger Bay Area.

Second, Enculturation: We teach by how we are. Have you ever noticed how you just fall into doing things the way your family did? Families pass on things like how they resolve conflict, how they are hospitable, how they celebrate. We created a congregational covenant here because we want to be conscious about the principles we are living day in and day out as we do our work together, as we live into this community. My colleague Cilla Raughley offered some thoughts about how covenants really work once you’ve got them. “Covenants are most important to keep when you least feel like keeping them.” When the flood waters are rising is the most important time for us to remember who we are called to be. In the onrush of change we must hold to our principles as if to a life preserver, and embody them in the way we are with each other.

Then I want to posit that we as a religious tradition have some special tools at our disposal to build our lifeboat, to preserve not only the best of our own tradition and our own congregation, but of our culture as a whole.

Think about how religion has historically preserved wisdom and tradition —

• scripture
• preaching and teaching
• liturgy and ritual
• story.

When I read the bible lately, I see thousands of little messages from the past, like notes in bottles cast into the sea. When I was little I was particularly impressed with the 10 commandments and the story of the Good Samaritan. I found here guidelines for how I could be a good person. When I was pursuing women’s history and my own identity as a woman, I found little scraps of long lost women’s ritual traditions hidden in stories of the patriarchy. When I fell in love with God in Seminary, the Song of Solomon spoke to me. And when I felt outraged with the injustice of our society, I read Amos and Jeremiah. I imagine some day that parts of the bible that now seem opaque to me will open up as I experience new aspects of being alive, or as our society changes. The bible was really the ultimate life-boating anthology of Judeo-Christian heritage for a people often in exile. Think of the Pilgrims coming to America, taking as their one possession the bible.

So what happens when the bible falls overboard? Then we have the oral tradition, which is deeper and harder to erase as long as it is carefully passed from generation to generation. I feel good knowing that there is a collection of books on UU history in the library, but I want all of our children to know a few of those stories by heart. I want them to know about UU ministers like James Reeb who went down to Alabama with other ministers to be white allies in the Civil Rights marches, even though it cost him his life. I want them to know about King John Sigismund who had the power to choose the state religion in Transylvania, and chose tolerance instead. And I want them to know the story of Olympia Brown who fought the system until she became the first female minister in the United States of America, and helped bring the vote to all American Women.

And then there are the little notes we tuck away to ourselves and to our grandchildren in the form of worship and ritual. For thousands of years we have asked our religious traditions to mark for us the turning of the seasons. We call everyone together in the fall to remind ourselves “these are our people.” We mark the darkest time of the year, and remind us that hope and life will return, that all things rise and pass away. And in the spring we gather together a profusion of flowers to notice and remember that spring really did come, and it’s so worth the wait. The cycles of life we also mark. Each of us passes these cycles only once in a life, but all of us steward the wisdom of those stages for each as they come into transition. We mark the coming of age of our teenagers even though most of us in this room have not thought of that transition in years, and we remind ourselves that those breaching adolescence have important work to do, and need our support and our witness. Many of us have experienced the loss of loved ones, and so we come together with some sophistication when one among us dies, and we bring our own experience and wisdom into the memorial service and the way we tend to the bereaved hoping to bring some comfort. These are just some of the ways that we have always collected wisdom and passed it on.

Maybe Heinberg’s picture of a post-carbon world is dead-on, or maybe flawed. Change usually happens in incremental ways, but sometimes it comes like a giant wave. We as religious people, as Unitarian Universalists do not shirk from the knowledge that we are in transition, that transitions are part of life, and that if we can bring our attention and consciousness to the future that is coming, we have a chance to do a lot of good, both for our own community and for the world at large. In the same way that the Buddhist practice of looking unflinchingly at death allows for a life of wholeness and depth, by allowing our imaginations and reason to explore the many possibilities for our future as a world, even though some of those possibilities are quite grim, we face the future with resources and wisdom that may support and strengthen our own future, and that of our children, and their children to 7 generations. Let us load careful our lifeboat in anticipation of those who will follow us. May their journey be eased by all we have prepared for them.