Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Part of Something Big

 

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
December 3, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

It’s not easy being a small part of something big. It is said of the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages that they could take 500 years to build. Notre Dame was a relatively quick job by that standard, completed in only about 200 years, its great north rose window completed after about 100. From the vantage point of one lifetime, especially a short, medieval lifetime, that’s still a long time. The grandchildren of the workers who placed the foundation stones probably would not have lived to see the light come through that window. What must it have been like to be one of those stonemasons? The apprentice coloring the glass, which might take decades to be cut and soldered into its place in the pattern? The digger of trenches for the mighty walls?

I hope that the workers’ energy didn’t come only from the need to earn their daily bread. I hope they were able to look around them sometimes and envision, in the mess of the construction site, the beauty that would be realized in their great-great-grandchildren’s time. I hope they received some satisfaction, dare I say even fulfillment, from contributing a part of something so great and glorious.

Belief in God would have helped. These churches were designed to reflect the glory of the God their builders worshipped: the creator of all that is. A pretty tall order. If anything could meet it, it would be a great cathedral: the towers filtering light from hundreds of feet above reminding pilgrims of their ultimate goal, the lacy arches echoing the complexity of creation, the hush of the empty space above evoking the mystery of this invisible yet omnipresent force. When you’re a part of something that big, you expect to feel small sometimes, but you know you’re not alone.

Belief in humanity must have helped as well. To know that long after your bones were buried in the fields in sight of the unfinished walls, others would carry on and bring the work to completion. To know that you are part of a chain of being, that when you die with the work unfinished, other hands will take it up.

What faith it must have taken to keep at it when there were other things that could have given so much more immediate gratification. Why build a tiny part of what you’re told will be a cathedral, when you can build a simple house with your own hands in a couple of weeks? When the original architect died, maybe only 20 years into the centuries-long project, what if someone puzzling over the plans had said, “What was he thinking?! Let’s scrap this and go with something simpler”?

Do we have the stamina to work toward a vision that will not reach completion until our great-grandchildren have children?

Just before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr., told the story of Moses and how it inspired him. Moses led his people to the Promised Land, but he never crossed into it himself. He died an exile, banished from the home he had longed for all his life and traveled towards for 40 years. He died besieged by loneliness and turmoil, tranquility visible from the mountaintop, but out of reach.

What keeps a Moses or a Martin Luther King from despair? Only the knowledge that they are a part of something bigger than themselves — something so big that they can’t reach the far edge of it — but that without them it would never come to be.

Members of our congregation were very active in two legislative efforts this fall that in a significant sense failed. Our Local Organizing Committee of PIA devoted tremendous energy to Proposition 86, which would have funded health care for every currently uninsured child in California. Many of you signed the petitions, or gathered signatures from people around supermarkets and your homes, and informed and excited, you voted for it. It did not pass, in the end. And Nancy Neff taught many of us about Clean Money, the campaign finance reform proposition 89. Shortly before the election, when the polls about the Clean Money proposition did not look promising, Nancy reminded me of an article by Frances Moore Lappé in a recent UU World magazine. She said it had inspired her to re-enter the political arena in an area that had seemed hopeless. Lappé wrote, “I meet many people who feel depressed and powerless. They disparage their acts as mere drops in the bucket, as useless. But think about it: Buckets fill up really fast on a rainy night. Such feelings of powerlessness come not from seeing oneself as a drop, but from not seeing the bucket.” ¹

The bucket is still there. These propositions that were voted down will, I hope and believe, one day be milestones on the road to health care for everyone and campaigns free of corruption and legal bribery. Others will look back on them and be thankful for the thousands of people, most of them with unremembered names, who added those drops to the bucket. Who laid the foundations on which a beautiful structure will at last have been built.

When we know we are a small part of something much bigger, our small part to play stops seeming insignificant and instead becomes a crucial role in what we know to be a grand scheme.

A few weeks ago at the Membership Committee’s introduction to our church and tradition, Getting to Know UUCPA, a newcomer cautiously asked, “Why are we so small?” Why so few UUs — about 200,000 in the US, a few thousand more here and there around the world? I offered a couple of theories, as did others in the room. Maybe we don’t get the word out enough … we don’t like to advertise, much less evangelize … Here’s another one. Maybe one reason is that we forget how big we actually are and how big we have been and can be — so we shrink to fit that diminished vision. No, 200,000 people is not many. But there is another way to look at the numbers: to look at our own small drop of 300-some adults, 80-some children and realize we have helped fill a bucket that is so much more. Too often we look inward, and from inside these walls looking inward, we are very small.

This congregation used to be a few hundred members bigger than it is now. A few decades ago, crowded to the point of discomfort, some of our members helped start congregations in Sunnyvale, Redwood City, and San Mateo. Years later, we gave a boost to the little circle in Fremont that sought to create another home for the Unitarian Universalists of the South and East Bay.

Now we are a part of a network of churches that includes over a thousand members. Fifty years ago, these churches did not exist. A liberal seeker in San Mateo could go to the Unitarian church in San Francisco or to Palo Alto, if he or she were fortunate enough to have heard of us. Many others remained “Unitarians without knowing it” until the end of their days.

I have no doubt that there are so many “Unitarian Universalists who don’t know it,” people who are seeking exactly the kind of spiritual community that our new members have joined this morning, just in a radius of ten miles from here, that we could become a congregation of one thousand. I also know that we have brothers and sisters all over this Peninsula, this district, this association. Their work is our work, their creations part of our cathedral. Most of the time we just don’t even know what it is; we don’t see the bucket, only our little drops.

I used to get depressed when I went to General Assembly and the Professional Days that precede it. Listening to colleagues talk excitedly about all the things that were going on in their congregations, I heard so many projects I would have liked to be doing at home. There are UU churches partnered with congregations in Romania or the Philippines, churches with 10-member Pastoral Caregiving teams, churches where half the members are in small group ministries, churches that send crews to Biloxi to rebuild homes and to rural South Dakota to build them for the first time, churches that start community investment projects. The number of possibilities seemed so many and the things we were doing so few in contrast.

But then I heard myself telling our own stories, and saw the excitement in others’ eyes. “You have an Elder Journey? (This year it will also be: a Parent Journeys?) and Worship Associates? and a bookshop? and what’s Baby Café and Get Better Bistro? Wow, we need those! And your choir sings every Sunday? And you have worship services designed just for children and their families? And your Adult Religious Education Committee offers how many classes a year?! And you give away a part of every offering? And you put on films about social change for the whole community? And, and, and … ” The gleam in their eyes wasn’t envy — it was excitement. Look at what we can do! Look at what we are doing!

When we know what else is being built in our district and denomination, we can realize how thrilling it is to be doing, not only the things a church of 300-some members have the time and energy do, but all the work and learning and service of a church of 200,000-some. And how much more thrilling it would be if it were 500,000, or a million … all doing much more than I and my congregation can accomplish in a lifetime of service. We have 200,000 lifetimes instead.

That’s why a few visionary people have begun the Bay Area Regional Marketing Campaign — why I and others in our congregation have put our resources into advertising Unitarian Universalism all over the Bay Area. I hope many more will help make this campaign happen when the fundraising letters arrive in your mailboxes. Most of the people who see the ads we buy won’t live close enough to Palo Alto to ever enter our doors. Some will, and we will welcome them home with smiles and hugs. Others will find their way into the embrace of our brother and sister churches.

When Gini Courter, moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association, addressed our District in 2005, she urged us to tell visitors about the other UU churches nearby as well. I don’t think I was the only person in the audience who felt a pang, a guilty little thought: “but then they might go somewhere else!” It takes a conscious reminder to myself to be happy when a seeker finds a home in Sunnyvale or Redwood City — to be glad that he or she is now one of us, to rejoice that we on the Peninsula have a choice of UU congregations, each slightly different in feel and focus, together that much more likely to fit any given explorer. And all building the same grand vision.

When Bonnie asks me for the names of UUCPA leaders who might serve on the District level, I confess to a little reluctant feeling of possessiveness: if I “give” her “our” best leaders, “we’ll” lose their leadership! As if “we” only consist of the members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, as if there is no bigger “we” we belong to.

And then something like the Chalice Lighters reminds me that we the leaders of UUCPA are not just serving this congregation — that like the stonemason of Notre Dame, we are part of something much bigger than this. How wonderful that is!

When I get one of those envelopes from the Pacific Central District, asking me to make good on my Chalice Lighter pledge, I open it with great anticipation. What’s going on now? Who is building a new wing, hiring a Religious Education director, renewing their choir? What new excitement is stirring in some California, Nevada or Hawaii town, thanks to other UUs I don’t even know? Someone is about to discover us who didn’t know until now that we are here. I can help make it happen.

I know what it’s like to be thirsty. It took me years to find the oasis of Unitarian Universalism when I was wandering in the desert, thirsting for something I didn’t even know existed. And you mean to tell me that this little drop of mine can fill a bucket to overflowing with the water that has quenched my own thirst again and again? All I have to do is fill out my check and send back the envelope?

When a congregation goes to a new building or members of an established congregation deliberately create a new one nearby, there is a ritual we sometimes practice. We light the chalice in the familiar sanctuary. And then we carry its flame to the new place in a joyous procession, and light a new chalice there.

The lighting of the new flame diminishes the old one not one bit. Instead, the light, the warmth, is doubled. The strength of the new is the strength of the old.

We don’t see that light most of the time, but we know it’s burning. It burns right now in San Mateo, in Fremont, in Redwood City, in Sunnyvale … in Chico, in Modesto, in Grass Valley … in New Orleans and Biloxi, Lexington and Concord, Bucharest and London and Manila … because people just like us lit it and tended it and keep it aflame.

Whether in our work, our volunteering, our political action, our families … in whatever small and local service we do, something much bigger than us is happening here. It’s so big that it’s beyond what we can immediately see. But we know it’s out there. And we know we can make it even bigger. Let’s do it.

 

Benediction

Blessed are the droplets, for they shall fill the bucket to overflowing.
Blessed are they who know there is a bucket, for they shall be filled with hope.
Blessed are they who can see beyond their lifetimes, for they shall walk in faith that their work will not be in vain.
Blessed are we when we know we only appear so small because what we are creating is so big.
Blessed are we who are part of one another.
Blessed are we when we give new life and light to others, for we will live more richly ourselves.
Blessed be.

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