by Leela Sinha, Assistant Minister

A sermon given December 3, 2006

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Baruch atah adonai alaheynu…blessed art thou oh Lord our god who bringeth forth bread from the earth. 

That was probably the first prayer I learned, the blessing of the bread in Hebrew and English.  I learned it from family friends when I was fairly young; they said it over every meal they ate, including the ones we shared.  They were never apologetic, never rushed, never either quiet or loud.  It was something that was done.  The guests were free to join in or not, but the blessing preceded the meal.  Our schools in southwestern Connecticut were half Jewish, half “other,” mostly Christians, and that meant that there was always a careful respect for the non-Christians in the room.  I thought the whole country got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur vacation days until I went to college in Minnesota.  Perhaps it should not surprise anyone, then, that I knew about Seder before I knew about Advent.

My best friend’s family had an advent wreath.  It sat on their dining table through December every year.  I had a vague notion of Advent as a before-Christmas something-or-other, but I knew virtually nothing of advent rituals until the year that my best friend went away to college and I did not.  One evening I was at their house, and was spontaneously invited to participate in the last Sunday in Advent.

We sat around the table, her mother and father and older sister and I.  They said a few words, and then we each lit a candle.  Her father, oldest, lit the first and shortest candle.  It had been lit each week.  Her mother came next, then her sister, and finally I, the youngest present, lit the last, tallest candle of the wreath.  We sat and watched it burn, ate sweet foods, and thought about hope and the new year, and I was in the circle, in a ceremony I knew nothing about.  Participating in a ritual you don’t understand is a leap of faith; inviting strangers to your tradition is also a leap of faith.  It was one of the most deeply spiritual experiences of my life.  I belonged.  Without question, I belonged, and I came to understand Advent as a time of opening, a time of welcoming, a time of beginning.

Belonging is a profound, mystical, spiritual, religious experience.  We don’t know what makes it real.  You can sign a book that says you’re a member of something but feel nothing, or you can have no ritual at all and know you’ve come home.

Of course, ritual can be anything and everywhere, so it’s hard to claim a ritual-free life.  Taking off your coat, putting down your keys, picking up the mail…could be ritual.  Don’t believe me?  Think of Mister Rogers, the children’s TV icon.  His sweater- and shoe-changing routine was every bit as important as his visits to neighborhood professionals to ask questions.  He fed the fish and visited the land of make-believe, and at the end of the day he changed back into his street shoes and sweater and went out the door.  Fred Rogers was a minister—I can’t imagine that all that repetition was accidental.  He knew that people, especially children, like things to be predictable.  The world is a scary, changing place.  It’s important to keep some things the same.  It’s important to have some things you can count on.

But who counts on them?  Who knows that they are the same?  How does something move from action to repetition to ritual?  

Part of it is meaning.  Part of it is intent.  Part of it is pace.

Walking meditations, tai chi, and prayer are all invitations to slow down and live deeply rather than fast.  A ritual is not merely a task—it is a part of a day, lived but once.  Best to live it fully.  Even brushing teeth is a ritual of care for oneself.  Ritual is repeated.  Ritual is mindful.  Ritual is about connecting: even meditation alone connects us with the whole world around us; even washing dishes is care for oneself and one’s community, and happens all over the world.  It is that interconnectedness that brings us to mindfulness of spirit: we have a place in the world that is small, but no smaller and big but no bigger than others.  We have gifts to offer; if nothing else we can offer ourselves.  When we offer ourselves to each other we strengthen the bonds of connection, person to person, life to life…

What do you do when you sing “Spirit of Life”?  Do you close your eyes?  Do you let the words lull you into a deeper, more mindful place?  Do you take the time to finish your grocery list because you can sing without thinking, or because it’s the only still part of your week?  What does the lighting of the chalice mean to you?  The welcome of visitors?  The call to worship?  At which point do you finish with the loose threads of your day and let your mind arrive here in the sanctuary where your body has been sitting?  When does your breathing slow?  When do you forget where you are and fall into a place of worship?

Ritual is about commitment and connection, and about touching something we can’t reach any other way.  And when we reach that inarticulable something together, we have a shared experience that cannot be passed on except by inviting others into the circle.  Much as we hesitate to say it, part of the feast we offer at our Unitarian Universalist table is not something we can rationalize, not something we can say, not something we fully understand.  It is that most frightening of things in a concrete world: experience passed not through the fire of thought, but through the fire of experience (apologies to Emerson).  And with such a thing, seductive and powerful and wonderful, we are called to lift it up, to acknowledge its wisdom, and to share it.  This is the light we are not going to hide under the bushel; this is the guiding star of our faith, with reason to lay the cobbles of our path and good company for the journey.  The wisdom we cannot speak, that we find in ritual, in company, in song; the wisdom of the body and the soul is what brings us here, and it is what draws us ever onward.

Fortunately, the same ritual that opens us to the ineffable can welcome others—and it is incumbent upon us to throw the doors wide.  It is not right to turn aside a poor and pregnant couple because there is no room at the inn.  We must make room.  Better yet, we must save room, for they are easily discouraged.  Ritual is not weakened except by inconsistency and inattentiveness.  It is not weakened by strangers we welcome, but by us.  When we fail to attend to our repetitions, when they become empty gestures, then we truly have lost something, especially since anything can be a ritual. Anything.  Your glass of orange juice in the morning can hold the whole world, if you decide that it will. 

Rachel Naomi Remen writes,

“I begin and end every day with a very old ritual that was taught to me by a gentle elderly woman who is a Tibetan nun.  Each morning, the first thing after awakening, you take a small empty bowl that you keep for this purpose and fill it slowly to the brim from a source of running water.  Doubtless, the originators of this ritual had in mind some high mountain stream.  I use my kitchen faucet.

“As the bowl fills you reflect on the particulars of your life, receiving your life openheartedly and unconditionally as your portion.  Walking very slowly so as not to spill a drop out of the brimming bowl, you take it to a…personal altar and place it there, dedicating all that it contains to the service of life.

“Each evening, the last thing before going to sleep, you take the bowl outside and empty the water out onto the earth,” replace the bowl, and rest. (216, My Grandfather’s Blessings)

Hers is an ideal.  It need not be a special bowl; it need not be water; it need not stand all day.  It might be a glass, your orange juice, a moment of prayer, of rest, of mindfulness.  It could be anything.  We choose our rituals, and for the most part we choose their meanings.

Several weeks ago this congregation laid hands on Mark Slegers and lifted him from director to minister of music.  People touched people until all the people on the chancel, representing all the people in the sanctuary, were connected.  He has said since then that it is an indescribable feeling.  Laying-on of hands is one of our rituals, one of those which come down to us through hundreds of years and generations of religious people.  It is a ritual that connects us through time as well as space, to the fundamental power that lies in people who come together for religious reasons and seek leaders, choosing clergy and laity who can nurture the community to wholeness.  Ritual reminds us of who we are, of where we came from, of what we can be.  It calls us back to our path and our potential. 

We build our communities on the routines of our lives.  We can use those routines to enlarge or restrict our communities—or both.  There is nothing wrong with wanting people who are committed to the community, who hold common values, who will support the others. 

But there is also an obligation to welcome the stranger.

There’s a lot of fuss about Sodom and Gomorrah. You might know the story: two strangers meet the very antithesis of desert hospitality when they seek lodging for the night.  There’s an angry mob and a lot of violence…and God is so disgusted that He burns the whole town to the ground.  I have thought for a long time that that’s a little extreme, but what do I know?  The alternative for travelers in the desert at that time was attack by marauders or death by any one of a number of means.

I suspect every culture has a ritual of welcome, but in extreme climates, that welcoming takes on another dimension.  It becomes a social imperative, because next week it might be you seeking shelter from sandstorm or blizzard or torrential rains or searing heat.  In a place where death is literally camped out on the doorstep, every choice not to open the door is a choice for murder.

I learned about Advent from a friend, but I learned about Seder in Sunday School.  Every spring, near Passover, we would have a children’s haggadah—the script for the Seder—and a congregation member who was raised Jewish, and a plate with the ritual foods.  And every year we would hear the story of Elijah.

Elijah is a Hebrew Scriptures prophet who did not die, and so is expected to return. The last cup of wine (we used grape juice) poured at the Seder is called the Cup of Elijah—it is poured toward the end of the meal and the door is left ajar for a while; tradition has it that he visits every Seder, sips a little wine, and takes his leave.  I have always loved the story as I learned it in Sunday school, Elijah as symbol of the universal wayfarer—the stranger who is always welcome at the table. That is a Unitarian Universalist twist on the original Jewish ritual which appears to have much more pragmatic origins but the ideal of welcome is real, and not unique to Passover.  Elijah is the perennial guest at your table, although it took me years to make the connection between him and the boxes Cathy handed out today. 

Those guests at your table boxes have been around as long as I have—they first turned up in my childhood around Halloween, next to the UNICEF boxes we used to carry and fill with pennies.  I think the boxes have gotten bigger, but the idea has remained the same: welcome a guest to the table; what we have is for sharing.  A friend of mine from seminary will tell anyone who cares to listen that he and his wife maintain a “ministry of hospitality.”  They do, I have seen it.  While we were in school they went out of their way to create community events which brought us together outside of the classrooms and interconnected our lives.  They had a signal on their porch to let us know when it was okay to drop by…and it usually was.  They organized communal meals and game nights; they talked and they laughed and they cried with whoever came to the door.  The kindness of strangers very rapidly became the kindness of friends, and all of our lives were richer for it. In this world, inviting strangers into our homes is a challenge, but the UUSC has given us a way to conduct a ministry of hospitality from our dining rooms.

Every one of us has had times when we were lost; when we were scared; when we didn’t know anyone well enough to expect their hospitality.  Our culture is not of the desert—we do not die without invitations, and so ironically, now that resources are less scarce we make less of a habit of free welcome. What would the world look like if anyone who knocked at the door was welcome at the table?

Our reading this morning was from the Song of Songs—

Hark!  My beloved is knocking.

“Open to me, my sister, my love,

my dove, my perfect one;

for my head is wet with dew,

my locks with the drops of the night.”

It is a lover at the door, pleading to be let in, protected from the night.  Kathleen Norris in Cloister Walk writes,

“For years I hated weddings.  I used to think it was simply a cultural prejudice….but it ran much deeper, a fear of giving myself to anyone.  And then, one night, when my [depressed] husband had hidden himself away and was found by a gentle policeman…I read myself to sleep with the Song of Songs and found us there, the beloved knocking, calling, ‘Open to me…’ and my own delayed response, the selfish thought, in the face of love—‘I had put off my garment, how could I put it on again…’The comic scurrying, the bad timing: ‘I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and was gone.’  …For years I had chosen relationships that seemed safe because I was choosing; in fact, I had chosen them because they didn’t require commitment.  It’s hard to change old ways, to let myself be chosen, blessed by love, as if anointed.’” (Norris, The Cloister Walk, 109-110)

It’s just a hesitation of hospitality but the lover is gone. Those who seek hospitality, the people who lack community, who need shelter, who would come into our circle are often shy and quick to retreat.  Our rituals of welcome must be confident and certain—Elijah’s cup, waiting, door already ajar.  We must know before we begin that we are committed to welcome the stranger.

We have a feast to offer, we Unitarian Universalists.  All of us have come here because we are nourished by this place, this work, these doings.  We come here for community, for strength, for wisdom, for new ways and old traditions.  We gather, we celebrate, we mourn.  People know that rhythm and ritual help to forge the bounds of community—our practice together, repeated by the week or the month or the year, makes us whole and holy and strong.  (Ritual is a tool of inclusion and a tool of exclusion; it helps us define the boundaries of community.  Let us use it to draw people in, to welcome people in, to share what must be lived to be believed.)  We can assume that people will wander in at will…or we can reach out: setting an extra place, opening the door, sharing the bounty.  It’s who we are.  It’s what we do.  Of course there is room at the inn.

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Copyright 2006, Leela Sinha. All rights reserved.