A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau locates and rents an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall. After several weeks, the journalist realizes that whenever he looks out at the wall, he sees the same older Jewish man davening, praying vigorously, throughout the day.
The journalist wonders whether there is a publishable story here. He goes down to the wall, introduces himself and says: “You come every day to the wall. What are you praying for?”
The old man replies: “What am I praying for? In the morning I pray for world peace, then I pray for the kinship of all beings. I go home, have a glass of tea, and I come back to the wall to pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth.”
The journalist is taken by the old man’s sincerity and persistence. “You mean you have been coming to the wall to pray every day for these things?”
The old man nods.
“How long have you been coming to the wall to pray for these things?”
The old man becomes reflective and then replies: “How long? Maybe twenty, twenty-five years.”
The amazed journalist finally asks: “How does it feel to come and pray every day for over 20 years for these things?”
“How does it feel?” the old man replies. “It feels like I’m talking to a wall.”
Those of us who have faith or who dare to believe a better world is possible may relate to this joke. It takes a steadfastness and a willingness to experience doubt and disappointment to set your mind, heart, and spirit on peace amidst centuries of conflict, on global health amidst a pandemic, on the safety and wellbeing of communities amidst a natural disaster, and on liberation amidst the realities of oppression.
Are you moved enough by something beautiful or broken or both in this world to devote ten, twenty, twenty-five years or a lifetime? Just imagine like that man, spending your time in relationship to what you find to be most sacred – in his case God – and also spending your time in ways that you hope will make a difference to others, all the people you are related to – those you love and care about deeply, your community, as well as those you do not know, but with the help of a trusted source, you view as kin. This path
and the promise it holds involves a healthy amount of faith to return to the task every day, and faith’s natural counterpart, a healthy amount of doubt too.
In some ways, this is the same pull we respond to when we cross the threshold of a Unitarian Universalist congregation. We also want our lives to relate and be connected to something much larger than any one of us.
When people cross our threshold for the first time, they often share they are looking for a place to make meaning, to connect with sacred sources of truth, and in our case to do it in a place where they will be free to question, free to choose amidst a number of sources, and free to change how they might relate to those sources over time. That’s why here rather than another place where meaning making takes the shape of one path to God or the holy.
When we are connected to a source of truth born of love, which is so important to us… Love is the spirit of this church… Then, like that man, our sacred source will compel us to be in relationship with something we often sum up as community… the community in here and online now, the community of our city, our nation, and ultimately our world. Meaning that is true and trustworthy will expand our concern in ever widening circles outward.
Often when people arrive here, they instinctively know that the religious point of view brings us in relationship to others. Many who have visited over the past couple of weeks put it this way: “I am searching for community.” Perhaps, that is why the word ‘Community’ started to surpass the word ‘First’ for new churches. We care less about whether we were the first and more about how we are and our quality of relating to each other.
This isn’t a ‘me’ path; it is a ‘we’ path. Or, better put for us, we hope to offer multiple paths drawn from the teachings of prophets in every age that lead us to the greater ‘we’ that is larger than any of us. However, it is hard to feel connected to all the people of world and even harder to practice those connections in meaningful ways.
We come here to practice a life grounded in love and what it asks of us as we relate to others. We come here to practice building the beloved community, and we aim to carry that practice with us beyond these walls forming the bonds of love everywhere we go. In our tradition, one foundational way that we practice these bonds or commitments born of love is to make covenants. But first another word about the man praying at the wall, who again sheds some light on our task.
Prayers are powerful because the people who speak them, or chant them, or move them silently out into the universe believe in their power, and especially when those people (and I would say I am one of those people who believe in prayer) behave differently once these aspirational commitments are released from our hearts into our daily actions. If people are moved by prayers to be changed by them, then those prayers may well lead to
changes – sometimes small or hardly noticeable change and at other times large or catalytic change.
It is not enough to go to a wall, or a temple, or a mosque, or a church, or a favorite spot in the woods or your home and pray silently. To have an impact, we must engage the aspirational words of our prayers with the rest of our life outside of prayer or whatever is our spiritual practice.
When you reflect on it, this isn’t altogether different from another spiritual practice that is foundational to what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. We believe in the power of a covenant to create possibilities for transformation. We have a regular practice of speaking aloud, writing down, and holding in our minds, hearts, and spirits a set of agreements that represent our highest aspirations and our most sacred commitments.
While prayer may be private, our practice of covenanting is communal. A bit like the quilt in our children’s story, “The All-Together Quilt,” (by Lizzie Rockwell) our covenants are co-created with multiple people or groups contributing pieces that build upon one another to make a whole.
The co-creating doesn’t stop when the covenant is finished. The promises that comprise our covenants require both individual and collective commitment and action to come to fruition.
As with prayer, it is not enough to just think these words or say these words, we must act upon them through how we are with one another and in the wider world, or the healing changes that you and I seek will never happen. UU Theologian Thandeka asks this cautionary question, “Do we believe that simply to think about an issue is the same as to live in a way which exemplifies our concern for the issue?”
We are called to make these promises incarnate through our daily experience and experimenting with how to fulfill them.
Our congregation has at least two current covenants that I am aware of – one we share with other Unitarian Universalists everywhere – a set of seven and now eight principles, beginning with the 1st: “promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and continuing on to our 8th: “our commitment to dismantle racism and other oppressions and to build the Beloved Community.” A second covenant, which is specific to us here at First Unitarian Portland, includes a litany of promises… If you’re new or have forgotten, there are 17 promises. One of them is “to be kind and compassionate”… Easier to quote and say, much harder to enact… The last one included in that litany is “to forgive myself and others when we fail to keep these promises and begin again in love and faith.”
This last line of First Unitarian Portland’s covenant is inspired by the Jewish liturgical season we are passing through at this moment, the High Holy Days, the ten days between Rosh Hashanah, which began last Sunday evening and goes through Yom Kippur, which begins this coming Tuesday evening. The words are an echo of the line repeated in a
“Litany of Atonement” (# 637 SLT) written by Rob Eller-Isaacs for the High Holidays and treasured by many, “We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.”
The holiday of Yom Kippur speaks deeply to us as Unitarian Universalists whether we have Jewish heritage or not. It is a call to return to the covenants we have made and to the covenants we have kept or broken, to the sacred commitments which call forth the best in us, require daily practice, and an acknowledgement that we will inevitably mess up from time to time – not because we don’t care enough, but because we care enough to keep doing better.
One of the most prominent features of Yom Kippur services is the haunting melody of the Kol Nidre prayer. In fact, many simply call the service the Kol Nidre. It is a service meant to move people to introspection and a spiritual reckoning of sorts with what we have done or left undone.
What do we need to let go of to hold on to life? How have we fallen short?
How can we make amends? Are we willing to forgive?
What commitments no longer make sense?
What commitments move us towards our hearts true longing?
However, the Kol Nidre is not so much a prayer, as it is a sung legal declaration about renouncing all vows and oaths. This would seem to run counter to the ethos of the holiday. Many believe the Kol Nidre became part of the liturgy in response to Jews being forced to convert to other religions like Christianity or else face persecution or even death.
There is an energy in this part of the service that words matter and have power, and people must be free and not coerced into making false promises. There is also a sense of renewing the commitments that we are freely choosing with this fresh start. It is not about being freed from promises, but rather being free to make meaningful promises.
The practice of creating covenants in our worshipping communities goes back all the way to our spiritual ancestors of the 1600s. One often studied covenant is the Cambridge Platform in 1648. While the language would seem very unfamiliar to many of us today, there are recognizable aspects. It is a technically a voluntary agreement. Although, I would never claim our Puritan forebears didn’t coerce anyone – so the idea of being voluntary and the practice of it were no doubt quite distanced.
When we look at it today, we can see some of the kernels of now, including the importance of a gathering of people moving together in the ways of love. They used the words ‘walking together’ to describe that movement and the word ‘love’ appears 18 times in the document. The word ‘admonish,’ also appears 7 times and is worthy of note. In the Cambridge platform as with the Jewish High Holidays, there is a recognition that
we will break vows and need encouragement to take them seriously. Breaking a vow in and of itself is not an excuse to do it again. We can always start anew.
When we put our faith not just in God or in Love itself, but in people’s ability to carry out God’s or Love’s will, which we do, then we know we will make mistakes. We are imperfect vessels and yet we are also the very ones that love, truth, wisdom, hope, and the like interdepend upon for existence.
Admonish has a number of meanings… to advise, to warn, and yes, also to reprimand. It carries with it two significant points we might consider in this season. One, that we need one another to reveal more and more truth, and we need the help of others to faithfully live out a covenant. Our spiritual forebears practiced advising one another as individuals and congregations as a whole practiced advising one another on how best to fulfill their promises.
This isn’t altogether different today from when we reflect on our covenants at the end of an RE Class, or a Board meeting, or a small group, or as a community of the whole. We and ask questions like: how are we doing at practicing promises in our covenant? Is there something missing from our actions? Is there something missing from the covenant?
And that is the beauty of a covenant – it is compelling – it pulls us toward fulfilling it, and it can and must change over time. We call it a living document.
This practice of discernment and advising over time ultimately led to sweeping changes – the Cambridge platform through evolutions and revolutions can be traced to our current eight principles as Unitarian Universalists in 2022. Now, our eight principles would be unrecognizable to those who participated in those congregations in the 1600s. But, like we do, they might find kernels that remain the same as well as what has been lost or gained.
No! Who am I kidding? They would probably be turning over in their graves, but that’s how it should be. We are not a conservative or conserving tradition; we are a liberal and open tradition. Change is part of our practice, including changing our covenants. That doesn’t mean we take new promises or the renewal of promises less seriously. We hope they will lead us to freely choose love, which is ultimately a commitment to liberation.
The All-Together Quilt is also a story of a community formed through a regular practice of stitching together a diverse, multigenerational community’s lives. While we heard the story of making one particular quilt, it is actually a true story of fourteen years of practice. They co-created many quilts along with relationships of mentoring, not admonishing, of relating to a whole larger than any of the pieces, but where all the pieces are seen and give shape to something beautiful.
In the story, they try out different things and fitting the pieces in different ways. Quilting and covenanting isn’t something that you know how to do without practice.
As their community has grown more diverse in age, gender identity, race, culture, class, and experience, and with months and years of dedication to creating new quilts… They have brought forth new insights and increasingly inclusive ways to allow the lives and the artists in the room to reflect and act upon wholeness and beauty moving amidst the brokenness of our world.
Our prayer is this:
May we too be open to build upon our past wisdom and our past promises. May we invite the evolutions and revolutions
that ultimately pull us towards our heart’s true longing. May we be co-creators of community.
And may we learn, ever onward, how to begin again in love.
Amen. And may it be so.
Topics: Commitment