I’m so glad to be with all of you this morning. I’ve met a lot of you already, and I know that there are probably a lot more folks out there who still have questions about me. I’ll take a guess that one of the most prominent ones is, “How do I pronounce her last name??” Don’t worry — this is a common question, and actually one my parents had to wrestle with as well.

Because before I was born, my parents had a deal — if I was a girl, I’d get my mom’s last name, Mattingly, and if I was a boy, I’d get my dad’s. I guess my dad either didn’t realize how important it was to him for his kid to have his name, or didn’t realize that there was a possibility I wouldn’t be a boy, because when I was born, he begged my mom to let me have his name.

He pronounced it MICK-a-witz, the American way, which my mom didn’t really like. She preferred the Polish pronunciation, Mich-KYAY-vich. Even though it went against their agreement, she compromised with my dad and said I could have his last name, as long as we pronounced it the Polish way, Mich-kyay-vich.

My dad was not one to tell family stories, so I don’t know much about the Polish side of my family, other than that they spent about five hundred years as Catholic nobility in Lithuania, where they were missionaries and colonizers. Eventually they had a farm and raised horses which were conscripted into the Russian Cavalry. My great-great-grandparents, Joseph and Josephine Mickiewicz (and their nine children) fled to the United States in 1895 to escape the boys being drafted into the Cavalry as well, which at that point had a term of service of thirty years.

Knowing this about my family made me pay particular attention when I began learning about the Polish Unitarian movement during seminary. I’d learned before about the historical roots of the American Unitarian movement in the eighteen-hundreds, but never knew that Unitarianism briefly flourished in Poland and Lithuania two hundred years before that, before being brutally and systematically suppressed, and I wondered if my ancestors had participated in that suppression.

Poland had been a place of relative religious tolerance, with the Jewish and Pagan minorities mostly coexisting with the Catholic majority, but when new Christian theologies began to spread in the 1500s that centered the unity of God and rejected the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this threatened the Catholic authorities.

And so, in 1539, Katherine Weigel, who was an eighty-year-old woman who declared the unity of God, and refused to recognize Jesus Christ as the Son of God, was told by Catholic authorities that she could either recant her beliefs or be burned at the stake. She chose the latter, and reportedly went to her death “boldly and cheerfully, unwilling to compromise her beliefs.” Can you imagine having to choose between your life and Unitarian Universalism? I think it’s pretty hard most of us to fathom.

In the decades after Katherine Weigel’s death, in Poland and Lithuania, a group called the Polish Brethren began to take form. They held up the importance of religious plurality and free choice in faith, much like we do in Unitarian Universalism today.

Through debate and conversation together, the Polish Brethren let their views evolve over time, listening thoughtfully, and letting their group’s theologies grow and change as their individual understandings did. Sound familiar to this church?

Because of this openness and emphasis on reason and direct experience, the Polish Brethren gained a lot of followers and founded dozens of churches. They even founded a town called Rakow that was a haven and utopia of sorts, with an academy and printing press that became the center of Unitarian life in Europe for several decades.

But, in towns besides Rakow, the Catholic order of Jesuits, who felt even more threatened by this non-doctrinal, free-thinking group, began attacking members of the Polish Brethren with increasing vitriol. They harassed churchgoers, burned down their churches, desecrated their graves, and assaulted their ministers and leaders, and in 1611, they brutally executing Polish Brethren prosthelytizer Iwan Tyszkiewicz when he refused to renounce his beliefs.

Eventually, even the town of Rakow was destroyed. The schools and printing press were levelled, the books burned, and all of the Polish Brethren were ordered to leave the town within four week’s time or be killed. As refugees from their homes, for years they tried to establish new cultural centers, but each time they were met with violence and pushed out again.

Finally, in 1658, Polish authorities explicitly outlawed the “Unitarian heresy”, and the Polish Brethren had to either leave the country within two years, renounce their faith, or be put to death. Hundreds scattered to Prussia, Transylvania, and Holland, in poverty and ill health. And many more, without the financial means to relocate, converted to Catholicism and remained in Poland.

I’m curious, how many of you have heard of the Polish Brethren before today?

Yeah — I had never heard of them while I was growing up in the pews of my modern UU churches, which I find sad, because though the Polish Unitarians were not the direct historical ancestors of our modern movement, they are certainly our spiritual ancestors. And by spiritual ancestors I mean that we can invoke thier legacy and their memory as we do the work of seeking wholeness and integrity in this chaotic world today.

One thing that I love about the story of the Polish Brethren is that it flies in the face of the common quip that “UUs don’t really have any beliefs in particular” or that “we can pretty much believe whatever we want.”

It’s actually the opposite — the tenets that our Polish ancestors lived and died for have very strong resonance with our modern faith today: the value of religious tolerance, the unity of all divinity, the importance of reason and freewill in understanding the world and our lives, and salvation in this lifetime through accountable, just and peaceful relationship with one another. To me, these ARE things worth living and dying for, and we can claim our Polish spiritual ancestors in these beliefs.

This spring, the night after I first read stories of Katherine Weigel and Iwan Tyszkiewicz, and of all of the persecuted and displaced Polish Unitarians, I had a powerful, violent, and moving dream about that last piece of the Polish Brethren theology, salvation in this live through relationship to one another.

It was long and complex, but in the final scene, I was on a school bus full of terrified and panicked adults, and we were fleeing the town we lived in as military assailants wreaked havoc. I was one of several people who the soldiers were specifically searching for, so I laid in the aisle of the bus so I couldn’t be seen through the windows.

But, as we got to the edge of town, we saw that they had established a checkpoint ahead. The soldiers were firing into vehicles, and I realized that they hadn’t been searching for me, particularly, after all — they intended destruction on everyone in the town, and didn’t care one bit about killing innocent people. Everyone on the bus could see that there was absolutely no way that we would escape alive, and became even more panicked.

But when I realized that there was no escape, I actually became a lot calmer. Without thinking about it or choosing, almost as if watching myself in a movie, I stood up from the aisle, and walked past all the people to the front of the bus.

There I found a large bowl of water with a wooden cup floating in it. I picked up a cupful of water and held it up to the bus of people and said, “We are going to take communion now.”

I explained to this assortment of people — not UUs, or people who were necessarily familiar with the practice of communion — I explained that water connects us all through our very molecules, as ancient as time and as fresh and present as ever.

I told them that though we don’t know each other, we are here together right now, and we are connected by this terrible thing that we are facing. I said, “we are going to die together in just a few minutes, and though there is nothing we can do to control that, we do have the power to choose how we face it.”

I said that in my tradition, OUR tradition, in Unitarian Universalism, we each hold the power to bless one another and to see and name holiness. And so, I blessed the water, and drank some, and invited each person to drink it, bless it, and pass it to the next person.

The first person I passed the cup to was the woman in the first seat. She wasn’t one of the townspeople, an extra bus driver perhaps, and either way was neutral in this unfolding drama, and I wasn’t sure if she would join us. But as soon as I offered her the cup, and met her eyes, and invited her in to this ritual with us, she came alive and with an expression of gratitude, reciprocated my connection, taking the cup, drinking from it, and blessing the water and passing it to the one behind her.

One by one, the cup passed from one person to the next, and the next, and the next, aligning us with the substance of ourselves and calling forth a shared divinity together. As the blessings passed through the bus, the energy changed and aligned, somehow. It felt like being part of a flock of birds, or maybe like signing in harmony together.

Before we even reached the checkpoint, the dream faded, and I was just left with the feeling of unity, connection, peace, resolve, and common purpose.

From my dream I learned in an explicit way that even though we may not have control over the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we do have the power to choose what our response will be. In the dream, we were going to die either way — the choice was whether we died in full awareness of our interdependence and in communion with our divine power, or if we died lonely and fearful, isolated by our own distress.

In the example of the Polish Unitarians, who I am sure inspired my dream that night, even though the movement eventually died out, hundreds of people chose their beliefs and their community, despite an uncertain future, rather than converting to a faith that didn’t resonate with their souls or have grounding in their community.

And I do want to also honor those who stayed behind and converted, making the choices they felt they needed to for their families, for one reason or another. Either way, all of them found ways to choose to preserve dignity and identity in the face of terror.

I sincerely hope that nobody here ever has to choose between their literal lives and their values. Though we all know, right, that there are still those in our world and our communities who do have to make that choice. In some ways, though, even the most mundane moments of our lives are not so different from my dream: In the dream we were all stuck on the bus together, in a dire circumstance, about to die.

In waking life, we are all here together, stuck in this one world together. And even everyday life is, and has been, dire. (Most recently, I have been seething at our culture and our political system’s disregard for life and justice, and I have been grieving the sobering reports on climate change to come.)

And we are all certainly going to die. Even optimistically, nobody here today will be here in 150 years, right?

And yet, even despite being stuck together, in dire times, facing certain death, we can still choose life. We can welcome each other’s spirits and wholeness. We can choose to look each other in the eye and say, I see you, I love you. In the words of Reverend Theresa Inés Soto, we can say, “we are here. Imperfect and together and reaching. You can hold my hand if you want. I washed it with soap.”

We’re here together, floating in this river, and (as Suzanne Enzwiler said) there are certainly rapids ahead. We could choose to go it alone, or we could choose, at the very least, to have company in the difficulty, and at best, to navigate it collectively with more ease. We can choose to join together, and to claim one another as our own.

The words to our opening hymn this morning came from the Hebrew Bible, from the Book of Ruth. In it, Ruth is told in several ways by her mother-in-law Naomi to return to her own village and family of origin, now that both of their husbands have died, so that Ruth might have a chance at marrying again and raising a family. But the two women have become family to one another, and Ruth says to Naomi,

“Do not urge me to leave you, or to turn from following you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.”

What would our lives be like if we could claim each other in this way, in a tangible way? That is what a covenantal church is, right? It’s making promises that bind us together. This is the cornerstone of our faith: belonging to one another. We can choose to say, like Ruth did to Naomi, that “your people are my people” and to act accordingly.

Now I know that in this congregation and in Unitarian Universalism we may not always go as far as to say that “your God is my God” like Ruth did, but interpreted a different way I think it does speak to our faith. It doesn’t need to mean that we all have to have the same beliefs, the same Gods.

Instead it means that within a covenant, the divinity within YOU, is divinity I honor, and that the divinity within ME is divinity YOU honor. This connection is part of what we center every time we worship in this congregation. It is why we seek to welcome newcomers and to build community within our church.

Since arriving here I have met so many of you who hold this sacred welcome in your hearts. And still, I have also met many of you who have shared with me the challenges and difficulties of finding your place and your people in this very large congregation. It’s easy, sometimes, to feel lost in the bigness, to feel like you are not really being seen and honored for who you are and your divinity.

So my hope is that today we might realize more fully that we are all on that bus together, and that in every moment we have the opportunity to really see one another, to build love and connection, to claim one another as our people.

Maybe this is contributing to the life of the church through finances, energy, and time. Maybe this is sitting next to someone you didn’t know before, or starting a conversation with someone new at coffee hour.

Maybe this is extending grace to that person who really irritates you.

Our Unitarian Universalist ancestors, the Polish Brethren among them, tell us of the possibility salvation in this life. By my dream I am reminded I am reminded that wholeness, that salvation, can be present in even the most dire of circumstances when we listen to Spirit and when we join together.

I am reminded that communion, the practice of honoring that which ties us together, is not about any particular historical religious ritual, but about choosing to acknowledge that we share in this life together right now, and whether or not it’s apparent, we have a shared future as well.

What does communion look like in THIS community? I feel communion when we are worshipping together. When we’re singing together, being close to one another, working for justice together, laughing and drinking coffee together. And when we align our hearts in prayer together.

Please join me in a spirit of prayer.

Divine tapestry of love and grace, we give gratitude for our lives and the opportunity to experience the world together. We give thanks for our ancestors, those whose blood runs in our veins, and those whose spirits animate us, those whose ideas have become our own, and those whose lives made our own lives possible. Encircle us with care, open our hearts to the beauty that always exists within, and around, and between us.

For all those in this congregation and the world right now who must choose between their lives and their integrity, those who are persecuted, isolated, distressed, and lonely, we offer a prayer of wholeness, liberation and interdependence. For those without community, and for everyone who knows the desires of their own heart and cannot express them, we pray for healing, for courage, and for communion with the divine that is all around us.

So may it be, Aamin, Amen.

Topics: Mutuality