One day this summer, on a warm Friday afternoon, a dog named Tillie showed up on our front porch. Tillie was a shepherd and collie mix with a beautiful thick black and tan colored coat. We didn’t recognize Tillie from the neighborhood but she seemed to feel right at home on our porch. We were not sure how long she was out there before we noticed. When we did we went out and greeted her and she promptly invited herself into the house. We invited her to take a tour of the back yard and then she came back inside. I was working upstairs and she settled down on the rug at my feet.
It turned out that Tillie lived just a couple blocks away and she was in the care of a new house sitter. I’m imagining that maybe Tillie felt that since her humans were on holiday she may as well check out the neighborhood in a way that she hadn’t been allowed to for awhile. After some calls we eventually contacted the owner who contacted the house sitter who made their way over to pick up our unexpected guest.
Now this is not all that remarkable a story except for the fact that it did feel a little remarkable on that day, in this COVID, or maybe now we’d describe it as this, at least hopefully, coming-out-of-COVID time. Guests, including canines, have been few and far between in our household, so somehow this uninvited guest felt oddly adventursesome. It almost felt as if we had all conspired to break some kind of rule.
Funny how several months in isolation can change the way we look at the world or at least our reaction to a dog showing up at our door.
As we continue to make our way through this time there will no doubt be plenty of readjusting. I think many of us are figuring out any number of things. When does it feel safe to be in groups of people? How do we feel about wearing masks or not? And this week with news of the rapidly spreading variant, especially among the unvaccinated, it feels as if once again we are on shifting ground.
Now I should note here that dogs, all through this COVID time, have been a kind of marker for me. Over all those months when it was the norm to distance and walk out of the way to avoid other humans and their dogs you’d meet while on walks the dogs seemed to keep asking, “what’s the deal with all of this? Can’t we greet the other dogs like we used to?”
It will take some time, maybe quite a long time, before so many things get back to some sense of normal, whatever that means for us in these times.
All of us, I expect, have learned some things about ourselves in these last 16 months or so. For those of us who live alone it has perhaps been a time when we have had to rely on our own company like never before. For those of us who live with others it has been, perhaps a time to learn the blessings and the challenges of being with the people we are with.
And extending out from there it has been a time when we have been asked to reflect on our sense of community. Just where is it we find community? Can that happen when we aren’t together in person? Can that happen on a computer screen or over a phone line? What are the things we have learned about ourselves over these months? And what does all of this mean for the future?
Now I’m certainly thinking about all of this as we hopefully look to being together here at church in the not-too-distant future. But whether it is here at church or in other contexts this time of disruption has been a time to call into question just what community means to us.
It is easy for life to just keep rolling along all too often. We are in our routines. We are in our norms. And those norms can become pretty settled. And that is can be good. It offers stability, normalcy, predictability. But on the other side of that can be that we may not necessarily be putting ourselves in contexts that ask us to grow, maybe to change, maybe to learn.
I don’t know about you but the past months have offered some space for reflection on all kinds of things. They have asked me to explore how my life is connected to and dependent on so many others. I have been made aware of so many things—and so many people—that take for granted. I have for a long time tried to preach a message about interdependence but the past months have helped me understand that message more literally.
What are the choices I make and how do those choices affect those around me? This time has brought not only this global pandemic, but also a global call for racial justice and for police accountability the likes of which many of us have not seen before—and most especially here in our own city. And on top of that we continue to witness example after example of our changing planet, and here in the west our burning planet. Well, all of this has asked us to pay attention in ways that I’m not sure we’ve been asked to pay attention to before. It has made this moment in history a kind of inflection point. How is it now that we find ourselves being shaped and reshaped by the times we are in? And how is it that the world is also being reshaped, reimagined right now? And with all of that just what are our responsibilities to ourselves and what are our responsibilities to the whole?
It would be easy in times like these to want to focus mostly on our own needs and perhaps to even retreat into our own bubbles of privilege—most of all for those of us who can be in those bubbles. COVID has been a time witness some of the inequities that are so built into our ways of being. These have been times full of fear and uncertainty and perhaps our first response to all of that is to want to hunker down and center our own lives and our own security even if it is at the expense of others.
But I hope these times have also offered us an opportunity—an invitation even—to be aware of just how interconnected we all are. How dependent we are on others and also how dependent they are on us.
Community comes out of our need to be connected to something larger. It is the awareness that we need others. It can happen in the midst of crisis, when we are in some kind of danger. It can happen in moments of grace when we make connections and those connections take hold. At its best these can be moments when we find ourselves in a kind of communion with others and we come to know a kind of mutual dependence. We are aware that we are not on this journey alone.
Community, we also can quickly come to learn, can be messy. It can make us very aware of our humanness. It may be that we have needed to recognize ways that we are vulnerable and we may not want to recognize that. It may be that this has been a time to recognize those places of privilege we in habit. And in the midst of that we come to realize how easy it is for our own needs to brush up against the needs of others.
True community asks us to be real and also to recognize others in all of their realness, in all of their wholeness. That can include our histories and our wounds and our narratives of how things have come to be. Sometimes it asks us to be present with another and with their story that may not quite line up with our own view of things.
It happens on a person to person level, yes, but how it is we name and confront wrongs that may go back generations to whole groups of people. How is it we wrestle with patterns of oppression that may have benefited some of us at the expense of others? Just how does that happen? How is it we claim our voice? How is it make space for the voice, for the story, of another? How is it that healing and wholeness are possible?
Especially for those of us who know privilege this can be something we may not want to do. But if we really want to get to that place called the beloved community that we talk about here at the church, it is part of what we are asked to do. That can take time and perseverance. It can take an open heart and a courageous heart for all involved.
One of the gifts of this COVID time, I hope, is that we have been shaken out of some of our patterns that have been in place for a long time. We have been asked to look at our lives and the lives of those around us like we haven’t been asked to look at before. To recognize our interdependence and what that asks of us in this present time and also as we look to the future.
One of the blessings of this time has been to reorient us—or at least to make us more aware—to the stories of others who for a long time have been on the margins, those who got the message that their lives haven’t mattered like the lives of others. That that recognition is at least a starting place.
Let me try to put this into a Unitarian Universalis perspective. It is easy to approach this looking at our principles, specifically our first principle honoring the inherent worth and dignity of all people. That first principle that has guided us for almost 40 years and has been bookended by the 7th principle, that calls us to awareness of the web of life can connects us all. Our work in the last year on the 8th principle has asked us to imagine something larger, that asks us to articulate and work towards a multicultural and anti-racist world where all of our identities are celebrated and embraced. In particular it calls us to do the hard work of looking at the sins racism and white supremacy and how they keep us, and will continue to keep us, from that goal of beloved community. As we are able to do that I think it gets us a little closer to that goal of knowing and more fully embracing our interdependence.
I think—I hope—this this time may offer a kind of opening, a kind of invitation, for us and for our world. In the midst of what feels like so much division all around us it can be hard to recognize sometimes. But it I think—I hope—we are witnessing some kind of breaking open, some kind of transformational moment.
I think the question for me right now is, as we look to some new future, how is it that we will choose to show up in this time? How is it that we will bring all of ourselves into this time? Our vulnerabilities and our fears but also our open hearts? How is it we will welcome others, too? How is it that we can increase the odds that this sea change might actually take hold?
How is it that we find our way out of our comfort zones and see ourselves as part of what I hope is change unfolding around us.
In the hymn we sang earlier in the service there is a line that has always spoken to me. “Our separate fires will kindle one flame.” Fire, as we know so well right now, represents danger and risk as well as opportunity as we let go of what has been and as we find our way to something new, to something in the process of transformation. How it is we see our lives as connected to the lives of others and how it is we kindle sparks of community and of hope and of love among us.
Each of our lives is a manifestation of our histories, the families we come from, the communities that have shaped us. The people we have been blessed to know and love. Our privilege or our lack of privilege. Our gifts and our vulnerabilities. The losses and the blessings we have known. Inherent in that last part comes the recognition that none of us did all of this on our own and that we bring all of that to the present moment, this present chapter of our lives, with all of its complexity and messiness and possibility too. And yes, holding all of that, how is it that we will choose to show up?
Perhaps Tillie the dog that I talked about at the beginning of the sermon was offering a lesson. Now we always want to be mindful about how it is we invite ourselves into any given place. Miss Manners—pre or post COVID—would be clear about that. But maybe the lesson is about being open to the right invitation that presents itself and saying yes, even when we might find all kinds of excuses like fear to say no.
Words again of poet Marge Piercy:
Some people move through your life
like the perfume of peonies, heavy
and sensual and lingering.
Some come down hard on you like
a striking falcon and the scars remain
and you are forever wary of the sky.
We all are waiting rooms at bus
stations where hundreds have passed
through unnoticed and others
have almost burned us down
and others have left us clean and new
and others have just moved in. [1]
May our call in these times of peril and opportunity to be live with open hearts. May we meet those around us with curiosity and imagination, with wonder and hope. And may we not get discouraged when things may not go as we hope, always keeping before us that dream of a community worthy of the name beloved. Amen.
Prayer
Great spirit of life, hold us in all of our days. Call us away from separateness, and towards love. Call us to be in right relationship with others and with this good green earth upon which all our lives depend. Give us courage for the journey. Give us wisdom. Give us humility. When we are afraid, remind us that we are held in a love so much greater than any of us. May that love guide us as we carry on. Amen.
Benediction
Remember, good people, that through these complicated and difficult and yes, even sometimes amazing times that you do no journey alone. On this day and in all the days ahead, use your gifts to bless the world.
[1] From “The Visible and the In-“ by Marge Piercy
Topics: Journey