Sermon: Sacred Vessels
Before we begin, I’d love for everyone to move your body however it wants to move right now. That might be stretching your legs and arms, wiggling, standing up, or giving your hands a little massage.
I want to take a moment to acknowledge all that our bodies do and hold. Bodies are what allow us to move through the world, to interact, to express ourselves, to experience pleasure, to do all of the amazing things that humans can do. They also are sometimes what holds us back from all that we might want to do, because of fatigue, pain, fear, disability, injury, illness, or insufficient strength.
Our bodies hold memories, carry visible and invisible scars, and store trauma from our own lives and those of our ancestors. Our bodies are our interface with the world, the keeper of our feelings, the bearer of our stress and striving, the canvas upon which our days and years are drawn. Our bodies are the site of every interaction we have, the sacred vessels of our mind and spirit, our first and last companion.
As we begin, I want to turn your attention toward something in the order of service this morning. It is a “finger labyrinth” — a pocket-sized version of the symbolic pilgrimage in the floor of Chartres Cathedral, which also, serendipitously is set up in the Buchan Reception room following the service today if you would like to walk it.
If, at any point in the sermon you feel called to it, I invite you to trace the finger labyrinth as one small act of embodied prayer.
Unitarian Universalists are known in the wider world as people who support all kinds of beauty and variation in embodiment, honoring the uniqueness and worth of each individual. We show up to embody our values for all kinds of struggles, including racial, sexual, and gender justice.
We co-developed the Our Whole Lives program with the United Church of Christ, a comprehensive body, sexuality, and relationship curriculum for kids, teens, and adults of all ages. We seem to value and honor bodies and embodiment, recognizing how integral our bodies are in our sense of self, our struggles for justice, and in building the beloved community.
And yet, how often do we actually honor and express with our bodies during worship on Sunday mornings? My experience in most UU churches, not just this one, is that the usual extent of embodiment during worship is to stand if we’re able during songs and responsive readings, perhaps do some shared breathing, and sing the congregational hymns.
Most UU worship seems to support Cartesian duality, this idea that we are minds and spirits that also have bodies, and that it is our minds and spirits that are supposed to be nourished, enlivened, and engaged by church, not our bodies.
But for me, and I imagine many of you, some of the most spiritual and connective experiences I’ve had have been moments when my body was fully engaged, along with my heart and mind. Chanting, singing, dancing, traveling through nature, sharing rituals of communion and connection… All of these have opened me more to deepening my connection to divine spirit than just reading or listening to words.
Unitarian Universalism credits six sources as the wellsprings of our faith, which can be summarized as: direct experience; prophetic words and deeds; wisdom from the world’s religions; Jewish and Christian teachings; reason, science, and humanism; and earth-centered traditions. Taken together, in these six sources I hear a desire to be open to as much of the wisdom and experience in this world as we can be, and to embrace, or at least try on, ideas and practices which may be unfamiliar to us. And in each of these sources there is the possibility for deepening our embodied practice of worship and connection.
I want to focus particularly on one of these sources this morning. Our first stated source of Unitarian Universalism, “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” The forces that create and uphold life.
The most immediate need each of us has is to breathe. Paying attention to our breath is something which can connect us again to the mystery of life, to the persistent choice to continue to live. Each time we take a breath, and particularly so when we do it with intention and attention, we reaffirm our contract with the divine, with our participation in life.
Let’s take a minute now to just pay attention to our breath, noticing the sensation of it entering mouth or nose, filling lungs and belly, bringing oxygen to our blood and limbs. Don’t try to change or do anything different with your breath, just notice it for a bit. [breathe for 1 minute]
Breathe in, breathe out.
When I breathe in, I breathe in peace, when I breathe out, I breathe out love.
This is our most primal connection to the world, bringing in the outside within us, letting what is within back out. This connection, this interchange, is always happening and when we bring it into our awareness it can change our relationship to ourselves, one another, and the divine.
Direct experience with transcendence also means valuing the ways that each of us finds and feels called to relationship with the divine, or to making peace with the balance between ourselves as individuals and the community, the world, and the universe as a whole. In our discourse, we say that we acknowledge the importance of different embodied experiences, and our sources reflect the diversity of cultures that make up our faith. But often in UU worship, the default is a style that reflects just one strand of that collective tapestry of influences, and that is the strand of puritan-influenced mainline protestant worship.
We sit in rows facing the front. At the front I stand raised above you. When I am speaking, for the most part, if a feeling of joy or distaste or anger or movement wells up in your body, you usually keep it to yourself. When we are singing, you usually remain still, whether seated or standing, save for a little bit of gentle swaying if you’re feeling really into it.
And I understand — many of you come to learn and to listen, to have one hour of respite and peace in your week, to enjoy the special kind of quiet that is somehow amplified when many are quiet together. Yet I know that when you come, many of you also yearn for connection to one another, yearn to be moved by the spirit of community, of wisdom, of your own highest selves, of the divine. And sometimes, maybe often, it is our bodies that might hear that call of the holy when we worship together.
In the current issue of the UU World magazine there is an article entitled “Time to Dance” by Takiyah Nur Amin, a member of the Organizing Collective Board of Black Lives of UU. In it, she beautifully details the importance of dance in her life, and how it is interwoven with her faith.
She says, growing up, “dancing was expression, and it was all around me. In my neighborhood, folks danced on the porches when the long Buffalo winters relented and gave us the sunshine we yearned for. No celebration or community gathering was complete without movement and dancing. People clapped and moved and swayed at the Baptist church my grandfather attended, and while my grandmother’s AMEZ church was a little more restrained, those congregants cut loose too when the sermon got good.”
She goes on to say, “As a black Unitarian Universalist, one of the challenges I have faced in predominantly white UU spaces is a kind of separation from embodiment generally and dance in particular. The dominant and pervasive style of worship I experience in our congregations is one that privileges the notion that we are there to learn/hear/participate when directed to do so (and only in the ways we are directed to do so) and that this is somehow sophisticated, intellectual, correct…”
But, she says “It’s odd the way we leave embodiment outside of our worship experience like that, if we consider the development of human history. Communicating ideas through the body is as old as human beings—older, really. It certainly predates the written word and spoken language. Some of the earliest dances we know of are tied to ritual and spiritual practice. We also find dance—this moving with intention through time and space—in every culture on the planet. Dance is a fundamental aspect of being human: doing it, seeing it, experiencing it. And yet, in our desire to build community and fellowship, UUs tend to leave dance out, and the body (the one thing we all have) more generally on the doorstep.”
I commend you to read the whole article, but what lingers with me is the way in which this lack of embodiment, which for some might feel neutral and comfortable, is actively unwelcoming for others of us. I believe that asking, essentially, to “leave our bodies on the doorstep” by shunning the expression of emotion and movement that arises in them in worship actually runs counter to our first source of honoring direct experience with the divine. And I believe that this may be one of the instances when we are called forward out of patterns of a culture of whiteness in Unitarian Universalism and into more diverse and authentic expressions of faith.
Now I know some of you may be thinking, “well, ok, maybe we can make room for people who want to call out or dance during worship. But it’s not going to be me. I can’t dance.” I wonder how many of you out there also say with regularity that you can’t sing, and yet still add your voice, even if uncertain and quiet, into our collective voice when we sing together.
It would be a whole other sermon for me to go into the ways that a white and western ambivalence toward the body is tied up in shaming of sexuality, of domination of women and the earth, of devaluing of our own knowledge and intuition, and of concentrating power in the hands of the elite, but suffice it to say: those words, “I can’t dance” have entirely to do with a cultural construct and very little to do with your ability to move your body in space.
I used to be one of those people who always said, “I can’t dance.” Really what I meant was, “I have been told that there is one right way, one desireable way, to move my body, and I’m unsure about my ability to follow the rhythm precisely, and I don’t want to do it wrong or get ridiculed so I’m not even going to try.” But it’s not true for me, and I bet it’s not true for you either, and just to give you fair warning, I will be inviting you to dance a simple dance with me during our final hymn.
Our bodies are with us always. They carry the stories of our living — strengthening and setback, challenge and survival. Our bodies, our senses, our movements, are where we meet one another, meet the divine. May we continue to invite our bodies, our whole selves, into our spaces of worship, that we may live more fully and freely together. Amen.
Prayer
For our prayer today, I want to invite you into a prayer of embodied community. I invite you to check with your neighbors around you to find a comfortable way to connect, a hand on the shoulder, hand in hand, or something else that works for you both. If you are joining us online, or are not seated near anyone, I invite you to hold out your hands to connect with us across the distance.
Spirit of life, be with us this morning as we join together not just our hearts and minds, but our physical presence, the matter of our being. Our bodies are of all shapes, colors, ages, sizes. They are made of the universe, of the soil and the sun and the rain and the air that we take into ourselves daily. They are made of the sweat and the labor of those who bring us the food we eat, they are made of the star stuff that exploded into existence billions of years ago. Our bodies are sacred. Our bodies are whole. Our bodies are good enough. Our bodies are loved. May we feel at home in our bodies. May we make room for one another. May our wounds be healed, our hunger fed, our thirst quenched. And may we listen to the wisdom and the call and the rhythm of our bodies, honoring them as holy. May it be so, Amen.
Topics: Embodiment