The Shelter of Each Other
a sermon delivered by Alan Taylor
October 24^th,1999 to the Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church

First Reading: from Robert Fulghum, From Beginning to End

To be human is to be religious.
To be religious is to be mindful.
To be mindful is to pay attention.
To pay attention is to sanctify existence.
Rituals are one way in which attention is paid.
Rituals may be public, private, or secret.
Rituals may be spontaneous or arranged.
Rituals are in constant evolution and reformation.
Rituals create sacred time.
Sacred time is the dwelling place of the Eternal.
Haste and ambition are the adversaries of sacred time.
Is this so?
From beginning to end, the rituals of our lives shape each hour, day, and year.
Everyone leads a ritualized life: Rituals are repeated patterns of meaningful acts.
If you are mindful of your actions, you will see the ritual patterns.
If you see the patterns, you may understand them.
If you understand them, you may enrich them.
In this way, the habits of a lifetime become sacred.
Is this so?

Second reading: from Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other

Too often families are blamed for our cultural crisis. They make an easy target. They are screwed up in a variety of ways. People argue or they don’t express themselves, they depend on each other too much and then let each other down. Families have secrets and shame, overemotional and underemotional members. Family members are too close or too distant, have too much conflict or too little. Family members ignore, control and perpetually make mistakes. Every family has its Achilles heel or even its Achilles torso. We all can tell "family from hell" stories, usually about our own families.

But families are also our shelter from the storm, our oldest and most precious institution and our last great hope. Families were once powerful institutions, strong enough to withstand assaults. But now almost every force in our culture works against families. Parents do not know how to protect their children from crime, media, poverty, alcohol and bad company. They can no longer give their children childhoods. It’s a terrible time to undercut families.

Sermon:

"For sale online: Eggs from 8 models" This was a headline on page two of this morning’s Seattle Times. Because I was groggy I thought to myself, models of what? Eggs from mechanical or architectural models? That doesn’t make sense. As I read the story, I became speechless:

A fashion photographer hoping to cash in on would-be parents’ wishes for a beautiful baby is offering the eggs of eight models in an online auction set to start tomorrow. Infertility groups have expressed disgust at the offer, saying it turns human life into a commodity. But photographer Ron Harris says his offer is a reflection of American society, where beauty can be purchased by the highest bidder. … His Web site boasts that the models are "beautiful and healthy" and subject to rigorous health examination. In a letter on the site, Harris describes the egg auction as "Darwin’s Natural Selection at its very best." He says society’s obsession with appearance has made us stronger and healthier, and he pitches the egg auction as a chance for parents to give their children an advantage in society. "Every organism is evolving to its most perfect state," Harris writes, "Finding traits that ‘repair’ your genetic flaws is what we are all about."

I fear this newspaper article is indicative of American pop-culture. I could have just as easily opened to a page at random in any one of countless magazines aimed at teen-age readers. I could have turned on commercial television or radio and heard how my life would be better, more convenient, or more attractive, if only I spend my money on what the advertiser is selling. Or I could go to my own mailbox where I find Victoria’s Secret catalogs full of seductive poses of scantily clad women. It is not easy for many men to simply throw them away without, on a sub-conscious level, thinking that such nubile young women would make life more enjoyable. I am certain it is even harder for women to shuck off the implicit message, that unless you look like these sexy models, you better try harder to be "beautiful."

Television is the greatest purveyor of cultural norms. We get to see how people look, act, dress, and talk. The only problem is that these people are Hollywood people, larger than life. Before television, families and friends were the extent of the role models children had growing up. Today, our children spend more time with the television and with their peers than with their family. Understandably, our children want to be accepted and affirmed by their peers. The problem is that the media promotes a youth culture that glorifies sex, consumerism, and, most recently, disrespectful behavior.

Mary Pipher is a therapist who has worked with hundreds of families. In her bestseller, Reviving Ophelia, Pipher makes a compelling case that our society encourages adolescent girls to hate themselves and their bodies. She has seen a pattern where many girls before puberty were active, intelligent, and outgoing then in adolescence become defiant, self-effacing, or prone to acting out with sex or drugs. Of course not all girls demonstrate this pattern while growing up, but many do. And Pipher’s response is that, for the wide majority of behavior problems, the parents are not to blame, but instead the girls’ struggle to integrate the junk values that the media convinces so many girls are important. The desperate realities Pipher describes often sound like inner-city Oakland. But Mary Pipher, who incidentally is a Unitarian Universalist, lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. In another book, The Shelter of Each Other, she extends her critique of culture and advocates for families. In her words:

The culture of the 1990s is too hard for many families to handle. As a therapist, I see families in which the parents work long hours, in which sick children go to day care or teenagers rebel in ways that terrify their parents. Parents are confused and vulnerable to depression, addictions, violence and mind-numbing cynicism. One in eight adults abuses alcohol, a phenomenon that wreaks havoc in families and in the culture. We have many new tools: fax machines, computers and car phones. We have home entertainment centers, which keep people from neighborhood events; and Nintendo, which keeps kids from playing with each other. We can interact on the Internet with people from all over the world. Now, all these tools have their uses and their good points. I wouldn’t argue that any tool is bad and should be eliminated. It’s the whole pile that’s the problem. The cumulative effect of the pile is to change the way we live in families.

The spiritual leaders of our century are constantly warning us to be mindful of how we embrace new technology and a secular culture. Zen master D.T. Suzuki taught, "There is no direct connection between convenience and happiness." Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, "The problem of our youth is not our youth. The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual. The central problem is that we do not know how to think, how to pray, how to cry, how to resist the deceptions of too many persuaders."

Last year while I was in Littleton, a member said something quite remarkable during a structured conversation where I had asked people what they value about their church. A woman named Linda said, "I believe that if something were to happen to me, this congregation would rally together to support my daughters and see to it they are taken care of." Littleton is a small community where a number of the residents have lived most or all of their lives and where the church is nearly 300 years old.

At Starr King, where I went to seminary, I learned of a poignant classroom discussion. The teacher, Til Evans, in her class on children’s education, was speaking about the kind of church community she seeks to create. It is this: if a child of the church awoke one awful morning to find that both of his parents had died, he would he know, instinctively, that the members of his and his parents’ church community would become his family, would take him in and raise him safely and securely to adulthood. Til Evans then said, quite casually, that she had encountered no UU church of which this could be said. And she went on to speak of other things. It was a friend and colleague of mine who related this story at our graduation, pointing out that Til Evans has not yet witnessed her ideal of religious community after decades of service and yet she continues to unwaveringly devote her life to fostering churches as places where people can shelter and learn from one another.

I want our church to become a religious community where both parents and children know that if a crisis occurred, members of their church would see to it that the children were raised safely and with love. Of course this doesn’t happen overnight. It will take years, likely generations, for our church to be that strong. It takes time, a long time, for people to know and trust one another. Furthermore, our society’s norms that extol independence and individualism make it difficult for community’s like ours to deepen to the extent we can take care of one another. For we must individually forge our own values vis-à-vis those of our culture. And that takes time and effort.

At this time, we as a church are doing something very important for families. We offer a place where liberal religious values are imparted to our children. We seek to help families with teaching their children to think critically and treat others with respect. Our children need our support if they are to wade through all the junk values of our media-driven culture and not get sucked up into its narrow narcissism and crazy consumerism.

As Unitarian Universalists, we naturally pride ourselves on our values of tolerance and respect. It is common for our congregations to seek to be tolerant to the point of extremes. We don’t want to set unnecessary limits on our children—or our adults for that matter. The result is that we are prone to tolerate behavior that is disrespectful and unhealthy for a community. It is a tension inherent within our movement as we prize both tolerance and respect as values. It is also a tension in our public schools, where students behaviors are, in my perspective, out of control. It is common to "dis" one’s peers, to treat others with profound disrespect—following the example of many of the popular television shows and movies.

Here at our own church, twice it has come to my attention that children have called one another names, where our children simply follow the norms they see in the wider culture. I we are to honestly be the shelter of each other, we as adults must realize we have not only the permission but also the responsibility to respond to disrespectful behavior. The best training I received for ministry occurred before I entered seminary—three years of working in residential treatment with abused children with behavior problems. If these children can turn around their behavior, I know any child in any UU congregation can.

Mary Pipher warns us, "In the current family-hurting culture, families must do two things to survive: They must protect themselves from what is most hurtful to the health of the family and they must connect with what is good outside the family. These tasks require time and energy, both of which are scarce commodities in an era when many parents work long hours at jobs far from their homes. This protection and connection to others will change the culture. Families can be really healthy only when children once again have communities of real people who care about them."

There are four ways families can strengthen themselves against the onslaught of our culture’s junk values. The first is to make time for being together. The second is to deepen connections with extended family. Third, to make and deepen connections with other families, so as to make an extended family of trusted friends. And fourth, to get involved with church and other organizations that actively promote positive values and offer good role models.

As a minister, I am especially interested in the rituals of our lives. From the beginning to the end of your own lives, while I am your minister, I am here to walk with you through the most important times, the most difficult times, and the most significant times of your lives. And I am here to help you develop the rituals that are meaningful for you and your loved ones. Whether it be a child dedication such as will happen in a couple of weeks, or a funeral, which I will do two weeks after that (just kidding), or blessing ceremony of a new house. Already there are three couples who have sought me out to perform their wedding. It is so important to take time for reflecting on the meaning of our lives.

Robert Fulghum, the other of the finest work on rituals I know, From Beginning to End, writes,

As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years.

We don’t need eggs from models to make beautiful, healthy babies. We need something much more precious. We need to take time to reflect on much more important criteria for making healthy human beings than seeking a certain image. For example:

What makes us stronger and healthier?

What are the flaws within us we need to attend to?

What do we find beautiful in our heart of hearts?

What advantages do we want to give our children?

Together we will address these questions in the coming years. With our own answers to these questions, we will build the shelter of each other, just as we will build the physical shelter, our own physical sanctuary just a mile east of here.

As for rituals that give our lives meaning in relation to the church, I hope you can make either the church clean up Saturday November 6 or the Blessing Ceremony as we claim our own land the following day. These will be the first among many rituals I will join with you to nourish our community. It was a great joy to have so many of you at my Open House last night—the opportunity to offer hospitality is as meaningful as any ritual I know. Looking ahead, I hope to participate in the Baccalaureate service of even those children who are now in elementary school. It is an honor to be your minister.

Blessed be. Amen.