"Beware The Gazorninplotz!"
Some years ago I saw a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, created around the idea (as has often been stated about statistical possibilities) that if you could sit monkeys in front of typewriters and let them type long enough (for eons – down the ages), eventually, just by chance (and, remember, given a near-infinity of time), statistically, one of them would type out the whole Bible – or the complete works of Shakespeare.
So in the New Yorker, there was depicted this monkey, seated in front of the typewriter, clicking away; and what you read over the monkey’s shoulder on the paper was: “To be or not to be, that is the gazorninplotz!” So, you can’t have everything.
In religion, that same attitude is reflected in the idea that if you put a bunch of people together for a long time in what we call ‘churches,’ we will automatically come up with a religious work of art of Shakespearean quality (of perfection). But we know this is not so!
As a free-religious movement, we do celebrate certain principles and purposes of ‘high’ aspiration; but they, too, in time, like once motivating bulwark Bible verses, will wear and erode and fall into smooth pebble anonymity and stale abstraction.
To keep from forgetting the meaning in lofty passages, it is required, week by week, year in and year out, to bring intentionality, planning, and devoted work to the ongoing common enterprise.
As Unitarian Universalists, therefore, we must accept responsibility for what-we-are, where-we-are in order to beware the gazorninplotz.
It has been said that a major reason for getting together in congregations is to congregate. That is, we congregate in order to congregate, and that is not bad. We endure planning because we want to go on being used to being used to being together. I should like to suggest, however, seven ways against Sunday to keep ourselves lively as we sustain purposes and togetherness, so that we maintain the wonder of freedom in religion and avoid the drift.
Number one: The central issue in the life of our churches all over this country (at least as I see it) is the issue of strength.
For we are a tiny movement. To be strong, to maintain strength, and to make Unitarian Universalism truly available to those who can grow and be sustained by it (and because we are voluntary institutions), a congregation has to want to be strong, to be vital, to work word-of-mouth, programmatically, and in every way to grow or it will drift.
And if a church drifts, it must beware getting stuck in the gazorninplotz!
Ministers alone cannot make strong churches! Vigorous congregations (strong in the quality of their being) help make strong ministers who help sustain dynamic congregations. It is a circular thing. Both need and aid each other. This congregation has a fine, an exceptional new minister. Probably the most important thing I can possibly say tonight is, “Please support him so he can support you at his best!”
To do that, members have to want to lead and take leadership and respond to his leadership and others, to follow and assume fellowship. Any religious society must do that or a congregation suffers ‘church-sag,’ a condition of poor muscle tone.
Because churches are like individuals, they need exercise! And they need new blood along with old blood, new wood along with enduring and gnarled old tree trunks around the place, to be strong. A congregation has to want to invite new people into its midst and to be an ‘inviting’ community when they arrive.
Members have to go out looking for people who could benefit from our kind of church and free faith, and bring them in. You have to want to want to, then to want to, then to do it. And then lively, dynamic churches ask their people, new and long-time members, to participate! Pooped-out churches just can’t seem to work up the energy to invite all kinds of folks into the act.
Issue one: Demand of ourselves that the church be strong and participatory.
As we are doing that, though, and a second way to vitalize churches is the people have to pay attention to norms and standards for their life together without becoming too judgmental. First, a church ought to ask something of us.
In our churches, we try to foster upright living. We support conduct becoming true humanity. And we are places of forgiveness too, so it is a balancing act.
I have had someone tell me and others, “You Unitarian Universalists out-Christian the Christians!” What does it mean? “I am a Christian,” said another member to that one. Well, that person meant we accepted, genuinely accepted, into our midst all sorts and conditions of human beings without moralistic judging. (More so than she had found to be so in the faith of her origin.) But perhaps no church lives up to all of its ideals. Still, surely, the faith of our heritage-of-tolerance means we do not look down our noses of other people especially those who may have stumbled.
At the same time, though, the Free Church cannot allow demanding or small-minded or unloving personalities to control the way things are going to go or how people are going to handle tolerance. We do not tolerate intolerance to the right, to the left, or meanly via media!
So the church people are responsible to accept and forgive and support each other and yet reject behaviors that fly in the face of that acceptance and support.
William Ellery Channing said we do not excommunicate anyone except by the death of goodness in their own hearts, in their own breasts.
By way of illustration, listen to the way the Benedictines did it and put it. They said, “If a pilgrim monk comes from distant parts to dwell within the monastery and will be content with the customs he finds in the place, he shall be received for as long a time as he desires.
“If, indeed, he finds fault with anything, or expresses it reasonably, and with the humility of charity, the abbot shall discuss it prudently, lest, perchance, God has sent him for this very thing.
“But, if he has been found ‘gossipy’ and contumacious in the time of his sojourn as guest, not only should he not be joined to the body of the monastery, but also it shall be said to him honestly, that he must depart.”
And, “if he does not go: let two stout monks, in the name of God, explain the matter to him.”
We don’t put it quite that way, but there ought to be guidelines! There ought to be standards of cooperation and mutuality, and excellence for men and women in our churches where each person is to be held accountable for his or her furtherance of the common good.
Another way, a third way, or strength among us (issue before us) is creative renewal, personal and institutional. We have to work out methods to provide ways of renewal, some through informal sharing, small groups, workshops, social gatherings, classes, and so on.
Unitarian Universalists need a place, as theologian Henry Nelson Wieman put it, for “creative interchange,” in fact, that’s what he thought that very abstract word ‘God’ meant, “Creative Interchange.”
In congregations, in addition to the importance of worship services, we want other occasions to exchange ideas, resources, feelings, people-stuff, and just plain ‘talk’ that makes us feel good again and renews the spirit. Renewal!
The ‘church’ ought to be one of the places to which we can ‘repair’ to ‘get it together again.’
When I think about this, I am remembering a talk from one of a church research outfit’s people about the duty of churches. The speaker drew an oval on the blackboard and put and “x” at one side of the oval and said, “This ‘X’ represents the church. That’s where the minister is and the people come.” Their place of belonging.
Then he put arrows going out from the church, arrows at the top of the oval representing the members going out into the town, out into the world each week. And he said, “The church’s job and the minister’s job is not to charge out there into the world like an admiral or a general with the troops into the fray. The people of the church go out there to face the world and their tasks, their obligations and their attempts to serve and change the world each week, and they get tired and some of them are darned near beat-to-death by the world out there. People go forth to face the troubles and the burdens of existence.”
And he drew arrows at the bottom of the oval representing the return of the people into the church each week, people returning to the sustenance and celebration and religious services of their church.
They come back at the end of the week, beginning of a new week, looking for help.
And the church’s job is to ‘be there’ for them, not as a general of the armies is there, but as to say it with smiles, to be there as a mess sergeant is there!
The church’s job is to feed the people some beans! And send them out once more, refreshed and filled and ready to meet the world again, that’s renewal.
Our churches ought to be places where we go to get some beans, by golly! And go out from churches full of beans! Happier, and fed, and ready to meet life, the demands, the suffering, as well as the surprises of joy that shall greet us out there.
A fourth issue (or opportunity) afforded us in churches is that of ‘mentorship.' We want people who will help us and teach us things we need to know. Mentors!
And it can be anyone in the church who becomes someone else’s mentor at a particular point of need. A minister may be a mentor one time. Someone else may be the minister’s teacher another time. Various people with various gifts in the church may ‘mentor’ each other.
And the most telling way we do this for each other is not only by the ‘smarts’ (not even by intelligence first) but by example.
When Unitarian Universalist Alfred Schweitzer was asked, “What are the three best methods of teaching?” he replied, “By example, by example, by example.”
There are mentors in every church (sometimes they don’t even know it) who set examples of spiritual authenticity for the rest of us.
I can recall when the Reverend Dr. Joe Barth (who has retired to Alna, Maine) was head of the Department of Ministry at the denominational headquarters in Boston. I was going to Boston for some meetings in those days. And every Tuesday they had a little chapel service at 25 Beacon Street for the staff and anyone else who was visiting.
I remember sitting in the back of the room one day as the chapel service started. Someone was delivering a prayer. Now this was years ago when many Unitarians and Universalists (including many ministers) would not be caught alive praying. (Dead maybe, but not alive.)
I would deliver pulpit prayers in those days, myself, but I was pretty skeptical. I thought of personal, especially petitionary, prayer than as a Santa Claus kind of thing, a sitting on the lap of illusion.
But somebody was praying in earnest at that service. And I looked because I believed then, rather superstitiously, that one should keep one’s eyes up, fully open, and straight ahead during such word-making in order to keep the dangerous aura of religiosity from descending upon folks, no spiritual fog allowed! So, I looked wide-eyed ahead of me during the prayer when my head was supposed to be bowed and there was Joe Barth, the Director of the Department of Ministry, an old mentor of mine, sitting with this head bowed and his eyes closed, deeply at prayer.
Now that was something! Imagine that! There was no mistaking the genuineness. I shall never forget it, that image! There was Joe, rough and tough, intelligent old Barnacle Joe Barth (as I had known him to be on some occasions). Joe Barth, at prayer!
God’s hooks! There he was, and he remains, for me, a spiritual person. An example of one who responds to the religious impulse seriously and spiritually—a mentor.
Who was it was asked what is his theology led him to prayer? (Niebuhr, I think.) And his answer, “I don’t pray because I have a theology. I have theology because I pray!” Something to think about. (Or maybe even—even!—to pray about.)
A church is a religious institution. Our kinds of churches, too! Through worship services, and in other ways, they ought to nourish us spiritually.
Furthermore, and this is a fifth need and issue among us, our churches in the movement should afford us some warmth.
A church is a place to go to learn that we are not alone in a tough world.
Ministers and other members help us put life into a religious context. Together the people identify the trenches. They, we in churches, see clearly the discomfort of climbing out of the trenches. But we can learn how to do it together. And help each other when there is fear, the need for human warmth.
Quite a few years ago on sabbatical, I studied religion and literature in San Diego, California. We were reading a bunch of religious novels and discussing them. It was quite a good course.
You may recall from one of those books, West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, where the Pope was moving incognito through the streets where the poor people lived in Rome. He is directed by events to a house where a man is dying. The doctor has left, a woman nurse attends the man.
The priestly figure, disguised but obviously one of the ‘religious,’ out of his ancient tradition of care and service pronounces absolution and kneels to pray. Soon the man is dead.
“Father, we should go,” says the woman. “Neither of us will be welcome now.”
“But I would like to help the family,” says the man standing, as it were, in the shoes of the fisherman.
“We should go,” the woman repeats. Then she adds in a line that penetrates all the way from the pit to excruciating poignancy, “They can cope with death, it is only living that defeats them.”
We are rational religious people. We are! We come to feel we are strong enough, and we are strong enough, to bear our responsibilities and not be defeated by life.
At the same time, life can threaten us, too, the composure, the health, the confidence of any one of us; including people who usually seem to us to be very secure, certainly including ministers.
The day can arrive for any one of us when that one becomes one of the wounded or helpless people, and we too may find ourselves to be people who, conceivably, could cope with death, but we feel defeated by living, defeated by life!
When a time like that comes, there ought to be someone (and churches are places to nurture and empower the ‘someones’). Someone around us, some group, the congregation as a caring community itself, to help us through the day, to help us get through the long, long night.
Churches (we know it in our hearts) are about mercy. They are about compassion. They are about helping and healing. And they are about facing life, of course they are!
Most of the time we are not allowed, and should not be, to engage in too much self-pity, for that is a downward spiral.
John Ciardi once wrote a zinger of a poem, familiar to many Unitarian Universalists now. Sort of wakes you up each time you hear it! This one, listen, again, “At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected,” he said, “I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration. They who are wholly broken, I shall embrace at once, and lead to pillows in Heaven. But they who are the meek, by trade (baiting the best of their betters with the extortism of mock-helplessness) I shall take last to love, and never wholly. Oh, let them into heaven (I abolish hell!). But let it be read over them as they enter, ‘Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing, gave nothing, and could never receive enough!’”
We want to be strong as persons, in vigorous churches, of course we do! Strong and honest and up-front! Religious free thinkers believe in leveling with each other and in cutting out the baloney!
Therefore, vexing hidden agendas and suspicious (the stuff baloney is made of) should be, and they are when we feel more secure about ourselves, should be sent packing.
A priority of belonging is trusting acceptance. If we can give to each other some warmth, some acceptance that is a great deal, for the world around us is dying of the cold.
A sixth characteristic of a real church, a place that meets religious needs, is that it is a place of wonder, where you get a sense of the ‘religious’ at your ‘center.’
This past summer, I discovered (having read only one of his poems earlier) a whole book full of the poems of Maine poet Philip Booth. I loved them!
Booth is reminding us, in a poem he calls “To Think,” that after the big bang when the universe we know got started had there been a fraction less expansion, the universe would have collapsed, a fraction more, gravity would not have held the stars.
But then living stuff came along, and consciousness, the biggie that nobody understands, consciousness. My God, who would think something like that could evolve?
And Booth, sitting ‘down East’ wonders, “Suppose we human beings are the only truly conscious critters in the entire universe?”
Kind of blows you away to think about it.
“What reason have we to imagine that anyone might imagine us?” he asks and goes on,
“Who for Christ’s sake?
Until we invented God, who could believe?
We love to believe, we have to believe
We love. But to think:
After we go (in the last millisecond), when
the planet will be beyond wonder, (without
wonder) what we were ever about.”
Without wonder, what are we about?
Wonder is at the soul of religion, and religion gives us to know what we are about. We feel it. Intuit it. Know it. And wonder opens us up to it: a sense of the ‘religious.’
Six ways against Sunday that churches are about.
Let me speak, please do, of just one more here at the end, a seventh characteristic of the dynamic church.
A church, one of our churches, anyway, ought to be a place to have fun!
If it is not fun some of the time, we are going to learn that it is just not worth it much of the time! We have to play together. In every congregation I have known, there are play times:
Potlucks and parties and picnics, too;
Halloween and hilarity and church hymnody (no less!)
Limericks for rhyming and sometimes ribaldry;
Christmas and caring, coffee hours and
Curling up Sundays at the end.
We ought to bend our churches up at the end if we can and go out to them caring about each other, and glad for having been there.
Then, when we have confrontations, let us have them and go forth with determination to come back and work on that again, and resolve our differences.
Bend our churches up at the end, make them happier!
Langston Hughes did that for me one time, bent his public reading, some of which was the reading of sad, sad poems, bent them up at the end, when years on years ago at the University of California he closed with the reading of this poem called ‘My Motto,” and I still hear him down the halls of time doing it. He said:
I play it cool
And dig all jive. That’s the reason
I stay alive.
My motto as I live and learn is
Dig and be dug
In return.”
Do it here, folks! Dig it!
“Make a church that shall be free.”
And dig,
and be dug,
In return….
Praise be!
Amen.
