Flourishing together is the lived experience of this beloved community.
We’ve moved through the years and stormy clouds when everywhere there was a sense of dread and foreboding. We navigated through innumerable changes — some bidden and others that were wrought upon us. We were visited by a devastating pandemic, wildfires, and the march of white supremacy, cisheteropatrarchy, fears, and fascism in our society. While many communities facing such realities might fracture or flee, shrinking before so many challenges, our community learned to adapt, to strategize, to grieve, and then even to thrive. For with the stormy clouds came the rains of nourishment and sustenance that emboldened our living love and our commitments to our liberal and liberatory faith.
We know the world has not gotten better — the pandemic may have passed and the wildfires may have been extinguished — but there remains the generations of trauma, inequity, and injustice that are at the roots of so many of the realities we face today. Their impact upon people, communities, nations, and our world reverberate across time and place. We know too that in the midst of it all a holy disturbance, the clarion call of freedom, the difficult work of repair, the ministry of healing, and a good news proclaimed have also reverberated across time and space.
We know that religious community invites us to stand before the storms, to dance in the rainfall, and to witness to the terrible and the wondrous realities of life not alone but with neighbors and friends and lovers; not without purpose or direction, but with enduring values, indomitable hope, a clear mission, and a compelling dream of the world to come: a vision of our collective liberation and a dream of the creation of a beloved community where all are free and may flourish with profound dignity and respect and a sense of their responsibilities to their neighbors, and to their communities, and to our planet home.
When I gave up my life in San Francisco and crossed through that threshold into this sanctuary seven years ago to partner with you on this journey of ministry, I thought I knew what to expect. We had a comprehensive developmental plan in which you had identified an array of institutional, technical, and cultural goals to provide a foundation for your rebirth and return to flourishing as a community. I had already been a minister for a decade and had served as a lay leader, student minister, and then chaplain in the decade before my ordained ministry began.
Ministers have a unique position of being with people through the triumphs and tragedies of life, and being with communities as they change, learn together, make mistakes, struggle, and even grow. I am sometimes left believing that nothing can surprise me but it usually just takes a new ministry to dissuade one from such a misguided belief!
What is that old adage from Ecclesiastes? “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9). While perhaps that is true on some level, I don’t know that I could have ever expected the myriad of surprises, delights, and adventures we’d go on over these seven years!
I discovered photographs the other week of the community in the years immediately before I arrived and they made it clear to me just how much our community had grown and transformed itself into a beloved community. We have said goodbye to so many over the years — I can still remember the Rev. Ernie Pipes and Helen Brown sitting in their reserved chairs right over there on the side by the windows (may their memories always be blessings) — and we welcomed so many new folks into our community. Babies were born and beloveds were laid to rest. Marriages were celebrated, vows were renewed, and sometimes relationships ended.
We stretched our imaginations and opened our hearts to spiritual wisdom and the possibilities of our renewal and rebirth. We’ve been surprised time and time again by our resilience and our fragility, our strength and our vulnerability, our moments of vitality and those of our weakness. We extended care to those we knew and those who were new. We provided for the religious education of our multigenerational community and created opportunities to be together in times of societal upheaval as well as in times of profound elation.
We achieved goals, experienced setbacks, listened deeply, learned to give and receive forgiveness, and practiced what it means to be human. We practiced also what it means to be a community, a liberal religious congregation, and a beloved community, which, in the words of the 8th Principle project, “is what happens when people of diverse racial, ethnic, educational, class, gender, abilities, sexual orientation, backgrounds [and] identities come together in an interdependent relationship of love, mutual respect, and care that seeks to realize justice within the community and in the broader world.” What our religious ancestors might have called our practice of bringing heaven to earth.
Now we are at another threshold. This is a sacred time in the life of a religious community. We are preparing to write the next chapters of our adventures. It is a tender time and a bittersweet time. I’ve been preparing myself for this day for the past seven years. I knew when I first met you that I’d fall in love, and I’d have to give it my all — and then some! — and then I would have to say goodbye. That is the nature of developmental ministry and it was what we all signed up for when I crossed that threshold seven years ago.
Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. This is my longest congregational ministry to date and I know from my former congregations that you carry the people, memories, sorrows, and joys with you when you leave. It is said that when one is ordained to the ministry it leaves an indelible spiritual mark, that it is an existential reorientation to life and one’s own being. I think the same is also true when one declares their membership in a spiritual community or steps up to lead or commits to service to that which they are a part and is greater than themselves.
You’ve made me a better minister and I’ve gleaned so much wisdom and skill from our ministry together that will help me to better serve the communities to which I am called. Thank you for being my partner in ministry and for giving so much of your time, talents, presence, and treasures to these transformative years. Words cannot express that gratitude I have for each of you and this place we claim as our spiritual home.
While I was criss-crossing the country earlier this year in the pre-candidating process, and sitting for some seventeen interviews, and entering into discernment with communities about our spiritual callings, I had a dream. It wasn’t an ordinary dream but it was one of those experiences that come to you when you are at a threshold and preparing to welcome profound changes which will determine the flow and course of your life. It was profoundly instructive and also illuminating. No, it didn’t tell me that I should go to this congregation or that congregation, or accept this offer or that offer, or anything like that at all. Its meaning transcended those incidental questions I had been sitting with throughout the discernment process and through those many interviews.
You see, in this dream I was traveling with my old friend Justice — sometimes my subconscious is a bit too on the nose — an extraordinary person who had played an important role in my early formative years of ministry. In the dream, we were moving from one underground encampment to another and meeting with friends — old and new — at each clandestine spiritual stronghold. People were coming and going at each community we visited. While there, they were engaged in painting a beautiful mosaic. I interpreted the arrivals and departures as people joining the community and leaving the community and also people being born and returning to the ancestors when their time had come. The destinations we visited were each part of an underground network of people who had been summoned to be of service to humanity. The mosaic was like a multidimensional mandala and each person had special talents or gifts or ways to contributing to its formation. As we traveled from one location to the next — often across vast distances and to foreign places — we began to realize that the artwork each community was creating was a piece, a fragment, a shard of a larger, more majestic and beautiful composition. It was something that had been called into being by providence and that would only come into being through the dedicated artistry of each of the communities of the underground.
I awoke from the dream with the clarity that it was the work that mattered and not the location. We’ve all been called to the work of the underground and it is happening all time — right here — and everywhere the spirit of life and love is present or summons us to be.
May we each continue to contribute the gifts that are ours to share and know that we are all connected, the ministry of our liberal faith is vital to our world, and we are all called to the great work of our lifetimes. Our beloved community is now flourishing and one day, may the same be true everywhere.
Thank you. I love you. May the future unfold in beautiful ways for you.
To the glory of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Monica.
Amin, Amane, Amen, and Blessed Be.
Photos from June 21st by Carol Ring, Roy Patience, Greg Wood, and Gerald Saldo.
