Stories that Ground Us

SACRED STORIES, SACRED WORLD, SACRED PEOPLE

by Paul Kent Oakley, Intern Minister

Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship

10:30AM, Sunday, February 5, 2012

PART I: MYTHIC STORIES OF ORIGINS

When my daughters were in school they liked to spend time at their Grandma and Grandpa Oakley’s house. My parents didn’t have a television or video games to keep my girls occupied, so, being inquisitive, they liked to look at the stacks of old National Geographics. This worried my mother, who knew that National Geographic assumed the scientific accuracy of the Big Bang and Evolution as the starting point for life on earth. So my mother taped a note for my girls on any issue where Evolution was assumed or the Big Bang mentioned. The note told my girls that the magazine had a lot of good stuff in it, but it was wrong about where the universe and life came from. For that information they needed to read the beginning chapters of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void…”

These great mythic stories are foundational to our culture. And they have consequences. The Genesis story tells humans to subdue the natural world. As traditionally read, this supported the destruction of forests, extinction of species, strip mining, and many other things that we now know hurt us in the long term. Genesis’s God created man first and created woman as an afterthought, as his helper. Patriarchy and male dominance and sexism all are grounded in traditional readings of this creation story. Of course, stories can be read more than one way. We have the right to interpret them. We have the responsibility to ground ourselves in narratives that give us good values. But stories of origin matter.

Among medieval Jews, a mystical way developed. We know it as Kabbalah. Kabbalists accepted the Genesis story of creation, but they told other stories around it. Midrash. Filling in details the earlier stories missed. Reaching into unknown corners where new insight might dwell. Beginning with the Beginning was too restrictive for them. Here is a condensed, inevitably fragmentary interpretation of how Kabbalists understand our origins:

Before the Beginning. Before time and space had been created. Before existence itself, there was Ayn Sof. The Infinite. Some people will want to call the Infinite God. But that puts us in a different way of thinking. God is too much a character in ancient narratives. But Ayn Sof? Ayn Sof is. Ayn Sof is Being. Ayn Sof is Infinite. Ayn Sof is represented as infinite, unbounded, undifferentiated light… And the Infinite was a paradox. Ayn Sof desired self-knowledge. But how was self-knowledge possible where there was neither space nor distance nor differentiation? The Infinite needed something different if there were to be any hope of knowing the self. The Infinite needed the Finite.

So Ayn Sof focused. Let’s imagine the focus as a point. But we have to imagine it because space did not yet exist. And the Infinite paradoxically withdrew, creating a void at the heart of infinity. The void was empty, but it consisted of the dimensions of finitude. For the first time, we imagine, using our own time-bound frame of reference, for the first time, space existed. And it was empty. And Ayn Sof fashioned vessels in space into which to pour a portion of the infinite light. But when the light was poured into the vessels in the void, a catastrophe happened. The light of infinity was too powerful and the vessels shattered, scattering the light of infinity in fragments through the void. And creation was begun. Within the void, all that was was shaped and formed from the finite portion of infinite light that had erupted into the void. When human consciousness arose, humanity was charged with the task of gathering the shards of the broken vessels, the sparks of infinite light. Our is the task of repairing the world.

And this story has consequences. All creation is formed of bits of Ayn Sof. God, to speak in narrative form, is not separate from us or the rest of creation. All that exists is part of the divine seeking to know itself. And our purpose here is to repair the world. Tikkun Olam. It is a story that recognizes brokenness. It is a story that sees that brokenness as an opportunity for humanity to participate in divine self knowledge through service. Every story has consequences.

Thomas King, a Native American story teller, tells a different creation story. Far above primordial earth, if you will, was another world. Let’s start, at least, with his own words:

“Back at the beginning of the imagination, the world we know was nothing but water, while above the earth, somewhere in space, was a larger, more ancient world. And on that world was a woman… A crazy woman… Well, she wasn’t exactly crazy. She was more nosy. Curious. The kind of curious that doesn’t give up…”

The birds tried to convince her to be less curious. …But, wait! What shall we call this woman? It is easier to tell the story if she has a name. Let’s call her Charm. Just because she just doesn’t seem very much like a Catherine or an Edith… It just wasn’t in Charm’s nature to curb her curiosity. She was curious about why she had five toes instead of three. And she was curious about the mud on the river bank squishing between her toes. And she was curious about why she was experiencing cravings. And Rabbit told her it was because she was pregnant. “Whenever I get pregnant, I have cravings,” said Rabbit. Fish and Rabbit told Charm that she needed to dig some Red Fern Root because that was perfect for pregnant humans. Badger told her to be careful not to dig too deep. But Charm ignored him and dug right through to the other side of the world. She fell through. Right out into space. And she tumbled and tumbled. And ahead of her a blue dot grew and grew. Until she splashed down in the waters of water world.

Now, everybody knows that if you splash down after falling so far you won’t survive impact, so all the sea birds, seeing her coming, flew up and formed a net to break her fall. But that wasn’t the end of the challenges because Charm wasn’t a very good swimmer, and there was no land. Charm asked if there was anything large and flat that she could rest on. And the sea birds and fish and other sea creatures convinced Turtle to let her rest on his back.

Then Muskrat says, “This isn’t going to work for long! She’s going to have a baby!” And Charm says if they could find dry land, that would solve the problem. The animals ask what dry land is. And as she tells them, she remembers the mud at the bottom of the river on her home world. So the animals have a contest to find mud at the bottom of their ocean. Animal after animal gives up the search for mud, but finally, after being gone for days, Otter surfaces carrying some mud. Otter makes several trips to the bottom and brings up lots of mud just in time for Charm to have a place to give birth. To twins. A boy and a girl. One light, one dark. One left-handed, the other right-handed. And the twins love the mud. The girl spends her days smoothing out the surface of the mud, while the boy stomps and plays and builds hills and valleys. Together with the animals, Charm and her children create the world…

Every story has its consequences – its lessons to teach. And Charm’s story teaches that joining together to meet necessities, humanity, all creatures, and the forces of nature shape a developing world. Only cooperation makes survival possible.

But we live in a scientific age. Mysticism and folk tales aren’t the compelling explanations they once were. We’re interested in measurements and theorems and light spectra and degrees Kelvin. With Robert Frost, we want to know what elements are blended in distant stars and with what degree of heat they burn. And so our official story touches on these, and we don’t narrate it so often around the campfire but in labs and professional journals and university classrooms:

About 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was in a very dense, intensely hot state. For reasons our brightest scientists can theorize and the rest of us nod along like we comprehend, the universe suddenly expanded, cooling and forming patterns that were to become galaxies and star systems, hurtling through space at vast speeds, growing farther and farther apart from each other and from that original Big Bang. After about a hundred million years the first stars began to shine. 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system formed. Eventually conditions on our cooling planet were ripe for the emergence of life, leading to a great chain of evolutionary changes. Something like 2.3 million years ago, humans of the genus Homo emerged from that evolutionary process. Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago.

It is not the kind of story with characters and plots that gets told easily for our entertainment but is something we learn at school. It is a foundational story and has consequences. In it we ground our knowledge that the universe was not made for humanity to rule over but that we are part of it. We are deeply connected to all that exists. Part of the web of all existence. We know that we are responsible not just to ourselves but to the totality. It is science. And it is a story that changed the way we can and must see ourselves.

We can’t any longer look to the distant heavens in search of God or the Holy. We are surrounded by the Holy. Everything is holy now.


PART II: HISTORIC STORIES OF FELLOWSHIP

Ever since I came to Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship a year and a half ago, each month, on the last Tuesday of the month, you will find me at Bethel AME Church on the northeast side of town. I’m there with group of six to eight of you – occasionally fewer or more – cooking, serving, delivering for Feed My Sheep Community Kitchen. Feed My Sheep is a free hot meals program for people who walk in as well as 60-some home-bound people We have a lot of fun together, eat our own cooking (and we’re pretty good!), fill a real need for nutritious food for people who are in a tight spot, and we serve as a respite for the volunteers of Bethel AME. Only a one other church takes on the regular task of running the kitchen for a day. But the rest of the time, five days a week, 22 days a month, the people of Bethel feed the flock of people who depend on them. They are very appreciative of the respite we provide.

Feed My Sheep is a ministry that is almost 10 years old now. What took a while to sink into my feel for our place there is the fact that the relationship between the two congregations is not so new as that. In recent years, we may just hear their choir each year at Carbondale in Thanksgiving and we cook in their space once a month, but the tradition of healthy cooperation between out congregations goes back to the civil rights era. In late 1961 the fellowship’s Social Action Committee, reported plans to conduct a survey of the African American Community regarding job skills and housing. The survey itself was drawn up by the SIU Community Development Office, and someone suggested that Bethel AME’s cooperation be sought. This was thought of as a project for a whole year that would increase this fellowship’s involvement and visibility in the community.

On February 11, 1962, which was Brotherhood Sunday, teams of two, a white Unitarian recording the answers to the survey and a Black AME member asking the questions, canvassed the houses in the Northeast quadrant of the city. It did not turn into a year-long high-visibility project, but cooperative social action began to gel in the commitments of the fellowship, and a few months later the tabulated results pointed to an experience of discrimination and employment in menial jobs for African Americans here. The results of the survey were shared with the Carbondale Civil Rights Council. This was one of several ways this fellowship cooperated with Bethel AME during the Civil Rights Era. Children from the two congregations paired up to distribute cards to local merchants thanking them for desegregating. There were a series of interracial dinners involving fellowship members and members of Bethel. The early 1960s were something of a Golden Age for interracial and interdenominational cooperation for this congregation. The stories from that time ground us.

But the glory is not the whole story. Somehow we lost focus and in 1968 members admitted that, while once the congregation had acted in unity in significant social justice concerns, those days were in the past, the process stymied by the objections of individual members. Unity was invoked to do nothing as a congregation. And in 1972 the board was told that the social action committee was no longer needed as a standing committee because needs could be handled ad hoc as they arose. The board unanimously approved abolishing the standing committee.

Was the work of the Civil Rights Era done? I invite you to take a walk today through the northeast side of the city. With our own eyes, do we see equality and security there even now? What are the consequences of that part of our story? What lessons for the future?

A lot has happened since the 1960s, and I hope you will tell your stories of those years to people who are newer to the congregation. The stories of our successes can help define who we want to be going forward. And the stories of missteps help us keep our feet in reality and give us a program of things to do better in the future. This congregation is entering a time of more focused thinking about who we are and who we want to be. Our stories ground us. And every story has some consequence.

So let me close with one final story. A very recent one.

A couple of years ago this congregation was faced with a challenge unlike any it had faced before. Bill had approached the board and the board asked the congregation to vote whether you were willing to take a step into the unknown. You voted to accept the responsibility of becoming a teaching congregation. It was something that you didn’t have to do. But your doing so made it possible for me to do my ministerial internship while living at home, rather than having to move across the country for a year to do it.

So, in September 2010, I showed up, spoke to you first about how I became a Unitarian Universalist, and settled into getting to know you and how this congregation functions. At every step, you were there with me, encouraging me, affirming me. And as you got to know me, you learned that I commute from Mt. Vernon. And several of you commiserated with me over high gas prices.

An unpaid internship while a full-time seminary student, you realized, is something of a financial complication. Now I had entered this venture with you, accepting in advance the financial realities it entails. But you were concerned about the impact it would have on me. And so, quietly, without my knowing, a call went out to the members, giving you all the opportunity to show your love, your concern, your appreciation, and your generosity by contributing what you wished to help defray my fuel costs.

And so, a few days before the end of 2011, I received in the mail that freewill offering designated for that purpose by you: a check from the fellowship for a little more than $2,800! For that offering of faith, I thank you! Words do not sufficiently express what it means. The money is immensely helpful. But even more than the dollars themselves is what it represents concerning your generosity and your love.

The story of this fellowship is ever changing, but this story is part of it. Life goes on. Change is certain. But this story has consequences. This story tells part of the story of who this fellowship is. May it be taken on as a grounding narrative. A story that plays a part in shaping our sense of who we are becoming. Who we want to be.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ORDER OF SERVICE
Paul Kent Oakley, Worship Leader
Candy Davis, Vocals and Guitar


Gathering Music: “Shawnee Song” by Candy Davis

Welcome

Kindling the Chalice – Katarena Moroz

Story: The Earth rests on the back of a turtle… – from Thomas King

Round: “Gathered Here”

Stories: How did it all start?
| The Infinite
| Charm – from Thomas King
| This Evolving Universe

Music: “Holy Now” by Peter Mayer

Stories: What do we carry with us?
| Joys and Sorrows
| Silence

Taizé Chant: “Kindle in us the fire of love”

Stories: Who do we say that we are?
| Feeding the Sheep
| A Cautionary Tale
| Generosity and Gratitude

Music: “Life Goes On” by Candy Davis

Unison Offering Reading: “From each according to the ability and commitment of each, we build this fellowship and repair the world together. We come together and refresh ourselves, sharing our talents, our perspectives, our love, our resources, and our stories. In this way may our work for hope and justice continue in Carbondale and in the world.” (Paul Kent Oakley)

Offering Music: “Blossom Where You’re Planted” by Candy Davis

Recognitions and Announcements

Story: It’s stories all the way down… – from Thomas King

Blessing