"Secular Days"

READING

Robert Coles is a professor of social ethics at Harvard University and of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of "The Children of Crisis" series, in which he studied children of color who grew up during the civil rights movement, as well as many other works. Here is an excerpt from a short memoir, "Here and Now We Are Walking Together."

We all dreaded getting Miss Avery for the fifth grade - those of us in the fourth grade, awaiting the next year's classroom assignment. "She's tough," one of us remarked; "real bad tough," affirmed another. . . .

I was assigned to "room five," where she supposedly reigned supreme, if not tyrannically. To this day I see us all sitting in that classroom, headed by Bernicia Avery, a Vermont lady, heavyset, with white hair and alert blue eyes that darted everywhere and sometimes concentrated mightily, unrelievedly on the one of us who had gotten her ire up. To this day, also, I can hear the words that came my way one school morning: "Bobby! I've called your name twice before." Lifting my eyes, I realized how closely I was being watched by my fellow students, who knew well the dramatic possibilities immediately ahead: "This is a school," she bellowed. "You are not at home, alone in your bedroom or study room, reading a book on your own. You are here, with others, and we all deserve your attention as much as that book, valuable as it is!"

Our eyes met, stayed fixed on one another for a second or two - and then my head lowered. I stared at the book, then the floor beyond it. She had been sitting behind her big teacher's desk, but now she got herself up. . . .

As she began her walk, she spoke: "We are entitled to travel on our own paths, but here and now we are walking together." I finally lifted my eyes to acknowledge the speaker . . ."We should pay attention to others, as well as ourselves." A pause, while we took in the admonition. "We spend time looking at ourselves and looking out for ourselves, but please, let us look to our right and to our left, to our front and to what's going on to our back. Please, let us be mindful of others, as we hope they will be of us!" . . .

Back home, that day's afternoon, I told my mother of the instruction offered us. We'd all been told to write down what our teacher called for us to witness and consider - and there it was, now mine, in my hand, for my mom to contemplate. She read my words quietly, then read them out loud - not to me, but to herself. I can see her looking out the window, often her wont, then her eyes directed at me, and then her words: "If more people lived up to those words, the world would be a better place to live." Yes, I sure agreed in my thinking - my mother had now linked arms with my teacher, and I was very much a link between them. . . .

Here I am, in another lifetime, so to speak, remembering Miss Avery and her times of tough insistence: a teacher who wanted us to learn our letters and numbers, yes, but a teacher who also wanted to keep us a bit free of the self-preoccupation that tempts us often, a bit free to turn outside ourselves so we might be fellow citizens to others. A big freedom, indeed - to be pushed now and then from the mind's inevitable self-consciousness in the direction of our fellow wayfarers and citizens; human inwardness given the outward life of human connection - an expressive and introspective freedom that both defines our humanity and gives it the sovereignty of enactment in the everydayness of our time spent here living with others as well as ourselves.

"Here and Now We Are Walking Together"
Robert Coles

SERMON

Having spent nearly all my conscious life going to church on Sunday mornings, I am always amazed to find out what else people do while we are in here. During my sabbatical these past four months I discovered over and over that there is a big world out there - not just the world we traveled, but an alluring local alternative to the one we inhabit by coming to church. Once I got over feeling strange about roaming around outside on Sunday mornings, I adapted to making use of the time the way nearly everyone else does. I went to the grocery store and the farmer's market, to the beach and the gym; I went out for Sunday brunch. If I bumped into someone I knew - sometimes one of you, but not all that often - I would feel compelled to explain why I wasn't in church.

It always seemed a little awkward. I have this idea that ministers should be in church Sunday morning. I can't imagine where else we would be. Same place nearly everyone else is, it turns out. Out there in secular space.

It's a thin membrane that divides the secular world - the world of shopping and chores and meeting friends for brunch - from the church world. We church people travel back and forth all the time, without even realizing how profound the difference can be. It becomes part of our life.

But for many people, the secular world is all they have or want to have. Their lives are already full, with ample demands and opportunities to grow. As I mingled with them and thought about them on my Sundays away from you, I had to recognize how easy it is for any of us just to slip away, spending more and more time on the secular side of that thin membrane, and less and less time here. It takes an active commitment, manifested by setting aside the time each week, entering into a relationship with a community, allowing it to become habitual, as in a "habit of the heart," until we can't imagine what life would be like without it.

We get caught up in the day to day life of this church, its personalities and aspirations, its ups and downs. This momentum pulls us along, as if it were its own reason for being. It could be. But that is not all it is. We are seeking something here we can find nowhere else.

What we seek here is not simply a sacred place set aside for worship, as we commonly think of churches. Sacred places are everywhere: in nature, in spaces holding cherished memories, in earth itself. Our tradition has taught us that a church is only as sacred as the people make it, by the integrity of our lives and the quality of our respect for others. We are responsible for what happens when we cross the threshold into the sanctuary.

It's a big step to take. We come with intention - and with expectation. This makes us open and vulnerable, hoping to discover that something in here will be different from out there, and that we will be changed as we experience it.

Maybe that makes it sound too mysterious. But there has to be a powerful force to call someone away from the farmer's market or "Meet the Press" - especially for the first time - to find the way to us. It calls each of us, the habitual church-goer and the first-timer, when we seek to act on our intentions and see where they will take us.

I cannot tell you how many times while I was away this fall, I thought of you with increased respect and admiration. Considering all the attractions of the secular world, you really have to want to be here to come on Sunday. I never fully appreciated the effort all of you make. Or the powerful motivation that keeps you going.

I note that Grace Phillips and Tom Lloyd have given the flowers for today's service to mark their first year with the church. The decision to become part of a religious community is a turning point in our lives. I'm glad that it is something to celebrate and to share with others. "Let us celebrate what we share," writes Richard S. Gilbert, "We are, after all, in this together."

The recognition that "we are in this together" results from realizing how much we share as human beings. It also happens when we discover our differences and learn how to coexist. We grow from honest encounters with others, and growth is good. Of course, we can have this kind of insight and growth anywhere. But when we come here, we enter into an agreement to have these experiences as a community and to understand them through values we share.

In Robert Coles's memoir of fifth grade, he describes how he learns a simple but important value. "We are entitled to travel on our own paths," his teacher tells him, "but here and now we are walking together." She hammers the lesson home by making all the children write it out. When young Bobby brings his lesson home to his mother, she takes seriously what he has written. She tells him, "If more people lived up to those words, the world would be a better place to live." Many years later, Robert Coles reflects that we all need a push "now and then from the mind's inevitable self-consciousness in the direction of our fellow wayfarers and citizens; human inwardness given the outward life of human connection."

It is this movement, from self to other, that makes the world a better place and makes us better people. This is something like the change we seek when we come to church. It is also the reason why it takes powerful intention - and follow through - to get here. But it's worth it.

Something happens when we walk together in community. It's more than meeting like-minded individuals or making new friends - as valuable as such experiences can be. It's more than growing as a person or learning new ideas. It is realizing that "we are all in this together." Community is a moral force to be used for the good - a power we can gain no other way. Only by affiliating with others, human to human, friends or strangers, can we generate this power to be and do something in the world.

Early this fall, just as my sabbatical began, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast. I sat at home in my TV chair, glumly viewing the images of devastation and desperation, barely able to understand what I was seeing. Like so many other Americans, I felt shocked and ashamed by the feeble response of our government. When I couldn't stand it another moment, I would go upstairs to my computer and click to send money.

I wasn't alone. People responded to this tragedy with unprecedented generosity. But I felt alone. It was just me and my computer against the forces of nature and negligence. One household doing what it could. I thought about what people in our church and our larger Unitarian Universalist community would be doing. Raising money - and lots of it, but not just that; witnessing also to the dignity of the lives lost, giving voice to the shared sorrow, expressing frustration at not being able to do more. Asking questions about justice and accountability, sharing stories of hope and survival.

"Here and now we are walking together," Robert Coles's teacher told him, and that would have been one of those times. We would have been walking not just with each other, but with all the suffering humanity with whom we share our world. We would have generated compassion and solidarity, moral forces to ease the pain, and found a way to give.

That's what I imagined was going on here and with church people everywhere while I sat transfixed by disaster on CNN. And I'm sure I'm not too far from the truth. I know what is possible with a church - and what is so much harder without it.

Here we fulfill our human vocation to be a moral force for good, a force with the power to change, to heal, to comfort, and to care in a world that is too large for each of us alone. We need each other - to be what human beings can be when we use our collective power. That is the need we bring with us each time we cross the threshold into this sanctuary. That is the contribution each of us gives to keep this place sacred - our wish, our will, and our hope to make this place truly different, and the world transformed by our lives, here and now, as we walk together.

Resources used to prepare this sermon include Robert Coles, "Here and Now We Are Walking Together," in "The Best American Spiritual Writing," ed. Philip Zaleski (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), pp. 28-30; Richard S. Gilbert, "What We Share," in "What We Share: Collected Meditations," Volume Two, ed. Patricia Frevert (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2002).