This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, in Kensington, California. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.

Here’s a handsaw. There’s more than one type of handsaw, but when I worked in residential construction, we sometimes called this a panel saw. In a nutshell, here’s how it works:

You put the piece of wood you’re working on across a sawhorse, or something low enough that you can trap the work with your knee — start your cut slowly, then begin sawing in long rhythmic strokes — keeping the saw absolutely perpendicular to the work by twisting your body slightly — if you have to make corrections, to keep cutting along the line you’ve marked, you twist slightly at the handle of the saw….

Well, that’s the basic idea. But I realize as I try to tell you how to use a handsaw that it’s not something that’s easy to put into words. I learned to use this tool by working as a carpenter for five years. I watched my boss, watched how he did it. I learned a lot from my boss, and I learned a lot from the saw itself. The saw taught me — if you don’t keep the saw absolutely perpendicular to the work, it buckles and throws you off — if you don’t take long, rhythmic strokes, you’ll never get the work done. I built up muscles in my right arm that I didn’t know I had, and after a time my body naturally took the right posture — knee on the work, ready to go — whenever I picked up a saw.

Tools can teach us. Psychologists call this phenomenon “distributed cognition.” A tool contains the distillation of generations of human activity and wisdom. Tools can teach us, can shape our bodies and our very beings, just as books can. Any cultural artifact can shape us and teach us — tools, and books, and, yes, churches. We use cultural artifacts, benefitting from the wisdom of the ages, and as we use them they shape us, shape our muscles and ligaments and bones, shape our souls — whatever a soul is — so that we move through the world in new ways.

Consider this church. Look beyond the new lights we have here in this room. Forget about the argument about whether there should be bigger windows. Ignore the inconsequential matters. Get down to a deeper level. Here we sit, in a large room together on Sunday morning, in much the same way Unitarians and Universalists have sat together on Sunday mornings since Unitarianism and Universalism began in North America. We stand to sing hymns in much the same way that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson and there children stood to sing hymns in their Unitarian church a hundred and fifty years ago. We sit and listen to a sermon, in much the same way that Judith Sargent Murray sat and listened to John Murray, one of the first Universalist preachers in North America. We come together in much the same way that religious liberals came together to hear Thomas Starr King preach liberal religion for the first time in California a century and a half ago.

Our liberal religion, our Unitarian Universalist faith, shapes us each week when we come to church. We come to hear poems and great religious writings read out loud, and we are shaped by them. We listen as ministers and lay leaders try to make sense out of the world. We are shaped by what they say, and then during coffee hour we talk with them, and they in turn are shaped by the congregation. We reshape the great old scriptures to meet our needs, turning the Torah and the gospels of Jesus into books of liberation — and shaped by their liberating message, we in turn go out of this church to shape the world.

As you can see, churches are just like handsaws. As we use a handsaw to cut and shape something we’re working on, the handsaw teaches us and shapes us. Maybe we don’t want to push that metaphor too far — churches don’t make sawdust. And churches are different, too, because the church shapes us as we shape the church, and those of us in the church are all shaping each other.

So we are shaped by church. But here’s a funny thing. While we let ourselves shape and be shaped by church, we no longer let that process happen to our children, at least not much.

Up until fifty years or so ago, Unitarians and Universalists mostly had their Sunday school classes for children (and sometimes for adults) before the worship service, maybe at 9:30. Then, in theory at least, after Sunday school was over, whole families would go to the 10:45 worship service together — just as Lidian Emerson sat in the Emerson family pew flanked by her daughter Ellen on one side, and her son Edward Emerson on the other side. By the early 20th century, however, people began to notice that more and more often families with children would leave after Sunday school and not come to the worship service.

In the 1920’s, a brilliant religiou educator named Sophia Lyon Fahs noticed that children were not coming to church much any more. Using the new science of developmental psychology, Sophia Fahs thought she could explain this phenomenon — worship services were not developmentally appropriate for children and teenagers. Sophia Fahs was not sure about changing worship services to make them appropriate for both adults and children, but she thought she could create a really good, age-appropriate Sunday school for children.

She got the Union Theological School in New York City to sponsor her new school, so from the bginning her school had no connection with a church. Her school was absolutely wonderful. It was so wonderful that when the Unitarians and the Universalists teamed up together to create the best curriculum series possible, they naturally hired Sophia Fahs to take charge of the project.

Sophia Fahs and her generation completely split the Sunday school from the worship services — they completely split the children from the adults of the church. Typically, children were not even allowed to come in to worship services. By the time our building was built, in 1961, many Unitarian Universalist congregations worked hard to separate their children and teenagers in completely separate buildings. While Sophia Fahs is one of my heroes, I now feel that separating children from adults was the worst possible thing to do.

I feel that way because I was one of those children. As a Unitarian Universalist child, I rarely was allowed in worship services at all. When my parents and other adults went to wroship services, we children were all sent off to a completely separate wing of the church building. Looking back, I remember almost nothing from any of my Sunday school curriculums. What I do vivdly remember was when I got to go to worship services.

I remember when I was twelve or thirteen, I would sometimes help my father usher — I think he was head usher that year, and he had a terrible time recruiting enough ushers, so that’s why I got to usher — and when it came time for the sermon, I’d go and sit down to listen. Sophia Fahs was right — mostly I couldn’t understand the sermon, because it wasn’t developmentally appropriate. I always tried to sit next to a man named Hrand Saxenian, because during the sermon he would periodically take a notebook out of his pocket and scribble some notes to himself. When I sat next to him, I felt it was OK to read the back of the hymnal. Those of you who remember the old blue hymnal will remember that in the back, there were little capsule biographies of all the authors and composers. I loved reading those capsule biographies, and from them I learned about William Ellery Channing, Kennethe Patton, and Beethoven. Maybe the sermon wasn’t developmentally appropriate, but sitting next to Hrand Saxenian certainly was. I learned that even if you couldn’t understand the sermon, you came to church to be with other people, to gather in community.

But mostly, I went off to Sunday school. As did many kids who grew up as Unitarian Universalists in those years. The funny thing is, most of the kids I went to Sunday school with are no longer Unitarian Universalists. Most of the ones I still know don’t go to any church at all. My generation of Unitarian Universalist kids got a strong message: go off to school but don’t bother us adults in church. I feel lucky that my dad let me usher, and that I got to know Hrand Saxenian.

Recently, I was talking with my friend Jen Devine, who also grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and she has given me permission to tell you about her experiences growing up in a Unitarian Unviersalist church. Her experiences were quite different than mine. Her family belonged to a small Unitarian Universalist church in norhtern New England. She remembers that there were only ten or twelve kids, of all ages, in her Sunday school, and they all met in one big room. But she only went to Sunday school about half the time. The rest of the time, she was upstairs in the worship service. Like me, Jen said mostly she remembers being “bored out her mind” during the sermon — “someone droning on with a sermon up in front” is how she put it. But the worship services were important to her nonetheless.

Jen remembers that when you walked into the worship service there was an eternal flame that was lit, symbolizing the wisdom of the ages, and that the chalice was lit from that eternal flame showing our debt to the ages past. She remembers gazing up at a mobile from which hung symbols of the world’s religions, and she felt some kind of connection with those religions. When a new minister came, she remembers that worship services got even better for kids. The new minister made sure kids got to light the chalice, and do readings, and become full participants in the worship service. Jen would still go downstairs to Sunday school about half the time, to do an art project or something — but I sense that it was the time in worship service that really shaped her as a Unitarian Universalist.

I asked Jen if, as was true at my church, most of the kids she grew up with left Unitarian Universalism. No, she said after a moment’s reflection, most of the kids from her church are still Unitarian Universalists.

Here’s what I think happened:

In my childhood church, we had a vision of separateness. Just as in the wider society, children were to be separated from adults. The children were shaped by that experience, and naturally did not stay in church.

But in Jen’s church, children and teenagers were integrated into the whole life of the congregation. Jen’s church was counter-cultural in the best possible way, because her church had a vision of wholeness. I’ll go further — her church truly had a vision of the oneness of humanity. Including children. Including teenagers. As well as adults of all ages.

When children come to church, we shape them — we adults shape them. Earlier, you saw how Bill shaped the children during the storytelling, helping them to be a grove of trees. But did you also notice that the children shaped Bill? By where they stood, by how they moved, they helped to shape Bill’s dance. Just so, when Bryan has the children sing one part of a round, and the adults sing another part, our voices blend together in a harmony that would be impossible if we sang alone. This, my friends, gives you a snese of the wholeness that is possible in our church.

Where does this church stand? How well do we integrate children into the whole life of the congregation? We do better than the church of my childhood — we welcome the children into the worship service, we sing with them, we dance with them, and they feel comfortable with us. These things are very important, and they are to our credit.

But I am troubled by other aspects of our church. I am troubled by how hard it is to find Sunday school teachers. We only have about 65 children and teenagers on any given Sunday morning. In our church, with its 550 members, it should be easy to find more than enough people who are called to a ministry with children and youth, who are willing to be Sunday school teachers and youth advisors. But here it is October already, and I still need half a dozen more teachers and advisors — and I worry about January when I will have to recruit more teachers and advisors. There are other, equally troubling signs. I look around and I don’t see any children’s art on the walls. In fact, I see almost no evidence in this building that children might use this building. If I were a child, how would I feel about that? Would I feel that this was an adult-only building, and that I was not completely welcome here?

Here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, we say that we welcome people no matter what race, we accept you if you’re gay or straight; we believe in the oneness of humanity. We have a vision of wholeness for ourselves and for our world.

But our vision of wholeness must also include all people no matter what their age — children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged folks like me, and older adults. Like my friend Jen’s church, we must find a way to be counter-cultural, to resist the impulse to age-separation, to become whole.

I’m a good Universalist, and so for me it all comes down to the fact that love is the most powerful force in the universe. I feel we are called to find deeper ways of shaping and being shaped by children, and teeneagers. I feel we are called to open ourselves to increasing the numbers of young adults in our midst. If we let it, love will shape us so.

As a Universalist, I know that love will triumph in the end. We will heal the separation between children and adults. I believe we are called to become a community of wholeness, a community bound together with bonds across the generations, a community where people of all ages are central to our life together — in short a community worshipping together in love.

This worship service was conducted at First Church, Unitarian, in Athol, Mass. The sermon itself was extemporaneous, and the readings and introduction exist in manuscript form only.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Church, Unitarian, of Athol, Massachusetts. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The reading this morning is from the first page of the book Returning: A Spiritual Journey, by Dan Wakefield.

One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again. This was not, in other words, one of those waking nightmares left over from sleep that is dispelled by the comforting light of day. It was, rather, a response to the reality that another morning had broken in a life I could only deal with sedated by wine, loud noises, moving images, and wired to electronic games that further distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being, my most essential self. It was the beginning of a year in which I would have scored in the upper percentile of those popular magazine tests that list the greatest stresses of life: I left the house I owned, the city I was living in, the work I was doing, the woman I had lived with for seven years and had hoped to remain with the rest of my life, ran out of money, discovered I had endangered my health, and attended the funeral of my father in May and my mother in November.

The day I woke up screaming I grabbed from among my books an old Bible I hadn’t opened for nearly a quarter of a century. With a desperate instinct I turned to the Twenty-third Psalm and read it over, several times, the words and the King James cadence bringing a sense of relief and comfort, a kind of emotional balm. In the coming chaotic days and months I sometimes recited that psalm over in my mind, and it always had that calming effect, but it did not give me any sense that I believed in God again. The psalm simply seemed an isolated source of solace and calm, such as any great poem might be. [p. 1 ff.]

Sermon

Some of you may remember having read Dan Wakefield’s words from this morning’s reading. As I said, the reading is from a book called Returning, which was quite popular after it was published back in 1988. And the book was based in part on articles Dan Wakefield wrote for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and GQ magazine back in 1984 and 1985. Dan Wakefield’s articles and books made quite an impression on quite a number of people back then. Which was remarkable, because what Dan Wakefield was saying was, in essence, that religion and spirituality turned out to be central to his life.

If Dan Wakefield had been an evangelical Christian, no one would have cared if religion had been at the center of his life; no one would have cared about his spirituality. But Wakefield was a tough, skeptical journalist and novelist. He was tough: his first book was about the year he spent living in Spanish Harlem. He was no angel: his best-selling novel, written in the 1960’s, was called Going All the Way — and the novel was not the story of someone going all the way to heaven, it was the story of a couple of guys who were trying to lose their virginity. He had worked as a sports reporter, he hung out in bars, he wrote scripts for network TV, he was typical in many ways of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking (male) writer of the middle twentieth century.

Writers of that type tended not to have religious feelings; or if they did, they kept them to themselves. When Dan Wakefield rediscovered the spiritual dimension of his life, that was important to him. But then he published articles about it, and they were published in respectable mainstream secular newspapers and magazines. He wrote a book that sold well enough that Penguin Books picked it up and published it in paperback. Bill Moyers called the book “one of the most important memoirs of the spirit that I’ve ever read.”

All this was enough to make people begin to sit up and take notice — maybe something was going on here. Maybe our spiritual lives are something that we really can’t separate off from the rest of our lives; we can’t just keep them to ourselves. And Dan seemed to be going farther than that: he seemed to be saying that it was, in fact, important that we talk about our spiritual lives with other people; that we share our spiritual stories with those around us.

Dan said this about his book Returning: “This book originated in the living room of the King’s Chapel parish house in Boston, where a group of ten people sat around a table sharing their life experiences in a course in ‘religious autobiography’ taught by the minister [Rev. Carl Scovel].” Carl Scovel (who, by the way, is a Unitarian Universalist minister), over a period of some years had developed a series of exercises to help people remember the story of their lives. A key part of Carl Scovel’s course in “religious autobiography” was that you did your remembering in a group with other people. Everybody did the exercises together, and then they wrote about their memories, and then they read what they had written, out loud, to the others taking the course. A good part of the power in that original course that Dan Wakefield took lay in the sharing of stories with the other nine people sitting around that table in King’s Chapel parish house.

After he had written his own religious autobiography, Dan Wakefield began to lead religious autobiography courses himself. He wanted to expand the idea beyond the King’s Chapel community. He began leading what he called spiritual autobiography courses through the Boston Center for Adult Education; he chose the term because the word “spiritual” felt more inclusive than “religious.” Those courses went so well that he began offering them in other venues. He led spiritual autobiography courses at yoga centers, in a gym at the Rancho La Puerta health spa in New Mexico, at the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, at University Unitarian Church in Seattle; he even incorporated some of the exercises into a graduate course in writing that he taught at Emerson College. He found that there was great power in this idea of spiritual autobiography; that here was something that touched people’s lives deeply, with immediacy.

Now where did this power come from? You sit around with some other people and write the story of your life — what makes that so powerful? Dan Wakefield has offered some reasons why, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his reasons; partly because I think ultimately he wants to give most of the credit to God.

I’m not sure I can agree that God necessarily provides the power behind the course. I’ve been leading spiritual autobiography courses myself since I experienced some of Dan’s exercises in a course I took with him at Emerson College in 1991, and I’ve helped lay people lead the course as well. I’ve watched liberal Christians and bedrock atheists take the course, and both believers and non-believers have felt some kind of power in writing spiritual autobiographies as a part of a group. I’m neither an atheist nor a believer. I’m not going to argue for or against the power of God as it may or may not affect your life. So it is that I find myself searching for another explanation.

Over the past couple of months, a group of five people from this church have been meeting with me on Sunday evenings, and we have pursued together this course in spiritual autobiography. As always, the stories that the participants read to each other, the memories that they shared in the course, moved me to the depths of my soul. And I kept asking myself, can I explain a little of the power that I felt from hearing these spiritual autobiographies?

I shared an idea with the group of why I thought this course could be so powerful. It can be so powerful because it gets right to the heart of one of the fundamental religious questions: who am I? I know that for myself I haven’t often come to church to find out what I believe about God. And speaking just for myself, I know that I have never come to church to listen to creeds and doctrines. What I believe in has become less and less important to me over the years.

I don’t want to ask what I believe in. I want to ask what I feel is the most fundamental religious question: Who am I? I want to learn who I am in relation to other people, and I want to know that others can accept me for who I am. I want to learn what it is that I hold most dear so that I can begin to know what it is that I should do. I want to know something about the core of my being, what it is about me that is most permanent, that has survived through hard times. Who am I? What is the core of my being?

The last meeting of our spiritual autobiography class this spring took place last Sunday, and at the end of the meeting, after we had listened to two people read their spiritual autobiographies, I took a few minutes and asked the members of the group if they could sum up their spiritual autobiographies in one sentence. The three people who were present that evening gave me permission to share their answers with you. Lyn Kimmel said, “I’m a person who doesn’t have the answers, but I enjoy searching for the questions.” Peg Robinson wondered if she had made the right choices at times, and then said, “I’m still searching and changing.” Bob Coyle managed to sum up his life in three words: “I’m still seeking.”

Bob added a story that he has given me permission to share with you. As a young man, Bob worked at a meat counter, selling cuts of meat. Bob says that at that time he really knew nothing about meat, a fact that was probably obvious to everyone who knew him. But as soon as he put on that white apron and stepped behind the meat counter, people assumed that he was a meat expert, and they would ask him meat questions: What cut would be best for such and such a recipe? Will this cut serve two people? (To which question a co-worker once responded, “Yes, if one of you doesn’t like meat.”) Bob’s point was that we have to take on roles in our lives, and these can shape who we are, and how others see us.

As I thought about Bob’s story of the meat counter, it began to occur to me wherein lies part of the power of the spiritual autobiography course. Church is one place where we don’t have to take on roles with quite the deadly seriousness required of us in most of the rest of the world. Yes, Sally is the chair of the Board of Managers, so yes, she does have a role that she plays here at church. But that is different than putting on that white apron and stepping behind the meat counter. I think the difference lies in the fact that here at church we can see more of who someone is. When you put on that white apron and step behind the meat counter, people tend to see the white apron and not the person wearing the white apron. When you come to church, there’s more of a chance that people will see you as you, not as one of the roles you have to play.

And when you participate in a spiritual autobiography group, there is even more of a chance that the others in the group can see you as yourself. The course starts off by asking you to remember who you were as a child. When you read your childhood memories to the group, you strip away the roles you have accumulated over the years: as a child, you were not a parent, or a lover, or an employee, or a Board chair, or someone who worked at a meat counter. Who are you when your roles don’t get in the way?

And there is something in the process of remembering. When I talk to the woman at the meat counter at Crosby’s supermarket where I shop, I don’t know where she has come from, nor who she once was. Even when I got to Vanderhoof’s hardware and talk to Scott Vanderhoof, even though I remember when he was just a young man and his father ran the store, Scott is still defined for me by his role as a hardware man. That can happen at church, too, but when I sit down with someone and hear their memories, hear how they have grown and changed over the years, then I begin to understand them as the complex, changing, spiritual beings that they truly are. We have a core, a kernel somewhere, a part of us that is not some role we fill in day-to-day life.

I noticed, as I’m sure you did, that Peg and Lyn and Bob all summed up their lives by talking about changing, and seeking, and searching for the questions. Sometimes I sum up my life by saying that I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up; and while I mean it partially as a joke, it is also the truth. What am I going to be when I grow up? I still don’t know; I still keep changing. It’s a little frightening at times: in my forties, and I still don’t know what I’m doing, or who I really am, or why I’m here.

Maybe we never figure out who we’re going to be when we grow up. In that case, I feel that what lies at the core is the remembering. I may not know who I’m going to be. I may not even be able to say who I am now. But I can remember a little bit of who I was; I can remember what I have done with my life (both for good and ill); I can remember the people around me who have shaped me, and in some cases whom I have helped to shape.

Dan Wakefield wrote, “One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again” (– a not-uncommon reaction to life, by the way, although we New Englanders are culturally less likely to actually scream out loud).

He screamed because something was wrong with his life. He didn’t know who he was any more. As he tells the story, there remained something in him that wanted to survive, and so he began to change his life. He stopped drinking, he started exercising, he did all those things that you are supposed to do. All that he did certainly helped; his health improved; he stopped screaming when he awakened in the morning. But the turning point for Dan Wakefield was going back to church, taking the spiritual autobiography class with Carl Scovel, and remembering who he was at his core. And in so doing, in becoming a part of a community where experienced him not as some role he filled, but a person, he became more whole. This connection of us and the past; both our own past, and the greater past. Towards the end of his book, Dan writes that he interviewed Carl Scovel on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the founding of King’s Chapel. Carl Scovel said:

I think our parishioners are people who like to feel they are a part of a ‘flow,’ of a stream of events. We have a very strong sense of history, and I think it’s important for people who do not feel ‘isolated in time’ — who do not feel this year is totally different from all other years, but want to know they are part of what’s happened and will be part of what happens.”

So said Carl Scovel.

The memories are not just our own. Some are memories that come from parents or ancestors, from the community, from humanity. In the act of remembering, we dip our toes into the river of humanity, which is also the river of all life. To ask, “Who am I?” is to invite the answer that while I am a person, I am connected to all humanity, I am a part of the greater life of the universe. I am not alone, nor are you. We are not alone because there are those who have gone before us; and there are those who will succeed us, and remember us in their turn. The immortality flows through us in memories, as we become a part of that flow when we are remembered; we are connected through the river that flows through all: that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.