Wow, a sermon . . .
Aug. 14th, 2005 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaThose of you who have been reading for a while know that I attend a Unitarian Universalist church, but I go to smaller meetings - Chalice Circles, discussion groups, and the like - far more often than I actually go to services. I went last week because our CC is currently running a food drive, and someone has to keep an eye on it before the first service, between services, and after the second service. I figured that as long as I was going to be watching the box before and after the second service, I would go ahead and actually, you know, attend the service.
Today's service was about the common Christian language of "salvation" and asking what, in a 21st-century Unitarian Universalist context - which needn't be theistic (and often isn't), much less Christocentric - that term can possibly mean. The "senior" co-minister at this church is a lady with the demeanor of a kindergarten teacher (which I think she might have been before going into the ministry), and so she opened the service with a story for the children - a parable about the inherent generosity of the universe, as expressed through the "everything seed."
In the actual sermon, she talked about what it means to save something, and she ended up with two contrasting but complementary ideas. One led back to what it means to be "unitarian" and "universalist" in the small sense, and described salvation in that context as bringing one's-self back into right relationship with one's Self and one's sacred Other - whether that Other is other people, one's immediate surroundings, one's environment in a larger sense, or Nature as a whole. The question then becomes, what is that right relationship? What does it look like, for instance, to be fully and wholly in right relationship with your True Self? If one must use that language, this seems a healthy way of thinking about it. It would probably be my personal preference not to use that language, as it is already rather unpleasantly loaded for me, but since so much of our social environment does use that language, I suppose it is better to be armored with a native, wholesome interpretation of it.
I liked the second idea better. My standard response to "are you saved?" is "I have nothing I need saving from." Her metaphor was for a set of quilts her family had been given when she was a child. They'd been used as bedquilts, as curtains for the kids' pretend stage, as throws for their couches, as picnic blankets, and finally, at the end of their useful lifetimes, as packing blankets for the kids' furniture when they moved off to college. Another family, being given a handmade quilt, might well have packed it neatly folded in a plastic bag on a shelf and "saved" it. These quilts were not saved; they were used, they were spent, they were handled and loved and fulfilled their purpose. I don't want to be saved! I want to be spent by the Divine in the world, in myself, in my Others, to be handled 'till I'm threadbare. That metaphor is much closer to my heart, my sense of myself.
Anyway, wow, a good sermon. Shocking! I'm intending to keep attending services until the food drive is over, and at the rate I'm currently going I might actually, like, occasionally attend even after it's done. Who'd have thought?
Today's service was about the common Christian language of "salvation" and asking what, in a 21st-century Unitarian Universalist context - which needn't be theistic (and often isn't), much less Christocentric - that term can possibly mean. The "senior" co-minister at this church is a lady with the demeanor of a kindergarten teacher (which I think she might have been before going into the ministry), and so she opened the service with a story for the children - a parable about the inherent generosity of the universe, as expressed through the "everything seed."
In the actual sermon, she talked about what it means to save something, and she ended up with two contrasting but complementary ideas. One led back to what it means to be "unitarian" and "universalist" in the small sense, and described salvation in that context as bringing one's-self back into right relationship with one's Self and one's sacred Other - whether that Other is other people, one's immediate surroundings, one's environment in a larger sense, or Nature as a whole. The question then becomes, what is that right relationship? What does it look like, for instance, to be fully and wholly in right relationship with your True Self? If one must use that language, this seems a healthy way of thinking about it. It would probably be my personal preference not to use that language, as it is already rather unpleasantly loaded for me, but since so much of our social environment does use that language, I suppose it is better to be armored with a native, wholesome interpretation of it.
I liked the second idea better. My standard response to "are you saved?" is "I have nothing I need saving from." Her metaphor was for a set of quilts her family had been given when she was a child. They'd been used as bedquilts, as curtains for the kids' pretend stage, as throws for their couches, as picnic blankets, and finally, at the end of their useful lifetimes, as packing blankets for the kids' furniture when they moved off to college. Another family, being given a handmade quilt, might well have packed it neatly folded in a plastic bag on a shelf and "saved" it. These quilts were not saved; they were used, they were spent, they were handled and loved and fulfilled their purpose. I don't want to be saved! I want to be spent by the Divine in the world, in myself, in my Others, to be handled 'till I'm threadbare. That metaphor is much closer to my heart, my sense of myself.
Anyway, wow, a good sermon. Shocking! I'm intending to keep attending services until the food drive is over, and at the rate I'm currently going I might actually, like, occasionally attend even after it's done. Who'd have thought?
