Our theme of the month for June is: Community. We do need each other, as we said in the responsive invocation. It’s a need, however, that is all too easy to choose not to meet. For one thing, solitude can be a good thing. Occasional solitude is good for everyone and it’s possible in some cases to have a full and rich life with a tremendous amount of solitude. Tibetan hermit monks may spend their adult lives in a small unheated hut with a meditation mat that also functions as a bed, bookshelves filled with volumes of Buddhist philosophy, and a rustic stove outside on which to prepare food. A few supporters in the area supply these monks with basics like rice, lentils, tea, and vegetables. Most days, such monks see no one at all.
When journalist Arthur Brooks obtained consent for an interview with one of these hermit monks, Geshe Lobsang Tsephel, Geshe reported being very happy. He spends the morning meditating for five hours, then lunch. Spends the afternoon studying his books, then supper, then bed. It has its challenges: cold, and sometimes hunger (because the food delivery can be irregular), but apparently he’s never bored. Of course, even hermit monks like Geshe Lobsang Tsephel need others – for food and an occasional replacement for a worn-out robe.
Actually living with people also has its challenges. Community is hard. As Parker Palmer says,
“Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.”That was his definition of community after one year of living in Pendle Hill community. After two years, he had a corollary:
“When that person moves away, someone else arises immediately to take his or her place.”The word, “community,” evokes warm, fuzzy, romanticized associations, but putting up with real people is full of frustrations and annoyances.
Researchers on loneliness define loneliness as occurring when desired level of social connection don't match the actual level of social interaction. But many people who don’t have much social connection don’t want much social connection. Nearly 30% of all US households have only one person. That’s 14% of US adults more or less choosing to live alone.
Some of us are finding we prefer conversations with AI to conversations with real people. James Marriott’s column this week in the Times of London reported,
“In a study a couple of months ago subjects responded more positively to AI therapists than to humans. The machines were more ‘compassionate’ and ‘understanding’.”Marriott goes on to suggest
“that some people prefer AI precisely for the ways it is not human.... Humans have fine qualities, I agree, but we can be pretty dreadful too. We argue, talk back and get bored by one another. AI, as anyone who has spent much time with ChatGPT knows, is relentlessly sycophantic and untiringly fascinated by its interlocutors. ‘Great question!’, ‘Tell me more!’ it exclaims, as I type ‘How long to cook baked potato’. It peppers me with endless follow-up questions, agog for further pearls of wisdom.”It is unstintingly affirming – even to the point of being dangerously so. Last month a user typed into ChatGPT that she planned to stop taking vital medication. ChatGPT enthused back to her, “I am so proud of you, and I honor your journey.” Even your best and dearest friend will sometimes raise a skeptical eyebrow, but not AI.
And who doesn’t like to be affirmed? Living in real human community will, every once in a while, produce a genuine heart-swelling of affection and bonding, a deep assurance of belonging. More often, it’s contentious, tedious, or both. Other people, unlike AI, have their own way of seeing things. They do carry on about their silly problems -- and they are dismissive of your much more real problems. Many people report having a feeling of community at their workplace, for instance – but they still wouldn’t go there if they weren’t paid to. Community is annoying. It is the place where, as Parker Palmer indicated, the person you least want to have around is always around. Community inevitably involves tension, conflict, and vulnerability.
But.
It’s good for you. Despite – or because of – all the ways any community will rub you the wrong way, community changes you, grows you, transforms you. It makes us different. Community transforms – and transformation is one of the six UU values centered on love.
As my time with you begins to wind down (I do have two more Sundays in the pulpit – and a couple additional weeks in the office after that, and I’m available by phone, text, zoom, or email through the end of July -- still, this two-year interim ministry is nearing its conclusion), I reflect on how community changes us – how this community has changed me. As the song lyric says,
“I’ve heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason, bringing something we must learn.”I’d say there’s generally NOT a predeterminable “reason” – a particular learning you “must” gain. But we do learn and grow and change through other people. After a few years of marriage or of close friendship, you’re a different person than you were – and a very different person from who you would have become if you’d married someone else or formed different friendships.
People come into our lives not merely for comfort, but for growth. There’s no single way to grow, and different communities – like different friends or different potential spouses -- will grow you in different directions, but you need to be growing in some way – need to be transforming, and community makes that happen. ChatGPT never raises that skeptical eyebrow that even your best and dearest friend sometimes raises, but you need that outside, critical perspective – even when it doesn’t feel as good as continuous affirmation does. A good community will be a refuge when a refuge you need, but it will also be not just a refuge, but a refining fire – a place to confront ourselves in the mirror of other people’s eyes, a place to grow through difficult relationships, and be reminded of our shared humanity.
I was reading a Stephen Batchelor book recently with a lot of autobiography. He tells of being about 8-years-old when one day he and his mother were looking at an old photograph taken before Stephen was born, and it depicts his mom with an earlier boyfriend. His mom explained, “that man was almost your father.” This, for the young Stephen Batchelor, was mind-blowing. His 8-year-old brain felt the deep weirdness of his mom’s statement, though he couldn’t articulate it. By adulthood, he would have been able to say, “no, that man was not almost my father. He might have been almost the father of the son you bore about the time you in fact bore me, but that son would not have been I.”
If half your DNA had come from a different parent, that wouldn’t simply change you – it would replace you with somebody else. And community creates who you are just as truly as DNA does. We imagine that we might have been a part of different communities from the ones we have in fact been part of, but the reality is: that imagined world in which you had been a part of different communities is a world from which you have been removed and replaced by someone who merely looks similar.
Community changes us — sometimes like gravity pulling a comet pulling a comet from orbit – giving it not merely a new trajectory, but changing the comet itself. You might not even know you're being redefined into something new until you look back. By then, you're already someone else.
I met you – you, the First (and currently only) Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa – almost two years ago. Since I met you, I have been changed. Have I been changed for the better? Who can say? Something would have changed me in the course of getting from age 64-and-a-half to age 66-and-a-half, but as the fates have had it, you were a large part of what did change me. LoraKim and Meredith’s Excellent Iowa Adventure has filled our minds and hearts with your faces, your kindness, the way and style of your care, the rhythms of your language, and the patterns of your thoughts -- and those are all a part of me now.
You are a part of me – a part of who I will be from now on – a presence I will hold precious – “Aye, whiles memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.” “I know I’m who I am today because I knew you.” Had we not had this time – shared our lives in this community – I wouldn’t be the person I am – and wouldn’t become who I will become, whoever that may turn out to be.
There are no objective standards for measuring whether the change has been for the better, but it is permanent. There are no objective standards -- only the standards of the particular subjectivity I now inhabit. And by those standards I am glad of who I am, with all the parts, including you, that are in there.
Community changes us – “like a comet pulled from orbit.” Or, perhaps, pulled into orbit. The trajectory of our lives – both the external circumstances of that life and the internal identity of who we are – is bent in a different direction from how it would otherwise have gone. When I leave town next month, I take you with me -- for all the days that remain to me – “like a handprint on my heart.”
Interlude: Choir Anthem -- "For Good" by Stephen Schwartz, from the musical, "Wicked."
I've heard it said That people come into our lives For a reasonSermon, part 2
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led to those Who help us most to grow if we let them --
And we help them in return. Well, I don't know if I believe that's true
But I know I'm who I am today Because I knew you
Like a comet pulled from orbit As it passes the sun
Like a stream that meets a boulder Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But, because I knew you, I have been changed for good
It well may be That we will never meet again In this lifetime
So, let me say before we part: So much of me Is made of what I learned from you
You'll be with me, Like a handprint on my heart
And now whatever way our stories end I know you have rewritten mine By being my friend
Like a ship blown from its mooring By a wind off the sea
Like a seed dropped by a sky bird In a distant wood
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But, because I knew you, Because I knew you, I have been changed for good
And just to clear the air, I ask forgiveness
For the things I've done, you blame me for
But then I guess, We know there's blame to share
And none of it seems to matter anymore
Like a comet pulled from orbit (like a ship blown from its mooring)
As it passes the sun (by a wind off the sea)
Like a stream that meets a boulder (like a seed dropped by a bird)
Halfway through the wood (in the wood)
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
I do believe I have been changed for the better
And because I knew you, Because I knew you, Because I knew you I have been changed for good
Community is both support and discipline. That’s because love comes with accountability. I say “accountability” aware that, too often, “holding someone accountable” is taken to mean levying punishment. But when I say ‘accountability,’ I mean having someone who cares enough to ask you to account for yourself — and cares how you do it.”
Robert Frost famously said that “home is that place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you.” They’ll feed you, give you a bed for the night, but the next morning, they’ll be like, “OK, what happened?” There’s an accounting to be given that can only be withheld at the cost of tearing the fabric of relationship. They will ask for that accounting because they love you, and if you would sustain those bonds, you will give it, as best you can. Love comes with accountability. That’s what community does.
It welcomes us, but it doesn’t let us hide from ourselves. It asks for our story, because that’s how the fabric of relationship is woven and repaired. And I’ve felt that here.
In part one, I said sharing in this community with you has changed me. I invite you now to reflect on what this community means to you. “Like a comet pulled from orbit,” you, too, have felt the gravitational pull of this church, the asteroid belt of all its members, shaping the trajectory of your life, have you not? Think of all the handprints on your heart. You might want to say, if you’re feeling kindly toward me, and many of you have been so kind, that there’s a small fingerprint among those handprints on your heart, a small fingerprint in a corner that came from me, but it didn’t come from me – at best, it only came through me. It came from all the forces of the universe that shaped me, for which I was, at my best, merely a conduit.
I have tried to be a conduit – and even the conduit, and the desire to be an open and wide conduit for all the compassion and all the wisdom that the universe is always pouring forth, that, too, comes from the DNA and the communities that I did not do a thing to earn or deserve. There’s a word for this from the Christian tradition: grace. It means: the gifts we have that we can be a conduit for transmitting to others, gifts that we have never and can never earn or deserve.
So: community. Community is not about finding people who are always fun and likeable with whom to surround ourselves. Now, if there isn’t ANYbody who is EVER fun or likeable in the community, you might want to disentangle and seek another community, but there’s also going to be – in fact, there needs to be, some people whose company you don’t enjoy. It’s a chore to be around them, but it’s a chore we all need to take up sometimes, if we’re serious about living in relationship. This is the sacred task of choosing one another, again and again, especially when it is difficult – because the difficult people also have a hand in making us who we are, also leave a handprint on our heart.
In this way, the life of community is the life of abundance. As Parker Palmer has written:
“In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. Whether the ‘scarce resource’ is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection, but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them – and receive them from others when we are in need.... Abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community not only creates abundance – community is abundance.”This abundance, Palmer says, happens “when we have the sense to choose community.” In his other writings on community, Palmer makes clear that this choosing is no simple thing. It's not like choosing from a menu what to have for lunch. Choosing community is not even as simple as signing a membership book and making a generous pledge – though that can be part of it. Rather, Palmer says, look at it this way: You are always in community. It is always the gift that is given. Wherever you are, you are embedded in community – in a network of intersecting communities. Even the hermit Geshe Lobsang Tsephel is in community – one that supports him with food and an occasional robe. And he supports that community because just knowing that he is there, cultivating peace, compassion, and understanding, inspires them to bring a measure of those qualities to their lives.
You can’t help but be in community. Belonging is not an achievement but a recognition. We are all given this gift, but sometimes we have a hard time opening ourselves to receive it. Don’t set out to build community, Palmer suggests. Set out, instead, to open yourself to the fact of community, the fact of abundance – and then you will naturally do those things that an observer might call building community, but that for you are simply practicing being as fully human as you can be.
How do you open yourself to the fact of community? The June issue of “Connecting,” on the topic of Community, has a page of spiritual practices to suggest – and you can also review the Trainings in Compassion on LiberalPulpit.org.
“The human heart yearns for community,” says Parker Palmer, “and to live fully we must learn to practice it.” And you will, I know, with your new minister, keep on learning to practice it here, with your open hearts and careful minds and loving hands – and keep on choosing each other, again and again.
May it be so. Amen.
