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Reading:  

          To Be Of Use, by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls. 

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again. 

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

 

Sermon:

            Many years ago now, I was having dinner with my friend Doug. Doug, his wife Ellen and I were all lay leaders in our congregation. We’d known each other for a long time, and were pretty good friends. I was about to be the teacher for their son’s religious education class where we were doing “About Your Sexuality,” the earlier version of today’s “Our Whole Lives” curriculum. So we were all pretty comfortable with each other. (As an aside, I must admit it was a bit disconcerting when several years later at my ordination, Ellen mentioned that her 17 year old son was traveling around Europe with a young woman, but that she wasn’t worried because I had taught him everything he needed to know about sex. Not quite the kind of thing that you want said at an ordination, but I think everyone understood it the right way.)

            Anyway, back to the dinner. I had invited Doug over because I knew that Ellen was out of town for a month on business, and that the kids were off visiting relatives for the summer. I thought Doug might be lonely and welcome some company. I shouldn’t have worried about this—it turned out that almost every night that Ellen was away, Doug was invited out to dinner. Mostly, it turned out, with single women. Unlike with her son traveling around Europe, Ellen was a bit concerned about this trend. I, however, was viewed as safe, as I was the congregation’s out lesbian.  

            Over dinner Doug and I talked, catching up. But after a while he confided that rather than having the wonderful “bachelor” time he had anticipated, he was instead having a hard time. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get his own meals and do his own laundry and figure out what to do with himself, because Doug was competent in all these things. Rather Doug was feeling off kilter because he didn’t know who he was. This month without Ellen and the kids was the first time in almost 20 years that he was by himself without anything from the outside defining him. With Ellen away, in practical terms he wasn’t a husband. With the kids away, in practical terms he wasn’t a dad. His term on the church board was over, and since no one had yet snapped him up to work on another dozen committees, he wasn’t a volunteer. And because Doug was a college professor, and this was the summer, in practical ways he wasn’t a teacher. For years, decades even, Doug’s understanding of himself was based on his relationships with the outside world, and for this one month, the outside world was leaving Doug to define himself. Not husband, not father, not volunteer, not teacher—Doug discovered he didn’t know who he was at a fundamental level.

            Who are we all without our connections? Who are we when we’re not sister, brother, mother, father, aunt, uncle, friend, companion, acquaintance, employee, employer? Who are we when we temporarily, or permanently, lose the people and relationships that define us?

Good questions, these. Who are we when we don’t have others to define us? Personally I agree with the psychological theorists who posit that people become human through our relationships with others. Whether it’s Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology or David Winnicott’s object-relations theory, or any of the other host of theorists, their basic premise is the same: we only become ourselves in relation to others. We learn who we are through understanding that others are separate from us, and from understanding that others are connected to us. Babies without relationships fail to thrive, and children and adults who have no meaningful relationships find difficulty in coping with the word in which they live. We are all connected, we are all created, and we all know ourselves in relation to each other. Even when we find ourselves alone, they are often with us inside our heads. I almost constantly have tapes running in my brain, asking me in voices I recognize "what the heck I’m doing", or other times reminding me who I am, where I am located, and what is important to me.

Doug’s confusion that night is to be expected. And I felt the same kind of confusion years later when I took a year off from parish ministry work. There wasn’t a ministry close to hand for me, and so I spent a year rewriting manuals for the UUA, occasionally pondering the work I had to do on my doctor of ministry degree, and much of the time being the household and neighborhood errand runner. If someone needed something done, they called on me. But all through that year I found myself returning to the question of self-definition. For the previous dozen years I had defined myself primarily as a Unitarian Universalist minister. It was not only my vocation, it was my avocation and my hobbies all rolled into one. So when I was not somebody’s minister, I found myself wondering who I was. Can you be, I asked myself, a minister if you have no one with whom you’re ministering? Or should I define myself as writer? Housewife? Errand master? Unemployed? Hard questions with no easy answers. Almost as hard as this week when I had to put my hair color on my driver’s license application: when do I start calling my hair gray rather than the brown I used to answer?

As defining as personal relationships are, the question of definition by way of work sometimes feels even more central. So often when we meet other people the first question after “What’s your name” is “What do you do?” And by this, we don’t mean do you go hiking, are you a painter, do you create poetry, do you watch the sunset, or raise plants, or walk a dog, or sail on ocean’s blue. No, by this question we mean: what work do you do, how are you valued in this world, how do you contribute to society, what class and status do you occupy by how you earn your livelihood. Rather than asking “who are you,” we default to the “what do you do,” assuming the definition of work will tell us what we need to know about each other.

It may have been sociologist Max Weber who coined the term “Protestant work ethic,” but it was our direct religious ancestors, the Puritans and Pilgrims who brought this ethic with them to the New World. The good people who came here on the Mayflower believed that they owed their labors to God. Theirs was an austere religion, one that emphasized simplicity and unadorned worship. For them, the sign of God’s grace was their unrelenting work. Even though Calvinists believed God has already ordained who will be saved and go to heaven, you still better hedge your bets by showing to the rest of the world how worthy you are of salvation. Personal wealth, especially that obtained by labor, was a sign of your favor in the eyes of God, and that you were by definition a righteous person. Coming as they did on the heels of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, they cast out the habits of salvation through the purchase of indulgences and the (to them) cheap grace found in other religious traditions. Their God required of them the adherence to a pure life—pure devotion, pure work, pure turning of their hearts away from vanity to hard, diligent effort. The Catholic notion of good works as a sign of the love of God was transformed into working hard as a sign of God’s favor.

It was these plain hardworking people who were the fathers and mothers of what first were Puritan and then Congregational and then Unitarian and then Unitarian Universalist congregations. The cultural context and strong values, if not the theological underpinning, came full force into our tradition. Along with the centrality of words in our worship, we also brought from the Puritans their ideas of “onward and upward forever” into our current religious tradition. For decades our religion has reflected this unconscious belief: that human beings are perfectible, and that if only we work hard enough and diligently enough, we’ll be able to get there. For me, it’s a double whammy—not only did I grow up in this tradition where we value salvation by works (and sometimes even salvation by committee meetings), but my grandmother did the research that shows that I’m a direct descendent of those Mayflower immigrants. So I’m damned to works justification by both religion and genome!

Yet even if they don’t have genetic predisposition, not many people have grown up in our American culture escaping the impact of this cultural context. We yearn, in the words of Marge Piercy from our reading, to be of use—to haul in line, to show by our living and being where we are of use. Lucky are those who find in their employment work that sustains that inner sense of wanting to be of use; lucky are those who find that their employment provides them with the money and wherewithal to be of use outside of their paid employment. Whether work is vocation or avocation, we yearn to be of use, to be there when the food needs to come in or the fire needs to be put out. Work defines us.

Even after we’re done. Most of the retirees I know had to struggle with the question of who they would be once they were no longer employed. It doesn’t matter how much their days are filled with things to do, that central question of who am I if I am no longer “X” rises to the surface. This same question comes to all those who stop work, regardless of the reason. Our American culture is so tied to work for pay as the pivotal defining factor, and it’s hard to get away from it. Many people, including many in our UU congregations, leap into volunteering both as a way of giving back and as a way of self definition. This is a good thing. Now that women have had the audacity to enter the workplace in such large numbers, some of our congregations often thrive only because of the volunteer hours provided by those who are no longer punching a work time clock. Once the historical source of church labor, women now are finding both joy and necessity in working outside of hearth and congregation, and much of what used to be done by the women’s guilds is now being done by retired people, male and female alike. For many it’s a way of giving back; and sometimes, too, it is the way of self-definition. The answer to “what do you do” becomes the list of volunteer activities in which you’re engaged. Work defines us, and we often become the work we do.

            As fascinating as all of this is, what the heck does it have to do with Labor Day? Well, as this country developed, the work ethic sank in deep. By the late 1800s, the average American worker put in 12 hour days, seven days a week just to get by. Children worked, too, often long hours in bad conditions, and for less pay because they couldn’t do the same amount as an adult. These conditions gave rise to labor unions that banded together to improve work conditions. One way they did this was by taking to the streets. On Tuesday, September 5th, 1882, 10,000 workers marched from City Hall to Union Square in New York City, to demonstrate for better treatment by employers, and to honor the workers who came before. The first Labor Day was born. For the next dozen years, parades sprung up in many cities in the country to honor laborers. Each one of these parades was a day without pay for the workers. Still they marched, both to honor those who worked, and to let employers know their issues. It was only in the aftermath of the bloody Pullman Palace Car strike and violence in 1894 that workers’ rights came to center stage and Congress finally declared the first Monday in September to be a holiday to celebrate labor.

            Yet as much as Labor Day, unions, and legislation have changed the working conditions since the 1800s, there still remains this strong assumption that work is, and should be, central to who we are as people. Even in complaints about how many hours we have to put in to get our work done, I sometimes hear an edge of unconscious pride or competition—an unspoken, unconscious sense that I must be a really good person because I work so many hours, and so many more hours than you do. It’s a paradox—while we complain about the hours, the hours tell who we are and how important we’ve become. For some it’s another version of the habit of wearing our wounds as badges of our worthiness—because I’ve been hurt, I have value. I’ve long thought that it’s too bad that along with the Puritan attitude toward work, we didn’t also retain the Puritan commitment to the Sabbath as well.

            For not only did the Puritans view work as an essential part of life, they also believed in observing the Sabbath, a day of rest. It was important to take time away from work to be with God, to study scripture, and express thankfulness. All that they had was by the grace of God, and all that they would achieve, including Salvation, would also flow from that source. Without a continual reflection on and recommitment to their God, they knew their fate would be compromised. Their approach was different than the Anglican one they broke away from. Anglicans, the Church of England founded by Henry VIII, believed that people should not do what the Bible prohibited—thou shalt not sin. But the Puritans believed that they should do everything the Bible commanded—thou shalt observe the commandments, a more positive reflection. Because the Bible said that the seventh day was the day of rest, the Puritans took it seriously. If it was good enough for God to have rested on that day, then it was good enough for them.

            Although we give a nod to the day of rest, sometimes it is only the barest of nods. I can’t help but wonder what it would be like for us today if our culture took the day of rest as seriously as we take the Puritan work ethic. What would it mean for us to keep the Sabbath holy—a day on which to reflect rather than to polish off all the errands of the week, or drag kids from one soccer game to another? How would our spirits be different if we observed the Sabbath, spent one day a week to reflect on our lives, to make deeper connections to that which we find most sacred? What if once you got to church there were no committee meetings after the service was over? What if you only did things like walk through Muir woods, or stroll along the beach in Stinson, and not get stuck in the traffic on 101? What would that be like? What would it be like if everyone took time, lots of time, unbounded time, to reflect on what meaning there is in living, and to what we should be committing our time and energy? To know how we are connected with each other? To nurture our relationships with those who define us? I can’t help but think it would make a positive difference.

            I expect that some of you already do this—showing up to church is one clue that reflection is important. But how many of us really take the balance of the day to rest and reflect, to observe the Sabbath? How many of us really take time away from the hurry and scurry of our lives, or away from the press of working life, to reflect weekly on that which we hold most important? How many of us allow ourselves—in mind, body and spirit—to relax and rejuvenate for the days to follow? For more than just a day here or day there? I know I don’t, at least not often enough. I know how wrapped up I get in our culture of workaholism, even when I know better, and even when my job would seem to require commitment to the Sabbath day. It’s hard stuff—going against the grain. There’s always something else we “should” be doing.

Yet even in the light of that, I can’t help but believe if we all spent time doing this—reflecting on what’s most important to us, and taking the whole day of rest without the crazy running around—that we would find our lives immeasurably better. Imagine it. What if we all took a chance to breathe? What if we all took a chance to remember what is most important, what is most holy? What if we all took off time to rest and reflect, to bring more peace to our spirits? What if we felt that spirit of life, if we let love guide us, if we took one more step toward our own internal peace and rejuvenation?

Maybe this is where my Pilgrim lineage shows up, but I can’t help but believe that this kind of intention and reflection would make this world a better place. I can’t help but believe that if we focused on right relationship with our god, however we define it, and with the people in our world, that we would find more happiness and faithfulness in our lives. I can’t help but believe that the “Dougs” amongst us would not be cast into disconcerting groundlessness when the external definitions fade away. I can’t help but believe that the day of rest, the day of the Sabbath, would make our other days more fulfilling and worthwhile, and even more productive. As I am frequently heard to say—if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Living our lives without the Sabbath casts us down those directionless roads, keeps us from knowing where we are going. So may we find ways to know the Sabbath, to rest enough in our spirits that the paths before us become clear; so that the roads we find ourselves on are the ones we choose; so that we find ourselves in right relationship with our gods, our selves, and the world around. May we know the Sabbath so that we may know ourselves. May it one day be so.

Amen.