HOME
  Directions/Map
  Sunday Services
  Calendar
  Social Concerns
  Photo Gallery
  Contact Us

  Unitarian Universalist
    Association

Reading:  

excerpt from Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, by Adrienne Rich (1975)

Why do we feel slightly crazy when we realize we have been lied to in a relationship?

We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: “In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning’s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

I also have faith that you are telling me things it is important I should know; that you do not conceal facts from me in an effort to spare me, or yourself, pain.

Or, at the very least, that you will say, “There are things I am not telling you.”

 

Sermon:

More precious than gold—have you figured out what that is yet? The reading from Adrienne Rich probably gives it away, don’t you think? So much for the subtle unveiling of the answer at the end of the carefully constructed sermon, but Rich has it too right not to use her reading. She is right—we do take so much of the universe on trust. Take me, for example. I’m a reasonably intelligent person—I have degrees from three institutions of higher learning that tell me so. I can often hold my own in discussions or arguments. Well, unless if the conversation is between my partner and her sister, and then I just sort of back out of the way because they are so sharp in intellect, wit, humor and conversation that I know I’ll just get hurt if I enter in. But for the most part, I’m a reasonably intelligent person.

            But there is so much of this universe that I take on trust. Take airplanes. Although I know a bit about the aerodynamics that allow a plane to fly, it is still preposterous to me that those incredible heavy and awkward looking things can lift off, attain altitude, fly well, and safely land. It’s simply preposterous. Same thing with televisions—I’ve never understood how they can shrink people down small enough to get them to run down the cable wires fast enough to show up inside my TV, and also in yours at the same time. It simply can’t be done. I have to take TV at face value—on trust. Otherwise, it’s impossible. My nephew tells me that he’s building structures out of viruses as a method of treatment delivery as part of his doctoral degree in biology, and all I can say is “Good for you, Andrew!” I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about, and try not to look too stupid as my eyes glaze over during what is, I’m sure, his  explanation that any five year old would clearly grasp. “Good for you, Andrew!” I take what he’s saying on trust. And hey, same is true for gravity, too. Never seen it, but I’m told it’s there, and so far I haven’t been to the southern hemisphere so I can’t tell you whether I’d fall off there because I’d be standing on my head in space. That’s a trust issue too.

            But what is even more a trust issue for me is our mere existence anyway. Big Bang theory? That all the right conditions came together at the same instant that created some incredibly big bang that spun out all sorts of things into the universe which resulted in carbon life forms? In our life forms? In the fact (if it is one) that I’m standing here talking in front of you all? That’s simply preposterous to think of, especially if you run the odds. It’s easier for me to believe that you are all a figment of my imagination created by either a sleep-induced psychosis or some bad drugs that I never took in the 70s.

            Equally outlandish to me is the thought that there’s some guy in a white robe sitting up in the clouds who had a really creative week some thousands of years ago, and spent time painting the feathers of a red macaw or the tail of a peacock and gluing all the hairs on the head of a golden retriever. I can’t imagine anyone, not even god, having the kind of creativity to create the abundance and flamboyance of this universe. Just couldn’t happen.

            Now, the expansion of the universe, once it was created, that I understand. I just have to watch my personal expansion and it makes all the sense in the world that the universe would also expand. Think of all the people who eat too much, and of course the universe has to expand to include us all. That’s no big deal. But the rest of it, I have to take it on trust.

Okay, so with the strike of the members of the Writers Guild of America threatening comedy shows across this nation, I thought you might want a laugh this morning. But you know, in some sense, it really is true. I take so much of this world on trust. My brain is embarrassingly practically oriented and higher level philosophy, mathematics, and science just leave me with a migraine. So I have to take all that on trust. There was, though, the year that I tried to link chaos theory to the congregation’s pledge drive . . . well, probably shouldn’t talk about that in public. It wasn’t pretty. Call it an enthusiastic rookie mistake sermon.

But for real, we do take so much of the universe on trust. What do we really know about each other, other than the things that we tell each other? There’s a game called Two Truths and a Lie—you might know it. You write down three things about yourself, two of which are true, and one of which is a lie, and get your friends to try to tell you which is which. How many of you could prove the truth of what your friends would write down? If I were to play the game with you, how would you know whether I was telling you the truth? One of my female colleagues who is now in her 70s once shared these three things:

1.      She put herself through theological school by playing poker and blackjack for money.

2.     She doesn’t like chocolate ice cream.

3.     She used to be a race car driver in England.

Any guesses? How surprising to find out that the thing this minister lied about was ice cream—she, in fact, loves chocolate anything. And she did gamble to get through school and drive in rally races. I almost guessed the right one, simply because how someone could not like chocolate is almost beyond my ken, but I chickened out. The other ones just seemed too bizarre to be true. Adrienne Rich says it all—we take the universe on trust. Address of 25 years ago, this morning’s weather—and in the Bay Area, that one does take an incredible amount of trust. Depends which window you’re looking out of.

            Trust is, I believe, the cornerstone of all authentic relationships. Whether in partnership or friendship, if we can’t trust each other, if we can’t trust that we’re hearing truth from each other, or that at the very least that we will each say to the other “There are things I am not telling you,” then I have to question what is real about that friendship. How does lying or prevaricating bring good things to life? Without being able to trust those around us, we live in a cantilever world, like in a Fun House where the mirrors reflect us back strangely, and where the walls are painted to make us think we’re walking up hill instead of down. To not be able to trust, that’s the madness of Escher drawings.

            I’m not saying we need to tell everyone everything—there needs to be discretion. And not everything needs to be told. If there is only hurt and injury rather than enlightenment, then I shy away from the telling. If someone doesn’t need the information, or if the telling merely transfers the guilt, then again, maybe not too necessary. But if it’s information that helps make sense of the universe, that should be shared well. Timing, place, motive all play their part.

            Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, in his work articulating human psychosocial development, said that throughout our lives we wrestle with the concept of trust versus mistrust. The question we ask, from the earliest days of life, is whether we can trust the world, or whether we can’t. For Erikson, the best way to affirmatively answer this question depended upon having a quality maternal relationship. This was the first task we faced as preverbal infants. If we gain this sense of trust early on, if our mothers are there when we need them, then Erikson says the outcome is that we have trust in people and the environment throughout our lives, and that hope becomes one of the tools in our emotional shopping cart. (Okay, he didn’t say “emotional shopping cart”—I told you, those writers are going out on strike, and I’m just trying to get you ready for it!) Because of trust, we learn how to be in the world—connect with others, navigate our way through the challenges of daily living. Yet if we don’t master this first chore—learning trust—then we live ever doubting lives. We have difficulty entering into relationships with others, and face the world without any modicum of hope intact. We might be able to cope with the world around us, but it is the presence and possibility of hope that helps us recover from life’s adventures and move on. The presence of hope, or the possibility of hope, is a key determinant in discerning between depression and grief—if hope is conceivable, then it’s often grief. If we can’t imagine hope, then it’s most often depression.  

            Erikson’s work helped transform the psychiatric and psychological world—by moving away from Freud’s hypotheses that sexual drives are the underlying determinants of all life, Erikson showed that human beings are not merely genetic and drive-related beings, but that we are actually more complex and nuanced. There is more to who we become than simply how we respond to stimuli. And although I understand why in the 1950s Erikson pegged the maternal relationship as the one that would help infants come to trust the world, I think we now understand this to be the presence of a compassionate, caring, responsive person, regardless of gender. It’s the role of the so-called maternal, rather than the female herself, that’s the key. When we’re nurtured, held, and have our needs responded to appropriately, we come to trust that the world is a safe place, and we come to believe that this is always possible.

            And this is true, especially true, in religious community. The main ingredient of liberal religion is hope. Hope that there is a better day coming. Hope that we can transform the world—our own lives, and the more global community around us. Hope that there is something that will keep us going when we we’re not sure of it ourselves. Hope that we will have gentle hands go with us, that we will not need to be alone in the challenging times, hope that there are others who will buoy us up, hope that we will find in religious community things to nurture our spirit and our soul. Hope—what liberal religious communities are all about.

            Yet that hope cannot be held, cannot survive, unless there is first and foremost a bedrock of trust. We come into religious communities vulnerable. Do you remember the risk you took when you first struggled up this hill, into these doors, or into the first congregation you chose as an adult person making your own decision? By the time you got your first “Hello,” you’d already decided to risk understanding that there was something in your life that wasn’t quite enough. You’d already decided to risk others possibly thinking of you as foolish or weak or a fanatic by wanting to find a religious community. You’d already risked walking into a new place, with people you didn’t know, hoping (sometimes against hope) that this would be a place where you could sneak in the back door and not be shunned for a thousand real or imagined faults. You’d already risked coming into a place where you didn’t necessarily know the customs, and where you weren’t sure you would be welcomed. Hopefully by the time you got in that first door you would have received that first welcome—but that doesn’t always happen. And somewhere inside yourself you knew that—and yet you dared to believe that religious community might be an answer to the unanswered questions in your life.

            Not only is there the vulnerability of coming into a place you don’t know, you rarely come during the easy parts of life. I’ve never met anyone who said, “Yippee, I’ve just won a million bucks in a lottery—I have to find a church to give it to!” Nor have I met people who say, “Everything in my life is absolutely hunky-dory—I just wanted a place to be happy, and to share everything I have.” Who I generally meet are people who, because of some life event, or lack of life event, have found in themselves a longing, a need for community, for religious exploration, for understanding the answer to the forever ponderable questions of why are we here, what is good and evil, and what happens when we die. I meet people who have been unable to answer their children’s persistent questions about god and life. I meet people who have lost someone they loved, or everyone they loved. I meet people who are asking the tough questions in life. All of these events—even winning the lottery—make us vulnerable in and of themselves, thereby justifying the risk of coming up the hill to find out if this is a place they can belong. Vulnerability is the draw, and trust the necessary bedrock.

Trust is the foundation. Without it, there is not much stable that can be built. One of the most potent images I have for myself as minister, for anyone as minister, is that we who minister are the holders of hope. This is our job. To hold the hope when others can’t, to hold the hope when it’s too hard, to hold the hope when there is joy in the world. We, unlike almost any other professional, are charged with holding hope. Yet that hope cannot be held, cannot survive, unless there is first and foremost trust. Trust is the foundation.

            Except when it isn’t there. Because even in religious community, trust can be and is eroded, even shattered. In too many congregations I’ve served, I see the examples or remnants of broken trust. In the congregations where I serve, it’s usually trust with the minister that has been broken. The minister turns out not to be who they sold themselves as, the minister turns out not to be the right match for the congregation, the minister turns out to be more human than they ever imagined—they being both the minister and the congregation. Since I specialize in congregations with hard histories, I see this over and over again.

            But that’s not all I see. Because usually along side of, or totally independent of the loss of trust in the minister, I see also loss of trust between and among members. I remember long ago, when I was only dreaming of ministry, I was on a church board in a congregation I will not name publicly when the married male minister was found to be inappropriately involved with his female intern minister. While this broke trust with the congregation, what it also did was to exacerbate the existing tensions already at play in the congregation. Because of misunderstandings separate and apart from the minister’s behavior and because of different visions of where the church should be going, the leadership had lost trust with one another long before. Competing agenda, all designed with the best of the church in mind, were used as weapons, one against the other. The minister’s malfeasance only served to illumine and heighten the preexisting lack of trust in the congregation.

            It was a hard time for that congregation. I always remember what it was the conflict consultant told us: first, he said, first you have to reestablish trust among the leadership. All else had to flow from that premise; nothing could be done until we in leadership could sit down in the same room, and listen to each other. Hear from each other how we had hurt each other. Hear from each other how we had all been disappointed in this community, how our vulnerability had been stretched to the limit. Hear, without defending, without explaining, but simply hear how even in our best efforts we had deeply wounded one another. Invite each other, figuratively and literally, back into trusting community. It was a hard time, but the consultant was right. Replacing the minister would only serve the congregation well if we first fought our way back into a place of deep, abiding and real trust in and of each other again. If we didn’t do the work, it wouldn’t matter who was the minister, or whether there was any minister at all.

            Here Adrienne Rich names it right again:

“When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For awhile, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.”

            That was the experience we had in that congregation—being brought close to formlessness because we forgot to tend the most basic relationships—the ones between us as members of the congregation. The minister’s behavior, while important and wrong, was not the determinative factor in that congregation losing its way. It was, I now believe, a symptom of the dis-ease, of the lack we found already between and among ourselves. Somewhere along the line, we had forgotten what it meant to be open and honest with each other, to honor our mutual vulnerability. We had forgotten to trust ourselves, and trust each other. We had forgotten how to tell each other the truth, openly, honestly, in love. We had instead acted like children, fearfully scrambling to be reminded that we were okay, fearfully scrambling to be loved. Fearfully scrambling to be loved. We had forgotten, I believe, that we were a people who could be loved. We had forgotten, I believe, that we were a people who deserved to be loved.

            Because what I also know is that religious communities in general, and even this one here—UUCM—in specific, that all congregations deserve, and dare I say long, to be loved. As a whole, and as individual people. That’s the essence of Rich’s honorable relationships—relationships that can only come into being when we are honest with each other. She ends her monograph with these words:

“It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

“It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

“The possibility of life between us.”

            I’m not sure how similar the story of my former congregation is to this congregation here—but I sense that there are many similarities. May we here, in this community, risk enough to honor that which is more precious than gold, trust; and may we, here, in this community, risk enough to extend the possibilities of truth between us, the possibilities of life between us. May it one day be so.

            Amen.