Patti asked me to speak briefly about how I became a UU, how I joined this Society, what I think of our current upheavals, and why I continue as a member. The history part is fairly straightforward -- I'm one of those rare "birthright UU's". My parents met in a Unitarian young adult group in Boston, and they both married and had me christened in Arlington Street Church. I went sporadically and not too enthusiastically to Sunday school and more or less dropped out until graduate school when I found myself living next to the UU church in Jamaica Plain. My wife Jessica was also raised UU -- we went in Jamaica Plain for a year, were married by our minister there, and looked for a church in the Valley when we moved out here in 1988. My daughter Julia was the first baby dedicated here by the Reverend Victoria Safford, and though both Jessica and Julia are no longer active here I'm still coming to services, singing in the choir, and helping to organize these summer services.
It's thus the weekly services that are my main connection to this place, which raises the question of what the weekly service is and what it's for. I'm an atheist. I don't find the words "worship" or "prayer" particularly useful in describing what we do here, and there is no "other" that I am directing myself to, though I have great respect for those who look at it that way. For me the service is something that the minister, musicians, readers, and congregation do for ourselves and each other. But what do we do?
One thing we do is to organize and present ideas verbally in a coherent way -- ideas about the human condition and our relationships to each other and to those things that are larger than ourselves. I know something about presenting ideas in verbal form -- in my day job I'm a university professor. A sermon has to have some of the qualities of a lecture -- it should bring in ideas from the speaker's learning and experience and arrange them to make some point. But of course a sermon must be something more than a lecture. Few of us choose to listen to a learned lecture once a week, even though we can find speakers on C-SPAN or Audiobooks more learned and experienced than anyone we'd find here. We want a sermon to speak to us about our lives, to reach our heart as well as our mind. I try to do this once a year, which gives me great respect for those who do it every week.
Another thing that happens in a service is performance -- of music, of the spoken word, sometimes even of drama. Sometimes we sing along, sometimes we listen, and sometimes we reread the order of meeting. Relatively recently in my life I've become an amateur singer and actor and gotten to understand something of the bond between performer and performer, and between performer and audience. We perform, and they applaud. But a service isn't a performance, or isn't just a performance any more than it's just a lecture. There's a tradition that we don't applaud a performance during the service, though we usually make an exception for children. I expect the tradition started because the performance was offered to God rather than to the human audience, but it still makes sense to me without a God being involved. To me, we don't applaud because we shouldn't divide our congregation into performer and audience -- how the music or the reading makes you feel is part of the service, and you should be free to process that yourself in silence without the audience member's obligation to applaud -- if the performer's work was meaningful to you, thank them after the service.
A third thing that we do in the service is ritual, doing the things we've always done -- lighting the chalice, Old Hundredth, balloons on Easter, Joys and Concerns, the traditions of our parent faiths and of our own. Rituals help make us a single community in this congregation and connect us to others -- through space to other UU congregations that do the same thing, and through time to those who did these things in the past and will do them in the future. When we sing Old Hundredth -- "De todos bajo el gran sol" -- I always think of the New Englanders who have sung that tune, with dozens of different sets of words, in this land for centuries. Ritual sets this time apart from the rest of the week. It focuses our attention as do other forms of meditation. And it lets us mark special events like baby dedications as a group.
That's what religious services mean to me. What do they mean to us as a congregation, as a purely practical matter? Along with religious education, which is at least as important, they form the "front end" of our congregation. They show new people who we are, what we do, and what we value. For us to survive as an organization, we have to have enough people who see something in those services that leads them to come back, leads some to join the congregation as financial contributors and partake in all our other actvities, and leads some of them to get involved in the leadership roles that make the congregation work.
Which brings me to what Patti delicately called our upheavals slash transitions slash problems slash traumas slash opportunities slash what you will. From a practical standpoint, our short-term problem is that we are not generating the revenue we need to implement the programs that we want. Our long-term problem is that we are attracting fewer new members and new potential leaders, though we are enormously appreciative of those we are attracting. And this raises the question of what we can do in our services to make them more attractive.
What we can do in our summer services is put forward a variety of voices and a variety of service formats, each more informal and intimate than what we do in the "regular season". If you're a visitor here today, I hope you'll come back next Sunday and the Sunday after that -- some things will be the same and some will be different, but we will be who we are and we might be a community that you would like to join.
When regular services start in the fall, I hope that they'll address our current members, our visitors who might become new members, and the world at large. I think the best way to deal with our instability is to become stable -- to call the best minister we can afford as soon as we reasonably can, which to me would seem to be to be a year from now, though the congregation has voted that it should be two years from now. We need in many ways to rebuild our congregation, and I think we can best to that with a minister who is committed to that challenge.
In the interests of stirring up some discussion among the existing members (and anyone else who cares), let me conclude by listing four theories about our upheavals, none of which I find very convincing:
Got a case for any of those theories? Or don't understand or care about any of them? Let's get together for lemonade after the service.
Last modified 22 June 2007