Rev. Marti Keller

26 August 2001

Since coming South a number of years ago now, I have been impressed by what seems to be an annual and quite sacred Southern past-time, family reunions. Elaborate ones, with custom t-shirts and other mementos of the get together; pots of Brunswick stew, pimento cheese sandwiches, and all sorts of pies. Huge in the African American communities I have worked with. Something like weddings and funerals that one attends religiously as it were. Just like church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. A source they tell me, of continuity, support, and uplift. A reminder to them of times when they were not allowed to freely associate with each other, when in fact whole families were involuntarily and permanently divided.

Now my own family is having itself what might have been the occasion for a family reunion, the upcoming wedding of my nephew in Vancouver, British Columbia Labor Day weekend--next weekend. Might have been because from the minute the invitations hit the mail, the e-mail lines were buzzing with reservations. Not reservations for airplane tickets and hotel rooms, but reservations about attending the event. It’s too far to travel, it’s expensive, it’s a bad time, just before or after the beginning or school, and besides given some of the incidents during the last family wedding, who wants to sit through another round of very public confrontations between my long divorced parents or other ill-behaved relatives. Word is that some of them may not even be invited, they acted out so badly five years ago when my other Canadian nephew got married.

Two out of three of my brothers said pretty quickly that they were inclined not to go, depending on a lot of other factors, including what other options there might be for vacations this summer. Or whatever else was happening that particular weekend.

In other words, don’t count on us.

In other words, showing up, in their view, was entirely optional.

And it has turned out that not one member of my twin brother’s blood family will be there. We have all settled for sending regrets and selecting wedding gifts online.

Sorry to not be there for your big day. Hope it goes well.

Showing up is not, apparently, a major value in my family of origin, at least not to those parts of life that are outside of the usual work and household maintenance responsibilities. We all hold jobs and care for our children, pay our bills, pay our taxes. But as for the rest of our lives, there’s a pretty strong commitment to not being committed, especially to the usual institutions that bring together extended families: reunions, holidays and life passages. And, except for yours truly, an almost aggressive disinterest in organized religion or organized spiritual community of any kind.

The same parents who quite faithfully took their four children to Unitarian church schools over a period of years, gradually tapered off their own involvement, my dad opting for Sunday morning bird watching trips, my mother for whatever puttering and playing she preferred. My brothers to a one never returned to church once they reached high school or earlier. I was the lone survivor, a heretic, going against the family tide, choosing to remain a churched kind of person, most of the time belonging to and attending services in one congregation or another.

In fact, except when I am absolutely away on vacations, those few Sundays I have stayed home have felt , quite frankly, strange. Off-balance. Spiritually dislocating.

Not that it hasn’t been periodically pleasant to see what happens with the rest of the world, or at least my own town, on those Sunday mornings I have for some reason or another decided not to go to services of any kind. I recall sometime last fall that my husband and I went out to brunch in a popular local cafe, waiting in line with all those other folks who were reading their Sunday papers and drinking their cups of coffee, and enjoying themselves immensely.

I imagined some of them would go on to do their weekly shopping, or visit the Home Depot, or maybe even go on a walk or hike, enjoying the woods, being in nature.

Just like we do many Sunday afternoons, spending the rest of our Sabbath in the kinds of activities that either attend to our physical and other material needs--or nourish our

spirits, or both.

But for me, there definitely was a hole, a religious hole, but one that I had not attempted to explore. Until recently. When the matter of showing up and not showing up--and how that has something to do with spirituality-- has come up for me more and more often. What is the connection. I have begun to ask, between being faithfully present in the world in general and in our liberal religious communities more specifically, and religious and spiritual growth and fulfillment? Is it in itself a kind of theology and a kind of practice?

Perhaps this is a question that will not even be relevant in the future, even the very near future, if recent polls are any indication of the trends. The Pew Center for Research just released the results of their data gathering, saying that 20 percent of Internet users in the United States-- two million people every day-- get religious and spiritual information online, making it more popular than online banking or online auctions.

According to one recent nationwide study, the growing convergence of religion and cyberspace is leading Americans to predict that a great many of them will be using the Internet for their main religious connection in coming years.

Currently only a small minority use the internet for spiritual or religious experiences. And so far these hits on the world wide web have not replaced physical churches and other places of worship in this country ( Europeans, it would appear from recent information, have almost completely become unchurched) with only two percent of

teens and fewer than one percent of adults saying that they consider the internet their religious home.

But when asked about the likelihood that they will use the internet for religious experiences in the future, more than two thirds of those polled said they imagined that they would make more use of the web in the future. These experiences might, for example, include reading the online devotional materials ( as I now do) buying religious products and texts ( as I now do) and listening to archived religious teaching ( which I have not done and might consider).

By the end of the decade, this survey predicts, in excess of 10 percent of our population will rely upon the Internet for their entire spiritual experience. Some of them will be individuals who have not ever had a connection with a faith community-- the completely unchurched as they are often labeled-- but millions of others will be people who drop out of the physical church in favor of cyberspace.

Now as a person who subscribes to several online religious news services and specialized spirituality pages, I admit without shame that I am numbered among the four out of five mainline to liberal denominational ministers who have and use internet access for academic and sermon research, and even as a source of personal devotions and enrichment. I find the divine on line, as it were, I the faithful recipient of daily techno-spirituality through several different website services.

Through Beliefnet. com, for example, I wake up each morning to an automatically e-mailed menu of offerings I have selected: one general inspirational message, the daily Torah passage from the Hebrew Bible ( in English) and a selection from Buddhist scripture.

And as some of you know, I was willing, in fact offered to have a sermon that I had prepared to deliver to our sister Mountain Light congregation on a day when they cancelled services because of icy road conditions last winter posted on their group e-mail. And now regularly offer my Sunday messages to upload and then download on our church website within a few days.

Yet despite and perhaps because of my use of the internet, the notion that my computer monitor would ever become an altar and the converted bedroom that serves as an office would become my only church, my congregation, is unfathomable. Because for me and our tradition, it is in what Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams called an embodied community that my faith, that our faith is realized. A community that gathers in the flesh to witness to the inherent worth and dignity of all persons, the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, our essential connectedness.

Rev. Roberta Finkelstein was commissioned three years ago by our denominational Commission on Appraisal, the group that periodically evaluates how we are doing, to articulate a theology of membership in our congregations. Why and how we belong.

In a sermon I retrieved, I will admit, from the internet, she laid out some of her findings which she presented at our annual General Assembly , this year in Cleveland, Ohio.

She has presumed, I think wonderfully and daringly, to identify and name a common theology among us, what she sees as our central and essential approach to meaning-making. And even to name where she thinks we find our salvation.

Salvation, for Unitarian Universalists, she declares, might be said to be found in our relationships and therefore in what has been called a relational theology. Relationship to the world we live in, relationship to and with each other.

This kind of theology assumes that in some way, individuals encounter the holy in human relationships. Not in all relationships, but in intentional, nurturing relationships. These relationships are ongoing, transforming, and directed toward the creation of something larger and greater than the individual: a powerful, loving community.

One of the questions posed to candidates for office in our Unitarian Universalist Association this year asked them to comment on where we are among faith traditions in North America. Are we basically an “umbrella” religious movement or do we actually have a theological center, a common way of understanding what is of greatest importance to us?

None of the candidates argued that we are just a temporary shelter-- an umbrella of protection for religiously unrelated individuals from the storms of fundamentalism-- or that we have settled on a single set of doctrinal beliefs.

Rev. William Sinkford , newly elected president of our association, wrote that our place among North American faith traditions is clear and simple, if we are only to claim it. In fact, he reminded us, Robert Bellah, the imminent sociologist has described us as the American religious community with the strongest coherence of any on the contemporary religious scene. At our best, Sinkford tells us, we are religious communities which value real, lived human experience.

So each week we gather in our pluralistic Unitarian Universalist communities which despite their differing ideas and practices share an overarching commitment to finding God-- finding meaning-- not in some alternative reality, some supernatural, apocalyptical world to come, but in the “real world.”

William Sinkford says that in this coming together in our churches, fellowships, and congregations, we give our greatest gift to a hurting planet, the lived experience that difference need not divide. It is what our retiring Unitarian Universalist Association president John Buehrens called our reverent, respectful religious pluralism that makes us a clear and powerful alternative to what he sees as America’s stagnant, divided and failing mainline denominations.

Or what I see as the disconnectedness and disempowerment of going it completely alone, detached from an organized community in our religious affiliations and spiritual practices.

A book published by one of our denominational presses a few years back has been the source of many helpful ideas about different paths we might use to connect with the mystery some of us call god, or nature, or spirit. How we find a sense of oneness with each other and all creation. Everyday Spiritual Practice incorporates a number of ways to deeper spirituality: mindfulness exercises and prayers, breathing, sacred reading, silent meditation , cooking, quilting, gardening, charitable giving, and social justice work in the larger world.

I remember when I first read it trying to find the ways, especially as a leader of this congregation, in which I was already involved in personal spiritual practices, and finding myself a little, no a lot apologetic to the cosmos for the fact that one of the main ways in which I had always located and expressed my spirituality had been by showing up in one or another Unitarian Universalist congregation many if not most weeks of the year for worship, for fellowship, for growth and guidance, for interconnection.

In fact the spiritual maintenance schedule offered by one of the contributors to this set of essays, a UU minister himself, while recommending meeting at least once a month with some sort of group : a men or women’s group , a 12 step program, or some other program, does not mention the practice of regular attendance in a worship community.

Perhaps because he is a minister, he makes the assumption that this is regular part of our spiritual practice. After all, contractually he has to show up three out of four Sundays a month, ten out of 12 months a year.

Mary Hunt, a relational theologian, defines spirituality not as a private, ethereal quality. but an intentional process of making choices that affect self and community. She believes that concern for meaning and value is expressed in very concrete ways.

For her, spirituality is attentiveness, focus, awareness of how our behavior and choices affect people around us. Her understanding of spirituality places showing up, being fully alive, fully present and connected to each other as a practice that can transport us into the realm of the holy.

As much if not more perhaps than finding the holy--the wholeness of all life-- only in solitary practices.

With the caveat, as longtime UU moderator Dennny Davidof reminds us, as I have said before, that we don’t run each other off with the amount of conflict we can sometimes generate. There’s not enough love in our congregations, she told a reporter regrettably. There’s too much rancor and backbiting, and an unwillingness to compromise.

Or run each other off, newcomers especially, with the numbers of committees we urge, in fact implicitly demand that they join: Finance Committees, Investment committees, Plant watering committees, thermostat control committees...

People come for bread, Roy Phillips reminds us in his book on Transforming Liberal Congregations , and get committee assignments instead, out of a greatly mistaken notion that joining committees and being responsible and powerful will feed them.

Make no mistake, however.

In small congregations especially there is no avoiding divvying up the work that must be done for the common good. Just as in family reunions, weddings, and funerals, all occasions were people gather in large numbers. But just like my family’s reluctance to attend a wedding where after traveling long distances, we might be greeted only by

quarrels and clean-up work, it may not be so appealing for us to show up in our churches if what waits us is not spiritual sustenance, but chores and complaints.

If this is indeed all we experience, or choose to experience when we gather together , we have missed the great opportunity and gift -- that of meaningful human relationship, that which formed the basis, for example of the earliest Christian communities, koinonia, the Greek word for fellowship --sharing something with someone.

Rev. Thomas Kirkpatrick has written that he knows that he feels the most exhuberantly human when he relates with others at the genuine and “gut” level, reaching beyond phoniness or superficiality. A relationship characterized by openness, acceptance, warmth and growth.

The kind of relationship that both inspires and grounds us.

The kind of deep fellowship we can find , if we seek it, in a community such as this one if we remain intentional about what we are about when we come together and what kind of relationship we are willing to offer each other.

Well known writer and community practitioner M. Scott Peck describes true community-- which he has found to be exceedingly rare-- as a place where all of us are welcome, where we have a commitment to one another, where we make decisions by mutual agreement, and where there is an atmosphere of realism, growth, and the safety to be authentically who we are.

A community is a safe place, he believes, precisely because no one is attempting to heal or convert us, fix us or change us. Instead its members accept us for who we are. He tells us that we are freed and being so we are truly free to discard defenses, masks, and disguises, free to seek our own psychological and spiritual health, to become our whole and holy selves.

a place where we become alone and together fully alive--