READING

The Invitation

Oriah Mountain Dreamer 1995

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.

I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream

of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to

know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your

dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow,

if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become

shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,

without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own,

if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you

to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful,

to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself;

if you can bear the accusation of betrayal

and not betray your own soul;

if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty,

even when it’s not pretty, every day,

and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,

and still stand on the edge of the lake

and shout to the silver of the full moon,

“Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or

how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair,

weary and bruised to the bone,

and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.

I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me

and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.

I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

SERMON: “The Driving Life”

I love to drive. But really only long distance, the longer the better. All during my growing up years we made a three day trek every late spring, heading up to the summer cottage on the Cape Cod Bay my paternal grandfather Goldenweiser had the foresight to acquire back in the twenties. On the first day we would drive from Roanoke, Virginia to my Goldenweiser Grandmother’s Luray, Virginia home—just two hours. The next day was eight hours to my mother’s aunt Virginia and Uncle Carl in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then in the morning we’d make the final five hours to Brewster. I knew when I began to see the Narragansett beer billboards that we were nearly there. I had the space in the way back of the station wagon, a little cozy spot between the luggage, all my stuff arrayed around me. I was alone back there, free to think my thoughts and dream my dreams. On the road. It was heaven. That’s where I caught the long drive bug.

My parents say that the first word that I ever said besides the questionably English “Da” and “Ma” was “bump,” B-U-M-P, bump. I was one-ish, lying on the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital. I had Roseola and we had just hit a pothole. “Bump” I said, astutely. Already I was analyzing the way of the road. Sixteen or so years later I made a similar observation about road conditions. I was in an ambulance having just suffered a compound fracture of my upper arm in a car accident. We were on the Interstate spur heading for the same hospital and I could feel every “bump” we encountered, even the tiniest ones. “This road sure is bumpy,” I said. At that time I preferred to ride than drive myself. My Mom had to trick me into driving lessons. One day when I was nineteen a driving instructor drove up to the house and forced me into the car. I’m glad I learned. It’s practical. For instance, Wednesday I am driving myself and my girlfriend Aoife, Tibetan terrier Keeper and Ocicat Pucci and some possessions in a trailer the thirteen or so hours back to Chicago. My internship here is over and I “done laid around” enough. Time to get back on the road.

Driving has been a great teacher to me about certain technical aspects life. Something I heard on the early Bill Cosby album “Why is There Air” got me started discovering driving aphorisms. He does a little sketch called “The $75 Car.” At one point he is making a long drive back to Philadelphia from his girlfriend’s home in Trenton. It is snowing and icy and he has a snow tire only on the right front wheel because he could afford to buy only one. Well, to make a long story short, he goes into a skid and recalls the driving manual’s advice: “When you go into a skid, turn in the direction of the skid.” “Turn in the direction of the skid!” God, that is SO counterintuitive for me. As Bill comments, it’s like leaning into a left hook. Why would you do that? But of course he is right. Everybody knows you turn the wheel in the direction of the skid in order to regain control of the car. Life is like that too. When after college I slammed on the brakes about divinity school and started to skid, I turned in the direction of the skid. In the course of twenty-two years in nursing I regained control of the car and resumed my course towards ministry. I had to be a nurse before I could be a minister. If I had tried to become a minister at twenty-six, I would have failed. I was out of control. I needed nursing to help me correct my course.

Back in January, Aoife and I had a crazy drive back from New Hampshire where we had spent The New Year’s holiday with my sister’s family. It was snowing hard up there and raining hard down here. We thought we might die, but decided, over and over again, to stay on the road. We prayed a lot, for ourselves and other people. There were lots of accidents. Later I heard a guy on the radio talking about something people do when they are in the process of having a car accident. They look where they do not want to go. They look at something they think they are about to hit, and nine times out of ten, they drive right into it. Where their eyes go, the car goes. This guy on the radio said “Decide on a safe place to go and steer that direction.” “Gosh,” I thought, “that is extremely wise advice.” Now, you have to think really fast, instinctively really, but I think we make most of our important decisions quickly in our guts. Bam, we decide. And then we pretend we are going over the pros and cons. But we’ve really already decided. So, think fast… fix your eyes on where you want to go and go there. If you focus on obstacles, you will run into them. Nike is right about this. Just do it.

The January before this, back in 2001, I was fooling around at my seminary in Chicago deciding by default to put off applying for internships for another year. In preaching class two fellow students and I offered a Vespers service on the Shadow, the prototype for the service I did here last week. Bill Murry, the president of the school came up to me afterward and said, “You are one of the students who does not have an internship placement yet, right?” “Right,” I said. And he said “Apply to Annapolis.” “OK,” I said. A thousand obstacles flashed before my eyes, but in that moment I steered resolutely through them, and drove my car right up to the Fahs House door. That’s how it felt to me. Ways to come a cropper were all around me. But I fixed my eyes upon you and grace delivered me out of accident into this safe, good place.

I lived for a while on the other side of a mountain from my job at Roanoke Memorial Hospital—yes, my birth hospital, the roseola hospital, my broken arm hospital, the open-heart ICU where I worked for fourteen years. This mountain, Catawba Mountain, was short and steep and you had to pay close attention when you were going up and down it. Now here is what I learned about life making this twice daily drive for five or six years. When you are going around a curve, watch the inside line of the curve. It was going up the mountain that taught me this trick, because at one point there was a cliff on the right side of the road and the road curved away from the cliff to the left. If I looked at the cliff, which I tended to do because I am right-handed, I panicked. But I learned that if I just said to myself, “OK, here we go,” and leaned left into the inside arc of the curve, I would be OK. I even learned that I could go faster that way, as long as I didn’t let my mind wander over to the cliff. This worked in the city too. In Chicago there is this spot on Lake Shore Drive between Wacker and Monroe which is like an autocross track. It comes up suddenly. If you are going too fast and are not ready to hunker down and concentrate, you will end up hitting the cliff (which is the burm wall in this case). I was in a car when that happened one time late at night. We ended up spinning around and stopping in the blind curve facing the wrong way. Not a good thing on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago let me assure you.

So what you have to do is this driving thing that is very much a life thing also. I call it grounding and focusing. I remember the day it occurred to me that this is what it means to “be grounded.” We pagans talk about grounding a lot. Well, ironically, driving helped me understand. When you say to yourself, “OK, here we go,” you are grounding. You have that sinking down and focusing feeling. You see your goal. You are one with the machine. You are close to the ground and you are taking that curve as if it were itself also a part of who you are. You do not have accidents if you drive that way. Well, you always have to watch out for the other guy. But if you are grounded and focused, you are good to go. You will make it through the autocross at Navy Pier in Chicago. If things are going really well and you are very grounded, you can even steal a glance at the Ferris wheel as you fly by. Life is like that. When I came here to Annapolis last fall to learn how to be a beginner minister, I grounded and focused and I said to myself “OK, here we go.” Same exact feeling—an odd mix of fear and certainty, exhilaration and fierce intent. I didn’t really know where exactly we were going, I just knew that I needed to stay grounded. I knew I needed to focus on and lean into the inside curve. And I knew I needed to say “Yes” to things I wasn’t sure I could do (see previous lesson). And you know, it was kind of like autocross here, or the Tour de France (to mix vehicles)—on either side the road has been crowded with supporters who trusted me to stay my path, not to careen out of control and cause a big accident. Every once in a while, I was able to steal a look at the Ferris wheel! And I did not have an accident! I became a minister. I fell in love with you. And now I have to go. That’s the way it works.

The fact is, the car metaphor has been prominent in my experience here. First there was Thandeka, professor at my school and a big pain—a very smart and intuitive and correct pain, but a pain none the less—who said to me “Your problem, Margie, is that you have your foot on the brake.” Then there was Keeper, my dog, who was the second person I said “I’m the minister” to and said it pounding the steering wheel. And then there was the drive down Lake Shore drive in October gripping the steering wheel and praying out loud to God like a maddened thing that my bag would still be in the alley in Rogers Park where I had left it two hours before. It wasn’t. So I had to get a new I.D., i.e. minister. Which I have done. Witness, I have two new bumperstickers: one says IMUURU and the other says The Uncommon Denomination: Unitarian Universalists. So now I am identified by my vehicle as not only a gay, feminist, non-fundamentalist, dog-loving new ager with an Irish girlfriend, but also as a UU. Otherwise, I have been in a sort of limbo here in Annapolis, car-wise. When I lost my Illinois license I got a Maryland one, but had to keep my Illinois plates because my car would not pass this state’s inspection. So in a way, I have been neither here nor there, and there is a reason for that. Driving has a shadow side I needed to see.

I met someone while I was here who likes to drive because when she is driving she can be absolutely and completely alone and unconnected. She can be totally in control on the curves as on the straightaways. She can be in her head and not her body. She can explain things to herself without having to endure any dialogue, without the interference of other opinions or ideas. She can be in between places in a space which requires absolutely nothing of her. She can be in the way back seat of her childhood pretending not to be in this family. She can have no connections. I met this person on a retreat I took in January and I came to know her better during a solo weekend at Murray Grove, our UU conference center on the Jersey Shore. She is part of me. I call her the Defender. She is a piece of my Shadow who, metaphorically speaking, has been in the driver’s seat for a long time, only she has her foot on the brake. She has forgotten who she is or why is there. All she knows is: she is alone; she is defending something she has forgotten against something she can’t remember; but she has a sword and she uses it very well to challenge all comers; she is incredibly loyal to her nebulous task and doggedly determined to do the very best job she can; and she is extremely tired. She has been doing this full-time for many years with no rest at all. She hasn’t had a bath or combed her long hair in years. She is dirty, exhausted, and she is jumpy. She doesn’t know her friends from her enemies. It was hard for me to help her. It was hard for us to help her. She wanted help, you could see it, but no one who had ever approached her had loved her, so we worked together slowly to help her rest and accept comfort and love.

I mention the Defender because she perhaps represents the part of me that loves to drive. Thinking about her in relation to driving and to all the lessons about life and driving that I have shared with you this morning brought me to the realization that my love of driving is related to a very old feeling that I have no home in the world. This feeling of homelessness got worse when my parents died and I cleaned out and sold their home and moved to Chicago. Everywhere I turned it seemed there was a battle brewing. I was always drawing my sword, grounding and focusing—“what now?” Until I came here. You offered me the first real home I have had in what feels like forever. Here there was welcome. Here there was patience and warmth and concern. Here there were respectful relationships and honest communication and real confidentiality. Here there was trouble-shooting and visioning and planning for contingencies. Here there was deep listening and people longing to be heard and known. Here was a healthy institution full of teachers and learners and all of them ministers. Here was a place where even the most determined Defender could put down her sword and rest, put down her sword and get about her real work in the world. Here I learned I really can do parish minister because now I know church can be a safe, imaginative, warm, exciting, faith-filled place.

I want to reach back for a minute to my very first sermon in this space. It was about labels, masks and identity. I told the story of how in addition to losing my journal, planner and wallet to a thief, I had also stepped on and crushed a gourd rattle I had made for myself for my fortieth birthday the year my mother died. I described it in the sermon as a “spirit egg” which had broken in order for something to come to life. I kept the pieces on the altar in my office all year long. Friday night it occurred to me that I could repair it. I was thinking as I glued it back together (not a hard fix really) that it was now a far more powerful tool, full as it now is of all you have taught and given me. It will replace the defender’s sword in my work. It now contains heart and home. Thank you for the hard work you and your predecessors at this church have done to make this a place where ministry can really happen, where an intern and her Shadow can meet and talk, where a new dimension of identity can take shape, where love and support are a given and the road to the true work open and free of obstacles. “Call yourself traveler/ I will call myself road,” our chalice lighting words went. I hope I was as gentle and exhilarating a road for you as you were for me.

I want to show you the mask I made with my covenant group in the snowy winter. The defender’s face and mine are in the process of merging to create the mask of minister I will wear in one form or another for as long as hope lives in me. This face will change, soften perhaps or change colors, but here is the minister you have made. Thank you for the magic you have wrought. [Puts on mask]

AMEN.

CLOSING WORDS

[from: Prayers To Protest: Poems that Center & Bless Us, Jennifer Bosveld, ed. (Jonestown, OH: Pudding House Publications,1998)]

How To Fly

First, build a long, low

gradually rising

ramp.

Hunt, scrounge, sweat, drag, mix, paste,

measure, pound, paint, polish, decorate.

Drink. Eat. Rest.

Then when it’s all done and painted green,

on a windy day,

RUN UP IT AS FAST AS YOU CAN!

As you run, flap your winging arms,

sprout feathers, round your body,

sleeken your thinning legs, reverse elbows and knees and

triumvirate the toes of what used to be your feet.

That’s it!

Remember your nest, and what your mother taught you.

Fly!

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Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis

Margie Allen, Summer Minister

CHALICE LIGHTING

How We Get Close

OPENING WORDS

In Blackwater Woods

READING

SERMON: “The Driving Life”

How To Fly