Playing Well Together

We live in anxious times.  Money is a worry for so many. If you’ll have a job, how to pay the bills, how to pay for college, if there will be enough money to last through retirement: these questions spin in our minds.  We worry about dying, about having been enough, about having done enough.  Will what we wanted to see happen in this world ever come to pass, before we are gone, before it is too late?  Will the other hate us and our children so much we disappear?

We live in anxious times.  Nothing seems certain except our worry.  Our worries tighten into knots that fill our stomachs, our heads, our hearts; that lie in our bodies like stones.  Too much worry robs us of life, blocks us from being faithful people…calm and sure, with open hearts and minds, who savor life, and risk working for justice, risk loving every one…

It is hard to get enough rest to be at ease, when there is a stone of anxiety in the gut.  It is hard to let it go and just relax when nothing feels sure or certain.  It is not easy to turn our lives and our energies over to what is really important.    

When we don’t know what is next, we find it hard to trust that we can know what to do now.  We wander around scared, frightened, vigilant, trying to ready ourselves for the next threat that will come our way.  It becomes easy to seek the relief offered by false promises of comfort. 

It is understandable that we’d turn to …food, drink, things…all that medicates, obsessing with what promises to ease our pain…to calm our worries…

We rely on too much something false, when there’s not enough of what counts… 

Nothing stays in balance/in focus, when we allow ourselves to be overcome with anxiety…

Popular culture reinforces our dis-ease when it redefines anxiety as “stress”, and offers us ways to deal with it as if it was a medical condition.  Take a pill… 

Or, last week there was a post floating around the web that suggested that cursing, gossip and lots of recreational sex were 3 of 6 sure ways for easing one’s stress!

Odd, isn't it, that we believe that more mindless separation from what would truly honor ourselves and each other will ease our worries?  

You’ve likely heard about the Cherokee teaching his grandson about life.  “A fight is going on inside me,” the old man said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.  One is evil, he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”   He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.  The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too”.

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee replied, “the one you feed.”

Overly simplistic perhaps, to imagine there is only this long list of good or that long list of bad.   But there is truth in the notion that what one feeds, what one pays attention to and nurtures is what will grow.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often used the term “the beloved community” to describe the great gathering together of all those committed to the ways of love and justice, of peaceful, non-anxious fulfilling lives guided by the certainty that one day we can be walking hand and hand together toward that which is already present.  

He was, of course, reframing the gospel message of the “kingdom of heaven on earth”.  Those who were familiar with the Christian idea of the church being the body of Christ, the beloved community, know that this frame always includes the “yet and not yet”. 

Only if we turn our attention, our commitment to what we can imagine, yet so often seems just out of our grasp, can we ever hope to get there, be there, rest there…there but not quite there, but there none the less…  in the paradoxical paradise.  Worries known, anxieties released.

Dr. King believed that the beloved community could be made real, was attainable in the here and now.  We don’t have to wait to pass over to the other side.  We don’t have to wait to be saved.  We do have to be saved, redeemed, forgiven….we have to choose to feed our souls again and again with the vision of who we really are…how loving and how loved we are…

He rarely preached about a far off heaven, but about the kingdom of God on earth which could be achieved by faithful commitment, by the coming together of those who not only believed in, but who again and again practiced the ways of love and trust.  He lifted up the great gathering together of those who would make the concept of the beloved community a reality in the present. 

Dr. King studied Gandhi in seminary and he knew that the Kingdom of God, Heaven on Earth, the beloved community stretched far wider than Christianity.     

It is no wonder that UU congregations often describe themselves as building the beloved community.   How do we do it?  By believing we can.  By righting ourselves again and again, by breaking our promises and beginning again, over and over…without succumbing to anxiety…feeding a non-anxious presence.

What we so often fail to understand, is that the beloved community is not conflict free.  It is just that we don’t go there with shame or to blame.

You know Dr. King, was a preacher’s son.  And there are many stories about how hesitant he was to go into the ministry. 

He must have heard his father call someone in their church a disruptive jerk.  Probably more than once.  Jr. must have been, like all preachers’ kids are, quite aware that congregational life was full of contradictions and hypocrisy, full of people full of fears and worries who irritated each other and gossiped and behaved badly at times.  He must have seen that congregational life was not perfect.  It was not always heaven on earth…not always safe, not always peopled by of saints, or martyrs…   Congregational life was filled with real people, loved people.

Every time he talked about the beloved community, he was quick to say conflict would not come to an end, conflict and strife would continue….but with practice and with understanding and trust in the ways of love, the community that worked together for justice would prevail.  It would be fed… by love again and again.  And, it would feed love to those who hungered…

The term "beloved community" originally comes from the writings of Josiah Royce, a Harvard philosophy professor in the late 19th and early 20th century. He is known in the study of philosophy as the founder of Idealism.  He was a follower of the German philosopher, Hegel.

(Hegel, as some of you might know, made the major contribution to theology by proposing that the purpose of an individual’s true religion was to help the individual to become whole.  And for Hegel, wholeness meant the joining of reason, sense, feeling and will.)

Josiah Royce and other liberals of his time, like Hegel, were determined to move away from the prevailing harsh views of Calvinism with its emphasis on man's complete inability to do anything to bring wholeness and happiness to himself.  Hegel believed wholeness was attainable, by individuals.  Royce also thought betterment was possible in this life. Yet he believed that wholeness and goodness would only occur in the midst of what he first called “the beloved community”.

Royce spent his entire academic career focused on what a group gathered as a loving and loved community was capable of doing and why.   We take it for granted now that every individual is embedded in and deeply shaped by whatever their group context is or has been.  In his day, Royce was considered novel and progressive in proposing that it was those ideals held by community that had the power to shape who we are and who we might become.  For him, it was the community for which one had loyalty that held the power to shape one’s sense of what good could be accomplished in the present.  So, it was only the community known as beloved that had the power to allow individuals to transcend the limitations of self. 

For Royce, it was there in community were the power was to do the kind of projects that would bring the imagined future into being.  These "projects" were engaged in not only because of one’s loyalty to the “beloved community”, but because the success of these projects engendered even more loyalty.  The circle of faith rolling together forward through the ages.

Both Royce and Dr. King understood that it was loyalty not to one’s sense of self but to the beloved community that allowed for the greatest collective ideals to be turned into reality. 

To what, to whom do you belong?

Who or what loves you?  Where are you loved?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Josiah Royce understood that not only does the gathered community have the capacity/power to engage in loving acts, it is also clearly and ultimately provides the place where each member understands that they belong to a LOVED group.  The beloved community is one that knows it is loved, favored, chosen, special.  That knowledge is part of what engenders allegiance, that powerful kind of loyalty that changes us.  The source of the power of the beloved community goes beyond the sum of its current membership.   It is in a the sharing of a history of being loved, a current reality of love and the expectation of being loved forever.   

It is this being loved that defines the beloved community. 

Loyalty to beloved community is what motivates us to move beyond the self and risk living out a purpose, a calling, that goes beyond what anxiety in the present might dictate.

Martin Luther King took exceptional risk because of his understanding that he was loved by God unconditionally.  Isn’t this why the oppressed risk challenging and loving the oppressor, because they know they are loved by a higher or deeper source?  Isn’t this why individuals and groups risk the behaviors of love and trust, because they ultimately trust that they are loved, beyond self love?

How might it change the perception of who we if we spoke about ourselves as not only capable social change agents, but also as the receivers of powerful acts of love?

How might we tell the story of Michael Servetus differently, for example, if we understood ourselves as Beloved?  We might stop saying that Servetus died in the mid 1500’s because he was a brilliant intellectual that read Unitarian views in the Scripture and irritated others so much that he was martyred.  We might instead tell the story that Servetus loved us so much that he wanted all, Christians, Jews and Muslims, Pagans, everyone, to know that God loves us all and wants no one to feel excluded from the care and concern and safety of the beloved community.   

If we knew that we are the beloved community, we might learn to say to each other, that behavior is not acceptable in this house of love.  We don’t do that here.   We might learn to stop just bumping together in the dark, saying hateful things behind each other’s back…and instead speak with purpose and with love…

We might be more courageous in declaring that all are welcome no matter what and this is how we act together, because here you needn’t be anxious or worried.  All you need to live at peace is here for you.  All we need to bring more justice and peace to this world is given by what we nurture here.  We don’t feed or encourage or tolerate what isn’t worthy of our loyalty…

Because we are a faith full people, the beloved community that is loved, is sure of how to love.