Meeting at the Deepest Level

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

September 18, 2005

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

This summer we were climbing the cliffs overlooking Jordan Pond in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine.  The weather was perfect – sunny but not too hot, with fluffy cumulus clouds floating over head.  After we cleared the trees, we began the ascent up the cliffs.  This was done by following a ledge horizontally, then pulling oneself up to the next ledge.  To do this we sometimes had to use the iron rungs that had been inserted into the rock face by some intrepid trail builder long ago.  But the effort was amply rewarded.  Each ledge provided a view more stunning the one before.  First we took in the pond itself, nestled in the green wooded hills.  Going higher we saw over the hills out to the ocean itself with the islands dotting the coast.  Eventually we could see miles in every direction – a full 360 degrees.  To repeat, it was spectacular!

On one of the ledges, pausing to take in the new view, my god daughter’s husband, a doctoral candidate in artificial intelligence at MIT, said to me, “This is where I get my spiritual feelings.”  The implication I knew from previous conversation was that he didn’t feel any need, and really couldn’t understand, why people would become part of a religious community.  His exclamation mirrors the kind of thing I often hear people say, like, “I feel more ‘at church’ in the woods than I do in any building.”  Or “when I need to feel close to God, I take a walk in the wilderness, thank you very much.”

I agreed with my young friend that the vista that day touched my spirit as well.  Indeed I wanted to hold those exquisite images in my psyche as a kind of spiritual reserve.  But the implied questions, “why would one go to a church, a fellowship?” and “what kind of spirituality can you possibly experience there?” started me thinking about why I am so committed to this religious community of seekers, along with many other UU congregations.

Jeremy, Linda, Cathi and Marc have just provided an answer.  Why commit your time, energy and money – your very soul – to a group of other human beings?  Because it offers the possibility of changing you in powerful ways.  MeetingPoint, to me, is one of the finest programs we offer each other to accomplish this part of our mission, “to strive for spiritual fulfillment, as individuals and in caring relationship with one another.”

There are two goals in MeetingPoint: intimacy and ultimacy.  Intimacy, as richly attested to already, is what happens when people share deeply with one another.  A bond arises that is precious.  In an environment made safe by each member’s commitment to caring listening and talking, you can share the many parts of yourself – your joys and sorrows, your experiences both good and bad, your uncertainties, and your green growing edges.  How often do we invite others to know us deeply?  How often do we open our hearts and minds so that we can deeply know another?  That’s one of the gifts that MeetingPoint offers, as do many other places of meeting within our congregation.

The other goal is ultimacy.  That is, MeetingPoint provides a safe space to explore that which gives our lives meaning and significance.  It’s a place to explore religious and ethical concepts that touch our lives most profoundly.  What does it mean to live gratefully?  Do you experience the underlying nature of the world as beneficent? Malevolent?  Indifferent?  What experiences in your life lead you to see the world in the way you do?  What experiences have led others to experience the world very differently from the way you do?  What in your life shapes the way you think about Jesus, say?  What, if any, religious images empower you, give you hope and courage to face the difficulties we all encounter in living, even death itself?  The questions go on and on, all of them invitations to meet others and ourselves in a deep way, an ultimate way.

For some of us the last time we dove into such waters was the all night “BS” sessions at college.  Here, in the company of fellow seekers, we, with more years of life experience, enter those waters again, because we humans are gifted with precious imagination and self-consciousness.

How rich it is to share this spiritual journey with others, recognizing our own deepening spirit, our own growing edges!

What an opportunity when another’s experience differs profoundly from our own.  That’s the gift of our liberal free religion.  We do not insist that everyone believe alike.  Quite the contrary!  We welcome other’s very different perspectives, trusting that, if we can respect each other and listen deeply, each of us will be enriched by sharing our different points of view.  We may not end up agreeing – in fact we probably won’t! – but we will expand our understanding of our shared human condition.  I think of the incredible range of people that Shakespeare could imagine himself into, and how appreciative his diverse world of characters was.  That range is available here.

Of course, the problem with religious community is us people.  Looking out over Jordan Pond, the Porcupine Islands and Bar Harbor, there’s no one nagging us to join this committee, or “guilting” us about a financial pledge.  There’s no contest of egos.  There’s no human quirkiness to get in our way.  But in community, we run into that all the time – the person whose voice grates in our ears, hardly leading us to “spiritual” feelings; there’s the person who whines about their life, leaving you looking for the quickest exit.  There’s the person on their high horse who expects everyone else to sign up for their cause.  You know the cast of characters.  Look around you.  Look at yourself!  How do we take this very, very human collection of persons, each of us with our own wonder and our crap, and make of this possibility an encounter with the holy, if you will?  Is it any wonder that some say, “Forget it, I’ll take my chances of finding the divine out of doors, away from people.”

I remember when I began in ministry, a wonderful young couple began coming to the congregation I served in East Brunswick, New Jersey.  They were clearly exploring the deep questions, and they had so much to give.  He sang with that resonant deep voice of a Gordon Bok.  In wanting to know about the congregation they attended a membership budget meeting.  When the discussion of the budget foundered on an extended debate about $50 for snowplowing, they got fed up.  Afterwards when they explained to me why they weren’t going to join, they said something like, “We just don’t want to get involved in organized religion.  There’s too much baggage.”  I felt so sad losing them.  And at the time I felt angry at the individual who had kept the debate going.

That is one side of being in a human community.  It can be messy.  It can be ugly.  It can be petty.  It can be confrontational.

And it can be glorious.  Love is like that.  “I’d rather be lonely” professes the country singer.  We know those times when we just get fed up.  Of course the next moment they’re crooning about “love, endless love.”  Human community is like that, too.  Wilderness, especially on a beautiful summer day, is so … so predictable.  Humans seldom are.

Although we can exasperate each other, there’s nothing more glorious than those moments of meeting another at the deepest level!  Those moments when another takes you in – all of you, the vulnerable parts as well as the places you feel competent – and shows through their words, through the warmth in their eyes that they care.  That’s a kind of love that is possible in a human community, like ours, where we commit ourselves to our principles and our mission.  That’s an awesome kind of love that complements the awe we feel looking over Jordan Pond.

MeetingPoint invites you to pursue that kind of meeting at the deepest level as we strive for spiritual fulfillment in caring relationship with one another.

If you want to learn more of the details of the commitment you would make as a member of MeetingPoint group, speak with me, or with Carol Lemke and Carlene Tockman at the sign up table this Sunday and next.

MeetingPoint is just one of the several reasons we find such richness in sharing this religious journey in human community, even as we delight also in the Jordan Pond cliffs of our life.  Blessed Be.