The Guide

Labyrith.

In the quietness of this place,
Surrounded by the all-pervading presence of the Holy,
Our hearts whisper,
Help us to keep our high resolve,
Help us to walk through life with humility,
Help us to act justly,
And to know, when it is time for us to leave this life,
That our being here has mattered.

Given at Livermore, California.

And what will you do with this precious gift of life that you have been given? Without asking, you were born—in places wide and far, in places near and here in the Tri-Valley area of California.

Now, this morning, you are gathered here because you are seekers, you are learners, you are wrestling with dragons, you hope you will pick up a hint or two about how to push dinosaurs out of the way so that you can move on with your life. Many things bring you here, but one thing remains common and constant among us all: we are all on the pilgrimage of life. There is no measure of success or failure, no standard of judgment or reward relating to how well or how poorly we managed our pilgrimage, save for this: Being. Being here. Being human. Becoming fully human.

The Dalai Lama teaches that basically, we are all the same by virtue of being human. We come from different backgrounds, cultures, races, customs—but His Holiness meets everyone as though we are basically the same, as though he knows each and every one who relates to him through reading, listening to his messages on tapes or CDs or visiting him as he fills vast auditoriums—he knows everyone already. His conversation is sprinkled with mirthful, contagious laughter. He is a spiritual leader who is experiencing life full-strength, combining an ability to feel love for the world and pain for the world simultaneously. His heart has broken out of its shell. There exists a phenomenal number of people all over the world who consider the Dalai Lama and others who have become fully human on this pilgrimage we call our lives as examples, or guides. We are drawn to them because we want to experience that same peace of mind, that same loss of fear, the ability to feel fully human, but if we are Unitarian Universalists, we know that, at some point, the work of becoming fully human rests within ourselves, with a willingness to grapple with our own suffering, our own pain, and in doing so realize the creativity, the joy, the incredible lightness of being available to us.

Unitarian Universalists who travel to Transylvania frequently refer to their visit as a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage to the place where Unitarianism began in the 16^th Century and continues to exist. Others among us go to specific places of personal importance, like Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where Thoreau spent time writing and reflecting on nature—or the grave of Theodore Parker in Florence Italy, where he rests in peace near his dear friend, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Geneva, to the monument dedicated to Michael Servetus, Or, Montreal or Toronto, to the sites where the first Canadian Unitarians settled. All reminders of who we are, what price was paid for us to have freedom of religion, and why it is important for us to pass our own narrative along to generations following after us. Taking these pilgrimages, we know, basically, the why and the where of our journey.

But what if we did not know the why or the where, other than that we are prepared to learn something that will take us deeper into our own knowing of who we are, why we suffer, what lies at the root of our fears? The Dalai Lama teaches that if we are in motion toward becoming more fully human, we are always learning these kinds of things.

It seems one of the most difficult lessons is the learning when to look to a guide and when it is time to lead yourself, not to mention understanding when it is your turn to lead! There may be times in our lives when we are relying on, or seeking a guide while we are struggling with loss, confusion, sorrow—and to top it off, there are people we care about who are looking to us for comfort! The situation may feel unmanageable, overwhelming and impossibly demanding.

Now, I introduce you to Leo.

Leo is a guide for a pilgrimage described in a book by Hermann Hesse called Journey to the East. In this book, there are immense numbers of pilgrims, divided into groups, each following their own guide in temporal (meaning they might visit the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or some other period) and geographically diverse locations. Occasionally thousands of disciples would come together, as if by some magical force—an army of pilgrims moving like a giant wave, joining the stream of the eternal striving of the human spirit—moving toward the East, toward Home. 

All of the pilgrims belonged to the Mother organization known as The League, which required faithfulness in living as a pilgrim, with no reliance on “use of contrivances.” Members visited places related to the ancient history of the League and offered homage—commemoration with prayers, music, flowers and contemplation.

While all members shared the same commitment to the League, no one could become a pilgrim unless they had discerned their own private goal, so in this regard the pilgrimage did not have one central focus for all participants.

We, as Unitarian Universalists, are responsible for building our own theology. There are as many theologies as there are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association who take this responsibility seriously. Our congregations share a common covenant to Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes. Pilgrims here at The Unitarian Universalist Church in Livermore are busy discerning. Discerning your own paths, while at the same time discerning together your vision for a community that will carry you into the future.

The central theme of the book, Journey to the East, and our focus this morning, is just one of the groups. The group led by Leo. Everyone in the group contributes to the effort according to what they are most gifted in doing. The artists paint, the musicians play, the poet writes, the archivist goes about archiving and so on. Leo helped to carry the luggage and happily tended to other chores in an unaffected, unobtrusive manner. He sang and whistled as he worked, and was thought to be the ideal servant. Even stray dogs that joined the group took immediately to Leo. There was a sense of joy and contentment among the members.

Then one day Leo went missing. The group searched for him, and thought of reasons why he might have disappeared. The more certain his loss became, the more indispensable he seemed. The pilgrimage began to lose its meaning, and then the members of the group began arguing among themselves. What had been a remarkable experience started to fall apart. The exalted spiritual life they had lived together, the communion of minds they had shared was going to be lost.

H.H. thought of himself as the last member of the group. He decided that he must write about the experience so that it would not disappear when he died. For years he tried to write what he wished to convey, but underneath the whole endeavor he felt a dreadful doubt. Not only was he unsure about the story being told, he was not sure that what he experienced was really what happened.

Leo had once told him that only those who serve live fully. H.H. realized that his futile attempts to record his experiences served only himself in his effort to save his live by giving it meaning again. His life was miserable. Ten years had passed. He began making pilgrimages to the place where he was first accepted as a brother of the League, each time telling himself it would be the last. After twenty or more pilgrimages to the same place, he heard the sound of whistling coming from an open window. It was “wonderfully sweet… unusually pure, as happy and as natural as the songs of birds.” It was Leo.

The story concludes with H.H. discovering that the League is still in full force and that Leo is the President. It is the President who makes the decision to allow H.H. readmittance to the League, but only after passing a test which consisted of reading about his own actions and failures, held in the archives of the League. Reading about his own failure—how he did not keep to his faith or his vows—how his perceptions were of his own making and did not reflect the truth of the League—this was the most difficult thing he could have been asked to do. After completing this task, he was required to take a position as an official in the League. To belong again, H.H. had to become a leader.

Journey to the East inspired a high-level corporate executive—a Quaker by the name of Robert Greenleaf, to design a remarkable leadership model. Greenleaf saw organizations originally created to serve people in need being turned into self-serving, self-preserving bureaucratic institutions. He wanted to create a model of leadership that had the potential of repairing some of the harm caused by individuals who were not taught their responsibility to help others—to serve those who are not successful within the social system. The concept of taking responsibility for maintaining a fair, balanced, civil society was simply missing in the minds of too many members of the generations that followed Greenleaf’s. He died in 1990 or 1991 at the age of 90.

The Lilly Foundation took on the challenge of introducing the Greenleaf model of leading by serving—thinking it would be best suited to seminaries accredited by The Association of Theological Schools. There are approximately 260 seminaries accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Now there is a thriving Greenleaf Center in Indianapolis, with a diverse, broadly known, dedicated Board of Trustees who understand and try and live by Greenleaf’s model of leadership.

Greenleaf flattened the pyramid of hierarchy. He made trust, respect, appreciation and collaboration an expectation of the workplace, and with that expectation, a leader who knows that they are serving, who is the spokesperson for the organization, the primus inter pares, or First Among Equals who takes responsibility for things that go awry and credits those who make their contributions to the good of the whole. This is very different from what we normally see in an organization. If something goes wrong, the person who takes the rap is usually the one considered the most vulnerable—the one who is viewed as a replaceable commodity.

The buck has to stop somewhere. In an environment where everyone participates in the endeavor because their work has meaning—because they care deeply about the mission of the organization, the overarching concern is not how one individual is going to protect her or his position, it is how everyone can pull together and reach for a good that is higher than what any one individual could achieve.

Here at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Livermore, I have become aware during my short tenure of a fairly amazing array of backgrounds, talents and abilities. I sense movement in the church toward a more open heart, which in turn invites the poets to write, the singers to sing, the painters to paint, the builders to build—and my intuition tells me that mobilization will soon be underway to tend to the things that can be afforded now, but will make a very big difference to everyone who comes here. I have been told by several members that the church felt like a whole community while you were working together to make this building your home. New members, long-time members, pick up your tools, organize work parties, celebrate yourselves! You have what you need to motivate the singers to sing, the artists to paint, the sewers to sew, the cooks to cook the teachers to teach, and the social justice committee to reach out—you have what you need, and that is a common love of this church.

When Leo disappeared, the pilgrims he left behind stopped singing, painting, archiving—even began thinking that the pilgrimage had collapsed. H.H. thought he was the last one. He lost faith, broke his vow—or covenant as you would call it here in your congregation.

Like H.H., I know many of you have done some serious soul-searching about your relationship to the church and you have done the hard task of traveling to the archives of your inner selves in order to read the account of your actions and non-actions. I know this for a fact because I have heard it from some of you.

You may not think you have experienced a Leo as your leader, but then the members of the League in Leo’s group thought he was a servant. Leo would have agreed that he was a servant, even as he revealed to H.H. that he was actually the President of the League. His knowing that leadership was about serving is what made him a true leader. And, leadership, pilgrimage, serving and joining with each other in community are inextricably bound together.

I know that we are surrounded by Leo’s here today, members who have always kept faith in the vision and mission of this church. And I know that for every member there is a different pilgrimage underway on the path of life. Then there is the League—or, in our case, Unitarian Universalism, where justice, peace and respect for the interdependent web of existence are values that extend far beyond us and bind us to serve something bigger than ourselves.

Always believe that the church is still here. Always know that you are served by leaders, and when you fully recognize this you will have no choice but to discern how it is that your gifts can serve this community. Each one of you who makes this step takes this group of pilgrims—this congregation—a step closer to Home.

In the coming week, keep our fellow travelers who practice the Jewish faith in your thoughts as they begin Chanukah, and Peace be with you.

What makes us free is the knowing
Of who we were,
Of what we have become,
Of where we were,
Of wherein we have been cast,
Of whereto we speed,
Of wherefrom we are redeemed,
Of what birth truly is,
And of what rebirth truly is.

Sermon 8

Obama Meets • The Guide • Commitment • Laughter • Sanctuary • Easter

 Universalism Timeline • Our Unitarian Heritage • A History of Unitarianism • In Their Own Words
Christianismi restitutio • The Earl Morse Wilbur Rare Book Collection

Pacific Unitarian Universalist