GUESTS IN OUR OWN HOME
A sermon by the Revs. Wayne B. Arnason & Kathleen C. Rolenz
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, February 5, 2006

Reading: from Radical Hospitality by Holman and Pratt:

The image of preparing a table, or preparing a place, is good overall image for hospitality.  In genuine hospitality we work to make our entire existence a welcoming table, a place prepared for others to be at ease to receive from us comfort and strength.  Hospitality teaches me to work at becoming someone who is easy to be with, as with either guest or host.
      

Hospitality becomes a way of life as we become more open.  It will not happen without preparation and unless we intend to make it happen.  When we speak of "preparing a table", we refer to the intention and the work of making space for another human being.

SERMON: Part 1 Meeting the Stranger (Wayne)

The practice of hospitality is a religious duty in many faith traditions. It is hard to remember in the kind of security-conscious country that we are becoming that the duty to open one’s door to a stranger and to feed and shelter them was a significant marker of a person of faith in cultures around the world. Perhaps when we recall the dangers of travel in eras past when there were many fewer people and no easy and safe ways of transportation, the reasoning behind hospitality as an ethical duty becomes more clear. There are many stories in world religions of strangers who are really gods or angels in disguise.

But even if I knew they were angels in disguise, I would still have to say that I’m not a person who is very comfortable meeting strangers. I grew up in a family of seven, with a sizeable extended family that provided much of our social life. I lived in the same neighborhood all my childhood, and had some of the same friends from elementary school through high school. The people I encountered were familiar, and mostly like me. When I first got excited about becoming a minister, my image of what this career meant was me in the pulpit, but not me in the line after church greeting two hundred people!!

Perhaps you are the same kind of introvert that I am. “Introvert” as a personality type doesn’t mean that you’re anti-social. It mostly means that personal encounters with others drain your energy, so you have to make sure that you are well-charged before you begin a day where you’ll be interacting with a lot of people. If you don’t, you’ll soon be feeling the need to close the door and do something quiet and alone for a while. For introverted ministers, the day at home alone writing the sermon is the best day of the week. Extroverts, by contrasts, are energized by their encounters with people. Getting out the door to a day full of appointments with people gets the extroverted minister all fired up. The day writing the sermon, in contrast, is filled with fear and dread.

Although personality type does have a lot to do with how we feel about meetings with strangers, personality type is not destiny! We introverts can learn extrovert skills. We can plan our days, and be conscious of the ebb and flow of our energy. We can also learn the practice of hospitality, which is a practice of welcoming, nourishing, and sheltering the stranger as a guest. In today’s service, and in different ways during the month of February, we are going to be looking at how the practices of hospitality can help us to meet the stranger, the stranger out there but also the stranger in here.

Listen to these words of Walt Whitman, bringing together the stranger outside with the stranger within, through his poem To a Stranger .

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

So was Walt Whitman an introvert or an extrovert? Or was he an introverted poet and writer who had learned extrovert skills? Or was he, in this particular poem, revealing himself as an introvert who longs to be an extrovert, who is drawn at some deep spiritual level to everyone he sees, but does not know how to reach across the barrier of fear to encounter meet the stranger whom he knows, deep down is just like him.

I think that the spiritual challenge involved in meetings with strangers is deeper and harder to overcome than those barriers posed by the personality traits we have. When we start to explore this challenge, we find ourselves involved with our cultural conditioning, our prejudices, our conscious and our unconscious fears and our longings.

To engage with those deeper levels of who we are, we have to make ourselves vulnerable in a way that is often only possible within our closest relationships. So let’s look for a moment at how we meet the stranger in those relationships, in our family relationships, our best friendships, and in our committed partnerships and marriages.

One of my teachers in ministry wrote once told me that the great gift and opportunity available in any marriage was to be able to explore the unknown territory of just one other person for an entire lifetime. Certainly this is the hope that all of us carry with us into a committed partnership – but it is all so easy to let this opportunity pass by, taking for granted the known and familiar partner and losing track of the mysterious stranger in your house who always has something new to teach us. With Valentine’s Day approaching, there will be a lot of reminders out in popular culture of the first intense blossoming of committed love. We should remember the long haul of a life commitment just as vividly during this season. We are people whose lives are lived from different layers of personality and of self-understanding. To have someone in your life who has seen most or all of these layers is a great blessing, but also a constant challenge The choir today is going to be offering the text from an ancient source that usually appears in our services as a reading, the verse from one of the great love Western love poems, Set Me as a Seal Upon Your Heart.

Part II—The Stranger Within (Kathleen)

“Rudyard Kipling wrote: The Stranger within my gate, He may be true or kind, But he does not talk my talk-- I cannot feel his mind. I see the face and the eyes and the mouth, But not the soul

behind.” Every morning we wake up—make coffee or tea or water and look in the mirror. Who do we see staring back at us? If we were to analyze the moment, we might say—well, I’m Kathleen…I’m a wife, a daughter, a sister, a step-mother, a minister, a writer…etc. We see the familiar face and eyes and mouth, but do we ever question—who or what belies this familiar face? What about the “soul behind?”

You see, we are torn between paradoxical longings—the desire to be truly and fully known; and the desire not to be fully known. In our most intimate relationships, we want to be fully known—we want the person in whom we have placed our trust—to cherish our being, to set us as a seal upon their heart. Slowly, sometimes painfully in a marriage, we peel back the many layers of self to reveal our vulnerabilities, our flaws, our failings. To explore the stranger that lives inside of us is to explore the multi-layered parts of our own self. It can happen in a marriage, or it can happen through private introspection. At our minister’s retreat this week, I spoke with a colleague who took a month of her sabbatical at A Center for the Practice of Zen Buddhist Meditation in Murphys, California. “What was the most important insight you learned while there?” I asked. “Seeing all the layers of my personality gradually peel away until, at one point, it was just me-the aching back and whining child—sitting on the cushion.” As we talked, she spoke of her month long exploration of what Cheri Huber calls our “sub-personalities.” Sub-personalities are all those personalities to which we ascribe meaning—such as the mothering or fathering self, the child-like or childish self, the wounded self, the arrogant self, the all business-self: you get the idea. Although Buddhism has been grappling with this insight for thousands of years, our Western world caught onto this only in the last hundred, when the exploration of the self — all the personalities and sub-personalities housed in one body - became rich gold for psychoanalysis, psychological therapy, encounter groups, and all sorts of other psychic mining. I wonder, however, if you could peel away all the selves that exist within , what would you be left with? A mystery. In many important ways, we remain strangers to ourselves and to each other. All our personalities and sub-personalities can be exposed, examined, discussed, critiqued, and at the heart of our own self—lies the fact that we can never be completely known.

I am reminded of a story I heard one of my colleagues tell me this fall. He told of his life as a young, evangelical from Port Clinton, OH, who was raised in a small, conservative church. He loved the church and the church folks loved him. He went onto college, with the ambition of becoming a preacher himself one day. He married a wonderful woman and they had begun their family. One night, after driving the family van back from a church revival meeting, he said he pulled over the side of the road and with tears streaming down his face, began sobbing and sobbing. “What’s wrong—what’s wrong?” his wife kept asking him. “Daddy—daddy, what’s the matter?” his children asked him. “There’s something in my life that is so broken I just can’t fix it…I don’t know how to fix it…nobody can help me…” He cried and cried but he did not know then what he discovered later—he was not cut out to be an evangelical preacher—nor was he able to be in a heterosexual marriage. He was, he said “a stranger to himself until that fateful day on the country road when the world I had known and loved broke open in a way that would change our lives forever.” Eventually, he would find Unitarian Universalism and become a fine preacher in this tradition. Eventually, he and his ex-wife and children would become and would remain, very close.

How could they have been married, had children, known each other so intimately and yet not known about his sexual orientation? Admittedly, this is a dramatic example, for there are many, more subtle ways in which we keep ourselves hidden from one another. We are strangers, sometimes, to our deepest selves—to our inner motivations—to our often unnamed and unclaimed “sub-personalities.” Meeting the stranger within means inviting all the pieces and parts of ourselves into community with one another. It means befriending and welcoming the stranger that lives inside of us—the parts of ourselves that we would just as soon not acknowledge or invite home for dinner.

Here’s where the spiritual discipline of hospitality becomes something more than just setting a good table. Can we truly welcome the stranger if we are unable to welcome our whole selves? How does the inner work we do in relationships, therapy, or spiritual practice help create a hospitable life within our church, our community, our places of employment and the world at large? We’ll take that up in the third part of our sermon today, but right now let’s sing from Carolyn McDade that has a beautiful image of the role that hospitality plays in our lives, a song that seems appropriate for this wintry day, A Rose in the Winter Time.

Part III: Guests in Our Own Home

(Wayne) I told you a few minutes ago that when we explore the spiritual practices of hospitality and meeting the stranger, we find ourselves involved with our cultural conditioning, our prejudices, our conscious and our unconscious fears and our longings.

We can become very vulnerable. For those of us involved with the small group work on undoing racism has been available here at West Shore for several years now, there has been this “aha-moment” when we realized this was internal spiritual work as much as it was political work, that in fact, we could not meet the stranger of a different race until we had met the stranger within that we were denying, the stranger whose racist attitudes and assumptions we never could admit was part of us.

One of the delights of the Walt Whitman poem we read earlier is that its readers divide on whether Whitman is talking about his response to a stranger he recognizes within himself, or outside of himself. One of the more important insights about how racism works is that people who carry prejudices about others of different cultures, classes, and races project upon those people aspects of themselves which are hidden and hard to acknowledge.

(Kathleen) Why is this important? The first goal of a religious life and of spiritual practice is simply put into one word: awareness. That’s what its all about really—awareness of one’s self—awareness of one’s self in relation to others and awareness of the Mystery in which we live. By studying the self we meet the stranger within—the one who has the power to hold other parts of our self- hostage—the part of the self that wants to forever remain a mystery – and we try to turn that stranger into a guest, a guest in our own house. “ Love has made a circle that holds us all inside; Where strangers are as family, and loneliness can't hide.” Kate Wolf sang that.

It’s from a song we used at our wedding ceremony, Give Yourself to Love. The other theme poem at our wedding was this one – it’s by Robert Bly and its called “the Third Body”:

“A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
(Wayne) The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.

(Kathleen) Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

The third body in this poem speaks to us of the mystery in our marriage, the stranger within that we each find through relationship with the other, and it also speaks of the stranger without, the third body that is present when a stranger is welcomed into our church community. We want to conclude today by talking about both of these ways that we experience the third body.

(Wayne ) When we got married, we both realized that there were some powerful reasons we were attracted to each other – notably many shared interests, most particularly the profession of Unitarian Universalist ministry. However, we also realized that there was much that we didn’t know about each other, and much that would we did not understand about how we would change as we grew older. So this image of a third body that is the marriage that we each serve, that we each feed, that lives with us in our home as a guest, was a powerful image that came to us through this poem and that held us in its grasp. We have continued to meditate on this poem and on this third body that we love in common that is who we are together.

(Kathleen) The discovery of the third body in our marriage was accompanied by a recognition that there is also a third body in the life of the church we serve. It is not unusual in religious life and religious ceremonies to have a representation of the stranger who is that third body at the table, the presence who is neither me nor thee. At the Seder meal in the Jewish celebration of Passover, there is always an extra chair and place at the table for the Prophet Elijah, the embodiment of the wisdom and lineage of Jewish traditions who shares the sacred meal with everyone present. The extra chair is for the third body.

(Wayne) In our church life, we remember the third body when we meet with you. Because we both lean to the introverted side, and have had to develop that hidden extrovert within us to engage with all the different kinds of people we meet in church work, it has helped us both to remember that in each of the encounters we have, in each of the meetings or services we share, there is not just you and me, minister and parishioner, there is also the third body that is the congregation and how we form the building blocks that make create the congregation together. When any of us has s chance to meet the stranger who walks into our building, we are also meeting and creating the third body that is the congregation, and how that meeting goes has a lot to do with how the congregation comes to life in the world.

(Kathleen) The members of our Friday morning group have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which reminds them of how quickly people form a first and lasting impression of a new situation. The life of the congregation takes form, for good or for ill, in the first few minutes of every new meeting we have. If we are not aware that this is happening, if we forget the third body, it may never be seen by either of us.

In our connection circles, we ask these groups meeting to share their vulnerable hearts and their best insights, to always leave an empty chair in the circle. The congregation that they are creating together is sitting in that empty chair. The empty chair also represents the next person who might like to join this group.

(Wayne) Because the third body will always be a stranger, will always be rooted in the mystery of that which is greater than any of us, that which is always possibility and not yet realized, that which beckons to us just beyond the veil of mystery, the best that we can do is set a place for the third body, for the stranger, in our own home. The best we can do is practice the disciplines of hospitality and welcome for what still feels unknown and different and new. In doing so, we make the stranger into a guest, worthy of our best attention, our nourishment, our conversation, our learning about what and who we might become together.

May it be so.

Words for Offering(Kathleen)

We are empowered to create a welcoming and hospitable community for free thinking people of faith here at this church by the generous gifts of pledges and Sunday offerings we share in these services. Honoring the many gifts we have received, we enter into this time of giving back, through the collection of the morning’s offering.

Pastoral Prayer (Wayne)

Mysterious Stranger, Spirit of Life,

Invisible in our Lives, and yet,

Sometimes

Recognized in the person sitting next to us,

We thank you for your presence.

We are grateful for all the ways our lives surprise and challenge us,

Extending a hand towards us that holds something new,

Inviting us to reach our hands back and welcome it in.

We would hold in our hearts this day all those in our community of family and friends who are just hanging on today to what they have,

For whom the new would be a restoration of health or stability in troubled lives.

We hold them in our hearts and pray for their relief.

We hold in our hearts as we do each week (whether we name them or not in prayer) the many people who are in harm’s way, in wars, conflict, and violence around the world,

Those dead and injured this week in Iraq and Afghanistan,

Those killed and injured by hatred and prejudice here at home in New Bedford Massachusetts,

Those who have quietly suffered or died this week after years of carrying the burdens of poverty and oppression.

We hold them all in our hearts and pray for their relief.

In silence we seek within the peace that is so hard to find in the world outside, so that in finding that peace we may share it with all we meet.

(silence)

As we turn to the days ahead, we pray for the wisdom to know ourselves better that we can more effectively make a difference in the world,

Be better parents, friends, and colleagues,

Encouraged and supported by the third body of this church community in all that we do,

Wherever we may go.

May it be so.