When the Greeks defeated the Trojans, bringing an end to the ten-year-long Trojan War, each soldier set out for home. It took Odysseus, a Greek warrior, another ten years to reach his destination, the island of Ithaka. Homer’s Odyssey is the story of that journey and over the years others hav e also recounted their versions of it, among them James Joyce (Ulysses) and Nikos Kazanzakis. We all have an odyssey. Here is a part of the poem by Constantine Cavafy, called Ithaka.
When you set out for Ithaka ask that your road be long, full of adventure, full of instruction. The (monsters) and the Cyclops, angry Poseidon-do not fear them: such as these you will never find as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare emotion touch your spirit and your body. The (monsters) and the Cyclops, wild Poseidon-you will not meet them unless you carry them in your soul, unless your soul raise them up before you. Ask that your way be long. . . . Have Ithaka always in your mind. Your arrival there is what you are destined for. But do not in the least hurry the journey. Better that it last for years, so that when you reach the island you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth. Ithaka gave you the splendid journey. Without her you would not have set out. She hasn’t anything else to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaka has not deceived you. So wise have you become, of such experience, that already you will have understood what these Ithakas mean. (Ithaka by Constantine Cavafy, trans Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
What follows, then, is an exploration of what Ithaka means for me, in terms of ministry. I offer it to you because several people have asked me to and in the hopes that the particularity of any story carries a more universal meaning for others. What is the journey you are on? What is the Ithaka that guides you? Once each year a minister is asked to present his/her odyssey before our district chapter of the UU Ministers’ Association. This year I was honored to be asked and I share some of it with you today.
The arrival of my son, Matthew, from Korea in the early 1980’s is as good a beginning as any for the turns that led me to the UU ministry. I began attending a UU congregation because of Matthew. We adopted him through a fundamentalist Christian agency and they wanted us to have a religion. Darwin, my husband at the time, had been raised Lutheran and I Episcopalian, but we both had left our churches years earlier. For me it was a case of irrelevancy. I loved Jesus, especially as a child, but he seemed more like a historical figure, or kind of a cool young James Dean type, more a creation of my dreams20than a god alive in my soul. There was an air of unreality about the whole church experience for me. I needed those biblical teachings we heard in Sunday School and from the pulpit to be translated into the reality of my twentieth century childhood. As I got a little older, I began to hate the idea of original sin and flawed, wormlike human nature. Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect only fed my already less than helpful teen aged tendencies toward perfectionism. I shrank from that picture of a judgmental, self-righteous god. And at the same time during my teen years I wanted to enter a convent. (Go figure.) But the romance of undying love and incense could not balance the lack of trust and could not fill my longings for a faith congruent with my life and I finally left the church for good while in college.
By the time I was filing adoption forms, Episcopalian seemed like the wrong answer to any question about religion. We tried to avoid the whole issue and put down “Protestant” but the agency just bounced it back to us. I remembered that while in college I had attended the wedding ceremony of friends and a Unitarian minister had officiated. I loved that=2 0ceremony. So I looked up the nearest Unitarian Universalist congregation, which turned out to be in Garden City, NY and began to show up there. It took. At first I appreciated the ethical relevancy to my life and the welcoming “fit” with the people. After some time passed I realized that I treasured the opportunity to fashion my own faith structures in a manner, not only congruent with my values, but with the inner experience of both heart and mind. Still later I learned to love our stories, our struggles and aspirations, our hermeneutic of questioning, perhaps even suspicion. In other words, what drew me first, and for many years, was the Unitarian Universalist approach to life and the kind of people who chose to undertake such.
We put Unitarian Universalist on the application as our religion. The agency didn’t like that much either, but they let it go. That was 1982. Matthew was born in June of 1983 and arrived here in September of that year.
I became active in Garden City and followed a pretty typical route of committee chairing, beginning with Social Action, serving on the board, attending leadership schools and finally, assuming the presidency of that congregation. It was a time of uneasy, disappointing, occasionally hostile ministerial transition -- 4 ministers during my two year term as president. As such, I was a pastoral presence, the organizational continuity and stability in a troubled congregation. I liked that role. I liked it because I had something good to offer and my efforts were helpful. It began to dawn on me that the work I had been doing was ministry and that it was work I wanted to continue doing. I enjoyed my other careers (college teaching and photography), but they did not ask enough of me. Ministry wanted all of me: my intellect, my heart, my spirit. It honored my instincts. Having planted myself in the UU approach and in a UU congregation, over time they molded me.
UU’ism allowed me to develop and offered the opportunity for work that asked for the best of me. That fertilized me and allowed me to grow. That satisfied my need to help people, to connec t deeply where the tectonic plates of life rub against one another. This connection formed the heart of my spiritual beliefs. It is in connection that I find the holy, the sacred, the power, the juice of life. It is from connection that I understand ethics to arise. Ministry asked me to live there and I wanted to. If, as David Pohl has said, ministry is more of an art than anything else, then like other creative endeavors, it comes from deep within. It’s a drive; it’s a need; it’s a response to the world; it’s an urge to express oneself with imaginative creativity. It’s what I encountered in UU’ism and this is how I understand my calling to the UU ministry.
I came to Kingston in 1992 as a consulting minister; turned into the extension minister in 1993 and finally was called as the first settled minister in 1996. My entire ministry career has been spent here in Kingston, except for two years as an intern in Brooklyn. It was the final two years of Donald McKinney’s forty year ministry and it was an important, formative time. I brought with me to Brooklyn teaching skills, artistic sensibility, a meditation practice, an understanding of organizational developme nt, good perception and instincts for people. With Donald I realized an abiding love for ministry.
I do love our Unitarian Universalist tradition. By and large, at our best we have stood for, and do stand for, human dignity in the world. Increasingly we stand for the dignity of other species, as well as for the planet. We choose congruity of our human experience with whatever and however we experience that which is greater than us, and called by any variety of names including, but certainly not limited to, god. I love it that the Unitarian Universalist tradition enfolds me and holds me accountable. I love it that I stand with so many ministers whose respect for our tradition was, and is, abiding.
I have loved serving here in the Hudson Valley. This October the congregation celebrated fifty years of existence. I want you to know the nobility in your history and to take pride in what you have20accomplished. I want to help all of us, gently, gain awareness of where we have fallen short of our own hopes for ourselves. I want to help you to continue to see the precious gift that has been given, and to continue to steward it carefully, and pass it along, stronger, to future generations. And to continue to forge a useful and inspiring identity as a people who stand for the dignity of all.
I have loved you. By loving, I mean that I want my ministry to come from a place of compassion and understanding within myself. No one does this all the time, of course, and in the face of all that comes at a minister, such love can’t be sustained for very long at all without a solid sense of perspective; a solid sense of what’s really going on, of the words under the words. Perhaps the greatest lessons regarding love that I learned from Donald McKinney were about maintaining perspective. He never thought that the role of a minister was to please people. He chose cheerfulness and he cultivated humor and they helped him to carry his ministry more lightly. He was wise enough not to get caught in expectations, either his own of what the congregation should be doing or the congregation’s regarding what he should be doing. While he had a strong ego, his humility tempered it and he seemingly did not allow himself to take the whole responsibility for what went on in Brooklyn. Neither the whole credit, nor the whole blame. He was never the only person in the room. That kind of perspective makes an enduring love possible. My love for ministry is abiding, if complicated.
Ministry is rooted in love. Love for our tradition; love for the people we serve; love for the very places in which we serve. And, this is a big and, that love for tradition, for place, for people, must also exist within the congregation, not only between minister and congregation but also between the people themselves. In that sense we share the ministry; we are all ministers. We are in relationship and this relationship is based upon mutuality of trust, of accountability and of responsibility for what we create together. It’s a covenantal relationship, a relationship of promises and intentions and accountability. It can be hard for UU’s to understand this because so much of our world does not operate on this model. It is a good model. The delicate balance inherent in our heritage between20individual freedom and community needs often tilts in favor of individualism. Nevertheless, it behooves us to remember that we are in covenantal relationship, with the intention of remaining faithful to the promises contained in the words with which you installed me as your minister. Contained in the words which you wrote as a covenant with one another. You have copies of these.
When we hold back, when we do not share our time, our talents, our financial resources as generously as we might, --- and that’s the key: as generously as we are able --- when we do not respond in a timely way to our pledge campaign, take a turn at leadership, volunteer on a project, we do not fulfill our own potential. There are many understandable reasons for holding back. Some of us fear over-commitment, some of us face a lot of uncertainty, some of us, perhaps, hold an unspoken wish that others will carry us, some of us feel so overwhelmed that we have no more to give. Some of us judge that what we could give is not good enough somehow. And more. Do you see that each of these reasons has to do with us not taking care of ourselves, not valuing ourselves, maybe even not knowing how to? We exist to lear n, not only to value and take care of one another, but to value and take care of ourselves.
I have, therefore, understood my ministry, our ministry together, as relational, as connective. People come to our congregations and communities seeking connection, seeking meaning, seeking a depth of experience they have not found on their own. Even, and especially, when they are unsure how to find it and how to live with it. Ministers help point the way. The people in a congregation help point the way for each other.
For me, spirituality is that movement toward connection. Thandeka, a Unitarian Universalist theologian, suggests that our vitality comes from our recognition that the deepest of human experiences, religious experiences, are those accompanied by feelings of connection to something within ourselves and beyond ourselves, however we describe that something. Those feelings of connection promote wholeness. Our spiritual practice, as manifested in our worship services, our social action and our religious education, is to stay present with one another and to encounter one another as whole persons -- emotions, thoughts, ideas and actions. When we know and experience congruence between what we feel, what we think and how we act; when we experience messages from each other that acknowledge our feelings with acceptance, then connection arises. Unitarian Universalism, by affirming and promoting connection, is a way of life whose ultimate goal is transformation: for healing, for justice, and for peace.
Because as Unitarian Universalists we are called, not just to individual freedom, but to action in the world. As ministers, as individual congregants and as a whole congregation, our prophetic voices and our spiritual voices are one and the same. Our UU spirituality is a combination of our individual spiritual practices, our worship services, our community with one another and our service to the world. Ministers help congregations to discern their vision and find within themselves the courage and inspiration to act upon it. Under that umbrella I have understood myself as a builder of spiritual community. I have understood us as building that community together. We ha ve accomplished much. Throughout all of our changes my focus has remained upon the quality of our Sunday services and the pastoral care of members and friends. I’m a resource, a cheerleader, a support, an advisor, an occasional coach, a person to be cc’ed on correspondence. I spend time developing leadership and promoting growth. And talking to you.
On May 31, Coming of Age Sunday, I will celebrate seventeen years of ordination to the UU ministry. Writing this odyssey has given me a tremendous opportunity for reflection. I still don’t know where Ithaka is, or even what it is. I’m still on the journey, sailing somewhere on the sea, encountering this monster or enjoying that temptation. A look back at ministry shows me that I have fallen into a vocation that I love. I have served a congregation that has grown with me and in our time we have fashioned a community which, while not without its problems, is willing, vibrant, spiritual, active in the larger world and a sanctuary for those within its walls. Through ministry I have had to confront my own demons, (a seemingly never-ending supply). I’ve established a spiritual practice that challenges me and takes care of me.
These days I resonate with a poem by Philip Booth, called First Lesson.
Lie back, daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand. Gently, and I will hold you. Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls. A dead- man’s-float is face down. You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me, when you tire on the long thrash to your island, lie up, and survive. As you float now, where I held you and let go, remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
And so it has held me in this odyssey of ministry. And so it will.