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There is, in the ancient Book of Ecclesiastes, a statement whose banality only underlines its truth. Here it is:

Two are better than one . . . for if they fall, one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they are warm; but how can one be warm alone?1

Gee thanks. A piece of drivel almost anybody could have said better. Maybe it’s memorable because it states the blindingly obvious — with blinding plainness. But there’s a lot more to this than staying warm, or having a hand getting up again after you fall.

When people come together, a culture is created. That culture shapes the people who exist within it.

But what kind of culture? What kind of people?

We are makers of our culture, of whatever sort it is. When I became aware of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, I was riveted by [couldn ’t put them down, kept reading all night long — Klemperer, a Jewish professor who somehow survived the Nazi era in Dresden, and then he lived through the grim rebuilding of Soviet East Germany. He saw people living in a society where the terms and conditions of civilized life were turned on their head. The air was thick with fear, intimidation, and hatred. Those were the terms and conditions. That society was so designed that this was the way it was supposed to be.

He saw what that did to people, how personalities and relationships were poisoned — first in Nazi Germany, and then, after the war, to Professor Klemperer’s great disillusion, in Walter Ulbricht’s Stalinist East Germany. He saw what his neighbors, his former associates, people in positions of responsibility and ordinary people — were capable of becoming. He saw them becoming false, monstrous, saw them organizing life around terror and never-ceasing lies, doing despicable things that once they could not have dreamed of doing.

If you think of Nazi Germany, what you’ve got is a highly educated European country where people have abandoned their autonomy. You didn’t think for yourself; you sank into some archaic mentality of the tribe or even a herd. Heil Hitler. Whatever he says is true. Has to be true. So some of our neighbors are having to wear those yellow stars or pink triangles or whatever and aren’t allowed on the trolleycar and get humiliated everywhere they go. So a few of our neighbors are disappearing. Heil. Goodbye conscience, so long autonomy.

A Unitarian Universalist congregation is likely to have some notion of personal autonomy. Sometimes verging on the polar extreme. But let’s celebrate the radical independence and authenticity.

Of course, we aren’t anywhere nearly as original and unique as we like to think. We are shaped by the culture, or the cultures, in which we live, aren’t we? Nevertheless this is not a gathering of conformists, particularly, and if you seem to agree about a lot of things here, it’s because a bunch of autonomous individuals with some integrity and courage living out there on their own found each other here, yeh? And the challenge for us — now that we’re here — is to go a step farther.

The challenge is to find an authenticity, an autonomy, that flows from the deepest part of ourselves — not just some quirky egos gathered together. No, I’m talking about a kind of unselfconscious creative freedom flowing deeply, powerfully, beyond ego, with each of us bringing our particular individual capacities and gifts into some larger communion.

Usually when an individual experiences autonomy it happens at the expense of communion with others. But the communion I’m talking about is a dynamic field that’s created when the many know also that they are really one. You bring your truest self, you bring your particular gifts, into a larger whole. So in the service of a higher purpose, there’s a quality of consciousness that transcends your individuality and yet depends on it.

History shows that human qualities and capacities develop most fully where they’re valued — in cultures that prize them. Consider what the context — a human community — can make of us. What it can make of us when it’s founded not on some nightmare of lies and violence, not on the rock-rigid dogma of other ages; — but on highly evolved human principles, on faith in each other, faith in the possible; organized on the principles of love and care; guided by a creative vision of hope.

But now, what happens when people are joined together in that way? They begin to feel an evolutionary tension. Something crackles. Something begins to come into being and it requires your care and attention and even your sacrifice. It challenges your own inertia. It overwhelms your sense of inertia with its radiant sense of possibility. There’s respect, there’s right relationship, because some compelling creative work needs you and commands you, and it’s thrilling and it’s challenging.

It’s not always comfortable. It’s transformative. Isn’t that what we said we wanted? But now it depends on you. It needs you.

There’s respect and care and there’s moral vision where people come together as a higher kind of “We.”

That’s the kind of context where the most enlightened kind of spiritual inquiry can happen. And not just inquiry. You begin to do what can’t be done, and say what can’t be said, for a purpose that maybe you’d previously known in an intellectual sort of way, but in a deeper sense you couldn’t have imagined it, at least until now. But now it’s absolutely, palpably real.

It has happened before. Think about William Ellery Channing’s church in Boston. From that one congregation came

Horace Mann, the great educational reformer and congressman, who brought us tax-funded free public schools; (imagine if he were just coming up with the idea for the first time now in the New Hampshire legislature — they’d start shrieking socialism! socialism!)

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, with her lifelong advocacy of early childhood education, who introduced the kindergarten to America.

A hospital for women was founded in that church, and now it’s among the best in the world, still with its Channing Laboratory — Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

And indirectly, from the influence of that place, came Emerson himself, and Theodore Parker, whose congregation of 7,000 included escaped slaves, abolitionists, laborers, and thinkers; — Theodore Parker, who formed the “Committee of Vigilance” to rescue slaves captured under the Fugitive Slave Law and set them free; Parker, whose printed sermons inspired Abraham Lincoln.

There were abolitionists and reformers, caregivers and visionaries.

This was a people with a passion potent enough to give them courage to stand up to the powerful institutions everybody assumed could never be changed, whose grip they thought could never be broken: political and cultural and, yes, religious powers that were crushing, choking the human spirit, snuffing out the light at the heart of that age.

I’ve often contemplated the community of people who gathered in Emerson’s parlor in Concord, Massachusetts, and the culture they created there, people who opened new vistas of spiritual understanding and experience. How could so few people be responsible for so much advancement of human culture and consciousness? There was Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century broke ground for modernday feminism. She was the first literary critic in an American newspaper (Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune); and there was Bronson Alcott, who along with Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody led a revolution in the education of children; and there was Henry Thoreau, the great naturalist and antislavery activist, the influence of whose Civil Disobedience seems to widen with the passing years beyond its well-known impact on Gandhi and King; and there was Moncure Conway, the great radical religious and abolitionist leader whose influence spanned the Atlantic; and Senator Charles Sumner, I think the greatest political leader of the era and the most uncompromising advocate of black Americans; and Theodore Parker himself; and leaders of a generation of religious visionaries who would transform the ossified Unitarian movement into a powerful vanguard.

Why would so many visionaries and great leaders come from one little town? Was it something in the water?

But of course, these were just folks with warts and foibles, such as you might find anywhere. But they were caught up in something greater than themselves, something that implicated and compelled them, something that challenged the terms and conditions of life in this world with a highly evolved and still-evolving vision of how the world might be. They could have declined participation on the grounds that they were not ready, not good enough. But life doesn’t require that we be “ready” or be something other than what we are: only that we be available.

In 1990, Vaçlav Havel stood before the United States Congress. This is what he said:

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, . . . the catastrophe toward which the world is headed — ecological, social, demographic, or general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable.

A revolution in the sphere of consciousness. A different, more evolved kind of human.

Yeh, we know: If we don’t want to be the last gasping century of human life on Earth, something essential will have to change, in a very short time.

What kind of faith, and what kind of faith-community, — can mobilize us to do that, move us to do it and support us in doing it?

Community, because you’re not going to be able to do it on your own. About nine years ago a tremendously hopeful book came out, titled Non-Zero, in which Robert Wright talks about cultural evolution — the great advances in human achievement — which he describes as virtually pouring from human societies that were big enough, concentrated enough, so that they could function like a many-celled brain, with all of its members sharing in a creative interaction. And he shows how other societies — too small, too sparse and isolated — remained stagnant or died out. No stimulation, no creativity. It’s true of just about everything — even bacteria. Even congregations. Bacteria and congregations both solve problems by interacting, forming a kind of collective mind smart enough, stimulated enough, to grow to the next stage.

We cannot do what must be done in these times in isolation. We only come into our highest potentialities in communion with others who share our vision. While we face a crisis truly like none humanity has ever faced — human communities, including congregations like this one, are the context for our being and our becoming — for good or for ill.

And a human community like that has a way of implicating us personally, of requiring us. This energy and vision and clear intention we’ve been thinking about today has to go somewhere — it will get expressed. And today we begin our annual Commitment campaign, our focus on Stewardship. What that means if you want the indisputable evidence of our vision, intention, and values — look at our checkbooks and credit card statements. It shows up there. One way or another.

I have always made a personal pledge of five percent of my income — this lasted until my current financial unravelling. Maybe you know about that sort of thing. I can’t do that now. And I am not here to tell you how much to pledge. Because I know some cannot pledge much of anything financially. Others can do well more than five percent. That’s for you to decide, in consultation with your values, your vision, your intention, and your financial realities. Every individual’s realities are different.
But here’s the thing: When it’s all over, the intentions, values, and vision of this congregation will be measurable by how well we’ve funded this work that we share for the sake of this faith we cherish.

For very long ages, human culture was defined by authoritarian rules and myths and belief systems. And then human consciousness advanced, though of course not everywhere. But our Unitarian Universalist movement represented a new kind of culture, incorporating the values of scientific, rational, free inquiry from the 18th-century Enlightenment, and then, in another advance beyond that, the values of pluralism, diversity, and respect — a wave that emerged in, like, the 1960s, and Unitarian Universalism embodies its values. That’s us to a T. It was a real transformation — but it’s time for another advance. That breakthrough brought a kind of inherent narcissism that cultivates the attitude that “it’s all about me.” So way too often, congregations look a little too much like clubs (existing for the pleasure of an entitled inner circle) or a store (where I expect to get what I want because, dammit, the customer is always right!).

I wonder — What would it be like to engage with others in a place beyond the boundaries of our personal egos and dramas? What would it be like to be somewhere where you could communicate from a part of your self that is absolutely free from self-consciousness, that is fearless, uncorrupted, and passionately interested in the truth?

Maybe you’ve known something like that at least in brief moments. I have a very fresh and vivid memory of a gathering a couple of years ago, a conversation of such breadth and depth and reach and potency that when it ended, naturally, as if we were an orchestra at the end of a great score, we could only sit in silence.

Maybe you have experienced what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s happened here. Maybe you yearn for it.

When it happens — a congregation can be a field for enlightenment and for the unfolding of human possibility. In that context each member’s individual life-work can become clear and can find support and collaboration. In that context a truly compelling vision can come into being and be shared.

And there, human beings can begin to reach their finest potentials — literally creating a new edge of the possible. Something bigger than an interaction of egos is going on, and when the conversation falls into stale opinions or personal obsessions and agendas or theoretical abstractions, something about this new context that you have created together refocuses, returns to the inspired passion, the focused intensity, the evolutionary tension. You feel a kind of clarity that embraces all the best and highest in you with a breadth and depth and scope that’s breathtaking.

You can sense the presence of a higher consciousness that can be revolutionary in its potential. Something ignites between you, and among you, and through you, that could never happen in the most brilliant of minds alone. That’s where we find out how to create the future. That’s where we finally see that we can.

When it happens, we will know with an assurance we’ve never known before that the world we dream is actually possible, and that our lives can take on the quality and force of that dream.

READING

from a transcription of a conversation in Michael Wombacher, Eleven Days At the Edge, 385ff slightly condensed

Andrew “So we can continue from where we left off last night,”

Andrew began and then turned his attention to a young Australian woman who had quickly raised her hand.

Voice 2 “I want to tell you about [what] happened in the dining room last night. [her voice quivering with enthusiasm].

Andrew “Okay, go on.”

Voice 2 “Well, there’s probably seventy versions of this but I can tell it from my vantage point. After dinner there were about six tables of people left in the dining room and many were starting to leave. But there was this sense that we’ve got to do something. And so we said, ‘Okay, there are a few people over there — we’ll go and talk to them and get them to come over.’ And when we started doing that, suddenly the whole room came together. Spontaneously everybody at all the different tables just got up and we all formed one big circle. We just came together very powerfully.”

Andrew “This was late last night?”

Voice 2 Yes. And then — I don’t even know how long we stayed there; a few hours at least — we had a very powerful discussion and there was an incredibly strong sense of conviction in everyone.”
Andrew “So, was everybody listening?”

Voice 2 “Yes. And that really felt like where the power of it was. It was like everybody was drawn to something. It wasn’t about yourself at all. It was very creative and it was about contributing to something new that was not about any one of us in particular. So it wasn’t like anybody went into long . . .”

Andrew “Monologues?”

Voice 2 “Right. Everybody kept it moving.”

Andrew “How did it feel?”

Voice 2 “At times it felt really ecstatic and at other times it felt like it slowed down and we were really grappling. At those times it was demanding that we go deeper and that we shouldn’t just let it go. At one point there was actually a break because a whole lot of people rushed to the toilet. But then we actually did come back together. That was a kind of dangerous point because we could have kind of lost it.”

[Suddenly a man who had apparently been part of the group said,]

Voice 3 “But it became more powerful after that.”

Voice 2 “That’s when it really became clear that we were going into the unknown. That’s what was challenging us.”

Andrew “So there was a willingness to engage with what was spontaneously emerging and beginning to open up. So you could say on one hand it was happening by itself but on the other it wasn’t — because you were also making it happen.”

Voice 2 “Yes. . . . There’s another point that I’ve been contemplating that has to do with being alone and being together being one and the same? For some reason that really struck me deeply. For that to be so I have to really know who I am.”

Andrew “So whoever was engaging in that inquiry wasn’t preoccupied with any kind of self-doubt, self-concern, unworthiness, ambition, sense of superiority, or anything else like that, right?”

Voice 2 “Yes, that’s right.”

Andrew “So what happens when all that ego is tangibly absent in a collective? A new being emerges and a new world opens up — right now!”

[He paused for a moment and then asked pointedly,]

Andrew “And what does that new being want to do?”

Voice 2 [without a trace of hesitation]
“It wants to keep creating the future.”

Andrew Okay, Christine.”
[he said to a young woman.]

Voice 4 “The shift really happened when we all recognized that we were being much too casual and started to look for the sacredness in what we were doing. And the difference was that then we had an emotional connection with the purpose. And from that point everything changed. We were all focused, listening to each other, and we were just one, really one, all the same.”

Andrew “So the creative dimension is you actually giving yourself to it — conscious engagement with this potential. Nothing could be more thrilling. Because you know something new and big is happening but you don’t know what its limit is. What you do know is that you’re discovering a completely unknown or radically new and profound dimension of your own self, right?”

Voice 4 “Yes and I observed one more thing at the end when the tables needed to go back. Then this very same quality of the Authentic Self that many of us had been experiencing in one form of action, the action of inquiry, transformed in rearranging the physical space with a quality of attention that was just a continuation of the same presence, the same qualities that we had in the inquiry. I felt that this is the kind of consciousness from which we would be able to solve complex problems and go at it in a totally new way.”

Andrew Evolutionary tension is a creative, positive tension. [It’s] what makes you sit up straight and pay attention when you hear something important, when you care about something, when you experience respect for someone or when you experience awe. So the spiritual life has to be pregnant with evolutionary tension.

If you want to create a new world you have to . . . examine how it is that we work together to do whatever it is that we do. . . . There are so many ego-based motives that come from very different parts of ourselves. . . . So you can see that once this Authentic Self would begin to gain some real foothold that it would eventually end up restructuring everything because the part of the self that would be driving our actions wouldn’t be the ego.”

For the sake of our future we have to create a new moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual context.”

Voice 4 “Yes.”