See How the Way Lies Open, by Rev. Carlton Elliott Smith Aug. 15, 2010

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“See How the Way Lies Open”

        I’m so happy to be here. On this first Sunday sharing a sermon as one of your ministers, I take time to honor my predecessors and contemporaries here, starting with the Rev. Dr. A. Powell Davies, whose sermons were broadcast to Arlington from All Souls DC in the 1940s and 50s, … Rev. Michael McGee, who was part of the Search Committee that invited me here, Rev. Linda Olson Peebles, who’s served so faithfully these past nine years and is helping me get oriented this month and to Natalie Fenimore, whom I’ve known through the UU ministers and professionals of color network. I’m grateful for each of them.

        And thank you, all who are here today. It’s one thing for a minister to prepare a service, but it’s another to have people actually listen to it. I’m glad you did whatever you needed to do to get here this morning, and our covenant as worship leaders and musicians is to make it worth your while.

        We ministers, as well as other staff members, receive inspiration from you. When we see your dedication to each other, to this congregation, and to the wider community and world, we push further, dig deeper … together, we are all trying to roll that big round boulder called Beloved Community up the hill. Even if it rolls back on us a thousand times, we will keep trying. And who knows? One day we ourselves or even a future generation will see the dreams we dreamed come to fruition.

         I dedicate this service to Alma Martinez, a member of the Hollis Unitarian Church in Queens, who introduced me to Alan Watts’ book Tao: The Watercourse Way and to Janet Abbott, a member of First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington, Mass., who introduced me to the phrase that is the title of this sermon.

        Let me tell you a bit about Janet. Several years ago now, I was asked by the First Parish Auction Committee to put up the title of one of my sermons for bid. That didn’t quite square with my spirit, so instead I offered the opportunity for someone to cause a breakthrough in their lives by creating a worship service with me. Now Janet, the exemplary churchwoman she is, saw that no one had bid on my proposal, so she put her name down, just to get the bidding going. And it turns out, hers was the only name that got put down, and she won! We met several times to talk about her desire to act on her interest in working with underserved populations and putting her fluency in French to use. She wound up as a volunteer with a group of Haitian women in Boston – a real breakthrough in her stepping out of her comfort zone.

        We eventually discussed what the title of the service would be, and she said, “It’s ‘See How the Way Lies Open.’”

        See how the way lies open? Qu’est que ce?

        Janet explained that a Quaker woman she knew would say, “Let’s see how the way lies open” whenever there was some significant choice to made.

        And instantly, I was filled with the insight and the depth this simple phrase evoked. I smiled. “Ah! See how the way lies open." Not only has the universe provided a route through our circumstances, but it has also provided us access to that route if we have eyes to see it.

         In many of our Unitarian Universalist congregations, we join in the observance of Passover, when we remember the flight of the Hebrews from of bondage, and the providence of their God. We hear fantastic stories of how Pharaoh and his people were brought into submission by the power of Yahweh, the great I Am, through the prophet Moses.

         There were great signs and wonders: the plagues, the pillar of fire; the parting of the Red Sea ... They all speak to the ability of the divine to act on behalf of a chosen people in the face of oppression.

        As is often said in black churches, “God can make a way out of no way.”

         The Hebrews couldn’t see how they were going to survive, how they were going to eat, but somehow, provision kept being made.

        Harriet Tubman is often referred to as the Moses of her people. Can you imagine what it must have been like for her to launch out under the cover of night, with only the light of the moon and the stars to guide her, with only a glimmer of the possibility of freedom? She must have believed there was an open way, an Underground Railroad, a series of open hearts and open homes, always making room. Always making room. And when she saw how the way lay open for herself, she didn’t stop there. She went back and helped others see what she saw. More that 70 enslaved Africans escaped because Harriet Tubman saw how the way lay open.

        Some of you were raised in Christian tradition, as I was, so you may recall hearing in the New Testament that Jesus taught, “Straight is the way, and narrow is the gate that leads to eternal life.” (Matthew 7.14)]

        If you were like me, you heard scriptures in which Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” (John 14.6) Later as I looked to other traditions, I realized there were other understandings of how to be and move in the world.

        I will come around to this shortly, but first, let me check something out with you. At the end of the winter, while I was still in northern New Jersey, we got hit by a wild rain and windstorm.

        Did northern Virginia get hit by this storm as hard as we did? In my neighborhood, we were without power, heat and light for about two days. It was very cold -- so cold that I couldn’t sleep in my bedroom. I pulled my reclining chair from the den into the kitchen and turned on the gas stove. Warm at last, I tried to sleep … then I heard trickling sounds. I soon realized it was the basement filling up with water. Without electricity, the sump pump stopped draining. The next morning I waded through the five inches of water in the basement to see what the damage was, and I began pulling wet things out. There were hundreds and hundreds of photographs that I had to separate and lay out to dry.

        One of the two books that got wet was my copy of Tao: The Watercourse Way, given to me by Alma Martinez when I was first starting out in ministry in Queens. I thought it wouldn’t be salvageable, but it dried out just fine. Now it’s crinkly … and totally priceless. What could be better than a baptized book about the philosophy of going with the flow and following the watercourse of nature …?

        Listen to this: [excerpt from Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts]

        Chao-Chou asked, “What is the Tao?”

        The master [Nan-ch’uan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.”

         “How can one return into accord with it?”

        “By intending to accord you immediately deviate.”

        “But without intention, how can one know the Tao?”

        “The Tao,” said the master, “belongs to neither knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond a doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”

        Alan Watts goes on to say:

        “In other words, people try to force issues only when not realizing that it can’t be done -- that there is no way of deviating from the watercourse of nature. You may imagine that you are outside, or separated from, the Tao and thus able to follow it or not follow; but this very imagination is itself within the stream, for there is no way other than the Way.”

        There is no way other than the Way.

        What a blessed assurance. According to the Tao, I never have strayed and never can stray from the Way, because the Way is all there is. All there is is what happens of itself. In the Universalist side of Unitarian Universalism, our forebears declared that salvation was available to everyone, and that no one would perish in the lake of fire. They declared that people of any faith tradition had the right to the Tree of Life, and not just Christians. We see then that our UU tradition has its own slant on the open way.

        But what happens when we bring ideas of right and wrong into our ordinary consciousness? One of the things that we get is the power of positive thinking, a line of thought in which God or the Universe seems to be some kind of cosmic busboy or personal assistant, responsible for making us happy.

         Barbara Erherenreich, the activist-academic author of Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, talks about her bout with breast cancer starting in 2001. She described how difficult it was to live with such a life-altering disease, and with the requirement of mandatory optimism that seemed to pervade the networks of people with cancer and their care providers.

        Erhenreich sees two dangers with the requirement to think positively at all times. First, it’s delusional and can lead to disastrous consequences. She points to the financial meltdown of 2008 that continues to affect us. Ehrenreich reminds us that five years ago, it was very difficult to find financial analysts who were willing to say that we were living inside an economic bubble, because no one wanted to hear the good times were going to end.

        Erhenreich’s other indictment of positive thinking is that it is cruel to the victimized and the exploited. How oppressive is it to expect people living with cancer to always put on a smiley face? And if you don’t have money or you lose your job, it’s not because you live in an unjust economic system or that there’s corporate malfeasance going on. It’s because you’re resisting wealth. “If you would stop all your negative thinking, God would bless you!” ... Can you see how positive thinking can be delusional and cruel?

        Negative thinking is not the antidote, and can be just as delusional as mandatory positive thinking. Erhenreich offers a radical proposition as an alternative to positive thinking, and that is realism. You see what’s going on in the world, and you try to do something about it. For the movements that have made a difference, people shifted from thinking private positive thoughts to gathering together and taking action. She refers to the signers of the Declaration of Independence [one of whom was Universalist Benjamin Rush ]. There was no reason for them to believe they could defeat Great Britain in a war. They must have said to themselves, “The chances we’ll win are slim, and this is going to be really tough. But we will either do it or die trying.” With determination, courage and hard work, they founded a nation.

        All along the way, those founders encountered ways that closed – battles lost, plans thwarted, treaties broken, attacks unexpected, supplies depleted – and yet they kept pushing onward. Rather than being stopped, they won other battles, made different plans, launched their own surprise attacks, restored their supplies. As the Quaker elder said in Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation, closing doors have the same guiding effect on our way as the doors that open.

        See how the way lies open. Over my years as an interim minister, I can identify many occasions when I was looking for an open way but didn’t see one, mostly because the open way was not in the direction I was looking. So let me pull some examples from what I once called my dossier of failures, so that you might be encouraged and look at your “failures” differently.

        I went to California during my sabbatical back in 2008 and interviewed for an interim minister position. I wanted to live there again. The interview went well, but the search committee thought I wasn’t quite the right match. Meanwhile I had applied to be the interim minister at Central Unitarian Church in northern New Jersey and was eventually hired.

        Because I was back in the New York metropolitan area, I was able to apply to be a lyricist in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in Midtown Manhattan. And I was accepted -- a dream come true.

         Beyond that, one of my family members living in New Jersey faced a major health crisis within weeks after I moved. There was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be than at his side when he needed me, and I couldn’t have been there if I had gone to California.

        Last winter, in the middle of my second year in the workshop, it became clear that I wasn’t going to meet the requirements for admission to the advanced third year workshop. Then a plumb ministry opportunity opened up. Oh, that’s why I didn’t make the cut in the workshop, so I could focus on applying to be minister at ABC Church!

        All the people I told about it said, “Oh, you’d be great there!” To which I responded, “I would, wouldn’t I?”

        I spent weeks fine-tuning my packet, and I submitted it. I knew the search committee was going to contact their top candidates a day or two after the due date. Around that time, a voice whispered, “What if your name’s not on the list?” That had never crossed my mind. A couple of days later, the voice got a little louder: “Your name’s not on the list!” By the time I got the “Dear Rev. Smith” email from the search committee chair at ABC, I already knew that that wasn’t the way that was opening for me.

        Next: Time to apply for interim and consulting ministry positions.

         Though there were small congregations seeking ministers in remote parts of the country that were very attractive to me, I chose to apply to larger congregations and cultivate my skills working with more people, more space, more resources. The UUA Transitions Office submitted my ministerial profile to five congregations. Two said early on, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I interviewed over the phone with the other three, two of which expressed strong interest. They were both extraordinary opportunities – the kind you wish would present themselves in sequence instead of at the same time.

        A song called “Watershed” by Indigo Girls comes to mind:

        Up on the watershed, standing at the fork in the road

         You can stand there and agonize until your agony’s your heaviest load

         You’ll never fly as the crow flies, get used to a country mile

         When you’re learning to face the path at your pace

         Every choice is worth your while

         I bowed to the path that had brought me to that point.

         I bowed to the path that I wasn’t going to take.

        I took a deep breath and received the gift of the path I’d chosen. When Michael called to offer me the position, I told him I would be delighted to join the ministerial staff here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington.

        There are wonderful things I’m never going to have the chance to experience because of the path I chose. There are amazing people that I may never meet because I’m here and not somewhere else.

        On the other hand, I’ve met some wonderful people since I’ve been here, and I can hardly wait to see how the Spirit moves in our midst so we learn and love and grow with our neighbors, as we give our hands and hearts to causes of justice and peace.

        On their Experience 101 CD, Sweet Honey in the Rock sings:

        Trust in your blessings

        And all will flow like

        Sweet honey from heaven (2x)

        We’ve got our own hills to climb in the days ahead here at UUCA. New staff and new members and friends to weave into the life of the congregation, new initiatives that you’ll be hearing more about in the weeks and months ahead, including the Capital Campaign that will kick off in January. We hope you will be part of the renewal conversations that are starting next weekend and you can learn about on Page Two of your order of service.

        I’m confident most, if not all, people here are facing at least one situation where the path to completion or resolution isn’t clear. I pray for your determination, fortitude and courage along the journey.

        Way closes and all the rest of the world opens up.

        Way opens and a new world of possibilities arises before your eyes.

        I encourage you this day and every day of your life, to see how the way lies open.

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