The Rev. Sally Hamlin speaking.

In her book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith author Anne Lamott asks her friend and mentor Father Tom: “How are we going to get through this craziness?” She is referring to the challenging event they are facing. “Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,” he responds, a good answer for Lamott.

And it is a good answer for me, who, like Lamott, has the capacity to jump into despair and helplessness when pondering the slippery slope of the tragic condition of our world. The ever widening disparity between the rich and poor in our country, the continued wars we wage in Afghanistan and in Iraq, our decaying cities, and the everyday violence occurring in our schools, on our streets and even in our sanctuaries, takes its toll on me, puts me in danger of careening down the crevasse, a solitary and self-indulgent slide off the edge.

This past August, I was feeling unmoored, congregationally speaking. I had left my congregation in Duluth, and following our UU Ministers Association’s guidelines which, among other things, provides advice about ministers’ transitions, was no longer in contact with the congregants there. Thank goodness for friends, family and colleagues.

I was sitting in my daughter and son-in-law’s house, in the room they use as an office, checking emails, listening to the peeps and trills of their bright blue parakeet Popsicle as he tried to make sense of the hidden message of my keystrokes. I was awaiting news of the whereabouts of my missing household effects, which, as far as I knew, were on a truck somewhere between Minnesota and New York. Little did I know the boxes filled with all my worldly goods were not on any truck anywhere, but sitting on the floor of the moving company’s warehouse, unloaded there the same day they were picked up from my apartment. And, as I said, I was feeling a bit lost, between homes, between congregations, and more cognizant than ever, and in a new way, about how much I rely upon my work – which I love so much- and my UU community for grounding and meaning in my world. It is within this covenantal relationship we share that I find solace and renewal.

Just a few days earlier, I’d heard the horrible news of the events in our Knoxville Tennessee congregation. I had been alone in my car, traveling back to Buffalo, after three days in rural Vermont with no connection to the outside world. I turned on the radio and found the local NPR station and pulled off the road so I would not lose the tenuous signal as I moved in and out of the Green Mountains. I felt shock. Disbelief. How could this be? A shooting in a UU congregation? I could not hold back my tears. I was thinking of a particular person.

Just weeks earlier in June while at General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, I met a new colleague, Reverend Mitra Jafarazadeh, minister at the Westside Knoxville congregation. Mitra’s congregation’s children, and I imagine, her own son and daughter, were among those participating in the Sunday service celebrating their production of the musical “Annie”.

In Florida, outside our hotel awaiting the convention center shuttle bus, Mitra shared with me her struggles in the mid-south to fight the overt and sometimes shady experiences of racism she and her family experienced in Tennessee on an all too regular basis. As I listened to this soft-spoken and elegant colleague describe her reality, I felt inspired and challenged to continue the difficult conversations we must engage in if we are serious about changing the status quo, serious about engaging our feet along with our hearts and minds, in true liberal religious fashion.

And now, in the news, I was hearing over and over the stories of shootings, the two deaths, congregants’ courage, and the outrage, all taking place in one of our congregations, a supposed refuge from horrors of the outside world. Our sanctuaries are supposed to be that: a refuge, a place of comfort and renewal. A beloved community, a supposed safe harbor, now hit and impacted by the same hatred we supposedly unite to fight against that exists outside our church walls, now had struck within.

And I began to think of those who were brave, who stood to protect the children and their friends from death, the two who died that day.

I wondered what else was in danger of disappearing, of dying, because of this man’s actions. I wondered: how many people will now stay away from church because they are afraid? Because we can now doubt in a new way, the illusion of safety that our congregations provide, what kind of new challenge will this present to us? What new bravery will the cowardly actions of one individual call into being?

Well, as it turns out, the story of this awful day is filled with other contradictions. The shooter was not a stranger to this congregation, nor a stranger to Unitarian Universalism. He was the former partner of a congregant. While the note found in his car said that he was angry with religious liberals and he felt he had liberals to blame for his employment difficulties, inside his home, according to the Bill Moyers’ Journal segment aired this past Friday night, books were found, written by radio ‘shock jocks’, filled with hate language aimed at religious liberals, people like us.

We have heard very little about what has happened to this man; obviously very disturbed as he was. Yet the effects of his actions still linger among us, and in other UU congregations. But after that day I began to wonder about what it means to be faithful, what faithfulness requires of us, what our faith asks of us. When we are feeling disenfranchised, disconnected from our communities of faith, when the world seems too overwhelming for us to find an adequate response, when we attempt to have some impact upon this mad world, how do we find our way back to belief, to faith, for support and sustenance?

What is our response when we, as Anne Lamott says “wake up some mornings pinned to the bed by centrifugal sadness and frustration”? Let’s be honest. We all succumb to these feelings once in a while. We are susceptible to our inner reptilian remnants which tell us to give up, to flee from the perceived danger, instead of engaging it. Activist writer Joanna Macy says that this despair for the world is part of a normal healthy response to all the sorrow and tragedy. And this can be of some comfort to us: we need not feel weak, but rather fully alive, with this response.

But, when, finally, we have had enough of retreat, we find a slight slender thread still strong enough to bear the weight of all we have encumbered, and we reach out to try again to make some sense of the madness that surrounds us. We find that tiny web-like strand, and hang on for dear life. We move forward tentatively, holding on, looking back only to remind us of what it was that we need not engage any longer, and turn instead in the other direction, back to what we know is true, what it is that calls to us from the depths of Knowledge. We feel the breath of God whisper in our ear, and we hear ‘do not lose faith; come back; come back’. Words come to us from far away, and we turn in the direction of our fellow pilgrims, and find our way to this, our congregation, to the beloved community of the faithful we call our religious home.

Theologian and religious scholar Richard R. Niebuhr names this connection to our religion “a kind of ligature by which we bind ourselves to divinity or that which bestows wholeness” and “by which we seek to bridge the distance that separates us from what is supreme in worth”. ¹

Is this connection to our religious home, our return to our particular religious values, where our questions and doubt are not only welcome, but expected, the same as having faith, being faithful? Is our responsive “yes!” to that distant call, what it means to be faithful in such difficult times? Or is it instead, a matter of belief, a matter of thinking through, logically, to a sensible conclusion, an answer to the question: “Where am I most likely to find what it is I need to navigate my way through the depth of such misery?”.

Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg defines the difference between faith and belief in this way: “When we hold a belief too tightly, it is often because we are afraid. We become rigid, and chastise others for believing the wrong things without really listening to what they are saying. We become defensive and resist opening our minds to new ideas or perspectives. This doesn’t mean that all beliefs are accurate reflections of the truth, but it does mean that we have to look at what’s motivating our defensiveness. . . .

Salzberg continues: “With their assumptions of correctness, beliefs try to make a known out of the unknown. They make presumptions about what is yet to come, how it will be, what it will mean, and how it will affect us. Faith, on the other hand, doesn’t carve out reality according to our preconceptions and desires. It doesn’t decide how we are going to perceive something but rather, is the ability to move forward even without knowing. Faith, in contrast to belief, is not a definition of reality, not a received answer, but an active, open state that makes us willing to explore. While beliefs come to us from outside — from another person or tradition or heritage — faith comes from within, from our active participation in the process of discovery. Writer Alan Watts summed up the difference simply and pointedly as, ‘Belief clings, faith lets go.”²

To me, what Salzberg, a Buddhist, is describing, along with the essential Buddhist lesson about attachment, is how our own liberal religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, a faith without creeds, provides a place for us to belong, to explore and share our beliefs and to turn them into action.

Liberal theologian and UU minister Paul Rasor names Unitarian Universalism, in his book of the same title, a Faith Without Certainty. Rasor invites us, instead, to consider the distinction between religion and theology. He describes religion as being “about the large scale world pictures that orient us in the universe and help give our lives meaning and purpose”. Alternatively, Theology, Rasor says, is “about examining these worldviews and the assumptions that go into them. It is about making our implicit patterns of orientation explicit, lifting them to the surface and examining them intentionally, honestly and critically. It is about reflecting on these patterns, trying to make sense of them by questioning, clarifying, and rearticulating them”.³

So, now, here is it, mid-September, and there is a lot at stake, a lot on the table. There is no time left for pondering, with our national elections only weeks away. And I am attempting, however poorly or well, to talk with you about the meaning of being a faithful community of seekers, holding onto one another in this crazy world. What is it that we hold out for one another that keeps us coming together, as individuals, struggling to make sense of the bad and awful things that happen in our lives? What does being faithful mean to us as a religious community which gathers week after week, singing our hope and our history through our hymns? We agree to consider our own and others’ failures only as testimony to our fallible and frail human condition. We attempt to name the evils of racism and hatred and power mongering in our world, and move with our feet and with our voice at the polls, to say ‘no’, we will not participate in their perpetuation.

Despite the inherent risks involved in such naming and claiming, it is clear to me that we need one another to stay faithful. We need to hear others’ sense of what is right, to feel the safe womb that a religious community can offer, to deepen and evolve in our understanding of how to live out our hope-filled vision of what is possible in the world. We need one another to ask our questions, to express our doubts, knowing both will be welcome here, that when we stumble, another will be there to correct us or to hold us, to inspire us, or to catch us.

I live with the absolute certainty that our collective journey can create the beloved city on the hill; that we will shine the beacon of light that beckons all into wholeness; that our voice which welcomes all to the table and the faithful called community will be heard far and wide.

May it be so. Amen.

©This sermon was written by Reverend Sally Hamlin for the congregation of the First Universalist Church of Rochester, New York and was delivered on September 14, 2008. No part of this sermon may be copied without permission of the author.