Sanctuary, in its original meaning, is a holy or sacred place. It is only through the use of such places as a refuge that it came to have the meaning of refuge, that to provide sanctuary for someone is to provide safety or protection. When I learned this, doing a casual google search as I sat down to write this sermon, I was struck by the profundity of this simple sequence. The use of sacred spaces to provide shelter led to those sacred spaces being synonymous with shelter. The spiritual shelter led to physical shelter. Anne Lindbergh s words paint a picture of a sacred space. She speaks with deep reverence of the waves, of the shells. Though it was not constructed with blueprints by human hands, it provides a spiritual shelter for her, space that provides nurture for her inner self, that allows the dramas of the busy, conscious mind to drop away so that the deeper mind may come out and play with the waves. The poet Wendell Barry said that There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. I like this view, that things are sacred until made otherwise, that their createdness, their place in the interconnected web, makes the default status one of sacredness. Which means that sanctuary could theoretically be anywhere, that any place could be our holy place, where are able to allow our minds to engage on deep levels, where are spirits are safe. This means that our own sanctuaries arise from the relationship with whatever we find sacred, be that God or respect for humanity or beauty, whatever leads us to provide shelter. For many of us, the values we hold dear in Unitarian Universalism guide our behavior in the world in much the same way, an apt example being the sanctuary movement in which congregations provide shelter to immigrants in danger of being deported. The First Unitarian Society of Denver sheltered a man in danger of deportation for 9 months last year, providing living space in their building, helping with necessities
and legal advice. We create sanctuary when we are in touch with what we find sacred. In the case of that Denver congregation, their high value on the worth and dignity of each person led them to provide physical and political sanctuary for that man. In this congregation, that same value on worth and dignity leads us to be a safe and welcoming space for people of different sexual and gender identities, to people from different cultures. How do we create this same sanctuary for ourselves? For one another? How, in more intimate ways than building a church building, do we create safe metaphorical spaces for one another? When I think of sanctuary in this sense, what comes to mind is a funeral I attended last year. One of my college roommates died, and when I flew out to Los Angeles for the funeral last year, I immediately flocked to one of my other roommates, my best friend Dallas, the person who most closely understood my loss. That night we stayed with her little brother, Greg, who was still a student. Greg slept on the floor of his dorm room and she and I, two twenty-seven year old grown women, squeezed into his dorm room twin bed. He had snacks for us, got us water. Greg sat in good natured and respectful quiet while Dallas and I alternately cried, sat in a daze, and gossiped about long lost friends. Greg let us talk while occasionally chiming in with a she said that?! In a small, sparse room he created a space where we could air out our feelings, our serious and trivial ones, where our physical needs were cared for so we could look after our tender hearts. In effect, he created the emotional equivalent of a padded room, he took away the sharp edges so that for a little while we didn t have to be careful or aware of what we needed or what we said or what came next, he made space for us to be in all our strong and stark emotions. Physically, this is not among the more comfortable nights that I have had. There is nothing special about that small, sparse room. What was special was how Greg cared for us, how he looked after small details for us,
how he created space for us out of his own limited space. He could not bring our friend back to life, but he cared for us and he made space for us to grieve, for Dallas and I to miss our friend and also be glad that we were together. For a little while, that uncomfortable little dorm room was among the more holy places I have known. We create sanctuaries like these for one another all the time. It is not always so dramatic as in the case of a death. We create smaller sanctuaries when we inquire how people are doing and make it clear we really want to know, when we are respectful of people s wishes and feelings. We create sanctuary among each other by accepting one another as we are. This is one of the most profound forms of sanctuary even as it is the simplest, to accept someone as they are. I think we can all identify that on edge feeling we experience when we spend time with someone with whom we cannot let our guard down. How unsafe it feels when we have to hide this or that aspect of ourselves. And this leads us to the sanctuary we can create for ourselves when we are able to accept ourselves as we are. This is not an easy thing to do, this is something that dozens of sermons could be written about instead of just a piece of one. To accept ourselves is to make our own mind, our own heart, safe. It is to make your body a sanctuary everywhere it goes, because you are not fighting within yourself. Accepting ourselves and each other for the person and the state that we are in is important work. It is work that the Carolyn L. Farrell foundation does in their work with dementia patients, creating safe, artistic, accepting spaces for people, just as we create sanctuary for one another. Our outreach offering today goes to the Farrell Foundation, which creates that safe and loving sanctuary. Jerry Devis will now tell us more about it.
Sermon Part 2 When I first heard that poem, I was struck by its darkness, by the biting, creepy edge to the sanctuary. It illustrates in a visceral way that a sanctuary that isn t flexible, that won t breathe, that can t withstand change, isn t any sanctuary at all. It is brittle, and will break instead of bend. It shows the way that a strict and rigid understanding of safety or sacred can lead to a space that is claustrophobic and crushing. So many of us in this faith have come from traditions that we found crushing or claustrophobic, that had such narrow understandings of what was safe or what was sacred that they became no sanctuaries at all. That need for flexibility and openness creates the sacred space we sit in today, creates this community that values the search for truth. In this specific community, we have a CARE covenant, which the junior choir so beautifully sang about earlier. The letters, as Layne illustrated for us, stand for Courtesy, Acceptance, Respect, and Engagement. We have talked already about how acceptance helps us create sanctuary for one another and for ourselves. And courtesy and respect are tied up in that acceptance, in showing care for each other and each other s choices. The piece of that covenant I want to talk about, the piece that plays a crucial though unlikely role in sanctuary, is engagement. It would be so easy just to think of sanctuary as a place where we were ourselves. That we go to the beach or come to this church simply to slough off the facades we wear for other people. And a sanctuary, hopefully this sanctuary, is a place where we can do that. But that is not enough. I think we need sanctuary not just as a space to be, though that is important, but as a space to do. For all that this is a calming place, for all that we come here for love and acceptance, we also come here to do really hard things. Sanctuary is a space that we have made safe to engage with unsafe things. Now, I don t mean any unsafe thing. This is not a place for violence or drugs or wanton law breaking. But it is a space where we
come to wrestle with the pains and injustices of the world. A place we have set aside to deal with death, inequality, disappointment, crumbling ideologies, uncomfortable truths. We not only have marriages in this very room, we have memorials in this very room. Sanctuaries exist for peace but not only peace, for joy, but not only for joy. They also exist for pain. For struggle. We come here to do this in many ways. We come here to do this theologically. This church is probably one of the safest places to do the difficult work of examining one s theology, of taking it apart and putting it back together in a new way. We also do this emotionally, finding this a safe space to do the painful work of mourning, of missing loved ones or dealing with disappointments. We come here to struggle with the very real injustices of the outside world. We come to this supportive place so we have the strength to look at those injustices, so that we have the strength and community to figure out how we can engage with them. I think that is how sanctuary came from meaning holy to meaning safe, that the holy called us to action, to create shelter. If something or someone is a shelter, then that means that they are in some way standing up to something. This building stands up to the Cleveland winter. The Unitarian Society in Denver stood up to the United States government. My friend s brother, Greg, withstood our grief. The move from sacred to safety means that someone or something is making it safe, that someone or something is being sturdy and brave. I wonder if this is how things come to be and remain holy. If Wendell Berry s words, that there are no unsacred places; there are sacred places and desecrated places, suggest that it is through lack of bravery, to withstand grief or political flack or difficulty that allows things to be desecrated. The sanctuary, the sacred, come
from our strength, the strength that it takes to protect the vulnerable. I do not mean this in a savior complex sort of way, in the way in which it is so comfortable to be strong. We are often more comfortable with vulnerability that is not our own. I mean this in the way in which we are strong enough to let ourselves be vulnerable, strong enough to let ourselves feel, strong enough to allow ourselves to face realities of deeply embedded racism and sexism, to look at refugee crises, the state of politics, to acknowledge our own pain and grief and the pain of our loved ones. Our final hymn today reads Love prepare me, to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true. With Thanksgiving, I ll be a living sanctuary for you. We can be living sanctuaries for one another, for ourselves. When we take each other and ourselves as we are, when we allow ourselves to feel our full grief and pain, when we make space for the grief and pain of our loved ones, we are acting as sanctuaries. We act as temples for ourselves and for one another, holding not only the easy or the happy but the painful and confusing. As long as we are engaging with ourselves, each other, and the world, as long as we are accepting each other and the world as it is, we are the sacred places, we are the living sanctuaries that we need. Please rise in body or in spirit to sing about those living sanctuaries in our closing hymn. You will find the words on the wall behind me. The choir will sing it once through, and then we will all sing it once through together.