LANDSCAPES OF OUR LIVES A Sermon by Reverend Lynn Strauss Do you love mountains, forests, or rivers? Did you grow up under a city skyline, or in a suburb of green lawns, or in a small town? Have you traveled or lived somewhere that took your breath away? Landscapes can be places that frame our lives, that are always alive in our hearts and memories places that hold us no matter where we go. There s a Beatles song There are places I remember All my life, though some have changed, some forever, not for better some have gone and some remain All these places have their moments with lovers and friends, I still can recall...some are dead and some are living, in my life, I ve loved them all. I invite you to close your eyes and recall a place you have loved. Zoom in.remember how those moments felt when you were in that place. Did you share those moments with lovers or friends? Are there places you remember that you have loved? Our lives happen in places, within certain frames of a yard, a house, or a beach. Our lives happen in concert with weather, a certain type of wind, or rain, a certain color of soil, a particular span of sky, with fog or not. Remember morning dew on bare feet, a walk in the garden, the stars at night. So many of us have moved away from those childhood landscapes, those first tastes of rain and mud, those lands of ice and snow. And often we are left with a yearning a yearning for that landscape that is outside of ourselves. A visual, external, never-forgotten experience of a place we loved. A place where we grew and practiced first things. An external place that mirrored our interior space.
We are formed by both nature and nurture...our internal chemistry and energy.and the external physical shape of our geographic and cultural environment both structure and form who we are, who we become. Sometimes I wonder why I love to come to church. Why it is so healing and comforting to me, so energizing. Even when I m on vacation or traveling, I look for a church to visit. Maybe you also wonder why you come to church so regularly and why you miss it when you don t. I don t think it s just the coffee Church is, for me, familiar ground, a home place, a place where they have to take me in. The landscape of a congregation, whether AME, Baptist, Catholic, synagogue, or Buddhist temple they are all familiar. I know there will be beauty there, whether a simple Quaker meeting house, or an ornate cathedral. I know there will be prayer, and chant or song. I know there will be service and healing and hope and joy and sorrow. There will be strangers with good intention, and a story told that touches my own story. In a profound way, church for me is one outer landscape that mirrors my interior landscape, the need of human care, the honoring of mystery, the serious quest for meaning. The landscape of religious community is invitational, celebratory, multigenerational; people are always glad you re there. Glad you re here! Returning to landscapes that we love is often a kind of homecoming. Attending church makes me happy it connects me to a universal sacred story. One of the questions for today s sermon is what kind of home do we, here at UUCR, want to be? What landscape do we wish to create? What values do we want to communicate to all who enter here? Some places can nurture us for our whole lives. Last week, my mother, who lives in Chicago, celebrated her 90 th birthday. The event she chose to celebrate with her four children was an architectural boat tour on the Chicago River.
The tour goes through the Loop and the tour guide, a high school history teacher by profession, gave a detail-filled, history- rich tour. The day was sunny and the trip about 75 minutes. Just perfect for my mom and she was thrilled. Mom has lived in Chicago for most of her life, and she loves everything about the city. For about twenty years, she and my father lived in rural Wisconsin, but after he died, she was happy to return to the place of deepest memory and meaning. The city is the place where she feels she belongs. She came to love Wisconsin hill country as well. At times we need a change of landscape and a return home as a way of finding our way home to ourselves. Perhaps certain beloved landscapes hold for us a sense of the eternal in a world of change. Perhaps we are always searching for the exterior place that most closely mirrors our interior heart and soul. Perhaps it is the human condition to long for return. I vacationed in Vermont and Canada this summer. One evening, we stopped for quite a while to watch a beautiful sunset over the mountains. Gratitude welled up in me as we stood. I felt connected to the color and the clouds the pinks and oranges kept changing, the clouds kept moving, forming new impressive sculptures in the sky. We were filled with awe and wonder. I experienced a connection to the holy sunset transient and yet eternal. A sunset, like the ocean tide, and the birds migration, and the miracle of human life - the sacred cycle of life, changing before our eyes, yet always returning again to touch us in the deepest part of ourselves. This is the cycle of religious community. A weekly return to the sacred. A sense of the new, always emerging from the unknown, or from the chaos, or from the tried and true. Congregational life always changing, yet always returning to the home place that holds and nurtures our minds, our hearts, our souls.
Here at UUCR, we want to create and sustain a religious home that mirrors the awe and wonder, that sense of gratitude, that ever-changing newness, that returns to us again and again as we gather as a congregation. We want the landscape of our congregation to mirror the landscape of our hearts. That most sacred part of our selves. As Rebecca Parker says in our reading: We want to make a home for love a sanctuary built on the understanding that all life is interdependent, whose foundation is faithful care, whose threshold is open-hearted welcome, whose kitchen serves any in need, and where love can lie down in peace and joy. In seeking and creating a landscape that mirrors our best and most sacred self, we participate in a theology of the interdependent web of life. A web, a theology of relationship, not only with nature, with the earth and the sky and the animals, but also beginning with relationship with one another. Relationships that becomes sacred, as we bring the best part of our sacred selves to the work of the church. Rebecca Parker continues: This kind of love (based on interdependence) can provide us the nourishment we need to resist the excesses and injustices of market capitalism, (and I would add racism, classism, and other oppressions). This kind of love can instigate more justice and sustainability for the planet. If we can create a home, a congregational landscape for such love, our faith will be a habitation that offers hope for the world. An interdependent love, a theology of relationship suggest to me a helpful mantra - one you might hear often in the coming year. For the good of the whole that is a value to underlie our relationships, our decision-making, our criteria for discernment. For the Good of the Whole. The idea of landscape helps me to study and understand my life. It helps me to consider the external and the interior influences on my formation as a religious person.
The idea of landscape offers a way of understanding what is transient and what is eternal, and the primary place of change and return - in me and in human nature. We come together each week to look at the landscape of UUCR we who are meant to be together. We come to study our lives, knowing that, as Adrienne Rich says: A lifetime is too narrow to understand it all, No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study as if learning natural history or music We take on everything at once before we ve even begun to read or mark time, we re forced to begin in the midst of the hardest movement, The one already sounding as we are born. Let us begin our study! Amen/Blessed Be