On Friday, the group of us that meets to spend 30 minutes of
silence together in meditation and prayer during this time of war, decided that
we would meet outside on the patio. What a treat, to feel the slight breeze, to
hear the rush of cars on Kimberly and Eastern, to notice the daffodils that
survive despite being planted under the shade of the large tree out there,
brightening the corner where they are.
Out on Kimberly, I spied the Ford dealership, the Cheddars
restaurant, the Walgreens. It will be no surprise to you to say that we are
surrounded, here on our beacon on the hill, by commercial interests. Off to
this side are apartments, automobile repair shops. Up Eastern Avenue, the
residential neighborhood sneaks up on you, unexpectedly.
Down Eastern Avenue, I couldn't see but I knew there was the
Annie Wittenmeyer Center, with programs for families. I knew there was a
hospital, a residential area with moderate income folks. The river, with grand
old houses. Sue Witte said to the group after we opened our lunch, "It is
amazing that at some point you could see cows grazing all around here."
I think often of the fact that our move to this corner of
Kimberly and Eastern impacts strongly how we understand ourselves as a congregation.
I think often of the fact that for one hundred years or so, we were right in
the heart of downtown at 10th and Perry, sharing a neighborhood with Edwards
Congregational and Temple Emanuel. What if the three congregations all stayed
down in the neighborhood? Would we host adult Spanish and English classes? What
would it mean to our ministry as a gathered people if we were still meeting
down there in the heart of Davenport's downtown? Would we have a food pantry?
Would we have a year round rummage sale? Would we be a site for a neighborhood
organizing initiative? These are questions that occur to me periodically.
It seems to me that a church is impacted by the kinds of folks
that come to visit, that may never be expected to join, that may never be expected
to be a part of worship, but rather are invited in for the sake of the public
good.
We are all so separated, so alienated by class, by status, by
educational level that periodically we are challenged to make available to the
community-at-large opportunities to hear from one another, to engage one
another, to build together a kind of beloved community of true hospitality that
acknowledges that underneath our differences we are one.
A little fresh air, a little splash of difference. I am reminded
of a story that James Luther Adams, one of my favorite Unitarian theologians,
used to tell about Pope John XXIII. Shortly after Vatican II, Adams went to the
First Unitarian Church in Syracuse and described the opening ceremony of the
Second Vatican Council. The Kyrie Eleison was sung by the boys choir, way up in
the cupola. Adams writes, "The sentiment of the Kyrie Eleison, "Lord,
have mercy upon us," is always pertinent in a worship service but was
especially pertinent then, when we consider what has happened as a consequence
of the Second Vatican Council. This part of the mass suggests that the first
act of the worshiper is to ask for divine mercy in the face of our alienation,
our separations." He goes on, "You will recall that it is said that,
when Pope John XXIII was asked about the purpose of the Second Vatican Council,
he went to the window, opened it, and said to the reporter, "There,
perhaps some fresh air will get into the church."
In church life, I submit, the neighborhood can serve as fresh
air if we open our doors to explore its impact on our life together.
I became so aware of the impact of neighborhood on a
congregation's self-understanding and ministry as a result of being a
seminarian in Washington, DC. I came to understand that neighborhoods make churches
as a result of my spending time at my home church, All Souls, my work with
youth at River Road in Bethesda, and my wife's congregation Channing Memorial
Church, Unitarian Universalist in Ellicott City, Maryland. All three churches
are completely different in worship style, in history, in demographic make up,
in ministers, but mostly in neighborhood.
All Souls is located at 16th and Harvard in Northwest
Washington. Close by are neighborhoods that once were the retreat houses of
Washington's elite and some still live close by. Many elites departed with the
influx of African Americans in the 40s through the 60s. Many African Americans
departed with the influx of El Salvadorans in the 80s and 90s. Close by is
Dupont Circle, Washington's gay and lesbian neighborhood. Just down the street
is Malcolm X park, a park that for most of the 80s and 90s was dominated by
drugs, prostitution and homelessness. All Souls started a housing project in
the neighborhood. All Souls houses the city's first integrated boys and girls
club, integrated in the late 40s. What I will never forget however was one day
in July going to church and walking down together to a smaller park about one
block away for worship. We sang together, we sat on blankets and listened to
our minister preach. We stood in a circle, holding hands and sharing joys and
sorrows. Some kids observed from a corner of the park. Some adults joined us.
Most walked by. But at one point, a woman recounted her life story, said that
she had no money to get on the bus that morning to go to her regular church
meeting. I saw her exactly one time in my life, and she made a huge impact on
me.
By being responsive to the neighborhood, All Souls is a new
place, a new congregation. Once lilly white, it is now integrated. This became
the case in the late 60s, when the minister there resigned the pulpit so that
an African American minister could be called to the pulpit.
All Souls is made by the neighborhood and has helped to shape
the neighborhood.
That park scene I described earlier was sometime in the early to
mid 90s. Years later, I would work with Marta as youth director at River Road
in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe in the top two or three of the wealthiest suburbs
in the Washington area. This church was the offspring of All Souls Church,
birthed during the boom years of the 1950s. It wins architectural awards. It
has three ministers. It is a stunningly successful congregation, both
personally and collectively.
One Friday evening, I was staffing the teen coffee house mostly
for the students at neighboring Walt Whitman High School. Hundreds of kids show
up, once a month, for hot chocolate, sodas and live teen bands. Light shows,
fun bands. The kids pay five bucks to get in. No smoking, no drinking, no hanky
panky! And they have a ball.
This particular night, I'm talking to the adults who gather to
help run the show, and collecting money. This high school boy walks in with
some kind of anarchy shirt, spiked hair, frankly a little on the smelly side.
He looks quizzically at me when I suggest that the cover charge is five bucks.
Wanting to be all about solidarity and sensitive, I say to him, but you know if
that is a problem, we can let you in. Oh, no, no problem, I just need to go to
the car to get some money. He, of course, goes to a late model Porsche to
retrieve his cash, and I learned something about that neighborhood as well.
River Road is placed on a major road connecting Washington to Potomac, Maryland
and the Beltway, but it is off in the woods set against a residential neighborhood
of some affluence. Except for Whitman High School, you would rarely see a
pedestrian in the neighborhood. Everyone drives there. So again, River Road is
impacted by its neighborhood and impacts its neighborhood with programs that
make sense in its context.
While Marta and I were youth directors, Marta worked part time
as director of religious education at a suburban Baltimore Unitarian
Universalist congregation in Ellicott City. They gathered in a school building
on Sunday mornings, so all of their meetings other than worship took place in
houses and libraries. They were a typical young suburban congregation. Half of
their total population consisted of adults, half of their total population
consisted of children. They had two hundred souls, but only one hundred adult
members! Their neighborhood, acting as a suburban bedroom community for both
Washington and Baltimore, had a huge impact on who they were.
What image do you have of the neighborhood in which we find
ourselves? If what sticks with me from the All Souls days is the public worship
in the park, what image sticks with you from your days here at the Unitarian
church serving the Quad Cities? How does the neighborhood shape who and what we
are and what we do?
I want to hear from you about that, because I believe it will
have an enormous impact on what we become as a congregation in the next few
years. What does it mean to have a community room in our new addition?
I want to give you an impression--still forming--as a newcomer.
Now I suppose Sandor could give you an even greater new impression, since he
has been here a total of 3 days or something. But as someone who has been in
the neighborhood since July 1st, let me give it a shot.
I don't know if it was Waitstill Sharp, but one of our previous
ministers took to calling this place a beacon on the hill. It occurred to me,
Friday at noon, sitting with five or six others in total silence, looking
around, how true that is. We are truly surrounded by commercial interests.
Cheddars, HyVee, Walgreens, the mall. All places to consume, all places to go
in relative isolation, pick up what you need and leave. No interaction. Music
is often playing to give the impression of a kind of intimacy. Cars all around,
driving from this place to that.
And here is a place, up on the hill, surrounded by gorgeous
trees, beautiful rolling land, that exists for no other reason than the beauty
of hospitality. I am going to do a whole series on hospitality next year, but I
want to give you a bit of a preview.
These twin ideas of neighborhood and hospitality bring to our
attention how we intertwine, appropriately, the relationship between public and
private. How we engage the stranger. It is often remarked in certain circles
that church is like a family. I think a more appropriate metaphor might be a
neighborhood. Relationships are possible in neighborhoods. Connections are
possible. Efforts for the common good are possible in neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods can be gated. Neighborhoods can be exclusive. Neighborhoods can
attract pedestrians, or keep them out. Neighborhoods can be about block
parties, and creating memories, or they can be dead. Neighborhoods keep intact
one's own sense of individuality and privacy, while working toward hospitality
and community.
Hospitality, in its ancient sense, serves as a bridge between
strangers, a bond in which "lies hidden the idea of humanity and of human
fellowship." Hospitality has become a harmless urbane quality in the order
of civility, politeness and table manners. It is on the verge of being regarded
as a matter of personality. .. Not far removed from the peculiar oblivion
spread ever wider by our obsession with the particular and the private. If we
manage, across some period of time, not to be rude to our friends within our
own house…then we are deemed hospitable…We forget that properly hospitality has
to do with unrecognizable strangers rather than with friend and kin…ancient
hospitality is firstly and primarily a bond between utter strangers.
We have at one point or another experienced real hospitality, I
imagine, received openly, warmly, freely, without need to earn your keep or
prove your worth. An inhospitable place is one in which we are made to feel
invisible, or perhaps all too visible, which is to say on trial. A hospitable
place is alive with trust and good will, a place that deeply understands that
we are one in a common humanity. When we are in the presence of a host that
assumes we are worthy, we relax, we open up, we are better for having been some
place.
At such a place there are no expectations about how we should or
must be. And in this way, we come to understand how this church differs from
Walgreens or HyVee or the mall.
Henry Nouwen, the great Catholic writer, has said this about the
nature of hospitality, of places where we are accepted for who and what we are:
"The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create an emptiness, not a
fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and
discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs; speak their
own language, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own
vocations. Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the
host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his or her own.
Hospitality is especially important because it links the private
and the public life, giving us a way to walk between the two spheres. When we
hosted a month or so ago the performance of the Lysistrada Project, inviting
any body who wanted to come around and hear the old ancient Greek play about
the women who insisted that the men give up their fighting arms or pay the
rather high consequences (!), we bridged for a moment the private life of this
place and the public good. We asked for nothing in return, but welcomed the
stranger in, intermingled with them and were perhaps changed in the process.
The stranger is found in the public, but the means of
hospitality are private. Hospitality means inviting the stranger into our
private space. When we do so, some important transformations occur. Our private
space is enlarged; no longer tight and restricted but open and expansive and
free. And our space may be lightened. Who knows how the presence of the
stranger may shed light on some aspect of our lives we had not seen before, a
misapprehension, a treasure, a gift, that would never have surfaced without the
courage of opening up our space.
This is not particularly theoretical or abstract musings on my
part. I took a number of Unitarian Universalist classes at Wesley Seminary in
Washington. I read our history. I knew that the Transylvanian connection was
important and illuminating and interesting. I have read For Faith and Freedom:
A Short History of Unitarianism in Europe. But it wasn't until Tuesday, when I
went to lunch with Sandor and Melinda, and heard their story, that I truly
formed a picture of our Unitarian roots in Transylvania. It wasn't until the
reception on Tuesday night here at the church, that I saw that we might form
relationships with our partner church that might influence who we are as a
congregation.
I heard the story of how in Janosfalva, Sandor and Melinda and
their congregation, is helping their village of 175 people by creating a
kindergarten, by providing adult education classes, by providing a guest
house--a house of hospitality for youth groups and adults from North America
who want to help out to stay at low costs in the summertime.
The neighborhood got smaller for me in that now with this
partner church visit, we know that we have opportunities to build relationships,
build friendships, build pen pals, visit our fellow Unitarians there, help them
in their village life. And so we will. Betty Gorshe and Ann Herington and Alan
Green and Martha Harris and Don Moore will lead us in exploring how we can make
our relationship even more powerful, join them won't you?
Perhaps next summer we can take some youngsters to Transylvania
and work on the parsonage, now just a little bit over 250 years old. We can
maybe paint a youth room or two.
Let me just say publicly that I am glad that your travels
brought you to Davenport, after Boston and New York and the Jersey shore and DC
and before you head off to Davis, California, I am glad that you found the time
to come here. My hope is that we can continue to build a strong partnership,
that we might learn from you something about our history and our future in
Europe and you might learn from us something about Unitarian Universalism in
the North American context and together we might walk the path toward a free
religious tradition that values liberation, peace, justice and community. May
our bonds of friendship grow ever stronger, together.
One more word about our neighborhood. It appears that we are
going to have the wonderful opportunity, May 31st, to host our District
Executive, Nancy Heege, and our District's Lifespan Education Director, Phil
Lund, to help them develop a Growth Workshop. I don't know how we are so
fortunate to have them come and field test that here, but that doesn't much
matter. We will be given an opportunity to think reflectively about where we
are, where we are headed and how our physical context helps to shape our hopes
and dreams for the future.
It may be that one of the obligations of being part of this
neighborhood surrounded by commercial interests is to acknowledge that we may
not just be hospitable by welcoming the stranger in to our space, but also
going out and being part of the neighborhood. Perhaps we could worship one July
morning in the field at Annie Wittenmeyer? Perhaps we could rent space in the mall
and host a community forum on Tuesday nights? Or a kiosk with community
services and individual gifts? You like to mow lawns?
What would it be like if as with All Souls and that park, we
went out and just let people see that we gather in joy and celebration on
Sunday mornings, to explore the topics of the day and the enduring questions in
freedom and laughter?
What if we said in the malls and on the streets that hospitality
and unity are possible and that we will celebrate our common humanity among the
strangers and the smelly and the homeless and the forgotten and that our
celebration always is in the hope of redeeming public spaces where divisiveness
and separateness is the order of the day. What if we said with Thomas Merton
that our celebrations are a sign of hope for a community of strangers too long
divided that have forgotten our common humanity: That our celebrations are not
just for individuals kicks but for the creation of a common identity, a common
consciousness. Celebration is everybody making joy...when we let joy make
itself our of our love. Celebration is the beginning of confidence, therefore
of power. They with their gold have turned our lives into rubble..but we with
our love and joy will set our lives on fire and turn the rubble back into gold.
So that the gold will have real value. The infinite value of human identity and
unity flaming up in joy.
This is the promise of hospitality. This is the promise of being
part of this neighborhood. This is the hope of our joining together in a gesture
of welcoming the stranger into our midst, the stranger that lives just down the
street and the promise of our going out to meet her halfway in celebration and
joy and the hospitality that unifies us all. The neighborhood cries out for our
hope, the neighborhood beckons us to come out and play.
Let us sing together a song of celebration and joy.
April 13, 2003, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Roger Butts