Finding Family

A Sermon by the Rev. Aaron McEmrys

Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, May 10, 2009

John had been teaching at Riverview High School, in Milwaukee, for over thirty years. He often joked, a little sadly, that it was the longest relationship he’d ever had. He’d been married twice. The first time for just a few years when he was young and the second for almost eighteen years before that marriage ended too, leaving him alone once more.

Although he loved teaching, he had never wanted kids, something that had surely contributed to the death of his first marriage and possibly the second. John taught math, and had the kind of reserve one often associates with math teachers – let’s just say he was never the dazzling center of life at the faculty Christmas party.

It was, coincidentally, shortly after one of those Christmas parties when his life changed forever. A new student transferred into his fourth period remedial class from another school. Reggie was a too-thin, quiet boy in clothes that were always at least one size to small for him, all in colors and styles that had long since lost whatever social capital they had once commanded.

Reggie got in a lot of fights and failed every quiz miserably. Some of them he even turned in blank except for his poorly written name on the top of the page. During class he kept his eyes downcast and his body very still as if trying to make himself invisible.

All the teachers had to rotate through cafeteria duty, and when John took his turn he noticed that Reggie sat alone at lunch, eyes still downcast, which was not surprising, and also that Reggie never ate lunch, which probably shouldn’t have been surprising, but was.

He couldn’t get the image of thin Reggie staring down at an empty table where there ought to be a lunch tray piled with bad, but filling food. A few days later while John was packing his lunch for the day, he impulsively made an extra sandwich and threw in an extra apple. That day after class he asked Reggie to stay for a minute after the other students had left. He pushed the brown bag across his desk and, when it looked like Reggie might bolt, he said, “Take it, Reggie. It’s no big deal – I just had some leftovers that I didn’t want to waste, no big deal.” Reggie took the bag.

Before long, John was packing two lunches every day and leaving one of them on a shelf where Reggie could grab it on his way out without being noticed. Where John had always been happy with peanut butter and jelly, he now packed the big healthy sandwiches he thought teenage boys needed and where he used to pack a diet-coke and a bag of cookies, he now packed juice and an orange or a banana – even baggies with carrots or celery would sometimes make an appearance.

One day Reggie turned in one of his blank quizzes again. He laid it on John’s desk face down like always, but this time John turned it over, frowned at its blankness and then up at Reggie. “No,” he said quietly, handing it back, “I won’t accept this kind of work. You can do better. Now I need you to come back after school to finish this quiz properly. I will be here to help if you have questions.”

And lo and behold, Reggie did in fact come back after school to work on his quiz – much to John’s surprise.

So many years have passed since then. John never forgot about Reggie and often wondered what had become of him. He finally retired from teaching, and lives quietly and alone in a little house in Brown Deer. One day not-so-long-ago his doorbell rang. He opened it and there stood Reggie, shyly as always. “I found you on the internet. I hope you don’t mind me stopping by.”

Reggie was in his late thirties. He wore glasses and a brown blazer. His handshake was strong, confident, and John noticed a gold wedding band. In his other hand were two brown lunch bags that smelled of freshly baked bread. They sat out on John’s porch and shared the first of many meals together. Today Reggie’s kids call John, “Uncle J”, and he is never alone at Christmas.

Jane Howard writes, “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” The need to be deeply connected to other people is a central pillar of what it means to be human. We all need, and we all need to be needed. This simple fact lies at the heart of Mother’s Day, which we are celebrating this morning. Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian peace activist, created Mother’s Day. She believed that the powerful, universal love between mothers and children could be transformed into a bridge of peace between people and nations everywhere. She was sure that if people would just stop for a minute and realize that everybody is someone’s child, someone’s mother, someone’s father – then perhaps they would be less willing to take up the sword. If only people could remember that every bullet kills at least two people – the young soldier who dies of bloody wounds, and the mother who dies of a broken heart.

In 1870, shortly after the terrible Civil War between American brothers, Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation, which goes in part, like this:

"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,

our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,

for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

will be too tender of those of another country

to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

These words embody a radical kind of love, an empathetic kind of love that reaches far beyond the nuclear family. “As I suffer, so do you. As I love, so do you.” Whatever differences we may have, Howe argues, pale in comparison to the commonality we find in our love. If every mother were able to see all children as their children, she reasoned – then that would be the end of war.

Mother’s Day, as it is currently configured, is aimed almost exclusively at biological mothers – and this leaves a lot of people out. We all have the need and the capacity to mother, whether we are biological parents or not.

Mothering is a quality of relationship. It is grounded in a deep and unconditional love, and expresses itself through an active kind of care. Mothering expresses itself through wanting the best for those we love, and believing in their ability to become their fullest selves. Mothering is love at its most nurturing, and something every single one of us is capable of.

Family should be one of the biggest, broadest, most embracing words we have – but a lot of the time it isn’t. We look after our own, and define who those people are very carefully, even stingily, and lots of things get in the way. Our ability to mother, to “do family” is also challenged by our wider society, which encourages selfishness, isolation, distraction and narrow definitions of what family is and who gets to be in one – ala Proposition 8. But I think the biggest barrier to finding the family we need comes from heartbreak. It is often the people we love the most, trust the most, who hurt us the most, and some betrayals are so painful and complete that our very ability to be in any trusting relationship is injured.

I once sat with a family in the hospital as an old man died. It was clear that none of them had a good relationship with the old man, but they had come to the hospital out of a painful sense of duty. He lay there in a coma, and nobody took his hand. One of the daughters started crying and no one moved to comfort her while one of the sons complained bitterly to no one in particular about missing his tee-time at the golf course. The family, such as it was, stood around uncomfortably, barely making eye contact with one another as their father’s chest slowly stopped moving. When he was finally, really and truly dead, they all turned and trooped out of the hospital, hiding their solitary tears, even from one another as they drove away in separate cars to their separate lives. This is one of the greatest tragedies I have ever witnessed.

We need to move toward mothering. We need to recommit ourselves to finding and nurturing family. Julia Ward Howe was right – if we can begin to see ourselves as fundamentally related to one another – then our world will be safer, more just – and immeasurably richer. This is why the Buddha enjoins us to “love the whole world as a mother loves her only child.”

All it takes is intentionality, commitment and love – and I have seen all of these qualities on full display during these days of fire and ash. If there is any good to be found in this terrible fire it is in all the ways this experience has reminded us of just how interconnected, how inextricably interdependent we are. Our sisters and brothers are not just people who show up to help us blow our birthday candles or ring in a New Year. Our sisters and brothers are the people that come when we cry out, the people we turn to when the sky turns yellow and clouds of ash fall like warm gray snowflakes.

We all know, rationally, that we are a loving and supportive community, but times like these, scary as they can be, are when we actually experience that love and support.

This week has seen many, many of our families evacuated, chased from their homes by the worst fire in at least twenty-five years. Everything is at risk, up in the air, unknowable – and yet there is wonder here, and beauty. In this world of ours, so fragmented, our congregation has opened its arms wide. If half of us have been forced from our homes, then it seems like the other half of the congregation has taken us in. How many of us have shown up at someone’s door this week – bedraggled, scared and bone tired, only to be met with a hug, a pillow and a glass of wine?

This, my sisters and brothers, is the phoenix that rises up out of the flames! This, the lived experience of loving and of being loved, of fleeing from fire into the safe harbor of a stranger. This is what finding family looks like. This is the phoenix.

Look around you. The faces you see are so precious.

Last fall, I stood in the church garden and watched the Tea Fire advancing down the hillsides in a 100ft tall wall. The Choir was here for rehearsal, and then, when the power went out, I expected to see them come out of the sanctuary. A minute passed, then another, and another – and still they didn’t come out. The power was out, and it was pitch dark. I went in and saw that someone had lit all the candles, which shone like so many stars. The choir sat in the flickering light quietly singing “Silent Night” - each note ascending like a prayer up through the ceiling and ever outward into a night full of fear and confusion and sirens.

Then, just a few days ago, when the fire was really starting to get bad, it happened again. Two girls, eighth graders from our Coming of Age Program, had stopped by the church to practice a song they’ll be singing for us next Sunday. The power went out. The sky was a murky orange and the sun turned a lurid red through the vast plume of smoke above us.

I was sitting in the sanctuary when I heard them singing. They were sitting on the stage in Parish Hall singing a duet, their young voices intertwined with a kind of beautiful innocence that almost made me want to cry. Their voices were beautiful, but were only the beginning of beauty. The real beauty lay somewhere inside them.

And so I realized two very important things. First, that when times get tough, when fires rage and eyes sting – this congregation sings. Those two girls could not have known about this tradition of ours – but there they were, singing defiance and love and peace into the roaring winds. When times are tough – we at the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara keep right on singing, and this, my friends is a quality beyond measure.

Listening to them, I realized that I don’t know these girls half as much as I would like. I don’t know what they dream about, what they struggle with or even what makes them laugh. Listening to them sing I saw a glimpse of how much there is to see, and what a gift they are to the world.

I made up my mind right there and then to begin. Not just with them, but with all our young people. If I ever feel too busy for them, I hope someone knocks some sense into me, because I don’t know what could be more important. I guess that’s one of the things these days of fire do for us – they remind us in no uncertain terms of what our priorities ought to be.

Some of the most beautiful, principled and creative people in our community are our children and youth. Believe it or not we have about eighty of them these days, yet they are seldom seen. Most of us see them only for a few minutes at the beginning of our first worship service or when they come sing for us as they have today. We may not know them very well or see them very often – but we need to change that because they need us, and we need them. We are all part of this village, and it is not only the parents, but all of us, who are responsible for their nurture and care.

There is so much for all of us to learn from one another, so much joy and depth and friendship for us to share regardless of age. They are our future, the future of this village.

So we are creating a new kind of volunteer role. I ask you, I challenge you, to sign up to join a class for six Sundays of your choice over the course of the year. You won’t have to teach the class or prepare the lesson. Your job will be to simply be there with them. Get to know them and let them get to know you. Participate in the class, have fun, have a snack. Do this, and be enriched. I am not asking you to dutifully sacrifice your Sundays for the good of the congregation, but rather to embrace this opportunity to grow and learn and love in this beautiful village of ours. Check out your order of service to find out how you can get involved.

Sisters and Brothers, Cousins, Mothers, Fathers, Friends, we are all interconnected in the sacred web of life. We are all related, all family. Let us embrace this. Let us celebrate this. Let ours be a village of many mothers, each of us giving and receiving the nurturing, the care, the mothering that is the great gift of the human heart.

In this season of fire, may we come together and rise up like a phoenix from the flames. Sisters and brother, as long as we stick together and keep on singing – we will be just fine. As much as we love our homes, they are not what really matters here – this is. We are.

©2009 Aaron McEmrys, Santa Barbara, CA