Roots and Branches

Rev. Amy Russell - 2007-08-19

Opening Words:

Like the trees, we are created to be firmly planted in the ground of our being,

The source of all, Life,

And like the branches, we are created to extend towards all the gifts of life- each other.

- adapted from Rev. Douglas Fisher

Moving across country three times while growing up, I knew nothing about having roots. My family life since my childhood often felt like a caravan with a wagon piled high with family possessions, all of us traveling behind like pioneers. I especially felt like a pioneer when I was told we were moving to Dayton, Ohio. But in moving to Dayton, I gained access to my family’s roots since it was my mother’s family’s home.

Our move to Dayton came when I was 16. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anything about Dayton. I did. My memories of Dayton were all good ones. Every summer of my childhood, we had visited my grandmother in Centerville, at the farm on Lebanon Pike where she lived with my step grandfather. It was a working farm. There were sheep and cows and a wonderful vegetable garden where my little sister and I would trail after my grandmother to gather fresh beans and corn for dinner. She would show us how to pull the tassels of the corn to tell if they were ready for picking. And then when we saw that corn on our plates at dinner, I’d feel so proud to have participated in providing for the meal.

Now you have to understand that my grandmother was the farthest thing from a farmer’s wife that you can imagine. She was not the flowered housedress and apron type. My grandmother was more the tweed suit, string of pearls and smart heels type. She had married my step grandfather around the time when I was born and then he moved her out to this farm away from her home in Oakwood. You can imagine it was a little like Green Acres and Zsa Zsa.

We called my grandmother “Pet,” the name she had chosen when she became a grandmother at age 41. Pet was a Southern belle, born and raised in Mer Rouge, Louisiana, the heart of the South.

When I visited my grandmother as I was growing up, she would say to me in her Southern accent, “Darlin’, your roots are so important. Where you came from, is so foundational to where you are going in life.” Now I paid little attention to this piece of advice because I had picked up along the way that my grandmother was somewhat of a snob. And I thought she meant that it mattered what kind of family you were born into. I had early on rejected any notion that one had to come from a “good family” in order to be okay.

But later in life, as I grew to know my grandmother better, she told me more about what she meant by emphasizing my “roots”. I was lucky enough to know my grandmother well in the winter of her life, as she lived out her last years and had a perspective on life that I as a young mother could appreciate. Pet told me that I was lucky to have parents who had taught me three things. They taught me about the importance of family, of education, and of faith.

Pet said that I came from a family where all of these things were important and that this was clear from the way my parents raised me. And then she said that it didn’t matter so much what kinds of problems you had, it mattered what you did about those problems. And what you learned about how to handle those problems sometimes came from your family. Sometimes it was in observing your family that you rejected their ways of dealing with life, and formed your own attitudes from that rejection. Then what you did with that learning, how you dealt with those problems, that was in large part influenced by your roots, your foundation in life.

Much later in life, I learned from my mother something else about these roots of mine. I knew that these values of family, education, and faith were the foundation of much of my upraising, but I didn’t know just how far back these roots went.

When I decided to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, my mother told me something about my roots that was a huge surprise. It turns out that I have a great, great, great grandfather who was one of the early Unitarian ministers in Massachusetts. In fact, my ancestor, Preserved Smith, was one of the Congregational ministers in Massachusetts who led his congregation to become Unitarians in the late eighteenth century when our movement was being founded.

So I guess you could say it’s in the genes. Or you could say that our roots, the kind of values that our families teach us, generation after generation, is persistent, and has a profound influence on us even when we are unaware of it.

Now I’m not saying that we follow exactly what our parents teach us and that becomes who we are. Because I know that a great many of us as UUs have rejected many of the values of our parent’s generation in shaping our own unique values. But there is often a root beneath what our parents may have taught us that we formed into our own way of life.

Barack Obama, in the excerpt from Dreams from My Father, speaks of the concentric circles that surround us defining levels of influence that people have had in our lives. Starting with the people in our immediate family, going out to friends and acquaintances, and widening to include our race and our nation, he speaks of how the widest circles define the values and commitments we have made to ourselves. These outer circles are inclusive—they include the influence that our early family and even ancestors made on us. That means that these outer circles defined by our own immediate commitments began with the influence of our ancestors and family.

In college, I rejected the Christianity that I was taught like many of you. But I’ve become much more aware over the years that the values underlying some of what I was taught led me to the paths where I trod. If in fact, my great, great, grandfather rejected much of what Christianity taught, then I think it was true that the value of questioning authority and teachings was something passed down through the generations to me.

The song that we heard earlier by Jethro Tull, says, “Words get written. Words get twisted. Old meanings move in the drift of time.” We sometimes will take something we’re taught and change it to fit the life we are leading. We may have totally rejected the religious teaching we were taught, but we may have internalized the value of seeking the truth. The song says “True disciples carrying that message to colour just a little with their personal touch.”

We each put our personal touch on the things we are taught. If I ask each of you here today what you see as the meaning of “the interdependent web of existence” you would each tell me something slightly different. But there’s a root there that gives us meaning, something to shape our lives as we shape the message into our own meaning.

And the way that we shape that meaning has everything to do with whom we meet along the way and our experiences with those people. We take from our roots the values we may have been taught and we grow our own branches, our own meaning from experiences we have with people.

I told you in my first candidating sermon about how my experience in this congregation shaped my spiritual beliefs about community, about how a caring community can create a feeling of sanctuary, a feeling of safety. And after I left here, re-married and moved my family down to Louisville, I began to shape my idea that perhaps a way for me to create meaning in community was to become a minister where I could dedicate myself to that spiritual journey of being in a spiritual community.

I decided to attend seminary. However, I had just married and was living in Louisville, KY. The only choices for seminaries there were a Baptist seminary or a Presbyterian one. I decided to attend the Presbyterian one to see if I could pursue my path toward ministry there.

What I learned there, in addition to learning much about the Bible that I found very helpful and interesting, was that there seemed to be people who wanted to include others and people who wanted to exclude others. And this seems to be a personality trait, not necessarily a religious tradition. I found many Christians who wanted to include me in their faith community and I found many others who wanted to exclude me based on my religious beliefs. I have found that in Unitarian Universalism we also have people who want to include as many others as possible and others who want to exclude people based on their religious beliefs. This seems like a universal fact. Someone once said, “There are two kinds of people in the world. The ones who see the world as divided into two kinds of people and the ones who don’t.”

What I also learned while in seminary came from my experience as a chaplain in a Baptist hospital. I had my doubts about how patients who were religious would react to me as a UU minister. So, when I started as a chaplain, I tried to hide my faith tradition and simply respond to people’s needs. I’d ask them in a time of difficulty if they would like to pray together and if they did, I would use the Lord’s Prayer. This often seemed like a very comforting ritual for many people. But I soon realized that when I sat beside someone and listened to their story, their story of their difficult disease, or a story about problems in their family, or whatever they wanted to talk about, that it didn’t make any difference what religion I subscribed to. My listening and caring about them was what made the difference, not what kind of religious tricks I had in my bag. I learned from them that I tended to see the world as two kinds of people, and I didn’t need to do that. That people are people and we need each other.

While working toward my degree, I also became a part-time intern minister at the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Universalist church. What I learned from my time there had a lot to do with helping them to find a meaningful social justice mission. I had heard about this agency in Louisville that facilitated bringing political refugees into this country and found churches that would sponsor them. After getting a group of people at the church interested, we decided we could sponsor a family. It was a lot of work, but everyone in the congregation helped. Some collected furniture, some held fund-raisers, until finally our family from the Sudan arrived. We were amazed by their lack of knowledge of modern living, as we taught them about using modern conveniences like a vacuum or a dishwasher. They were so grateful and we all became good friends. Since I’ve left that congregation, Thomas Jefferson UU has sponsored several other families coming from Africa including four of the Lost Boys. Those young men finished their schooling here and two of them have graduated from college in Louisville.

What I learned from that experience is how working together on a meaningful project creates a community with shared values and mission. Each person plays an important role and that brings each person a sense of value. The larger community becomes the vehicle that helps create meaning in people’s lives. Once again, I learned that through merging my life with others, I became something new. I am changed, as we all are through working toward a meaningful goal.

Once I completed my degree and my internship, I was called by a small congregation in Germantown, Maryland, the Sugarloaf Congregation. I was their first called minister. They had been founded seven years prior to my coming by three of the other UU churches in the area. They had had difficulties in growth, but were very motivated to grow and build their own building. They were meeting in a rented space. After I had been there two years, they bought five acres and began to raise money and plan for their new building. Due to the difficulties with the county regulations, it took us three more years to finally complete the building of a small sanctuary and a renovated office and classroom space. You may have seen a picture of the small round building called a “yurt” that was built from a kit with the help of some Amish barn raisers. It may not look like much, but it felt like a castle to those of us who worked so long to create a home for our congregation.

This summer I said goodbye to my Sugarloaf family and packed up my belongings to come here to Dayton. Saying good-bye was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I was changed by that congregation as well. I think I described to you in one of my candidating sermons that Sugarloaf taught me how a caring congregation can accomplish great things from building a building to creating a family for those who need one. I think I learned once again how the Beloved Community can be a place of caring even though conflict is an inevitable part of any human interaction. I was transformed once again by the way a dedicated congregation can work through difficulties, embrace each other through the problems, and become something new. None of their hard work was easy, but the result is a strong, growing congregation with their own home dedicated to Unitarian Universalism.

Now I have come here to the Miami Valley as your new minister, fully aware that you will change me as these other experiences in my life have changed me. We bring our roots, those foundational values that our family may have instilled, into the dance of life with the others we meet, and those values and beliefs change, imbued with new meaning, with new life.

Our spiritual beliefs are also something that has foundation in what we may have learned or rejected from our family, but are shaped and transformed by the people and experiences we encounter. My spiritual beliefs were based in the Christian upbringing I was given but have been changed by the experiences and people that came into my life. Some beliefs were thrown away, but many were simply re-shaped to match my new, more mature view of life.

My roots in Christianity taught me about a loving God who always cared for me as evidenced in the loving family around me. I learned that I had to take responsibility for my own life. And that I should always be loving and respectful of others. I learned a spiritual practice that was prayer.

The branches that I grew in college led to new spiritual learnings about Buddhism. I learned that we are One with the entire Universe. The teaching in Buddhism about cause and effect taught me that I am entirely responsible for my own happiness- that my actions create my life. Practicing compassion for others creates a compassionate world, Buddhism taught me. My spiritual practice during that time was chanting- a form of active prayer.

My life kept growing and changing and was transformed by marriage and children and career. I eventually discovered Unitarian Universalism, which encouraged me to bring my own beliefs and spiritual practices and share them with others. I grew to see the world, which I already viewed as One, as the interdependent web of existence, different words for a belief I already held. My interactions with others in the UU setting taught me how much my own spiritual journey is caught up with others. We are all on a path towards our own truth and meaning, but that we affect each other’s paths as well. In UUism, I grew to understand that our mission for compassion for others is a part of our UU mission for social justice in our own communities and in the world.

While my spiritual practice keeps on growing and changing, still including many of the early forms of prayer and meditation that I first learned, it became clear to me that my spiritual practice includes community. That the way we are together in community is a part of our spirituality. I have found that my being in community is a form of my meditation. My interactions with others in my life are not separate from my spiritual life, but form the breadth and depth of a full spiritual life.

So, as I come to you, fully aware of the impact that you may have on my spiritual being, I ask you to also be open to how my coming into community with you may bring opportunities for you. The family system theory in psychology describes each member of a family impacting each other in deep and often unseen ways. When one member of the family leaves or makes a life change, the family is often vulnerable to feelings of upset or disturbance. And when a new family member arrives, a new baby or a new spouse, the family also goes through an adjustment period that is sometimes unsettling.

You may feel that kind of feeling of uneasiness at first with me. I am a new member of your family. And my addition to the family changes the family, as it is an interconnected system. But as the family changes, so does each member change. I am changed by knowing you as you are by knowing me.

Since we are talking about our relationship together, let me offer my covenant to you. My promise as to how I want to be while in your family.

I offer you my intention to bring my best self to you. This doesn’t mean you won’t also see some parts of my self that aren’t my best—you will. But my intention is to bring myself fully, to offer who I am, what I care about, what I fear, what I love, and all that I hope for.

My intention is to be open to self-discovery with you as we journey together.

As I make mistakes, I will ask you for your help. Your help in telling me more what you need. Your help in helping me discover how I can best help the congregation find what they need.

I will hold what you each say to me as a confidence. What you share with me is a sacred treasure and I hold it to myself, unless you ask me to share it with others. So, if you are telling me about a health problem you are having, please let me know if it’s okay to share this with others, especially if you might want to accept some assistance from others. But if you want your confidence kept just between us, tell me that, too.

And I covenant to treat each of you with respect, trust, and acceptance.

We bring here our roots—what we inherited from our families of origin and what we did with that inheritance. And we bring here our branches—what we have shaped from the experiences we’ve had in life. Our roots and our branches make us who we are, what we believe, how we live our lives. But each day that we spend together, we rub against each other and shape the new growth forming in our souls. New green growth forming full leafy branches. Hungry for growth. Seeking new life. Seeking new experiences with each other, which in turn forms new growth.

I’m glad to be here. I’m eagerly waiting to see what new branches will begin to sprout as I grow with you.