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Sermon by Elisabeth Hathaway, MA, PhD It is my experience, and it may be yours, that I have curiosity and bemusement-interested engaged uncertainty-about spiritual practice. Sometimes this feeling, which can be a flash felt sense, or a more extended and conscious focused consideration, sometimes it is more intense and pressured, vigilant, questioning, searching, for what I know can be, or sometimes it is doubting, despairing of how to trust its reality or resilience. I feel spiritual moments, and I feel I am, I do think of myself, as a spiritually based person. But what does this mean? How do I know it, how do I live that? Aldous Huxley wrote: Of the reality of human meaning and truth, C.S. Lewis wrote that we each can be good individually, but God-Lewis was a fervent Christian-can only be revealed through the life of a community, we would call it a fellowship, whose members are, he wrote, "players in one band, or organs in one body," people who are loving one another and helping one another, people who, forming a collective become what he called the "equipment" of religious practice. It has been said that Unitarians, unique among many religions, choose their faith. Ours is a faith without dogma, and most who worship as Unitarians were not always so, but arrived here through the struggle of realizing or creating their individual truths and values as a conscious part of their journey. Indeed, Unitarians hold as their symbol the chalice flame, the inner light. We each make a choice, like the new members did today, to join in fellowship, and live from this place, to tend our flames, together. So today, as we welcome new members to our fellowship, we return from our adventures and travels of the summer, and rejoin one another, reconfirming our choice of faith and fellowship. This is an annual service, the Water and Stone service, which many Unitarian fellowships have at this time of year. Today also happens to be our one-year anniversary. A year ago weekly services were established here in our Petaluma fellowship. We're one year old! Remember pictures of yourselves, or your children, at the first birthday party, blowing out your first candle and eating your cake? Happy Birthday. What better way to celebrate it as a spiritual anniversary than with the Water and Stone ceremony. For Water and Stones, what potent symbols. Water. The primordial element of creation, source of all potentialities, and absolutely necessary for continued life. It is fluid, musical, relentless, purifying, enlivening, refreshing; emblem of the maternal Deep, signifier of the unconscious, the emotional, the capricious flow, water in human mythology has been said to give birth to spirit, to be a metaphor for love, and also to be the destination of death. From amniotic fluid to the River Styx, we pour it over our heads in baptism, drink of it and merge human and divine nature in communion, and float down it in the course of time, on the river of Life. And Stones. Water, it is said, springs from stone. Throughout human history stones have held profound magical, transformative and healing properties; they are Earth, cosmos, the eternal One; they are substance, heaviness, density, constancy, solidity. Stones and gems have been called the hidden flowers of Mother Earth's underworld, and used in altars, for meditation, talismans, charms, worry stones. Certain stones have been said to represent pleasant memories, or to be a source of great knowledge, or to symbolize protected and consecrated space, holy ground, Water and Stones. What do they mean to you? When you bring your stones or water forward to place in our
collective vessel, you are invited to share something of their
story and significance.  |