Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Learning to Trust
by Reverend Carolyn Price
September 26, 2004

A poem for the time of prayer and meditation:

Trust exists at birth, some say. And as the mother and father respond to the needs of the infant, trust grows. Over time, as the needs of the child (note: I did not say the wants of the child) are met satisfactorily by parents, then later by teachers, friends, and society at large, this trust grows deep and strong, and becomes a foundation. Some of us are lucky enough to have grown up like that. But many are not. And when that trust is stunted early, or badly breached at too young an age, it is not easy to recover, or to grow again. And yet - as with many matters of faith and human possibility - it happens. Let me talk more of this with a true story.

During the bombings of World War II, thousands of children were orphaned. The fortunate ones were rescued and taken to orphanages where they were given shelter, food and attention. But many of these children had endured so much loss in their young lives that they were not able to sleep at night. Their caretakers tried all that they knew. They gave the children hot milk before bed. They sang them lullaby after lullaby. They tried letting the children share beds and giving them hot water bottles to keep them warm. But nothing worked. Though most could not articulate it, the children were afraid to sleep, afraid that if they gave in to the darkness that they would wake up to find themselves again alone and hungry. So hungry. Their caregivers were religious people, so they prayed for help from God. Yet the situation continued. Some of the children began to hallucinate and to grow ill from lack of sleep. Finally one of the caregivers came up with the idea of giving each of the children a loaf of bread at bedtime. By holding this bread close to their small bodies, holding it right up next to their hearts, most of these children learned to sleep again. It was as if the bread reassured them that "today I have what I need and I will again tomorrow."

I don't know all the details of this story, but as a mother I can imagine that, by holding onto their bread, and granting their bodies rest, slowly these children began be able to hear the lullabies that were sung to them, and to draw comfort from the timeless melodies that lull little boys and girls into believing that all is well with the world, that it is safe to let go, to sleep. I can envision that, once rested, they began to eat better, and to venture into the yard outside, and to look up at the sun, even in the dark of winter and war. As a human being who is horrified at the outrageous suffering caused to innocent human children because of wars perpetrated by supposed grown ups, I want to believe that at some point these orphans who were lucky enough to find their way to shelter, came to understand that they were safe now. Perhaps over time, a few of them dared to speak aloud of what had happened to them. And the adults - not specially trained in trauma mediation then, not half a century ago, but because of the goodness in their hearts and because of their place in a religious movement which held love and care of others as god-like - these adults knew enough to listen, just to be there, with a gentle presence. Not to try to make it better, at least not right away, but simply to hear the stories of the fear and the loss and the profound mistrust in life that these children had learned at the hands of war mongers. And in the shelter of this care, I can imagine how the amazing resilience of the human spirit grew strong again. And the children learned to hold close not only to their bread, that real, tangible evidence of sustenance and life, but to each other, and to these adults who had earned their trust by their care and kind-heartedness.

Some of these children still had faith in God, and they prayed for a better world someday. Some had lost the ability to pray, and would never get it back or not for many, many years. But what they received during their time at the orphanage gave them life again. It was not their bodies that needed the bread as much as their souls, that place deep within each of us that, despite pain and loss and uncertainty, trusts that there is inherent worth in being alive in this world, that believes in the sustaining power of truth and beauty and goodness.

I tell this story because it speaks of the human ability to endure terrible loss and to learn to live, to trust, and even to love again. But I tell it also because it takes place in one of the darkest times of human history, a time that, collectively, I hope in some way that we, the people of this earth, never fully stop mourning. I agree with the writer Tess Gallagher, who tells us that "it is important that we be strengthened by the wisdom of our grievings." And I think it is important to remember these people who took in the children because of their conviction that love would make a difference, even in a world where all seemed lost. I think it is important to remember the children also, who, even though they had forsaken their innocence, opened themselves to what these people held out, and yielded to the forces of good that they felt rise around them and within them.

Bread is the ancient symbol for life. It plays a role in every culture and every religious tradition in the world. It symbolizes the life of the body, the food we need to survive. It also symbolizes the potential of the mind, that which nourishes and grows our most creative and intelligent thinking. Especially in religion, bread refers to the life of the spirit, that which feeds our deepest inner connection to truth, meaning, and to god, however we understand god to be. Bread is believed to be the oldest cooked food on earth. As the historians tell it, a Neanderthal man once mixed the wild wheat and water that was a staple for these early people, but then he fell asleep before he could warm it to make the usual flat and hard concoction. When he woke up, according to the interpretations of cave paintings, the mixture was much bigger - of course it had risen overnight - and thus bread as we know it in its oldest manifestation was born. Today's sermon is about the bread of the soul - perhaps the most essential ingredient for a human life well lived - trust.

Churches are interesting places when it comes to trust. Many of us arrive here, imagining that it will be a haven, a place where we can just naturally trust everyone about everything. It can come as quite a shock when we realize that the church is an organization in many ways just like any other organizations. And, being made of human beings, organizations are not exempt from disagreement and conflict. We invest a lot, many of us, in the church community we choose. And as Unitarian Universalists, some 98 % of us do come here by choice -most of us as an intentional move away from another, or from no, faith tradition. Because we choose it, it may be that we expect more here - that we expect church to consistently be what we want and need it to be.

In my short time here I have come to understand that this church may not have been all that some of you - not all, but some - have wanted and or needed it to be for some time. I understand that there have been disappointments, confusion, and conflicts. Some of you have felt betrayed. Your trust has been tested, and in a few cases, broken. A church -- because of the way that it stands apart from the secular world, even a creedless church such as ours - can be a place where experiences take on heightened meaning. In many ways, those of us who choose to belong to a church are vulnerable. We are vulnerable because we say, yes, I will bring myself to this place. I choose it. And I will give of myself. My time, my talent, my finances. I will give my friendship, yes, I will give my heart and my mind, and when the walls need painted or the scenery built for the children's Christmas pageant, I will give of my body. And because sometimes we have this sense that a church is a place where we will always be safe and cared for, we can be quite hurt in a congregation when things go awry. Which they will do, and do do, as all of you who have been here (or in any church) for some time understand.

What has impressed me so much about this congregation though is that you are not hanging on to those hurts, those disappointments, not even to the sense of betrayal that a few of you have felt. You have let go. You have used your power of choice to decide to move on and begin again, here, this year. And I want you to know that as your minister, this makes me proud to be among you.

You hardly knew me when you hired me. It was something like an arranged marriage although you had two choices for your ministerial - mate. I also had choices, and I chose you. Every day I am grateful for this. We are off to a good beginning. I feel you giving me your trust, despite the difficulties that I know some of you experienced in these past years. I came ready to trust you, and to care for you, and to give you the best ministry I can give. Together we are moving forward. I see this in your commitments that you wrote on that lovely day when Jerry and John and Carol designed a service of welcome for me, for us, together. Those commitments are included in today's Order of Service. They speak of a congregation willing to trust, willing to give the best of themselves to a community that is beloved.

Though we are still learning to trust one another - to learn what our strengths are and how we might best complement one another - our beginning, in the language of congregational dynamics would be called a "honeymoon". It is lovely and I hope it lasts a good long while. You deserve it, and I would be honored and happy. But it will not last forever. There will come a time when we disappoint each other, when we turn in a direction that the other does not want to go. This, too, is part of being a healthy church, part of trusting the process of community. And what I want to say to you is that we will be fine when this time comes. It may not be as fun, or pleasant, but we will be fine. There is a saying I would like to suggest, for all of us who love this congregation and want to stay here. I learned it in seminary. It is useful I think with churches or other important relationships. It is the saying: This will not undo us. This will not undo us. It may be a good saying for me and for you to use when the honeymoon hits a bump in the road, or when times get tough. Because what I think this saying does is remind us of the bond that we have made - of the human, spiritual connection we are creating with our care and our commitments that is worth keeping. Perhaps that saying can be bread for our journey.

In the wider view of our lives, it is true that experiences can diminish trust, damage its integrity, and in some cases shut it down entirely. Certainly many of us know of this, having endured the pain of the world; through illness, death, divorce, disaster, the loss of our livelihoods, and more. It is not easy to live on this earth, not if we are to give ourselves to it, not if we are to allow ourselves to love. And yet, part of being a successful human being, I believe, is meeting life on its terms, meeting it and when the pain subsides a bit, choosing to trust again. Or as the poet Ellen Bass says:

We learn trust first as infants, with our mothers, fathers, our care-givers. We learn it for good or, far more often than not if we take into account the earth as a whole - for bad, because of the forces of poverty, illness, oppression, and all that can hold the human spirit down. But whenever it is - when we are very young or growing older - that we come to understand for the first time or for the fiftieth time our basic human separateness, our trust is shaken. Fear - the opposite of trust - grows. This is a place where religions come in, to offer comfort and hope and a chance to grow whole again. But whether we choose a religious path or not, sooner or later as human beings we need to locate our own bread - some source of consolation and renewal that we can hold onto, and learn to carry with us. This is what we touch in the darkness. This is the song we hear inside ourselves, the lullaby of our lives. This is what we give thanks for before we take our rest at night, and again when we rise, to begin a new day.

In a beautiful contemporary novel called "The Secret Life of Bees", a young girl's trust in the world is shattered early. Her mentally ill mother dies when the girl, Lily, is 4, leaving her with an abusive father. It is important to this story, as with so many human stories of triumph, that there is another human being - one not related by blood or even by marriage - who becomes the source of help and hope for Lily. Through their journey together - Lily learns to trust again, amid a community of black women who worship around the statue of a black Madonna in the parlor. The women call this Madonna "Our Lady". She appeals to them because she is she is a woman, like them, and black, like them. And divine, like them. And divine, like God. Here in a conversation with the woman who owns the house, whose name, not coincidentally, is "August", as Lily comes to understand the power of claiming a personal religion, and to find bread for her journey.

"I told Our Lady one night in the pink house that she was my mother. I put my hand on her heart the way you and the Daughters always do at your meetings. I know I tried it that one time before and fainted, but this time I stayed on my feet, and for a while after that I really did feel stronger. Then I seemed to lose it. I think what I need is to go back and touch her heart again.

August said, "Listen to me now, Lily. I'm going to tell you something I want you to always remember, all right?"

Her face had grown serious, intent. Her eyes did not blink.

"All right," I said, and I felt something electric slide down my spine.

"Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She's not the statue in the parlor. She's something inside of you. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"Our Lady is inside me," I repeated, not sure I did.

"You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside." She held out her hand to me. "Give me your hand."

I lifted my left hand and placed it in hers. She took it and pressed the flat of my palm up against my chest, over my beating heart. "You don't have to put your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life," she said. "You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart."

August stepped closer. She kept the pressure steady against my hand. "All those times your father treated you mean, Our Lady was the voice in you that said, "No, I will not bow down to this. I am Lily Melissa Owens, and I will not bow down.' Whether you could hear this voice or not, she was in there saying it."

I took my other hand and placed it on top of hers, and she moved her free hand on top of it, so we had this stack of hands resting upon my chest.

"When you're unsure of yourself," she said, "when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, "get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.' She's the power inside you, you understand?"

Her hands stayed where they were but released their pressure. "And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that's her (Mary) too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that's the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love - but to persist in love.

She paused. Bees drummed their sound into the air. August retrieved her hands from the pile on my chest, but I left mine there.

("Not just to love Lily) - but to persist in love.")

I closed my eyes and in the coolness of the morning… I felt for one clear instant what she was talking about.

When I opened my eyes, August was nowhere around. I looked back … and saw her crossing the yard, her white dress catching the light.

--Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 288-289.

To persist in love requires than that we learn to trust, over and over again, until the very end. It requires that we learn to trust human beings, knowing that we are imperfect. It requires that we learn to trust in the possibilities of this life, knowing the certainty of death. Perhaps most of all it requires that we learn to trust ourselves, our own deepest understanding. Religion can help us because it extends our vision beyond the mundane, and moves us toward and into the more important questions. As Unitarian Universalists, however, our questions come with no answer key at the back of the book. In fact, they come with no book. Instead we are handed the doctrine of all humankind: every sacred text ever written, every masterpiece of poetry and art, the rejoinders of nature and the earth, the teachings from history, science, literature, mathematics, and more. Add to this the philosophical and theological treatises of the world's best thinkers, and the stories of all people of all time. This is the vast plate of bread that lies waiting for us for us as Unitarian Universalists. It is up to us to choose what to hold onto.

I will leave you with a truth that I hold onto: Our Lady, our God, our human potential, the Spirit of Life, the Tao, nirvana - that transforming power of many names - is not out there, apart from ourselves. It is right here, in this world, among us and within us. It is made manifest on this earth, now - not in a time to come, not in a life beyond life. This has long been the message of our faith. It - the holy, the divine, the Great Giver of Trust - is not out there. It is close to us, closer still than breathing. It is the first lullaby ever sung. It is the last human hand that we will hold in our life. It is the worship of the ages, the bread that has sustained the human spirit since the daybreak of time. It is what we most need to hold in our arms to grant us rest, to give us strength for the journey. It is the abiding vision of a better world, not just for ourselves, but for all god's people, and for all the earth. It is not out there. It is right here in us. It is right here among us. It is right here. It always has been.
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Will you please join me in singing hymn #409, Sleep My Child ?

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