"Your children are not your children
They are the sons and the daughters of life's longing for itself
They come through you, but they are not from you
and though they are with you they belong not to you.
You can give them your love, but not your thought
They have their own thoughts (they have their own thoughts)
You can house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow
Which you can't even visit, not even in your dreams.
You can strive to be like them,
but you cannot make them just like you
(strive to be like them, but you cannot make them just like you)"
Words from The Prophet written by Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran, in 1923. This is a reading that has inspired many a Unitarian Universalist child dedication.
The child dedication is one of the more powerful ways Unitarian Universalists articulate family values in a public forum. This ritual captures much of how we regard one another, our communities and life itself. When we dedicate a child, we stand in witness and speak aloud our solemn intentions -- as parents, as caretakers and as a community -- to do all that we can to nurture and support the child in ways of truth, beauty, and love. Just as Rev. Nye reminded us this morning, we are encouraged to inspire a way of life that is noble in its hopes and aspirations.
Let me name some of the values we affirm. To begin, we acknowledge that birth is the original blessing from which all potential emerges. We welcome children as a blessed gesture of creation who are afforded all rights to breathe in and celebrate life in their own style. Each life uniquely adds to the richness of experience and infinite variety ever unfolding amongst us.
We claim the child's dignity and her or is potential to contribute to our understanding of what it means to be alive. We acknowledge that we each have partial truth -- that we need one another for a glimpse of the larger whole.
By embracing our responsibility toward a new life, we bring forth our awareness of interdependence, that we, indeed, effect one another. And, finally, in our celebration, we recognize that our becoming, at whatever age or stage, is nurtured in relationship.
Praising Life. Relationship. Truth. Interdependence. These values and more speak to a liberal religious approach to living and relating. An approach that does not have a loud enough voice in society. There is a general lack of understanding that we are all in this together. That we are intricately bound to one another and that we rely on each other throughout our lives.
This is why the dialogue of family values is so strong in society today. It is the buzz word that people hope will fill the emptiness. There is a great deal of despair and cynicism toward the striking lack of civility in our public and private relatedness. The popular response is reactive -- "they" don't have the right values. "They" become the problem. The problem, then, becomes a rigid formula and the answer a certain way of being. Simple. Neat. Formulaic....Absolutely impossible to accomplish, and, frankly, not life affirming. Because life is messy, contextual, ever surprising and ever responsive. Homogeneity -- one way of being -- is not a viable solution, and ironically, never the way a family can work.
I agree that we need a mutual agreement of how to behave with one another. We are forgetting, even ignoring, our innate ability to respect and honor each another. The disregard for each other and so life, is startling. We see it on our streets, in the increased violence and crime, in our public policies which deny people and affirm profit. We see it in the negligence of our children, both within individual families and in our public priorities. As a society, we ignore children in their formative years and then wonder why the nation is seeming more and more aimless. We also ignore the aging and their years of wisdom and then wonder why we keep making the same mistakes.
Anger, frustration and fear can create a kind of tunnel vision where people desensitize themselves to others. We've decreased human contact by way of machines and flooded our airwaves with information -- somehow making it less possible to hear one another. I would agree with the popular claim that indeed, the breakdown of our human sensibilities is due to the loss of the sense of family, of community, and the work of acceptance and belonging. I would add, as well, that our lack of imagination as a society for what a family is also adds to the aimlessness and cynicism.
The definition of family that I assume is a group of loved ones who have serious intention and commitment toward sharing the challenges and joys of life and growth together. This is a unit not necessarily determined by blood or law. Families thrive in the spirit of connectedness and responsibility, they are defined by our dedication to know one another. There is obligation to our families: genetic, legal, covenantal or parental obligation. But there are different families in one person's life that often overlap or intermingle. There's the family of origin -- the one you were born into. Then there are the families of choice -- either through negotiation or mutual understanding or love and commitment.
Of course this is not what people will think you are promoting when you utter the need for "Family Values". The popular for this phrase is that you are promoting a conservative, Biblically fundamentalist, heterosexual family with a mom and dad and children. Any other configuration -- any other life situation, unless justified is deemed the problem with today's society.
So, if you don't take the Bible as the word of God, or are pro-choice, or homosexual, or an unwed parent, you are the cause of the degradation of society. You will be blamed for spreading anti-family values. (There have been attempts to include feminists to the list of sinners with more and less success. Be assured that there will be some who will keep trying.)
The narrow mindedness and need for everyone to be the same is dangerous enough, but look for a moment at the immoral message it sends to our future leaders -- the children. What do we teach our children with such simplistic logic laced by hatred? Not to take responsibility for their lives and make others the reason for all ills. Point fingers, find the group that is most effective in its blame and join. That way you'll win -- you'll be right...
What priorities do we want for our value system? What mutual agreement do we want to emphasize, to trust, in our living with one another?
The value system I affirm as a Unitarian Universalist is a system that puts its priorities towards mutuality, support, nurturance, loyalty and acceptance of one other as we grow and change. Its power is found in relation and in justice centered communities.
Justice-centered communities are communities that provide an openness to learning, teaching, giving and receiving. Justice-centered communities accept people wherever they are in their lives and helps them take that next step. Justice-centered communities contain a greater strength than the sum of its parts. Justice-centered communities are equipped to embrace and comfort phases of doubt, loss, despair, brokenness, joy, discovery and gratitude. Justice-centered communities come in all shapes and sizes, more than I could possibly imagine.
The healing power of such communities is first learned or damaged in the family of origin. We do not always find the value of family in our first born communities. Sometimes the family is not a haven for learning of our true goodness but rather a prison or minefield where our loved ones, and perhaps ourselves, lose the sense of the dignity of our lives and hurt each other. Our vulnerability is not publicly affirmed, so we put on masks of competence that often break at home. There is a disturbing amount of substance abuse and emotional and physical violation behind closed doors.
And all of us make mistakes, can be misguided or lost. We are fortunate when we do have a nourishing family and we must all strive as relatives to create a safe, comforting, affirming environment. But those environments are not always available for a variety of economic, circumstantial, emotional or psychological reasons.
It must be remembered that there are, as well, many survivors of abuses who know that their task is to stop the destructive behavior -- to create a new pattern which will fill the world with that much more love, that much more faith, that much more trust in the potential for goodness and peace. And one thing that families can teach over and over again, is the complicated journey of forgiveness. Or, in the very least, acceptance.
We all have room for improvement and can ever deepen our understanding and capability to find and form the family we know we are capable of being. That is part of the work we do here, risking mutuality toward a better world, learning what that means and how we can bring ourselves to the task.
Morality, according to Unitarian Universalists, is based on faith in people. It is grounded in the belief that our goodness, compassion and love need to be fostered and nurtured until we blossom into a life affirming, justice-centered being. Moral fortitude is strengthened when we apply ourselves to the vision of peace, awareness of beauty and knowledge of potential within us all.
Morality is affirmed, in the long run, not by wrath and fear, but by an inner wisdom in us that praises the sacredness of life. Morality is not telling others what is wrong with them, it is taking responsibility for ourselves and spreading the good news by example and affirmation. Unitarian Universalists do not ignore immoral behavior or think that anything goes. We believe in our ability to grow and learn, teach and train each other toward our better selves.
This kind of work takes courage, courage that needs to be affirmed, courage that values families. A courage that believes in dignity of life within the struggles and doubts and fears -- not against them. A courage that stands for self improvement with others -- not self aggrandizement at the expense of others.
Throughout our lives, we create our own families, either by committing to a partnership for life with another and/or dedicating love and loyalty to a circle of friends. We each deserve and can give the deep familial love so yearned for, the one that stays with and pulls through any storm. Therein we find "home", that place that honors our presence and our gratitude for being alive and with one another.
James Fowler, developmentalist, once stated that in faith "we are concerned with how to put our lives together and with what will make our life worth loving." The faith discipline known in valuing the family, finding ourselves and each other worth loving, helps us find lives worth living.
May we remember that our survival insists on mutuality and that the gift of interdependence will give us the strength, hope and knowledge to find a more compassionate and affirming world -- family by family, chosen or found, from the circle of home outstretching the globe.
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