(2007.01.14) Under These Beams: Soul Work

So… what are we doing here? Every week we come. For 325 years we’ve been coming. You would think there must be something to it.


What are we doing here?


Last Sunday I talked about this Old Ship Meeting House – with its broad hipped roof and many windows and doors – as a physical manifestation of our gradual, yet somehow inexorable journey to ever greater inclusion and welcome as a congregation. Yes, with mistakes, with sometimes faltering steps. But even before our meeting house was built, our first minister, Peter Hobart, began the journey with his baptizing of Hannah Burton, whose father (oh the scandal) was a member of the church of England and not of the Puritan faith of our congregation at the time – a radical act for the time. Then there was Ebenezer Gay, our third minister, who, with increasing clarity during his sixty-nine year ministry, preached a message contrary to his inherited Calvinist tradition, affirming the inherent potential for goodness in every person.

And so it went, as the theology preached under these beams more and more with the years emphasized deeds over creeds, emphasized the importance of a life of good character more than a life of so-called right belief.

So that in recent decades, reflecting the Unitarian Universalist congregation we had become, we came to welcome people of increasingly diverse religious views, each person drawing for inspiration on sources most personally meaningful – whether the teachings of Jesus or the teachings of the Buddha, whether the wonders of nature or the wonders of scientific discoveries.

And so that we have come to welcome and include and celebrate the lives of our gay and lesbian and bisexual sisters and brothers, and have celebrated many same sex marriages under these beams since the very week that it became legal.

And so that we have at least asked some of the right questions about race and class, though we have as yet done far too little to address these questions and realities and respond to them.

All this is, along with our passionate truth-seeking and our seeking to help make a better world… all this, as I said last week, is who we have been… and who we have become, who we are – as, all along the way, we also have cared for one another in the midst of all the trials and joys of life.

But how did we get this way? And how can we best remain faithful to the journey as it continues?

Well, one way of describing the journey is to call it a journey of soul work – the soul work that takes place under these beams as well as the soul work that takes place wherever we wander in between our times under these beams – but which, even so, perhaps comes to a more intense focus when we are here, gathered together for what we call worship.


So, what do I mean by “soul work”? I’ve taken these two words from the title of the fine and challenging book, Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies in Dialogue, published by the Unitarian Universalist Association, which addresses primarily issues of racism and class. But today I’m using this morning in a broader context, a context which nevertheless implicitly includes this range of issues.

I’ll begin at the beginning. Recall the creation stories in Genesis. As you will no doubt remember, at the end of the first creation story we are told that on the seventh day God rested. It was the first sabbath.

But why in the world would God rest or why would the storyteller tell us that God rested? After all, God wouldn’t need to rest, not if God was the all powerful God we imagine. Well, whatever else the reason, resting on the seventh day surely teaches us or reminds us of something essential about the rhythm of creation, and therefore something essential about the rhythm of our own lives.

Quite simply, stopping now and then is necessary for the health of creation itself – and therefore for our own health too. Not altogether and forever stopping, but at least from time to time ceasing and desisting our too-often incessant outward doing.

Look around us. Every winter in our northern climes nature stops much of its outward doing. The grass stops growing, many creatures hibernate, and except in a frighteningly unseasonable winter such as this one, no tree or flower buds or blooms.

Of course you might say that much goes on behind the scenes, deep within, under the soil. But that’s just the point! Yes, nature stops outwardly, so that more might go own inwardly, at the depths, feeding the continuing cycles of creation.

Just as own stopping, our ceasing and desisting now and then - every seventh day? maybe a little bit each morning or evening or noontime? - ceasing and desisting at least now and then from our outward doings might allow more to go on in our depths, might allow the depths of our souls to come to the surface, to inform the rest of our lives.

Just by stopping. Now and then at least.

Now, you might point out that when we gather here, it may not entirely look as though we have stopped. After all, we sing, we talk, we listen, we light candles, we stand up, we sit down.

But we have interrupted or stopped our usual round of activity. We have stepped out of our usual routines, our usual work, maybe our usual habits of mind.

And then anything might happen. You just never know.


Today we remember the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.. We think of him marching. We think of him writing. We think of him preaching from a high pulpit or speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

But how was he able to do what he did?

I would suggest that it was in good measure by virtue of his soul work, no doubt often during his times of stopping.

For he, like us, like anyone, had just to sit sometimes. He, like us, had to reflect, to find ways to renew, to be surprised by the spirit, or by the right word at the right time.

It wasn’t, of course, always under the beams of a church that his soul work took place, anymore than it is always so for us. And it wasn’t always by choice. Recall King’s time in the Birmingham City Jail. His arrest and imprisonment in April 1963 was an enforced stopping. And… from the depths of those days emerged his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” – a letter answering critics who accused him of being an “outside agitator,” accused him of not having enough patience with the pace of change. Hear some of King’s words which emerged from his own soul work:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

And observing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life, we see that his sympathies stretched ever wider with the years, as he came to see himself not only as an American citizen but also as a world citizen, connected to everyone. And so, his civil rights work came to include work for economic equality. His work for justice came to include also work for peace, opposition to the Vietnam War and to the nuclear arms race.

So yes, King was an activist and prophet of the highest order. Yet he was as effective as he was because his activism drew from deep wellsprings, drew from soul work, drew from remembering who we are at our depths.

He was hardly the first, nor will he be the last to draw from ancient and eternal wellsprings of wisdom through soul work. Soul work is a universal need.

Jesus, we are told, frequently withdrew from the crowds to pray, he spent forty days alone in the wilderness, and he prayed all the night in the quiet of Gethsemane before his execution.

The Buddha sat under the pipal tree, inviting enlightenment. And throughout his life of teaching, he and his community of monks withdrew during every rainy season to meditate and reflect more intensely.

And we… we routinely, regularly sit under these beams. Our retreat. Our spiritual garden. Our time to focus our soul work. Our time to remember who we are, “tied in a single garment of destiny,” interconnected, children of God, star stuff of the universe.


And so, following a universal and ancient rhythm, in our own time, in our own way, under these beams… we bring the rest of our lives here, and then we return to the rest of our lives. But for this hour each week, we sit and wait and listen. For a word, for a reminder of how we want to live our lives, for a reminder of who we are. Soul work under these beams.


These days, here’s some of what I bring to our time under these beams.

In addition to the ebbs and flows of personal concerns for family and friends and for you, and in addition to reflections on my own journey, I bring my anxieties about so much that is going on in our world – as I expect you do too: global climate change, the disaster of the war in Iraq in our name, the violence upon which our nation seems to rest, poverty, racism, the searing inequalities still present in our nation and in the world, and so much more. And I often feel pulled first to this issue, and then to that issue – where shall I put my efforts, how can we possibly address it all, can our nation regain its moral compass, what is the world coming to?

And I bring one more question too: Is there any connection among all these concerns and issues and crises?

The response to that last question, a response I discover and re-discover through soul work under these beams, is quite simple. When we remember who we truly are, we know that not only are we are connected, related one to another, but so too are all these so-called issues – the realities of our contemporary shared life on this dear earth. And the soul work we do here must help us to feel this connection ever more deeply in our bones – not just as an easy generality, but in relation to each specific and sometimes painful reality of the world. The soul work we do here must help us to understand and celebrate our differences, and then to transcend them, knowing the ultimate unity of all people and all life. The soul work we do here must help us to realize that getting and spending does, in the words of the poet, lay waste our powers, and has little to do with what we truly would want our lives to be about: giving and loving, peacemaking, justice-making, reconciliation, understanding, care for the creation.

So that when we leave, when we go forth once again each week – after worship or after a class on Buddhism or the Bible – we will quite naturally try to live out of these depths a little bit more than we have, meeting each person with greater kindness and love, maybe also putting our energy and gifts toward the issue or concern that calls to us most poignantly, continuing however imperfectly our Old Ship heritage of welcome and inclusion, each in our own lives, and together in community.


One more story for now.

The other night someone told me that though he wasn’t a member of Old Ship, didn’t consider himself particularly religious, and indeed had only been inside the meeting house once or twice, he felt that each time he drove past that this was a place that welcomed everyone, and that it would be a place where he would feel at home. And he recalled the evening almost four years ago when, after the candlelight vigil to protest the impending attack on Iraq, a few dozen of us – members of Old Ship and many others as well – silently marched from Hingham Square to the front door of our Old Ship. And we sang – a few old peace songs, and then “America the Beautiful.” He remembered the closeness we all felt. And in spite of all that has transpired since, he holds this memory as, or so it seems to me, a kind of sacred moment – a moment, as I would put it, during which our soul work, our remembering of who we truly are, had led us all to feel solidarity and unity with one another, with our brothers and sisters in Iraq, and with millions around the planet who were also yearning for peace.


Here, then, must be the incubator for such moments, for such depth experience, such remembering of who we are, so that we might indeed be more able to play our part in helping to create a better world, a world lived from the depths of our knowing that we are all one.


Under these beams, and for all our human imperfections and failings, such soul work has been going on for three and a quarter centuries. May it continue. Our lives and the world depend upon it.


So may it be.



Updated Feb 04, 2007 Written by Rev. Kenneth Read-Brown