Before I start, I want to assure you that everyone I mention here has given me permission to share their stories. I don’t want you to worry that I’m suddenly going to call you out, or that I’m sharing something that anyone didn’t want to be public. My Faith in Volunteering My mother came to visit last year, and she was impressed with our church—with the wonderful light in our sanctuary, with Carol Cissel’s sermon about finding a spiritual practice, with Ed Johnson’s testimonial about teaching the toddlers’ class. Then she read the insert in the order of service, and my mom was impressed with me. “You’re very involved, aren’t you?” she asked. “Seems like your name is on everything.” “You know where I got that,” I said. She couldn’t deny it. She smiled. If you think I’m involved in a lot of things, you should see my mom. In our home town of Winchester, NH, she’s served on the school board, the church board, and the board of the Winchester Learning Center, a child development program she and my sister Penny founded. She’s active in the Zero Population movement, volunteers with Planned Parenthood, and is on the Town conservation committee. She translates for Spanish-speaking families at the courthouse. I could rattle off fifteen or twenty other things. She inspires me: she jumps head first into things she cares about and figures out how to make things happen. I looked at my office a few years ago: I had a line of tote bags—my PTA tote bag, my UUCSS tote bag, my Hillwood Manor Gardening club bag, my book group bag, my work tote bag. I was just like my mom. That felt good, but also a little worrisome. To be fully honest, part of me resented my mother’s activism. As some of you know, I spent most of my younger years in Indonesia. We moved to Winchester when I was 13. Penny, Priscilla and I went to the local school; Ann went off to college. Then, my father took a job in Cairo. He was away for three years. We didn’t do too well during those years. I think we were all deeply depressed. Penny was down to a size 2 in clothes. Priscilla picked up all the household chores and perfected her performance as family clown. I slipped into the role of good student and quiet writer. And my mother coped through her whirlwind of activities, coming home late in the evening with her tote bags and new assignments. I wanted her to stay home, to ask me how my day went, to give me motherly advice that I could reject. But she was off saving the world. I see now that her activity was a way of coping with my father’s absence, giving her mind and heart something else to focus on. She needed to volunteer for her own stability. I can find a place in my heart for that. It makes me wonder, though, about the other people who served on those committees. Did anyone pull her aside and say, “Cyndy, I’m worried about you. You seem pretty low?” Did anyone notice that she wore the same pair of pants all week? I want to believe that my mother found deep connections, but I suspect she went to these meeting to hold herself together. She couldn’t be vulnerable, so she knuckled down and got things done. When I look at all my tote bags, I wonder about my own motivations. This summer, I dragged my younger son Alex with me to feed one neighbor’s cat and then water our community garden. He told me. “Mom, you do too much for other people.” Then he paused. I could tell he was really trying to figure things out. He asked, “Is it OK to put other people’s needs ahead of your own?” My older son Jake is the age I was when I propped my feet on the wood stove and waited in the winter darkness, knowing my mom would not be home for dinner. What messages do I want my children to learn from my propensity to volunteer? I think I can boil it down to three main lessons. 1. Serving can be a joy, if you choose deliberately. 2. Have faith in the abundance of our community. 3. Live by our community covenant, as best you can. Message #1: Serving can be a joy, if you choose deliberately One of the messages of our Community Covenant is: “We will share the work of advancing our community goals.” Sometimes, I think, we hear this responsibility as a burden. We resist it using Alex’s question: “Should I put the church’s needs before my own?” But I resist the assumption that is built into that question. It’s not other’s needs OR my needs. Volunteering with others meets my needs too. As I’ve mused toward writing this sermon, I have sidled up to people and asked about how they volunteer. The ready, joyful answer from many people on that side of the room was “singing in the choir.” Look what a great model that gives us. The choir provides our amazing music on most Sundays. Making that music demands time and energy— stretching one’s voice, attending regular choir rehearsals, singing all morning long and into the afternoon on Sundays. It means keeping harmony with people on your right and left, to your front and back. But people don’t join the choir because they feel it’s a duty, and gosh, no one else will step up. I don’t see anyone biding his time until a new member joins so he can hand over the work of being the soloist. People sign up because it’s fun to sing together. I can’t keep a tune, but I am tempted to join the choir because they perform with such delight. It helps, I suspect, that after choir rehearsal each week, they break out some six-packs and lounge around here, chatting and laughing and catching up. I didn’t know that secret until recently, but I love it, because it means that our musicians give to us from a place of community. They serve, surrounded by people who know them and care about them. In the big picture, the musicians don’t set the needs of the church above their own. Hearing their voices blend with more voices, seeing how that music moves the rest of us—that feels good to everyone. [Pause] You are a wise and skeptical crowd. I bet you’re thinking, “Yes, well, that’s music. The analogy doesn’t hold up for the rest of us.” But I think it does. The model from the choir is that we can choose things that motivate us. We can choose activities that make us feel useful and accomplished. Consider some of our church leaders. Deborah Hunsley is our membership chair. Helping people find Unitiarian Universalism is almost evangelical for her. She knows that people out there need what we have to offer. She believes with even more conviction that the world needs more UUs—more open-minded, thoughtful people. Membership committee is her civic activism. It’s what gives her hope when Congress devolves into cat fights or the Post spews sensational headlines. Carol Cissel was our Property Chair for a while. She chose the position because this sanctuary meant so much to her -- the blond wood, the high white ceilings, the light that pours in through the windows. She was recently widowed, and she used to come in during the week to sit, quietly, in these chairs. For a time, this room was the only peaceful, restorative place in her life. Becoming Property Chair was a way to take care of that peaceful place. It helped that she felt very prepared for such a position—she ran an electrical company; she knew the remodeling industry. But she didn’t choose because she had the capacity for the work; she chose because she had a passion for it. I don’t expect that everyone will find connections that are these dramatic, but I do believe that we can serve without sacrificing our own needs, that serving can bring out the best in each of us. The Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman puts it this way: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Message # 2: Have faith in the abundance of our community My second main point extends this idea of finding gifts. It’s not just that we individually can discover and share our gifts, but also that everyone around us has gifts—some that we know, some that we don’t. When we make decisions in a spirit of abundance, we are free to make wise choices for ourselves because we trust that there are enough of us, with diverse enough talents and interests, that the important things will be covered. But in order to manifest this abundance, we need to make room for it. My first foray into serving this community was not planned. Early on, I checked a form to say that I’d help in Sunday school. Jake was in pre-school. I figured I could spend some Sundays downstairs with his class, and the other Sundays here, mustering the courage to meet people at coffee hour. It turns out that I was the only person who had offered to help with the preschool class. The Director of Religious Education gave me names of other parents to schedule. I spent my first years downstairs. I remember standing in the preschool room one Sunday with Susan Relland, who has since moved to Oklahoma. At the time, Susan had three young kids, was active with the music program, and had helped start the group that lives on now as Families Living UU Values. Here was Susan down in the preschool room talking about some other task she’d agreed to do. “Ah,” I said, knowingly. “It’s so hard to say no, isn’t it?” It seemed like the right sentiment. I often took on too many activities because someone had to do it. I would say, “Sure,” and then stuff my resentments down to get the work done. I expected Susan to nod and say “yeah,” and we’d have connection over our fate of being agreeable people. But Susan gave me a sharp look. “No, Phyllis,” she said. “I want to do these things. I choose these things. I don’t take on things I don’t want to do.” That was an eye-opener to me. Susan was a big fan of Steven Covey and his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Later she ran a workshop at the women’s retreat and I learned how she very consciously sets her priorities. She used this metaphor. Imagine you have a bucket and a huge pile of rocks and gravel and sand to fit into it. You can fit everything in if you put the big rocks in first, then the gravel, then the sand, which will spill into the nooks and crannies. Everything can fit. But if you put the sand in first, you won’t have room for the big stuff. You’ve got to start with the big stuff. With that philosophy backing her, Susan can say no more clearly and yes more enthusiastically than most people I know. One problem I run into is that I can’t always tell if something is a pebble or a rock. I am curious about a wide range of things, so I start saying yes before I check what else I have already agreed to do. I underestimate how long or how much energy something will take. And then, after saying yes too often, I’m out of the house three nights a week and leaving Eric to cook on what are supposed to be my dinner nights, and I haven’t asked Jake about cross-country or Alex about soccer. I can’t perform well at everything I’ve agreed to do. I make excuses. I get defensive. That’s when I have to find a way to cut back. I have to check what’s in my bucket. Sometimes I find that what I thought was a pebble has morphed into a rock. I hadn’t chosen to put that rock in. I take it out and hand it to someone else. If I don’t hand it to someone else, I will be serving out of sense of duty, not joy. And that can make it hard to come to church. I was talking to Sandy Dwiggins at a party this summer. Though she’d back now, she said she’d left this church years ago. “Why’d you leave?” I asked. “It was too much work,” she said, “and I felt like the burden was all on me.” I suspect many of us have felt that pressure of responsibility and loneliness, a sense that we carry too much alone. When something feels that heavy, then we’ve been feeding you a big dose of scarcity. In scarcity, we do things because we fear that no one else will step up. Then we stop believing that anyone could help us or that anyone would actually find this task meaningful. We feel trapped. But all that changes if we can trust that there are enough wise, talented, creative people around who care about us and the work we do. Sandy told me that when she came back, she found a place where we are much more careful about what we ask of each other. It is a safe, mindful place. This comes from believing that we have a common vision. Within that vision, we can each choose different, meaningful parts, and together, we can do it all. When I was learning to teach, someone told me about a study on wait-time—the amount of time a teacher waits for a student to answer her question. If the teacher believes the student knows the answer, she waits longer for the student to form a response. The silence is not scary because the teacher knows the student can fill it. But if the teacher thinks the student does not know the answer, the silence is painful. It seems to amplify the students’ inability. The teacher jumps in to the rescue. Here’s the thing: students can tell how their teachers rank them, because they unconsciously measure the lengths of those pauses. As a teacher, I cultivate the lengthy pause. Now, more students participate. There is a parallel here for church: no need to panic if people don’t step up right away. They might just need more time. We can also make space for unexpected answers. We will hear more creative responses--we will discover the gifts that we all bring--when we pose capacious questions. And then, when others re-focus that question through the lenses of their own passions and abilities, the discussion is exciting, invigorating. We have been told by that one of our unique qualities is that we embrace new people and new approaches. We evolve. This is part of believing in abundance—knowing that there are many paths to the same goal, inviting each other to choose the paths that invigorate them, and believing that together, we can accomplish a great deal. Believing in the collective power of the community—that is a liberating message. That is the abundant community. Message # 3: Live by the covenant, as best you can Catherine Buckler also coordinates volunteers here, and she is teaching me to see our work as “volunteer ministry.” I like that phrase because it reminds us that we minister to each other as we work together. We have a fantastic guide to help us: our community covenant. Our covenant was written collaboratively by many smart people in this congregation, so it’s not surprising that it is full of so much wisdom. One of my favorite lines is: “Honor the covenant before the task and honor the person before the work.” Putting people first is a very liberating mandate. It is a profound reminder that helps me make compassionate, fulfilling choices. When I first stepped into my role as a volunteer coordinator, I often called my predecessor, Alexa Fraser, to get reassurance. I couldn’t get myself to pick up the phone and ask someone to help with the picnic or run the church auction. I felt like I was asking too much of them. I felt intrusive, manipulative. Alexa helped me see my job differently. “You’re inviting people into our community,” she said. “If they say yes or no, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve shown them that you’re glad that they are part of this church.” Alexa is one very smart woman. I try to make room for life to flow in when I am talking to someone: I curb the impulse to say, “Hey we really need to get going, the deadline is like yesterday and you need to do X.” Instead, I begin with, “How are you?” and then I listen, to see if this will be a conversation about a task or a conversation about something else. And even though that deadline is still looming, I am grateful when the conversation goes in a new direction and I can listen. Because nothing is going to fall apart if the deadline is missed, but someone might fall apart if we don’t make room to listen. One of my most profound experiences in this church happened when I was asked to do something and I said no. Quite a few years ago, at the university where I teach, I had to resign from an administrative position. It was the dramatic culmination of a very toxic work environment. After starting up a new writing program, I acquired a new boss, and we had fundamentally different ideas about how to manage people. Believing I had to protect my colleagues from her, I fought her early and often. In my performance review, she said I was belligerent, could not work with others, and was unable to take direction. She said I was divisive and unsuitable for administrative work. Soon after, Kelly Kleine stopped me downstairs by the water fountain. She was on the nominating committee. She said something like this, “Phyllis, I want you to know that we here at church admire so much the positive energy you bring, the way you work so well with people, the way you are such a good listener and problem-solver. We respect that. Would you consider serving as the chair of the Program Council and being a leader in our church?” Now I’m sure I’m exaggerating some of her words here, but I want you to see what I took in from that conversation. I still get teary when I think about it. It was such a gift, such a profound gift, to hear someone in a community I respected see in me all of those qualities my boss had just flattened. All those qualities that I wanted to believe about myself and had begun to doubt. What a tremendous affirmation. I said thank you to Kelly. And then I said no, I would not be Program Council chair. I wasn’t psychologically ready to step into that role then, but that gift from Kelly has kept me coming back year after year. It’s a gift I want to pay forward all the time. Our broader culture trains us to see each other as competition. Our bosses cajole us into a greater efficiency. Annually, we must explain how we will be more perfect next year. We are constantly admonished to improve. The political drama down the street is not a healthy model either: manipulative power plays, deliberate mis-interpretations, absolutely no tolerance for mistakes. In contrast, this community embraces our full humanity. The inevitable pressures of life—the fragility of health, the crashing weight of mortality, our defensiveness, our evasiveness, our impatience—we have made room for these human things in our church covenant. Our covenant reminds us to come into each encounter gently: Assume people mean well. Be loyal to the absent. Raise issues directly, promptly, bravely and in person. What I find so powerful about this community is that I feel bound by all of you to reflect on my own role in every interaction. I cannot slip into a defensive posture of self-righteousness, because I am among people who are also doing what they think is right and good. If I do slip into that indignant place, I find that I am gently redirected. This doesn’t mean that I can’t argue passionately and loudly for what I believe, but it means I can’t demonize or dismiss. I have to listen. This is the best place I know to practice being the kind of person I want to be. I have been very earnest up here. The covenant is a very earnest document. But one reason why I think this church works so well is that we are a playful group. We are a funny group. We are an imaginative group. We are an ambitious group. Just last weekend, a lot of us were here in this room dreaming about where we want to be as a church in the future. Let me tell you, we dream big. We dreamed that current UUA President Peter Morales was so impressed with our dynamic, multicultural congregation that he came here to assist Reverend Liz as our Associate Minister. We dreamed that we had a new platinum LEED solar powered community performance hall. We were not only off the grid, we powered the whole Hillandale neighborhood. We dreamed that U2 opened for UU2, our house band. Bono was very honored to be here. We have a lot of fun as a community; we use our humor to help us see what we love about who we are and who we can become. As we continue to dream big, we need to remember that the foundation for all our work is a community that listens, respects and encourages each of us, a community that teaches us that we can be both human and awesome, a community that we each create as we live out our covenant every day. I learned these lessons here, but I also learned them from my mom. When we talk on the phone, I can hear how much she cares about restoring funding to Planned Parenthood, and how glad she is that she drove someone to a doctor’s appointment. When I talked to her about this sermon, she reminded me that back when I was in high school, we both worked with the Winchester Star, an all-volunteer paper created to shine a bright light on our town. Along with women who are still my mom’s closest friends, we stayed late into the evenings, writing, editing, and laying out the paper. I loved how it felt to think together, laugh together, to celebrate our community together. My mom suggested a reading that I’d like to close with. This piece is often read in Universalist congregations. It goes like this: Love is the doctrine of this church, The quest for truth is its sacrament, And service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace, To seek knowledge in freedom, To serve human need, To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine - Thus do we covenant with each other and with God. Amen.