Companionship

October 15, 2000

In his great sermon entitled "You Are Accepted," theologian Paul Tillich speaks eloquently of the experience of acceptance, which he equates with grace:

You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept that you are accepted.

All of us, I am certain, yearn for acceptance. But many of us, and I include myself in that company, have difficulty believing that it is true for ourselves. "The greatest happiness of life," wrote Victor Hugo, "is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or
rather loved in spite of ourselves."

In spite of the best efforts of family and friends, many of us remain unconvinced that such acceptance is for us. We feel unworthy. How could anyone love us? Some of us are struggling to recover from a guilt-based religious upbringing and the threat of an angry God. We cannot possibly believe that we are accepted, in the words of the old hymn, "just as we are." Only after an impossible transformation would we ever be acceptable "in the eyes of God."

More often than not, we feel separated and alienated from what Tillich named "the Ground of our Being," and others have named God. He called such alienation and separation "sin": "Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone," he wrote, continuing,

Perhaps the word "sin" has the same root as the word "asunder." In any case, sin is separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all [people]
from the Ground of Being.

The word "sin" originally meant something akin to "missing the mark," as in an archery contest. So I'm not talking here about some inborn stain of corruption, and I don't think Tillich was, either. This has nothing to do with "original" sin. But all of us, to one extent or another, have had occasion to miss the mark, whether in our relationships to ourselves or to others or to the natural world of which we are a part. And most of us are no kinder to ourselves than we are to others. But, certainly, all of us long to be accepted as we are.

Acceptance, someone has said, is the beginning of change. And of course, some of us need to change! We know this without being told. We know where we have missed the mark, and we may even know what we ought to do about it. But without the sense of acceptance, such change is impossible. Without acceptance, we remain separated from all that would heal us.

I admit that I am an idealist. But one of my visions for the church is that it should be a place of acceptance. After all, Unitarian Universalists have always claimed that "God is love!" The church should be a place where, as one of my friends has said, you can "come as you are!" with all of your faults and foibles. The church, after all, is not for the "already saved," that is, the already whole. No, the church is a place for working out our salvation with what the philosopher called "fear and trembling." And by salvation, I mean our wholeness and our health.

Why do we come here on Sunday morning, if our mother or father didn't make us? Is it because we believe we have already arrived? Is it because we have already found peace, already have our proverbial acts together, already feel in our hearts that we are acceptable people? Somehow I doubt it.

Rather, what I think we come for is companionship, a term which includes not only the idea of company and fellowship, but of conviviality. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a companion as "an associate at table or at the bottle." I like that definition, not because I am advocating over-imbibing, but because it sounds like fun. We are not a bunch of sticks-in-the-mud, after all! Companionship doesn't have to be dry or boring or esoteric or touchy-feely, God forbid! This is New England, after all. And I'm from Maine where we don't do touchy-feely.

I'm learning, though. And I suspect that most of us who come here on Sunday morning come at least in part to escape the feeling that we are alone. Otherwise, why not a solitary walk on the beach? Why not a round of golf? Or, if we want to be alone, at least we come here to be alone together. We seek companionship, even if it is only the silent companionship of fellow seekers along the way.

Or perhaps it is that we seek something more. God is an open question here, of course, but could it be that some of us come here seeking a sense of cosmic companionship? My colleague in Weston, Tom Wintle, speaks of God as the feeling of companionship along the path of life. "God means not having to be alone," he has written. But it doesn't matter what we call it. Besides, as Tillich said, we do not know the name. "God" is only our name for something which is ultimately unnamable. Could that something be a sense of companionship, of atoneness in the universe, which we so desperately seek?

I suspect that, whether we know it or not, we come seeking both kinds of companionship, the human and the divine. Not that those two are mutually exclusive, because I believe they are not. How important is companionship? Well, as the morning's reading suggested, it may be a matter of life and death. As the Responsive Reading put it, with truth, "we need one another." Some of us hate to admit it. The rugged individualist is still alive and well in some of us. Emersonian self-reliance has been misconstrued by many of us to mean that we can do it all on our own. "What, me ask for help?"

But Emerson, we tend to forget, was a theist, albeit a non-traditional one. For Emerson, self-reliance meant living-out our God-given gifts in the most honest way possible. Which would begin by accepting ourselves as we are, with all of our own unique attributes and insights. Emerson believed in seeing the world with our own eyes, and not taking other people's words for it. "Insist on yourself; never imitate," he said.

For Emerson, nothing was so holy as the individual, not because he was selfish, not because he thought we should live in a bubble, or go it absolutely alone, but because he believed that what was truest in us was also truest to God. For Emerson, honesty and authenticity was all. For only thus could one have what he called a "first hand" relationship with God. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself," he wrote.

And although Emerson was reserved, he seldom missed a Sunday morning in church, and though he claimed to find "books in babbling brooks," and God in nature, he saved his best for his wide circle of close friends. He was not nearly the loner that his neighbor Thoreau was.

"Existence is separation!" wrote Tillich. At least, that is our perception of it. We come here to contradict that reality, at least for a little while. And sometimes, as those of you who come regularly know, we do! We come here, I think, to rediscover our connectedness. We want to believe in it. Poet Denise Levertov describes what it is we come seeking in her poem, "The Thread":

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me--a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic.

Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it
when I thought it had loosened itself and gone.

We come here for that "stirring of wonder." We want assurance that we are not alone in the universe, alone in our joy or our sorrow or our hope or our despair. Sometimes, we are lucky enough to sense it.

"Is it really there?" is an ultimate question. I can only say that sometimes I, too, feel the tug of it.

I feel the tug of it especially when I am able to step back from my daily routine for even a moment, to breathe deeply, and to let my mind go where it will. I feel it when I am alone, if I pay attention, but I feel it especially when I am with other people. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber spoke of the sacred as residing in the profundity of the "I-Thou" relationship. God, if there is a God, is to be found in the companionship itself. "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus was asked, and he answered by telling the story of a Samaritan. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, answering from his jail cell in Nazi Germany, answered that "whoever is near to us and reachable is the Transcendent," even though it be someone with whom we might never otherwise associate, or with whom we might not even want to associate.

Could it be that what we have traditionally called God is here among us, now and always? That the reality we call God is as near to us as our breathing? That we have already tasted paradise in the touch of our friends and loved ones, and in the company of strangers traveling the dark journey with us? "The more we love," wrote Jeremy Taylor, "the better we are; and the greater our friendships are, the dearer we are to God."

That is my hope, of course. I could never believe in a God who is remote or judgmental, a cosmic "guy in the sky" who hears and sees all and whose main purpose is to punish and reprove. I truly believe that we do not need God in order to be good.

But we may need God in order to not feel alone. A God who exists in relationship, a God who is known by love, a God who offers me companionship along the path of life, even during my darkest hours--now that is a possibility that I do not take lightly. For I have felt it pulling at me, and it has filled me with wonder and not fear. Not that it solves every problem, or erases the reality of evil in the world. It is definitely my hope more than my conviction, but it is a hope founded in the real stuff of life and living.

Let us be open to the possibility that we are, indeed, accepted, and that we do not walk alone. May we feel the tug of that possibility, and may we feel the wonder of it. And may it sustain us, from this day forth, until we meet again.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock