By the Rev. Rebecca Bryan
When have you experienced a deep sense of meaning in your life? Close your eyes for a moment, or look out the window, and take a moment to reflect on that question.  

Bring to your mind a memory of a time that was deeply meaningful to you. Don’t make this harder on yourself than it needs to be. It doesn’t have to be the most meaningful moment ever, and it doesn’t have to be a big memory. It can be small. In fact, whatever memory came to you is probably just fine.  

It doesn’t have to necessarily be a happy memory. It is  interesting that some of our the most meaningful moments are not necessarily the happiest of times.  

If we were to compare notes, and I encourage you to do that with each other or others in your life, I am sure that all of our memoires would share one thing in common. That one thing is connection.  

Authentic connection, by which I mean connection without pretense or façade.  

Some of the things that were supposed to be meaningful have not been meaningful in my life. This had nothing to do with the situations or the other people. It had to do with my state of presence or lack thereof.  

I’ll share two memories that came to my mind when I reflected on meaningful times in my life.  

The first was during a visit to my mother when she was sick.  I was resting on the couch, lying awake peacefully in the middle of the night, while she dozed on the chair beside me.  

The second is something that happens every Friday when I first sit to begin writing my sermons. I sit at my desk for a few minutes with my eyes closed and listen to music that a close friend gave me.  

In both of those examples, I was entirely present. I am connected with myself, another person, even by memory, and some sort of something, greater than myself. I call this something God. You may call it hope or flow or mystery.  

Why do I start off the first sermon of this month’s ministry theme of service by having us think about connection? I do so, because I believe that connection is the key to service.  

Here is the link. When we are connected to ourselves, to others, and to mystery, we make decisions about how we serve from a place of calling or authenticity. When we then act, we do so connecting authentically to those people we are in relationship with. When we do those things, serve in ways that we are genuinely called to do and bring our true selves to those experiences, true change for the good can occur. “Service” as I am referring to it is not limited to the traditional things you may think of. How we are in relationship with our friends and family, how we treat others at our job, and how we engage here are all forms of service. Marching, engaging, giving time and money, and your skills — those are also all forms of service.  

Service, as we heard in the reading by Rachel Remen early in the service, is when we seek to connect with others in a spirit of mutual respect and care. Service is not trying to “help” another.  “When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole.”1 Our youth, who you will hear from some next Sunday, have been working with this same concept using the words “solidarity, not charity.”  

When we approach service this way, the concepts of giver and recipient dissolve. Reverend Gary Smith is quoted in the book Soul Work as saying, “In our unison benediction… we say, “Strengthen the fainthearted. Support the weak. Help the suffering. Honor all beings.” Indeed… The great lie is that there is a helper and the helped. The great lie is that we have it and they don’t. If the ‘it’ is food and shelter and education, we do have it. If the ‘it’ is love and spiritual depth and faith and kindness, who can tell?”2  

When we serve, most especially when it is an outgrowth of our spirituality, we do not do it from a place of “should” or “supposed to” or “have to.” We serve because we are called to. We serve when it least makes sense. We serve because we are committed to a set of values, a commitment that eventually changes us. We serve because to do otherwise would never lead us to the happiness we seek.  

We all seek happiness, yet I wonder how does service fit into that equation? This is different from solving the problem or figuring out the cause, though there is need and room for that, of course. I’m talking about how we are in relationship with others and most especially in relationship with those that are, for that moment in time, in need of help, as all of us have been, are, or will be. 

Carl Jung said that “the hands can often figure out what the intellect has long struggled to understand.” In the rooms of recovery, we are encouraged to act our way into right thinking.  

We likely know all of this. Why then, do we not incorporate this action into our lives? Or if we are doing things, and taking action, why is it not bringing us joy?   

The answer can be traced back to authentic connection. This sounds easier than it is. Authentic connection is countercultural, for white patriarchal culture anyway. We are not taught in white American culture to connect in this way. We are taught to put on the good face, to act the part of good child, spouse, parent, employee, you name it. All of these expectations of how to act, more often than not, distance ourselves from who we really are.  

We are masked bodies interacting on a stage with other masked bodies.  

I am not exaggerating.  

There are exceptions.  

Go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, or be with two close friends who tell the truth, image be damned. Imagine yourself with almost any, though not all, dying people. And who can forget, of course, being with newborns? 

Ours is a culture that robs us of our authenticity and then points outward at all of the problems that exist “out there.”  

Peter Gabel in his book The Desire for Mutual Recognition frames this by saying that we all have a desire for mutual recognition, meaning that we all have a deep desire to be known and to know one another authentically. We also all suffer from a deep fear of rejection or, as he puts it, humiliation. As a defense against the prospect of this hurt, we put on masks. We become personas.  

If you doubt this, try this on. Has your child ever called you on how you act “in public” and with them? Have your family members seen you cry? And your friends? Fellow workers? Now, I’m going too far, right? Am I, or is it just the myths that we buy into?  

Children are taught very early to create this false self, in infancy, in fact. They pick up on it, and then they mimic us, creating their own facades and creating their own moats or distance in between their true selves and the other person, to use the language of Gabel. W. E. B. De Bois called this state of withdrawal “split consciousness.”  

Thus, Gabel asserts, and I agree, that the problems in our world are themselves “an expression of a psychospiritual alienation that underlies it rather than the converse.”3  

“If 20,000 children die of starvation each day and if we have sufficient food to feed them, then it is morally required that we discover the reason we are not doing so. ‘We’ are not experiencing the spiritual bond that unites us to each other and through each other to these children…” writes Gabel.4  

He writes about what he calls “social-spiritual activism,” which when employed around a common purpose, begins to break down moats, heal fears, and help us bring our true selves into relationship and solidarity.  Our part is that we need to be brave enough to lay down our masks and be real with one another. We love authentic people. I think of Brené Brown, Anne Lamott, Bryan Stevenson and Mary Oliver. I’m sure that you have people that come to your mind.  

“The only way to heal this existential gap between our withdrawn presence and our relatively absent, or empty, or hollow, social self is through a steady healing encountering of authentic social presence in others, and from others into us through authentic mutual recognition.” 5 

This church can be a place where that begins. We can learn how to reveal our authentic self here and bring it into our daily lives. We have opportunities right now to practice doing this together in the world. Habitat for Humanity is starting to build new homes in Salisbury. We can have a team. I want us to have a team, a cadre of volunteers who show up and help to build. The people at Habitat also need help doing work in their offices and at their resale store and in bringing meals to the volunteers who are building. Habitat needs a team of eight to twelve people each Saturday. If we got 40 people to sign up, we could each go once every other month. Bart and I will be there. We’ve signed up. You can learn more about this by attending the session this coming Wednesday evening at 6:30 or by talking with Howard Mandeville.  

This is not a plug for Habitat for Humanity; this is a plug for acting authentically and collectively, putting our Unitarian Universalist values into action.  

There are many other ways that this is for you to act authentically. I am only just beginning to learn how this is happening in your lives. Judy and Gail with foster care and Richard George with his work with veterans are just two examples. I want to know more.  

I am challenging us all in three ways. First, connect our spirituality and our engagement with the world. Second, live and act from your head and heart. And above all, bring your authentic self to the world. Bring it here, bring it out there. Bring it on.  

It’s not easy — authentic living, genuine connection.   

Mark Nepo writes about this in Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. He writes, “We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.”6   

What is service, if not a way of life? What is life without authentic connection?  Let our lives be our prayers and our actions be our creeds.  

We need to realize that how we live and show up is just as important as how we think and as what job we do or do not have? Barbara Holmes in her book, Joy Unspeakable, writes, “It has taken a while for the realization to set in that education, wealth, consumer goods and careful enunciation will not open liberation’s doors. These are matters of the heart and spirit. Freedom starts as a small ember within; it must be fanned and fed by intentional acts of faithfulness toward God and the nurture of self and community. The neglect of one or the other extinguishes the tiny flame.”7  

Remember, my friends, our time on this earth is limited. We don’t know how long we have. Between now and then, we are all just walking each other home.  

Amen and Blessed Be