A sanctuary can be many things.1
They are places for gathering. They are places for doing the work our souls must have. And for drifting into our calm centres. They are places for speaking. Speaking truth to the powers of our world. They are places for listening. Listening to the lives of the people around us.
They are full of potential. Filled with the potential of our lives’ many needs. What we find here in any sanctuary, in this sanctuary, tells us something. Each sanctuary tells us something about what we carve out of the world in order to make space for something precious.
We make places for gathering when we need connection. We build places for doing in order to store and find resources for our flourishing. We amplify places for speaking to make sure that what matters most can be heard. We soften places for listening so that we can attend to each other fully. Spaces which may not often exist, but which we need for our own wellbeing, and for each other’s.
Even one of these purposes is a lot to ask of any one space. And yet, all of these purposes and more exist side-by-side. Often in harmony, and sometimes in contradiction. The contradictions will sometimes seem so immense that they go beyond reconciling. We believe sometimes that one place, let alone one hour, cannot offer sanctuary to any more than one of these needs. Especially not when they contradict one another. Or seem to, anyway.
The contents of our sanctuaries are abundant and contradictory, and this is nothing new. When we trace this word back to its root, we find sanctuary unfurling from a Latin word. Sanctus, holy. This word bears a history of how we mark the holy. And that this marking has two purposes. Our sanctuaries are places where we exalt the sacred, where we carve out a special home for the Holy. It is a place where we recentre what can otherwise be desecrated. Rituals and holy rhythms. Sacred story and image. Even the sanctity of innocent life itself in the face of violence and oppression.
Sanctuaries, seemingly, have always been full of contradicting possibilities. When the world around us seems to be doing too little, we make spaces for doing what has to be done. When our lives seem to demand too much of us, we make places for drifting at a slower, steadier pace.
But you and I both know that life demands contradictory things of us. Do more, rest more. What though, we might wonder, is a place like this for? A sanctuary, a congregation like this one? And what should its most central hour recentre above all else?
This one is a lively and ongoing debate. So many of us come here for spiritual sustenance. You long for a time to attend to beauty, wonder, and curiosity. You expect that this may be the one hour you can rely on. Where you can have a day of rest from a world of spiritual shallowness. Where the cups of your souls can be filled.
And also, so many of us come here for moral fortification. You long for a time when you can attend to what really matters. Where you can encounter the injustices of our world, and take away some perspective or resource that will help you address them. You expect that this may be the one hour you can rely on. Where you can have a day of rest from a world of moral shallowness. Where the cups of your souls can be filled.
Our faith struggles with the seeming contradiction of giving airtime to both spiritual sustenance and moral fortification. This Unitarian Universalist faith honours our direct experiences of mystery and wonder. And it urges us undo the legacies of racism and colonialism which inhabit us and our institutions just as much. Our faith, holding the whole of the human condition, pulls us into the seeming tension of the spiritual and the material. The pastoral and prophetic. A tension between two needs which we construct as oppositional to each other.
This is not a new tension. When we draw sustenance from the “words and deeds of prophetic people,” when we name their legacies as a source of our faith, we are invoking something ancient. Implicitly and explicitly, we call to memory a long line of agitators. People who spoke to a disconnect between the world as it is and the world as it can be. People who drew attention through their words and actions to ethical shortcomings in the world around them. We remember the people who called for a return to a just, well-balanced world. We join them in saying that another world is possible. Within reach, if only we remember to reach out.
Whether we call them prophets or not, our religious histories are full of people who reminded anyone they could that the world can be different from how it is. More divine. Less rotten from suffering. Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors valued this too, joining other Christians in preaching a social gospel. A gospel which understood their faith, our faith, to be a catalyst for social justice.
Their words and deeds form the Second of Six Sources of our faith and its wisdom. They resonate with our Second Principle, which urges us to seek justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. To bring more of these things into human life. Into a world which has been flattened by injustice, inequity, and cauterized hearts.
And the Second Principle is followed by a Third. Our faith also asks us to accept one another as and where we are. To encourage one another in spiritual growth. This is also how Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes’ defines the “pastoral voice.” Not only to hold ourselves and each other in critical appraisal. Not only to provide each other comfort. But to “accept others, and to encourage growth and change.”2 It is the voice and vision of a pastor. Of someone who can accompany and guide whole people living full lives. People who may live wildly different lives than our own, who come from so many histories and places and experiences. Who bring all their complexities into every space they fill. While I spoke last week about caring as listening, it is more than that. It is holding, encountering, challenging, and nurturing whole people. And if we are going to lead with whole people, we must accept and encounter the humanness of being human.3
If the Second Principle is a loud cry for prophetic witness, the Third is a cry for pastoral religion. Our faith, it seems, asks a lot of us in two principles, never mind eight. And with only an hour together, what is worth our consideration? Our forebears have asked this, too. The Rev. Albert Ziegler, a Universalist minister in the mid-20th Century, reflected on what he saw as an imbalance in liberal religion. He greatly admired the social gospel his contemporaries in Unitarian and Universalist churches followed. Like his descendants, he knew his faith had the power to transform and restore the world. But he also had this to say:
“Society and social good, inasmuch as it affects the welfare of persons, must be the concern of a true religion; but it cannot be the heart of religion, religion’s only or even primary concern. This is the quarrel that religion has with the pseudo-religion of social reform, whether in communism or in liberalism. Ultimate values rest in the individual, not in the corporation….However much social progress is needed, the fundamental good, the true progress, is in the growth of persons...”4
Ultimate values rest in the individual, not the corporation. It is people who make change together. Make beauty together. Make truth together. Not disembodied corporations or social systems. These contain human people with human needs.
This is a perspective which Rev. Dr. Townes also shares, but which comes from a different location. She comes from a tradition seeking wholeness in a fractured world. A Black woman in the United States, she has spent her academic career developing and practicing ethics from a particular view of society and the church. As a womanist minister and scholar, she has experienced and worked against the interlocking oppressions of misogyny and anti-Black racism. Her point of view has allowed her to see the inadequacy of either/or thinking. From her point of view, she has seen the need for deep and radical social transformation. She has also seen the need to remember that people have to be involved, cultivated, and cared for. There can be no social transformation without personal transformation. It is we persons who hold the hope of transforming the social. The social realm will not transform itself for us.
So she claims that we must remember the humanness of humans. The pastoral and prophetic must inform one another. For the prophetic vision and voice to find its way into the world, it must build community. One of “faith, partnership, justice, and unity.” Our communities, and I mean all of them, are full of diversity. Diversity of life experiences and diversity of gifts and perspectives. For prophetic vision and voice to find its way in the world, these must all be brought to bear.
“Few social problems,” she writes,” and certainly not the multitude of social problems that face the contemporary church and society, can be solved with a single strategy.”5 As clearly as she sees the need for all experiences to be encountered and cultivated, she sees that the pastoral and prophetic inform and cultivate each other.
But merely entertaining this perspective may not resolve the tension at the heart of our Sunday mornings. I have also struggled in the tension of needing restoration, but coming to church and hearing only about the pain of the world. I have sought sanctuary only to find a call to arms with no arms available. No means of applying it to my life. Moral smugness in place of moral fortification.
And it is also true that I have sat through services which were intellectually and spiritually fascinating, but frankly, a little lifeless. I have sought sanctuary but found a spirituality with no relation to the life I am living. What I have longed for in our faith is a clear way to reflect deeply on what matters most. To discover how our faith can prepare us for lives in the world. Something which is relevant and sustaining, and available nowhere else. Perhaps you have experienced these things, too.
What I have longed for is something that engages my spirituality and material existence. But which regurgitates neither. I read the news. I practice spirituality. But this is a place where we can encounter the material and the spiritual together. A place which knows we are whole people in the world. People who need transformation as much as we wish to create transformation. This is the potential of our faith.
I believe that the rest we seek is “rest” from an unspiritual world. A world without depth. A world goading us into action without reflection. Into either/or thinking. This time we spend together is precious. Here, we find the potential to reflect deeply on the contents of our lives. To find where our faith touches, nourishes, and fortifies our lives. We will not find that through a spirituality set apart from the world. We will not find that through a world news brief bereft of spirituality. We will find it in a time and place that puts our spirits in touch with the world.
A sanctuary can, indeed, be many things.
1. Wendy Marloe, author, and Joanna Chen, illustrator, Sanctuary (Marloe Press, 2015), 43.
2. Emilie M. Townes, "Ethics as an art of doing the work our souls must have," in Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Westminster John Knox Press: 2011), 42.
3. Townes, 42.
4. Albert F. Ziegler, "One's-Self I Sing," in The Christian Leader, 1959.
5. Townes, 46.