The Spaces In Between

So much of the suffering and sorrow of this earth is because things aren’t right in the spaces in between. We’re living as if we’re separate from each other, held hostage to the belief that we are living primarily on our own steam. The truth is that we are being held in ways that we can’t imagine, with the air shifting around us because of the way it has slid over the wingtips of those preceding us for millions of years.  We are still flying on the strength of the draft they’ve left behind them.

This message was delivered to the good people at Eliot Unitarian Chapel (www.eliotchapel.org) on Sunday, September 10, 2023.

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Time for All Ages – High Flying Geese, author unknown

Have you ever seen geese flying across the sky? They fly south before winter arrives, to avoid the extra cold weather.  When geese fly long distances, they make a V formation in the sky.

Now, geese are very smart birds.  They know, by instinct, how to keep their flock intact, and how to work together to reach their destination. Those high flying geese are like a religious community in many ways. 

Geese do three things in particular which make for success and create meaningful communities.  These are  Sharing The Lead, Keeping Company With The Fallen, and Honking From Behind.

First – Sharing the Lead

Geese fly in a V formation because the wind rolling off the tips of one bird’s wings helps to hold up the bird just behind it. It’s a basic principle of flying called aerodynamic up rush. The bird in front, at the point of the V, has to work the hardest, but NOT all the time.  It leads the flock for a while, and then another bird comes forward to take the lead.  Geese share the lead and the work.

At their best, the groups here in our church community work the same way. People of all ages take turns as leaders.  When we work closely together as a group, the energy from one individual keeps others involved and refreshed.

Second – Keeping Company with the Fallen.

If a goose gets sick or becomes injured, often a mate or friend will fly down to the ground and sit beside the fallen goose. The partner tries to protect its fallen friend and find food, and it will sometimes wait for as long as a week until both birds can fly again. 

Sometimes a goose gets tired and cannot keep up with the big V formation. It will drop behind, but it’s never left alone to fend for itself. Two or three other geese will fall back and fly just ahead of the tired bird, helping to hold it up and encouraging it along in a smaller V formation. 

Here at Eliot, there are many kind people who look out for those who may be in need. They share food, send cards, provide rides, and much more.  Keeping company with those in need is one more thing that geese and our UU community have in common.

Third –  Honking from Behind

In every flock of geese, there are birds who take turns flying way at the back. They honk loudly and often, partly to encourage their fellow geese, and partly to keep them going in the right direction towards their destination.

Here at Eliot, there are many individuals who honk from behind.  They include ministers, Religious Education teachers, youth group leaders, Our Whole Lives facilitators, Board Members, musicians, pastoral care associates, social justice team members, and so many others.  These individuals teach about life, promote the ministry and mission of Eliot Chapel, and they encourage Eliot members and friends of all ages to use their own unique talents, gifts, and interests to serve others. 

We’ve now learned about three leadership qualities which geese practice to support each other.  I encourage all of you to think about the groups to which you belong, including Eliot Chapel, and remember the high-flying geese.  Just like these smart and effective birds, individuals of all ages serve others and their community well when they do three things:

Share the Lead

Keep Company with the Fallen

And honk from behind.

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Message

I was blessed to serve the Unitarian Church of Quincy IL for 5 years. Quincy is about two hours north of St. Louis on the Mississippi River. Whenever I go someplace new, I look for where I’m going to hike. I try to hike every morning because it sets my whole day right. One of my favorite trails was in Wakonda State Park on the Missouri side. I’d walk its 5 mile trail around a series of lakes that were left after a gravel company finished with the property. In fact, they’re still working on the property next to it and there aren’t many places in the park where you can’t hear the gravel grinder. It runs all day, and if you’re staying in the electric campsites, it’s in full view!

At first sight, Wakonda doesn’t seem like anything special.  There’s the gravel grinder, the lakes are old gravel pits, the landscape is flat, and it’s next to the highway which you can hear from every single campsite.  Trust me I know because I tried to camp there for some peace and quiet!  But there is one thing that makes it a park worth noting, and that’s the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of waterfowl that overwinter here.  They start arriving about now, having left their northern nesting grounds before winter sets in. 

The reason they are drawn to Wakonda is that one of the lakes near the back of the park never freezes, there’s a small island in the center of that lake where birds are safe from coyotes and wolves, and it’s surrounded by corn fields! So it’s got feeding grounds, open water, and safety! It’s the perfect place to overwinter! 

 That’s what ultimately drew me to Wakonda for my morning hike day after day, even on the coldest and most windswept of mornings. If you can handle the bird droppings (which are everywhere.  Your boots will get all mucked up), and the rank smell if the wind is blowing just the right way from the island, this is the place to be – with flocks of geese and ducks constantly circling overhead, flocks landing, flocks resting, flocks taking off, flocks honking to make sure everyone’s there, always in perfect rhythm, with all knowing exactly what they’re supposed to do.   

They know when it’s time to share the lead, when it’s time to keep company with the fallen, and when it’s time to honk from behind.  Let’s remind ourselves of what each of those roles are about: 

Everyone takes their turn as the leader, but they only lead so long.  When they tire, it is their responsibility to fall back and let someone else lead.  The survival of the flock actually depends on it.

Everyone takes their turn at staying with those who are falling back so that no one is left behind and alone.  Everyone is taken care of until they can rejoin the flock. 

And everyone takes their turn at honking from behind to encourage the ones at the front who are working the hardest.  

You ever wonder what it would be like if all of us were born knowing this? Knowing when to lead and when to fall back, when to keep company with the fallen, and when to honk from behind.  Wouldn’t that be nice!  

But that is not what we’re like. We’re not geese. We are a much messier species in terms of our relationships with each other and our relationships with ourselves. In fact, we’re kind of a Drama Queen species, constantly losing our balance and trying to get back to some kind of equilibrium. We aren’t born knowing how to lead, comfort, or encourage. We have to learn these things, often painstakingly. We have to learn that our survival depends on it. And we often have to learn it again and again because we get messed up, or we get attached to the roles we’re playing, or we get shunted into one of the roles because of how those with power see us, or because we just forget! It’s hard for us to remember that we can’t do it alone, that we need others and that we are needed.

In fact, I think that we’re in a time when we are more in danger of forgetting and actively resisting how much we need each other to fly. There have been societies throughout our history that achieve a much better balance than we have. Now I don’t want to romanticize the past. We’ve had enough of that in our country that last few years to know that there’s great danger in imagining some perfect past that in fact never existed. There is lots of ugliness in human history. But I do think there have been times when we were better at flying together. Right now we’re not good at flying together. There are so many divisions that I can’t even pretend to know what to do about that. We seem hell bent on tearing each other down and bringing everything else down with us, especially the earth. It’s hard not to be cynical when we have experienced the hottest summer ever recorded and when someone facing four indictments could be on the presidential ticket next fall.

But we can’t ever think that it’s too late, that things are too far gone to stop trying, to give up, to give in. It’s never too late, ever. 

One of the reasons that I think Unitarian Universalism is so important right now is because our theology is well suited to helping us see a way through this unbalanced time, and not because it can get us to the point of riding into the sunset where everything is fixed. But I do believe that we have something to offer because a core part of our theology is to help each other fly together.

We don’t have some of the elements of religions that can divide us from each other. We don’t have a god at our center so there’s no need to argue about the nature of god or what god expects from us or the rules that god wants us to live by. Lots of Unitarian Universalists have a god in their theology. In fact, 10% of Unitarian Universalists identify as Christian. Others identify as Jewish, as Muslim, and other faiths that have some kind of a god force at their center. And then we have many others who experience a higher power and have a relationship with that higher power outside of monotheism. Many of us pray or mediate to facilitate a relationship with something that is greater than us. That’s very important. But it’s not the center of our faith.

We also don’t have a sacred text at the center of our faith. We don’t have a Bible or a Torah, a Koran or a Bhagavad Gita or any other collection of writings that defines what faithfulness is for us. Not anymore. It used to be the Christian Bible but that stopped being the case for the majority of Unitarian Universalists in the mid-1900s. There are some Unitarian Universalists still alive, including in this congregation, who experienced that shift and there was a lot of conflict about that. There are still some unsettled feelings. But the challenges we have aren’t because we are divided about how to interpret scripture or what our scripture is. We simply don’t see Scripture as the central foundation of who we are as people of faith

So what is the central foundation for us? If it’s not a god or a scriptural text, who are we? Some people get confused about us because they assume that to be religious means to have a God and sacred writings. They think we aren’t even a religion or that we can believe anything we want. That’s not true. We can’t believe anything we want because we have this principle where we covenant to affirm and promote the interdependent web of all existence. We are accountable for what we believe and the impact of those beliefs on the world around us.

So what’s our central foundation, the thing that we revolve around? It’s our relationships. It’s our relationship with ourselves, our relationships with others, and our relationship to the earth.   The sacred exists in the spaces between us and what passes through those in between spaces, one to the other.  To use the metaphors of our story, the sacred happens when a leader falls back and someone takes their place. The sacred happens when someone falls behind and others stay with them.  The sacred happens in the honking that reaches the ears of the ones pushing themselves at the front. 

Our faith is focused on the complex relationships between us. That’s why you often hear the phrase “right relationship” in our congregations. It’s a central theological tenet for us. The big question for us is, “Are we right with each other?”Our vehicles for right relationship are our covenants, the sacred promises that we make about what should happen in those spaces betwee us. The congregational covenant we read every Sunday is oneof the promises we’ve made about what we believe should exist in the spaces between us. This morning we made promises that we hope will happen between our teachers, our children and youth, and our adults. Later, we expressed promises that we hope will be the binding thread between the congregation and those on the board who are both leading us and honking from behind. We will end our service by speaking the promises that we wish to live between me and you as we enter into a renewed ministerial relationship.

This concept of the sacred living in the in between places is how we understand all of life. What is a marriage or a committed partnership?  It’s what exists between committed adults.  The same is true of a friendship, or the relationship between a parent and child, or siblings, or anyone else we care about.  This concept of the sacred living in the in between places extends into the larger social justice issues that we are passionate about, like racial justice, reproductive justice, environmental justice, immigration reform and voter empowerment, to name just a few. 

So much of the suffering and sorrow of this earth is because things aren’t right in the spaces inbetween. We’re living as if we’re separate from each other, held hostage to the belief that we are living primarily on our own steam. The truth is that we are being held in ways that we can’t imagine, with the air shifting around us because of the way it has slid over the wingtips of those preceding us for millions of years.  We are still flying one the strength of the draft they’ve left behind them.

Our theology lives in this always moving air and our mission is to stay in formation in the drafts we create for each other and by each other.  For us, the moving of the air happens when we fill the spaces between us in right relationship through the living of our core values.  

We try to fill the space in between with the following seven values, which are not exhaustive!

First, the value of generosity encourages us to givefreely for each other from all that we have. Second, our value of interdependence invites us to cherish the earth and all beings. Third, the value of pluralism calls us to learn from each other in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Fourth, the value of justice energizes our covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression. Fifth, the value of transformation asks us to be always open to change. Sixth, the value of equity calls us to declare over and over that every person has a right to flourish with inherent dignity and worth. But the greatest of these values is love because ultimately it is the lovethat holds us together in formation and is at the center of everything.

If there is anything we believe, it’s that if we are to have a chance of claiming peace and harmony and right relationship, it’s through living these values. For us, this is the closest we get to salvation, which in Unitarian Universalism is not something that happens after we die. It’s what happens when the spaces between us are rich and pulsing with life. We save each other here and now. This is how we fly and this is how we come home, landing safely, resting safely, feeding safely.

The work of our congregation is to help us learn how to do this over and over, as many times as it takes, to help us remember that this is not only how we survive, it’s how we thrive.

In the coming months, the skies above us will fill with migrating geese. When you see them flying high, each bird is in its place in the V, the air around them shifting through the motion of their wings. Imagine that you are part of them. Imagine that you are the front bird pushing into the wind, the force of your wings becoming a draft for the ones behind. Imagine getting tired and falling back in the V, flying with the drafts created by the ones before you, who you strengthened when you led. Imagine that you have fallen behind and think of those who have stayed with you as you regathered your strength. Imagine that you are one who has stayed behind with one who needs love and care. Always, the air keeps moving, the spaces between you layered with more and more sacred covenants of love. As it is with the geese, the moving of the air between us binds us to each other as we keep learning and learning again and again and again, finding our way home towards the greater truth that we need each other not only to survive, but to thrive.

May it be so.

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This message is the copyright of Rev. Krista Taves. You are welcome to use with full attribution. Permission is needed to share the full message in a worship service.