I was twenty-one and studying
history at McGill when I decided to become a Unitarian
Universalist minister. Trooping over to the Unitarian church every
Sunday morning, singing in the choir and reorganizing the church
archives were the one part of my week that had nothing to do with
university life, and it was at one of those Sunday morning
services, during a sermon on B. F. Skinner that, strangely enough,
the idea of ministry popped into my head.
I must say, it was a really weird idea to have
in the early 1970s. I knew hardly any ministers, none under the
age of fifty, and I had never even heard of a woman being a
minister. I had taken one church history course, but in terms of
direct experience I was unfamiliar with any religion other than
Unitarianism. I had never particularly thought of myself as
religious or spiritual, although I looked forward to attending
Sunday services. And every time I mentioned the idea of becoming a
minister to a friend or a teacher, I could see they thought I had
lost my mind. It was just the kind of response guaranteed to pique
my interest.
I told my minister I wanted to join him in the
profession. He warned me that women don't make good ministers. The
idea sounded even more appealing. I went to a career counselor at
McGill. He laughed and sort of sneeringly suggested I might want
to join the Canadian military and become an army chaplain. Then he
got down to the business at hand. He told me I really wanted to
become a lawyer or take my MBA. For the next hour he explained
about LSATs and Graduate Record Exams and about applying to three
top schools, three middle schools and three bottom schools in each
field.
I think it was as I left his office, clutching
reams of application forms, that I actually made my decision. I
still knew almost nothing about ministry. But I knew one thing for
sure. I was going to be one.
Yesterday Charlotte, our daughter, turned
twenty. She and her friends are at that same stage in life I was
at when I decided to enter the ministry. Remembering how
thoughtfully I made my decision, and reflecting on all the wisdom
I've accumulated since then, I thought it would be prudent to
offer Charlotte some advice -- in the form of a sermon -- for her
birthday.
I am a bit nervous because when Charlotte was
nine and I gave her a violin for her birthday, she burst into
tears. And when I asked Mary, my best friend, what I'd done wrong,
Mary yelled at me and said I was stupid. "You're supposed to
give your children a present they want for their birthday, not the
present you want to give them." I'm not sure a sermon is
exactly what Charlotte wants for her birthday. In fact, when I got
up enough courage to actually tell her my idea she said she
thought it was about the worst idea she could imagine. But by then
the title had already appeared in the newsletter. We've been
talking it over though, and I can assure you we've come to an
understanding. Letting me do this sermon for her birthday is
Charlotte's birthday present to me. So, here are my words of
wisdom for the next generation, my advice for the leaders of the
new millenium. Here is my present to myself on the occasion of
Charlotte's twentieth birthday.
First, Charlotte: "Go jump off a
cliff." As you contemplate your place within the world's
unfolding, don't reason that demographics indicate there will be a
need for teachers in a few years. Don't say, "My mother
always wanted me to be a doctor." Don't even ask yourself,
"What am I good at?" My advice is, toss around some new
and totally weird ideas. Ask yourself, "What would I love
doing more than anything in the world?" Entertain your
wildest dreams and then go jump off a cliff.
When I enrolled in theological school and moved
to Chicago, I knew nothing about being a minister. But one of the
tasks on the list of requirements was to work as a hospital
chaplain for three months. So I signed up to do it the summer
after my first year of classes. Here's the scene. It's my first
week as chaplain in this desperately poor, inner-city hospital on
the south side of Chicago. I'm on call, the only chaplain in the
whole place for the entire night. Every time a death occurs, the
chaplain is called to offer comfort and help to the family, who
are, understandably, upset. I'd never seen a dead person before,
never mind helping a family deal with their sudden loss. I was
called five times that night. The first call came when a
four-year-old was brought in. His mother was single, in her teens
and had gone out for the evening and left him alone. He had fallen
out of the seventh floor window onto his head. The police could
not find the mother so they had called the child's grandmother,
who was there with her son. It took that baby three days to die.
The mother was arrested, but I met her when a guard brought her in
to see her child one last time. The grandmother was there and
wanted to kill her daughter. And I was there, the hospital's
immediate response to the emotional needs of the entire extended
family. My advice is if a cliff looks intriguing, jump off and see
where you land.
Second word of advice: "see with your own
eyes." Yes, see with your own eyes, think with your own mind,
speak with your own voice, act on your own principles and be your
own person. There are all sorts of lenses you can look through,
boxes you can jump into. You can be a liberal or a conservative.
You can be part of the black trench coat gang or the jocks and the
cheerleaders or the nerds. You can respond just the way engineers
might be expected to, or commerce types or arts students. You can
be a fundamentalist or a feminist, a red neck or an
environmentalist, a vegan-pagan-Buddhist or a Unitarian. Whatever
your party, you can follow the party line, for there are no
shortage of world-views to mouth. But my advice is: Don't do it.
All those canned worldviews are a response to yesterday's reality.
How could they not be? A leader, and I believe leadership is the
central task of every adult, to be a leader means first and
foremost, being your own person, being an individual. Look at the
world. What do you see? I know a million people who'll tell'ya how
it is. But what do you see? Speak and act out of your own reality.
Look beyond the old grids to new truths. Define yourself.
There was an all-day conference at Convocation
Hall last year on defining the New Left. Five leaders on the left
outlined their answers for the new millenium and then debated with
each other and with the audience. You know what was so great about
that day? There was no unanimity, only five individuals with five
unique perspectives on a variety of issues. When I decided to
enter the ministry no one thought it was a good idea. In fact, I
don't think anyone even understood what I was talking about. But
did that matter? Same thing happened when I decided to marry a
black American from Chicago. Same thing happened when we told
everyone we were going to share a job. Same thing happened when we
decided to skip the hospital and let Charlotte be born at home.
Each time our decisions were based upon our own thinking about our
own situation as we saw it. Since I became a Unitarian minister,
many times I have not been the kind of minister other people
wanted me to be. But that's okay, because I have been the kind of
minister I needed to be. I'm not saying don't listen to others.
But I am saying, listen very carefully to yourself as well. See
with your own eyes, think with your own mind, speak with your own
voice and act on your own principles.
Third: take care of yourself. You are of
absolutely no use to anyone if you don't. Life is not easy.
Especially when you go around jumping off cliffs all the time. It
is physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually
challenging. So find ways of taking care of yourself. Find ways of
gaining sustenance when you feel depleted, depressed, hopeless or
afraid, because if you live life fully, there will be times when
you feel all those ways and more. When you jump off cliffs,
sometimes you land on rock, and then you need a strategy for
healing yourself so you can go out and do it again. If you look
with your own eyes and think with your own mind and speak with
your own voice there will be times when people think you are
crazy. They may even be angry at you. Can you feel when you are
under stress or anxious? Do you have a plan if life backfires? If
your boyfriend dumps you or your best friend dies or all your
dreams suddenly seem destined for destruction? Those moments of
challenge or crisis will happen, because they happen to everyone.
How are you going to get through them stronger than ever? To take
care of yourself physically, you need to be sensitive to your own
stress and anxiety levels and learn how to relax. You need to eat
right, sleep right, exercise right. To take care of yourself
emotionally, you need really healthy strategies for dealing with
other people and with mind-numbing urban society. You need
emotional intelligence and good solid friends, a number of them,
who love you for who you are. Have you already built those
friendships? To take care of yourself spiritually, you need a
centre, a solid, sustaining core inside yourself from which you
can draw strength and peace. When depression, rage, terror,
boredom or hopelessness strike, as they will, you need to be able
to find a stillness, hold a stillness, let a stillness carry you
into a space of inner peace and renewal. Take good care of
yourself. Be your own best friend. You are of absolutely no use to
yourself or anyone else if you don't.
Fourth: "Live by your principles." But
wait. What are your principles? Your highest values? Who is your
god? Do you know? Do you have a clear enough understanding of your
principles that in the midst of the chaos of everyday life, in the
midst of crisis, you will be able to see a clear direction? Every
religion advocates a set of principles. Chief among Christianity's
is the principle of Love. Love your neighbour as you love
yourself. Love your god. Love the weakest among you, those whom
others shun. Even love your enemies. Christianity is clear: Turn a
divided world into one world. Make connections through love.
Judaism has principles as well, one of them being: you are God's
chosen people; now act like it. Treasure yourself and do the best
you can to be a model for others and a savior of the world.
Unitarian Universalism has seven principles affirming the inherent
worth and dignity of every person, promoting justice and calling
us to living in harmony with one another. Christianity has
principles. Judaism has principles. Unitarian Universalism has
principles. But what are your own principles? Are they clear? Do
they guide your living and your choosing? Principles help us
decide which cliff to jump off, help us decide between jumping off
the cliff called theological school or the cliff called cocaine
addiction? If we're going to see through our own eyes instead of
the lenses and labels of others, it is our principles that will
guide us in turning our seeing into an understanding out of which
to speak and act with authority.
One of my principles is that no one wins unless
we all win. There are no good guys or bad guys. Life is not about
one team winning and the other team losing, for as soon as we
divide the world, we all lose. Isn't that the lesson from
Columbine High School and the public transit office in Ottawa and
the trial of Reena Virk? Isn't that the lesson of Kosovo and
Yugoslavia and now from another high school in Alberta and a gay
pub in London? There is no way to separate yourself from the
outsiders. Unless we all win, unless we work at bringing all the
outsiders inside we all ultimately lose. I must say this is a very
unpopular principle in Ontario where the myth abounds that the
world is basically made up of good guys and bad guys. Every time I
turn around I'm told our problems are caused by some bad guy or
other: Mike Harris or the teacher's union, the gun lobby or the
tree huggers, the multinationals or the homeless, the 905 soccer
moms or our most recent immigrants. It doesn't matter which side
you're on. When are we going to start working together instead of
working so hard to tear each other down? It's not like we're going
to win as soon as they lose. There are no winners unless everyone
feels like a winner. To know what your principles are, to live by
them, is not just to speak with your own voice, but to speak with
the voice of authority and honour.
Charlotte, I've only listed four pieces of
advice and already I've run out of time. Do you think you'd let me
do another one of these on your next birthday? Yesterday, I was
telling Uncle Andy about all the wisdom I was going to impart this
morning. For those of you who don't know, I was at the St.
Lawrence District annual meeting in Syracuse yesterday, and Uncle
Andy is the minister in Schenectady. At any rate, while we were
talking Anne Orfald, the minister in Peterborough, came over. And
Andy turned to Anne and said, "Charlotte's birthday is today.
She's twenty. What advice would you give her?" Anne looked
down for a moment. Then she looked up, smiled and said, "Tell
Charlotte to enjoy life." Then she stopped talking.
"Isn't there more you want to tell her?" Anne thought
for a moment then shook her head. "No, that's all. Just tell
her to enjoy her life." So, I guess it's time for me to stop
talking. Happy birthday. And don't forget. Jump off a few cliffs
now and then. See with your own eyes and speak your mind. Take
care of yourself and your friends. Live by your principles and
above all, don't forget to enjoy life.
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