“language that opens up rather than shutting off. . .”
On this Labor Day, savor the final section of “Images for Our Lives,” the 2003 Berry Street Address by Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas.
Part one can be found here.
Part two can be found here.
“Images for Our Lives”
by Rev. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Berry Street Essay, 2003, part 3 of 3
I want to talk about another element of our linguistic crisis: that is the language of yearning. It’s not only that, but let’s start there.
Early in my ministry I began to question why people were coming to see me. The problems and issues they brought into my study were posed in psychological terms. I knew that there were enough therapists in town to cover the needs of my whole congregation. “Why were they coming to me?” I asked. Perhaps, I told myself, it was because I was a minister. They didn’t have the language to speak it, but they had the depth to feel it. They needed spiritual counsel.
One day, feeling rather bold, I asked a person who was in my office if she had prayed about her situation. Without hesitation, she said, “Yes. I feel like a child again, but I can’t help myself.”It gave me some traction, some place to minister. “Shall we pray about it now?” I asked, not sure of what I would say.
She said “yes” and we did.
I can’t say it was transformative for her. Although I had the keen sense that she, at some level expected that’s what we’d do.
But I will say that it changed my understanding about why people were coming to me. It was because I was a minister! They expected me to ask them about things like prayer. They expected me to take them somewhere beyond that childhood version of prayer they remembered.
I have learned always to ask.
I remember once visiting a woman who did not have long to live. She was a firm skeptic. I knew that. But I thought, perhaps, in this tender moment, she might want her minister to pray her through.
I asked, “Would she like me to pray?” She was so forceful in her “no” that I actually thought I might have given her a renewed reason to live!
So I want you to know that I’m not advocating one path, or one way. These are products of the imagination, not definitions of ministerial methods.
With that caveat, I will say that I am convinced that our congregations need a vocabulary of yearning. And that is prayer. They need an opportunity to name their their relationship with Life in relational words, in poetry, in metaphor. They need to pray.
I was fortunate that when I went to Dallas that prayer was already part of the service. Slowly, I introduced relational words. Slowly I directed the prayer to “God of many names, and mystery beyond all our naming. . . “ Slowly I began to ask for help and comfort and wisdom and strength. Slowly I began to name individuals who needed our prayer, and with whom we were celebrating. I gave thanks for new babies, and grieved over lost loved ones—naming Fathers and Mothers, and Sisters and Brothers who had died. I prayed our inadequacy to face the pain of our days.
This is not a rational posit to a responding deity. It is not a posture of groveling. It is an expression of our yearning, our grief, our gratitude. It has become an expression of our congregation as a whole.
Every once in awhile someone asks me “Who” I think I’m praying to. . . I recall the good advice from 12 step programs. “Just take care of your side of the street” that sage wisdom goes. And that’s what I do with prayer. I take care of my side of the street, with my gratitude and amazement and praise, and fear and anger and hurt. And as well the side of the street that my congregation is on. I figure the other side of the street can take care of itself and we can save the theological discussions for later.
I was lucky enough to inherit from Bob Raible’s ministry in the Dallas church, the closing to the prayer, which I commend to you. People, including Hardy Sanders, who I mentioned at the beginning of my essay—people have said that they wept when they first heard the words:
We pray in the names of all those, known and unknown, present and absent, remembered and forgotten. We pray in the names of all the helpers of humankind.
This is language that opens up rather than shutting off.
This is language that points beyond rather than positing definitions.
This is language that connects us with the yearning of humankind, of all sorts and kinds, rather than setting us apart as literal in our rejection, closed in our disdain, set apart in our determination to reject language that will not imagine anything beyond what we see and know. Remember, “we do live more deeply than we think.” We must, as religious leaders, point through our thinking, connecting to the depths of life, where our people live.
I once was taken with the idea put forth by two therapists about the importance of having a “richness of model.” They said that when people came with this or that difficulty, they found that their ability to overcome their problem was largely based in their “richness of model.” If one had a thin model of life and its possibilities, they would have little probability of finding new ways of living which would improve their relationships. If their model of life was varied and open, with many possibilities envisioned, they would have a much higher probability of adapting to new ways of being (Richard Bandler and John Grinder. The Structure of Magic: Language and Therapy. Also referenced in Roy Phillip’s essay “Preaching as a Sacramental Event” in Transforming Words, William Schulz, ed. p. 25).
“What is it,” we might ask, “that would contribute to a person’s ‘richness of model?’” I wouldn’t want to limit such a discussion among us—but I am convinced that before education, before life experience, before even the quality of our relationships which have brought us along—I would say, one of the possible contributing factors to a person’s ‘richness of model’ is religious imagination.
For that is where we name our experience, that is where we forge our relationship to what is, that is where we know who we are, what we are living for, and where our yearning is.
For what is the poetic, but an attempt to name experience in a relational way?
I can hear Walt (that would be Whitman) saying
You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me. . . (Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” (Stanza 3A) Leaves of Grass, p. 137)Religious imagination opens us to an encompassing “You” of life that takes on a complexity of relationship (a richness of model) we can nurture and cultivate, for ourselves, and for those with whom we minister.
But then there is Harry Scholefield raising a hand and saying, “Wait I have something to say.” This isn’t about preaching, or counseling, or the various ways we speak in our ministries—it is about our own depth as ministers. It is about living into the language of our ministries.”
“How’s your meditative life,” he would say to me.
”You talk about Images for Our Lives. You mean Images for *Our* Lives. Yours and mine. For how can we speak to the depths, if we are living in the shallows of busyness, where more than a few of us abide.
Late in Harry’s ministry he significantly changed the way he worked, trying to have his ministry arise more from the depths of his experience, than from the demands of the moment. He had always memorized poetry, and so he increasingly turned to the poetry he had memorized as a kind of mantra for meditation.
He said that the more he leaned into wisdom words from scripture and poets, and even such prose as the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural—the more he sat with those words, the more they began to associate—with other poems, with experiences in his life, with creative realities entering into the conversation.
What Langer had said about the associative properties of language suddenly became substantive in a person whose life and practice I could see. Here was a man who might have called himself a Religious Humanist. He certainly wasn’t a Christian, or a Theist. He worried over the use of the word God—and yet found solace in the 139th Psalm, found grounding for his activism in the words of the Prophets, especially Amos, and found his inner life peopled with Rumi and Rilke.
Here was Associative Devotional Practice.
Juxtaposing images in a sermon, or using the words God/she to break open the concretizing tendency of language and refresh meaning, are less tools of the trade, and more sources for the soul—certainly where our ministries have to originate if we are to do any good. Memorizing scripture and poetry and prose has become a spiritual practice for me, and a way into the spiritual lives of the very real people with whom I minister.
In other words, juxtaposing words and images began to arise from within my own being, out of my own spiritual practice,” having their own conversation,” Harry might have said—but to my mind, creating the kind of cognitive dissonances that keeps my life open and fresh.
Some of us have “found” poetry. We certainly have enough inspirational writing to keep us going for the next century. But at the end of the poem with which we begin a board or program council meeting—when we all pause for an appropriately thoughtful moment before plunging into the business of the evening—at that moment, where is the “living word?” Where is the word of our lives, of our hearts? Harry was right. It’s where we live. And unless our lives are expressed in those words of inspiration—they will go the way of all concretized words, into the hardened blocks of calcified religion, of no living use or help in the pains and joys of our lives.
I don’t know about your congregation, but mine has within it the full range of human joy and despair. I learned in my years at a church in a University town, that the people didn’t come to church to have an Adjunct to the University. They came to church to nourish their spiritual natures, to give voice to their hopes and their despair, to speak depth to depth with others, finding their natures beyond psychological language, and their purpose beyond political categories—to find meaning, purpose, and understanding in the religious language of the centuries, of necessity broken open yet one more time through association, through cognitive dissonance, through the naming of common yearnings and hopes, as well as failures. Challenging dogma wherever it occurs, in others and in ourselves. And taking religious language back from the fundamentalists, from the literalists who claim it as if it had always been their own. Seeing poetry and metaphor and some amazing examples of prose that serve as a scripture for our time, as much as the scriptures which have spoken to generations before us, before they were calcified and solidified by the process of concretization and allowed to die.
We not only need to invite poets into the rooms of our hearts, but we need to invite our spiritual ancestors as well. They are raising a hand or two, wanting to be heard. If we say, “We’ll listen but don’t use any words that have become solidified in the meantime, no matter how fulsome they were for you”—we will have cut ourselves off, not only from our spiritual DNA, but from one part of the conversation that we desperately need to have.
Our President has called us to a language of reverence. We need a language of reverence. We need a language of forgiveness. We need a language of reconciliation. A language of hope. A language that gives voice to despair. To name a few. That language for centuries, and in countless cultures has been metaphorical, it has pointed beyond itself to something much deeper than it could name. It is our turn to keep such language alive, hold it to our hearts, and speak to the depths of those who so desperately need our good word.
Source: Part three of three, “Images for Our Lives,” Berry Street Address 2003, Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas.
Part one can be found here.
Part two can be found here.
