delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pittsfield, MA today
Small—capitol S– embodies inherent spiritual paradox. It exudes a spiritual mandate to hold insignificant and vast in the same breath, minute and cosmic in the same moment.
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows.” So said the 20th century Hindu guru, Nisargadatta Maharaj, who taught non-dualism.
Carl Sagan once wrote, “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only
through love.”
“I want to be small but not so small that I am easy to miss,” tells us the poet, Thylias Moss, and the illustrator, Jerry Pinkney, in this morning’s children’s time.
“I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough,” says the poet, Rilke, in our reading today.
The Unitarian Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote about his experience of being in the woods,
“Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
We are taught, according to logic, that small and large, or their various synonyms, are opposites, that they fall into the realm of one-or-the-other, perhaps even contradictions. It is not rational to say that one is both small and large. Yet even the great advocate of Reason, Emerson himself, sees no contradiction: “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
I love that last phrase: part or particle of God. I’m not even sure I know what it means, but I feel its deep and abiding truth.
“Be humble, for you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars,” comes to us from Serbia. There is it again. Our perfect imperfection. Mind and heart, not as opposing dualities, not even as complementary qualities, but of the same essential cloth, distinct and reinforcing, renewing, regenerating.
I do not want to paint an overly pretty picture. Small is not always good. There are unpleasant and unredeemable connotations. Take puny, for instance. Where we might be able to rescue and reframe “small,” puny is unredeemable. Who wants to feel puny? That’s the guy on the beach who gets sand kicked in his face.
My friend Anne is now a hospital chaplain, full of deep compassion, sharp wit, and righteous sense of justice. She used to be an immigration lawyer, seeking asylum for all sorts of people from all over the world. You might not be surprised that after decades of stories of torture and denial of applications, she’s a bit on the cynical side towards our nation’s government. The other night she was describing Room 405 in the federal building in Hartford. It used to be where immigration officials work. There is a waiting room, full to the gills with people, whole families, small children, made to arrive on time, made to wait interminable hours, yelled out when their kids run around, made to feel puny. Unworthy. Insignificant.
About a year ago, one of my congregants died at the age of 91. He had worked for one of those big insurance companies back in the day. As his surviving son reflected on how well the company treated his father in retirement, his son said, “They didn’t treat him like a cog in the wheel. They treated him like he was part of the machine. It’s not like that anymore. But it was then.” They treated him worthy. A small and worthy part.
Worthy but not arrogant, not self-important. It’s a connected sense of Small, it’s a contextual sense of Small. It’s one where I may be a small piece, a speck, a fragment, but I have a place. I may not (yet) know that place, but I have one – and somehow, in that paradoxical way, the wide vastness of the cosmos gives me a greater sense not of belittlement, but of belonging.
It makes me think of the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s famous, “pale blue dot,” a photo taken in 1990 by Voyager One space probe as it was leaving our solar system.
It’s an image of the earth but you can barely tell, because it’s taken from 3.7 billion miles away. From that perspective, the earth looks like a tiny “mote of dust” in the midst of an never-ending sunbeam. Here is what Carl Sagan said in 1996 while reflecting on that Small:
“On [that dot], everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
He continued,
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. …To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Emerson also wrote, “Nature says – he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me.” If Emerson were alive today, while I like to think he would condone our widening his sexist language, but I’m pretty sure he would be displeased with our widening the concept of Nature, but we shall do it anyway: “Nature / Cosmos / God as you know Her says: you are my creature, in spite of your impertinent griefs. Within me, you shall be glad.”
Just a few days ago, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson was interviewed on the public radio program, Fresh Air. He was asked about another scientist who complained that a show deGrasse Tyson had curated at the Hayden Planetarium had left him feeling, well,…small. Here is deGrasse Tyson’s response:
I think if you walked in there with an ego that says I’m large, I’m important and I’m significant, [the show’s] going to hurt. This information is going to hurt. And so I think he went in there with the wrong attitude. …
I claim that if you went in there with no ego at all and then you saw the grandeur of the universe, recognizing that our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy, then you would see the universe as something you participate in, as this great unfolding of a cosmic story. And that, I think, should make you feel large, not small.
This is my third time to be with you here in Pittsfield. I am scheduled to return at least twice more and I look forward to that. Still, we barely know each other. So what I am about to say may sound like I am taking liberties. So I want to be clear that I offer this observation tentatively and humbly:
I don’t know why you don’t have a minister.
I know, I know: money. No doubt there is truth to that. I don’t need to see your budget spreadsheet. I am sure it is daunting and feels prohibitive. And this is not some self-serving commentary: I am too many years away from ordination for this to be relevant to me. Still, I don’t know why you don’t have a minister. I am going to guess that there are some very good reasons, some of which are still true and relevant, while some are probably old and have outlived their usefulness.
For the past nearly two years I have been serving a small officially-UCC church at which we are lucky to have 16 people at any given Sunday worship (except during July, when our ranks swell into the hundreds). I have regularly preached to 8 people in the pews, and on at least one occasion: 5 people. They have an old building that works sometimes and doesn’t work at other times. For instance, the clock in the steeple is accurate twice each day.
Yet those stalwart 8 -18 people are just about to vote to hire a part-time minister.
They have dwindling numbers and a rising average age. They meet for worship only twice per month. They are by all accounts and measures, small. Yet they are choosing to belong, to be a part of something greater, and that changes that lower-case “small” into the capitalized and paradoxical, the mighty “Small” of which I have been speaking.
Choosing to have a minister is not the only way to become upper-case Small. Maybe you know the Alban Institute’s book, Born of Water, Born of Spirit. This book, with its Christian-soaked metaphors, has much to offer small congregations of all faith perspectives. Its authors believe
that just because a community cannot pay a seminary-trained minister—a growing problem in remote regions—it does not mean that there is no ministry there. It does mean that we need to look at ministry and the church in a more expansive way.
So if professional ministry isn’t the answer (and I kinda think it is at least part of the answer) then what else?
Don’t be small. Be Small. Belong. Take part in the wider Unitarian Universalist presence. Take part in district happenings, like the district-wide assembly on April 26 where the new UUA Moderator – for the whole national organization – will be present. Take part in district learning opportunities, in person or virtually. Connect with Village Church only half an hour away as they explore a likely path to becoming a UU church. Experience that you are very much a part of a larger (though not quite vast) faith movement that is vibrant, and misses you. Invoking our story from this morning, don’t let yourselves be so small that you are missed.
It is when we know our Smallness, we know we are a part of something larger than ourselves. We know that we are not the ends, and neither are we the means, but that we are a part – a fragment yet, but we are a part of some greater Whole. The 20th century Jesuit mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin tells us that,
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.
I think this is why some of us still gather together – Sunday mornings, Friday nights at shul or Friday afternoon for Ju’maa prayers, Wednesday evening vespers or Thursday night meditation – even though the trend is against it (or against many versions of this congregational life). The longing is there and the longing is deep. We feel small of the puny kind and long to feel Small in the vast and connected kind.
In this seeking each other out, fragments and Wholeness, human creatures and godly Mystery, deep fullness and essential emptiness, we become not opposites, not contradictions, but spirit-filled paradoxes just outside our own grasping. It brings with it the possibility of transcendence, of becoming Small and Vast at the very same time, which is another way of saying there is no separation:
- not between us as stardust and that stardust “out there;”
- not between us and God/Love Eternal/Ultimate Source/Deep Spirit; and
- not between us and this pulsing planet that we have for too long treated as possession, but which breathes and lives.
There are times we need to be reminded of our capacity for transcendence – a reminder that is sometimes nearly impossible to find in the coarse and cruel interactions of human beings with one another, alienated as we can become, from our Source. Emerson wrote of finding such solace in nature; some of us find it in the young faces of children; and some in the flurry of stars always there, day or night, always — always –there. So we look out to the heavens and look back to the whole of this planet, this cherished blue mote of dust, to find our compassion and kindness for one another, a sense of belonging that transforms our smallness into a Mighty Smallness, connected and ever a part of that which is greater than ourselves.
Amen. And blessed be.