Sermon by the Rev. Dr. M. Maureen Killoran, delivered at Main Line Unitarian Church, Devon, PA, January 6, 2008 READING from “A History of Main Line Unitarian Church” by Nancy C. Wendell (2000) - used with permission: Some time in the early hours of the morning of February 19, 1990, a fire broke out, to be discovered only when the flames were bright enough to awaken a neighbor child. The fire department was called around five o’clock. Fire companies from eight municipalities responded, and the fire was brought under control at mid-morning. The senior minister, Rev. Bradford Greeley, was away; his wife Catherine notified him by telephone. The central part of the old mansion containing the spacious foyer with its handsome, pillared staircase, the kitchen, library and religious education meeting room, with classrooms above it, was completely gutted. The coffee room looked intact, but the walls were determined to be structurally unsound; it would have to be razed. The office wing was untouched, as were the new RE and meeting-room wings. A Steinway grand piano in the coffee room, which belonged to the Musical Coterie of Wayne, was protected by a fire blanket. It was somewhat damaged, but had been insured – as was everything else. Music director Ron Hockenberry rushed to the scene to rescue two pianos, the harpsichord, and the organ in the meeting room wing, saving them from water and smoke. A few other precious things were rescued also, including the ballroom fireplace, candelabra and such. The cause of the fire was determined to be faulty wiring underneath the kitchen, where heat had built up for some hours before finding oxygen; then flames suddenly engulfed the area. ---------------- SERMON: It’s a “Phoenix Rising” story, and you can’t top that. Everyone who was around back then has their version. If a book were to be written about The Fire, it would be this thick. There would be hundreds of individual stories, and even if you read them all, you still would not know the whole thing. Over the years several influential people, including at least one speaking from this pulpit, have said you should stop telling fire stories. It was a tragedy yes, a Really Big Deal, but now it’s done. You should ditch the Phoenix stories and move on. And I say to you, balderdash. The Phoenix story, the story of this church being destroyed by fire and then taking heart and rising from the ashes, this is a core metaphor for this congregation. Every group . . . every culture . . .every nation . . . has its core metaphors, what Joseph Campbell described as “public dreams.” Evolutionary prophet Thomas Berry wrote that core metaphors “shape our emotional attitudes, provide us with life purpose, energize our action.” Whether it’s the stone tablets Moses received on the mountaintop . . . or trees talking in a sacred grove . . . or stardust evolving into what we call “life” . . . metaphors connect us with our roots, remind us where we need to go. In the words of social ethicist Gibson Winter, "The human species abides in its world through the meanings borne in thought and discourse. . . . [Core] metaphors that give clues to the coherence of things serve to shape human activities even as they are reshaped by patterns of life and work." I’ll take me as an example. My family story begins in 1847. Patrick Killoran was nine years old, the youngest of seven. The Great Potato Famine was decimating Ireland, and like thousands of other peasants, Patrick’s family fled. They booked passage on what came to be known as a “coffin ship,” an overcrowded, disease-laden boat that wound up quarantined on Grosse Ile, a Canadian island in the St. Lawrence River. An exhausted official made arbitrary decisions – YOU, healthy, keep moving. YOU, step aside, you’re sick. Things moved fast for a young lad just 60 days off the Irish bog, and Patrick was stunned to find himself on the dock, alone. As far as we know, my father’s grandfather was the only one of his family to survive. For me, as for many of Irish descent . . . for generations of Jews whose history was extinguished by the Holocaust . . . for all refugees from tyranny and violence . . . for every person of color whose forebears were wrenched from their freedom . . . it is possible to interpret my heritage as defined by tragedy and loss. And yet, as Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel put it, our central human freedom is the right to choose our attitude in any given circumstances. It’s not just the facts of the story that matter, but the aspects one chooses to emphasize. It’s not just the story, but the meanings one chooses as inspiration to carry on. Which brings me to the Phoenix, which most people know as a mythical Arabian bird that rises from the ashes of its own funeral pyre. What I did not know when I chose my sermon title, was that there are dozens upon dozens of phoenix legends . . . from Greece. . . from China . . . from India . . . from Japan . . . from Jewish folk lore . . . I hadn’t put it together that Stravinsky’s “Firebird” was based on Russian phoenix tales and I confess that it took me a while to connect our Phoenix with the Thunderbird of Native American cosmology. This fire-connected bird that somehow manages to live and die and be reborn – if scholars could gather all the Phoenix stories from all the lands they would fill a hundred shelves, and yet we still wouldn’t know why this particular image accumulated such power, why it shows up in the mythology of so many diverse lands. In ancient Egypt, for example, it was believed that the world began in watery chaos. Land emerged gradually, rising from the deep, and there, on the first small island, the first creature – a phoenix! -- appeared. And for thousands of years, the phoenix remained a metaphor for hope, as Egyptians anxiously watched the waters rise in the annual flooding of the Nile. Let’s think about Jewish legends. Remember the Garden of Eden? The apple? Adam and Eve? I just learned that the phoenix was the only creature smart enough to avoid getting kicked out of the Paradise. When Eve was passing the apple around, the phoenix was the only creature that said ‘no,’ and so gained favor in the eyes of the Lord. He got what some of us might consider a rather questionable reward, for Yahweh built him a beautiful walled garden and made the Phoenix responsible for the safety of the world. Except, of course, for a break every thousand years when it burns up and reincarnates. Closer to home, though, Pennsylvanians burn the phoenix in effigy every December, complete with music and dancers and a parade. The festival, which is a growing attraction, is part of Phoenixville’s efforts to revitalize after the 1980’s closing of Phoenix Iron and Steel. Do you hear what I’m saying? The key point of these stories is not the fire, not the burning, not even the resurrection. The point of all the phoenix stories comes down to three things: the honoring of tradition; the sustaining of what is worthy; and the affirmation of what is ready to be born.
. . . as it goes through fire,
Passioned with a rebirth desire
It burns to ashes,
And a new life dashes;
For the Phoenix shall rise.
The Phoenix, you see, will always carry on.
And so we turn again to Devon, and the 1990 fire.
A building burned. That Buddha is one of the artifacts that was salvaged. Those window shutters. The mantel in the Fireside Room. But the building was toast.
“Within a short while the Episcopal priest from Old Saint David’s Church walked up the road, offering the use of his church to MLUC for as long as necessary.” (This is from Nancy Wendell’s history, p. 17).
People pulled together in ways nobody could have foreseen. Committees . . . meetings . . . meetings . . . meetings! . . . hard work by everybody including some who’d never intended to be so involved . . . As one current lay leader said recently, “Until it burned down, I never realized how much I cared about my church!” You’d been in the midst of a building program, and now more money was needed. When the dust settled it turned out that in one year this congregation raised (remember this was 1990) . . . in one year this congregation raised over $1,300,000, setting a record that is still impressive today.
Then it was time to break ground for what grew into this current building, and there was this little Buddha holding court on the edge of the muddy pit. As Nancy wrote, “It seemed to many to be blessing the work.” At the very least, it was symbolically linking the future with the past. Come to think of it, this Buddha lives upstairs in the Wonder Room -- maybe it’s blessing our work today!
Somewhere along the line, the Phoenix image came into play . . . the mythical bird, rising from the ashes. I remember the first time I saw this congregation’s banner carried in the parade at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly . The thousands of delegates knew the story of your fire, and applause was thunderous as Main Line’s banner crossed the stage.
It is an amazing story.
And The Fire, Capital T, Capital F, appropriately remains a key chapter in the story of MLUC to this day.
But . . . (you probably haven’t noticed, BUT I try hard not to say BUT in sermons . . . the word is a stopper. What I’ve said up ‘til now is fine, BUT just wait . . . In its one-syllable glory, the word “but” connotes a world of potential regret.)
And so I am intentional as I say . . . BUT . . . if Your Finest Hour (Capital Y, Capital F, Capital H) if Your Finest Hour took place seventeen years ago, I don’t care HOW dramatic it was. I don’t care how many heroes deserve undying gratitude. I don’t care how many memories draw tears and laughter and pride.
I’m reminded of a man I used to know – I’ll call him Luke. He was close to 70, retired, financially okay. Life should have been good for Luke, but he didn’t seem to be able to shape it that way. After I’d known him for a while I realized Luke was dining out on old memories. He spoke of how, YES, he had a happy marriage, YES he’d raised a good family, YES he’d had a relatively successful career, BUT nothing in the last 50 years had topped (are you ready for this?) . . . his high school years.
When we settle on X as our Finest Hour, what we do, in essence, is put a cap on the quality of experience we allow ourselves to claim today. What happens NOW always lives in the shadow of what happened “THEN.” Given the reality of that wondrous story of tragedy and recovery, given the really great thing you accomplished 17 years ago –
WHO ARE YOU NOW? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TODAY?
In legend after legend, the phoenix doesn’t just climb onto its nest and fry. The whole point of the phoenix metaphor is that the apparent ending is where the story begins. At the heart of every version of the Phoenix legend, is a demand to risk in the present, to fly to the future, to accept the reality that your finest hours (note the plural), your finest hours are many . . . and most of them are yet to be.
Which brings me to the phoenix Garuda, a major player in the mythology of the Hindus. He’s a fearsome creature, Garuda. He’s got an eagle’s beak, head, talons and wings – and he’s got the body and limbs of a man. His face is white, his wings are red, and his body is a burnished gold that flames like the sun.
The legend has it that Garuda’s mother was kidnapped . . . by serpents. They would only release her on the condition that Garuda steal the immortality potion sequestered by the gods in a sacred cave. So off he went, the dutiful bird-son, on a quest for the potion that would get his mother free.
You know about quests: three obstacles before you win the prize. The first obstacle that Garuda had to pass was a ring of fire with flames leaping to the sky. He looked at the fire, and quick as a wink, Garuda turned to the river and slurped up enough water to extinguish the flames.
Next, his way was blocked by a circular doorway guarded by a spinning wheel of knives. Using a good Harry Potter technique, Garuda shape-shifted, shrunk his body down, down down, until as a tiny creature he was able to dart between the whirling blades.
The third obstacle came in the form of two fire-breathing dragons at the mouth of the sacred cave. Here Garuda drew on his eagle-self, using his wings. Up and down, so fast and so hard, he flapped those wings, stirring up the dust until the monsters were blinded.
Garuda ran into cave, grabbed the potion and headed back to the serpent’s lair. The story ends with Garuda triumphantly bearing his mother home, though it notes that, ever after, Garuda had a passionate hatred of snakes.
It’s not all fun and games, this business of mythology.
It’s not all fun and games, this business of life. In the words of poet Adrienne Rich, “there come times – perhaps this is one of them - / when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die; / . . . bestow ourselves to silence, or a [deeper] listening."
What does it mean to take yourselves more seriously – I’m talking about this congregation, and maybe it works for you personally as well. Taking yourself seriously means dealing directly with reality.
It means drawing strength from the past, and at the same time releasing the problems, the resentments, what Scrooge might have called the “undigested bits of beef” that hold you from engaging fully in the present.
Let me risk one more, rather challenging, MLUC story and see where it takes us.
I don’t claim to have the story right. I don’t pretend to have all the details, and I don’t BEGIN to know all the complexities and dimensions of the pain. What I do know is that sometime in the years since the fire, this congregation undertook an experience that’s gone down in history as The Third Service. I know that some people worked very hard, and a large number of high quality, non-Sunday morning worship services were shared.
This is another one of those situations where I could talk with 30 people – in fact I HAVE talked with 30 people – and I have come away with 40 different understandings of what happened. I’ve come away with 50 different hypotheses about why.
For whatever reasons, however it was done, the Third Service experience was brought to an end. There are good people for whom the whole episode is so painful that they are reluctant to talk about it even today. There are good people whose hearts are still knotted because of decisions they felt drawn to make. Leadership isn’t easy. It never has been.
My point is, that this Third Service Experience sits there, a piece of MLUC history that will for most of us remain a mystery. BUT, you know, we all don’t need to know everything. I wasn’t there, neither were probably most of you. Some details can’t be known, because the people who were privy to them are no longer here.
Hear me – We don’t have to drag out every detail about every little thing for a conflict to be laid to rest. Sometimes leaving stuff alone can simply be . . . okay. Sometimes it HAS to be.
What is NOT okay is holding on. Letting the thing become an icon, a dead bird sitting on its nest, if you will, because that’s all a Phoenix is without the purifying flame.
Let it be said:
Once upon a time, sometime in the history of this congregation in the years since the fire, there was a Third Service Experience. For whatever reasons -- and there are good people who understand this in very different ways -- for whatever reasons, that particular Third Service experience came to an end.
AND HERE IS WHERE THE PHOENIX COMES IN.
One lesson we can learn from the phoenix metaphor, is that there comes a time when it is essential to let a problem, a wound, a source of pain, there comes a time to let that be released.
“What is to give light,” said Viktor Frankel, “what is to give light must endure burning.” It must endure burning, and it must come through both whole and new.
On that Canadian island back in 1847, there was at least one family of Killorans numbered among the dead. So it was that Patrick, my father’s grandfather, was abandoned. I don’t know the rest of the story, only that Patrick grew up and raised a family in the hard-hitting mining country of northern Quebec. I do know that he was my father’s father’s father, and so it is likely that Patrick was a rowdy, quarrelsome Irishman. All we know for sure is that he survived. And this is what I choose to carry in my heart -- the reality that I exist because of this child’s courage and the legacy of his life.
Life is much more than the sum of its pain.
And this congregation is oh-so-much more than the sum of its conflicts, its struggles, more even than the triumphal stories of its Fire.
If, as Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies wrote, “A life is just a chance to grow a soul,” then we need to pay attention to what we are doing, not just what we DID.
I say to you that this applies not just to us as individuals. It applies especially to the groups we create, to our beloved communities. The key question is: what are we doing that makes our lives shine TODAY . . .
Because beyond the burning there is always the transcendence of the phoenix.
Beyond the burning there is the light.
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It’s one of those wondrous a-causal connections Carl Jung called “synchronicities,” that those of you going on our upcoming Gulf Coast Relief Trip will be helping restore the 300-person town of Phoenix, New Orleans. This is putting your hands where your heart is. It’s putting your heart to work. It’s walking the talk, where too often as Unitarian Universalists we let our mouths do our justice work for us.
This is only one example, but there are many that tell me this congregation is ready once again to claim its Light.
* I believe you are ready to bond with a new senior minister, to settle in and work together with your ministers for the long haul.
* I believe you are ready to tap more fully the incredible pools of talent that walk in your doors each week;
I believe you are ready to share more generously the financial resources that really are yours to give;
I believe you are ready to coordinate the diverse passions for justice that give meaning to so many of your lives;
I believe, my friends – I believe YOU ARE READY to embrace this congregation’s ability to make a positive difference, in your own lives, yes, and also in the world.
For all sorts of reasons, the 1990 fire may have created this congregation’s Finest Hour to date. You are ready for the story to continue.
THE PHOENIX IS RISING!
As T. S. Eliot said:
To make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
Happy New Year.
(References and notes available from the author.)