Becoming a Spiritual Grown-up

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister &
The Rev. Sarah York, Assistant Minister for Pastoral Care
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

January 11, 2009

Introduction – Rev. Mark Ward

I began this church year in September talking about how the image of religion as a journey resonates powerfully among us. For one thing, it distinguishes us from other faith traditions that see the goal of religion as cultivating and strengthening certain fixed beliefs. We recognize that our religious beliefs evolve over our lifetimes as we change and grow, so we offer this church as a crucible to form, test, explore and act on our beliefs.

And yet, if we conceive of our church life as a religious journey, that leaves open the question of where our religious journey is taking us. I said I was intrigued with the suggestion offered by a number of leaders in our movement in recent years that we might describe that end point as the cultivation of spiritual maturity.

So, for this service I invited Sarah to join me in thinking about how our own paths have led us to an understanding of spiritual maturity. I don’t think either one of us considers ourselves fully evolved, spiritually mature folks in that way. We know we have more work to do and always will. But I thought that for your own reflection it might be valuable to hear our stories – our beginnings, our struggles and the places we have come to now – and our understandings of what it means to be a religious grown-up.

Origins – Sarah York

(available in print version)

Origins – Mark Ward

I think of it as a fall day. My parents, at that point juggling four children under the age of six (they would add a fifth in another couple of years) in their first home, a new ranch-style structure carved out of an overgrown New Jersey farm field, were likely busy with other things. And, as the oldest, I was likely set free to occupy myself while whatever that business was, was being attended to. What I remember was the thrill of being outside by myself and crossing over from the nicely trimmed patch of lawn behind the house into “the woods” beside it.

When I look into my past for the first moment of what I would call spiritual awakening it would be that. In a way that at the time I didn’t have words to describe, that scrubby, second-growth forest intimated that there was something outside this carefully combed and protected suburban landscape that I needed to pay attention to.

Call it wildness, access to a kind of vital energy and beauty alive in the world. It was alluring, awesome and profound. From then on, and, to be honest, ever since, I have sought out the woods for peace and consolation. At the time I imagined building forts and tree houses. My preferred activity with friends was tramping through the forest with no particular end in mind. Just to be there was a joy.

It was at about the same time that we moved into that home that my family joined the Unitarian Church of Princeton. They had just built their new sanctuary and classroom building, and the place would see an enormous expansion in the next decade.

Had you been a Sunday school teacher at the time, I would not have been the one you would have picked out as a prospect for ministry. I didn’t pay attention well, and I had this trick of getting down on the floor and swimming down the aisles of chairs as if I was a merman making my way through kelp in the Sargasso Sea. But the truth is that I liked church. I felt accepted and at home.

My mother, a New England Congregationalist, and my father, a northern New Jersey Catholic, had discovered what was Unitarianism at the time when they were dating and my father was in medical school, training for psychiatry, in Philadelphia. Harry Schofield, minister of the Philadelphia church, did a series on religion and psychoanalysis, and my parents were hooked. At the bidding of my mother’s family, they got married at what turned out to be a conservative Unitarian church in Portland, Maine. They were surprised in the middle of the service when the minister administered communion. But they went through with it, the church bells rang, and they skedaddled back to Philadelphia. Within about a year they delivered me, and when Harry Schofield dedicated me I returned the favor by pulling the glasses off his face.

Religious education in the 1960s was very much on the discovery model: no Bible stories, catechism, or such things. Classes were designed to elicit our thoughts and wondering. Stories from many cultures prompted probing conversations and art projects. Given that it was not unusual that my teacher was a faculty member from the university, they were often interesting classes.

As a teen, I was enrolled in a rather starchy private school in Princeton, so the church’s active youth group was a salvation. I found myself drawn into leadership, chairing the youth group in my senior year and serving as a youth delegate to General Assembly in Washington, D.C. This was before the time of Coming of Age and credos, but as I recall my spirituality would have retained the sense of union with the larger world through nature. It would also have embraced an emerging understanding that connecting with a larger community was key to knowing who I was. 

Coming of Age – Sarah York

(available in print version)

Coming of Age – Mark Ward

The coming of age often begins with a turn away, and so it was for me. The first year of college I checked out a tiny Unitarian Universalist fellowship outside of town. They were delighted to see me, but it just felt strange, and so after attending once or twice I never went back. Through my years in college, though I ended up with a philosophy major, religiously, spiritually I was a drifter. I attended a few of the Sunday morning meetings at the Quaker school where I studied, but there was no there there. Returning home after a year of graduate study, having salvaged a master’s degree in a philosophy program, but with no sense of what I wanted to do with myself, I decided to start attending the Princeton church again.

It was strange, since I didn’t recognize anyone other than parents of people who had been friends, who themselves were now scattered to the winds. But things changed after I came to church one Sunday for special music performance and happened to sit in a row a few seats away from this attractive woman who gave me a bright smile. Debbie and I continued to date even after I moved to New York City, only an hour way, for the Columbia Graduate School in Journalism. I got my first newspaper job in West Virginia and we got married, leaving for adventure in the hills of Appalachia.

In the suburbs of New Jersey I was aware of different religions, but the interactions among them were all very civil and subdued, and to self-identify as Unitarian Universalist was considered respectable, even progressive. West Virginia was a very different world.

My first assignment as a reporter was to cover the local school board, and the board president was the wife of a fundamentalist minister who was deep on a tear against the outrages of what she called “secular humanism” and books associated with it that she and her allies attempted to have banned from the schools.

It was an alarming time, and for Debbie and me it was clear what our only recourse was: we had to find a UU church. We found one, though it was a challenge: a tiny lay-led fellowship tucked away in a low-rent neighborhood looking across the river to a chemical plant. But the little A-frame building served the purpose, and we found there a combination of refugee transplants, as traumatized as us, and a few brave locals, standing up to a vicious tide. It was a time when we realized that we needed to take what felt like our humble, little, liberal values more seriously. And we did. We entered church leadership and joined efforts to help grow that tiny church.

Spiritually, we had gone beyond mouthing our beliefs; we were acting on them as well. We were taking ownership of who we were. We also entered a new stage of life, parenthood, one that gave us a new stake in the larger world.

Coming into Our Own – Sarah York

(available in print version)

Coming of Age – Mark Ward

I have always enjoyed that folk story about the tailor from Lodz who had a dream night after night in which his father told him he would find a fortune under a bridge in Vienna. After much agonizing he finally goes to the bridge and digs and digs and finds nothing there, until a guard stops him and demands to know what he is doing. The man tells his story and the guard laughs, saying, “You fool! Everyone has dreams. I myself dreamed that if I dug in the basement of a tailor from Lodz I would find a fortune.” The tailor thanks the man, returns home and, sure enough, finds his fortune digging in his basement.

I mentioned last fall that I was taken with the image of spiritual maturity as a kind of ripening; that is, in our spiritual journeys we are not just aimlessly wandering or looking for a path to salvation to which we can adhere ourselves. We are cultivating habits of being that fulfill a promise that was born in each of us. That promise, if nurtured and fed, in time will ripen into fullness.

This promise is not someone else’s: it is ours, our birthright, our treasure. Yet, as the story suggests, we do not find this treasure on our own, not walking forest paths or ensconced in the library. We must open ourselves to being guided by the people and experiences that come our way.

My wife, Debbie, has a saying that she offers at moments of challenge: the most important lessons in life I learned against my will. “This being human is a guest house,” says Rumi, “every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness: some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!”

My own awakening to ministry came that way: thrust upon me against my will when the calling I thought I had chosen, journalism, no longer seemed to fit. Tentative at first, each step I took seemed to lead to the next, and amid my doubts the affirmations of those around me, remarkable in their generosity, led me forward.

After nearly five years in this work, I feel I am turning a corner and am finding myself less tentative and more secure, less reactive to others and more compassionate. And, what I have found even more incredible is that each step forward leads me, not deeper into myself, but deeper into relationship: relationship with the people in my life, relationship with this buzzing, blooming world that never ceases to amaze me, and relationship with some sense of the holy, a quality that exists not outside the world and my experience but is inherent to it.

When I pay attention, when I let go of judgments and whatever is bedeviling my ego at the moment, I am present to it. It is both calming and invigorating. It is what “home” feels like. It is a centering place that is not easy to find, but once there I can be present to ambiguity and suffering with sympathy and compassion but not be drawn into them. I can experience simple beauty and joy and act with a generous heart.

This is part of the promise that I think we each bring into the world, the promise to act and respond in such ways: each by our own lights, to be sure, but toward a similar end. It is part of how our lives are completed, how we grow into spiritual grown-ups and ripen into fullness.

May your wanderings bring you to a similar place, a place where, as May Sarton describes it, we, the pursued, who madly run, in a single hour live all of ourselves. And so, like ripening fruit, we give what grows in us to become song, made so and rooted by love.