These Vital Threads

September 1982
Lakeland

[Editor’s note: Rev. Westman begins with some introductory remarks]

Welcome to our regathering for a new year of services.

Calendars can be confusing. The calendar year is January 1 – December 31. Our fellowship fiscal year is July 1 – June 30. Our year of Sunday services is September – June.

But there are precedents – the Jewish New Year begins this month.

I read that at least until the time of Peter the Great (who modernized many things), the Russians calculated time from the moment they believe Earth was created – [so it was] not 1698 (in Peter’s time), but 7206. The New Year began September 1, not January 1 – this stemmed from the old Russian belief that the world was created in Autumn, when fruits and grains were ripe and ready, not winter when all was snowed in.

While we can’t authentically claim such ancient cultural roots, this is a time of beginning again.

Our purpose is to celebrate life – with its joys and sorrows, its ironies and dilemmas, its hopes and fears, its historic moments and day-to-day living.

To those who may be inquiring if Unitarian Universalism is a religion for them, we provide no easy answers. Respecting each other’s persons and convictions, we seek truth for ourselves and for our world; many of us believe there is an uncommon need for common sense in religion. We aspire to enhance and deepen our understanding of life.

Each of us is on a journey through life. Here is a regular shared stopping place for friendship, freedom, and human dignity.

[Editor’s note: end of introductory remarks]

In the weeks since we last gathered, the hand of death has touched two of our beloved members, Barney Kuchalis and Roy Eichleay.

Life is a procession. We march from a mysterious origin to an unknown future. Comrades join, comrades fall out along the way of our human journey. Yet those who join, those who drop out, are not nameless entities – they know us, we know them by name, by presence, by relationship, by memory. As I call to mind Barney and Roy, John Donne’s words speak:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

We will remember.

Aldous Huxley wrote to a friend on the death of her husband:

“These vital threads that link the present to the past – how many of them have already been broken, and how increasingly often, as one grows older, does one receive the news of yet another break! And the questions keep multiplying. How are we related to what we were? Who are we now and what were we then? And who were the others – in our minds, in their minds, in the mind of omniscience? There are no answers of course – only the facts of living, changing, remembering, and at last dying.”

These vital threads – though they break they are still strong in our minds and affections.