Summer Time – When the U U Is Easy

June 5, 1983
Lakeland

From the East Shore Unitarian Church in Mentor, Ohio, comes the following: “Why Unitarian Churches Close in the Summer” by Patrick T.A. O’Neill.

1. To everything there is a season. A time to be open, and a time to be closed.
2. Unitarian ministers all drive ice cream trucks in the summer.
3. Michael Servetus was burned at the stake on the Feast of the Summer Solstice. In his memory we close for two months of mourning each summer.
4. Unitarians are the only group God can trust to be out of his sight for two months at a time.
5. All Unitarians are working on masters degrees. Taking the summer off makes sense.
6. Small Unitarian churches can’t afford air conditioning.
7. The Unitarian Ecclesiastical Calendar was originally drawn up by the Harvard Divinity Faculty. The “Harvard Calendar,” as it is known, dates back to 1825 and only has ten months. According to Harvard, this is already. [sic]
8. The summer hiatus is the Unitarians’ revolt against the Calvinists’ work ethics.
9. Actually, closing for the summer is a Universalist tradition. It was a concession made by the Unitarians at the time of merger in 1961.
10. We close for the summer to save energy. Closing is ecologically sound.
11. Unitarians are really closet Episcopalians. For two months every year we are secretly very “high church.”
12. We’ve always done it this way.
13. As Tevye says in “Fiddler On The Roof,” the reason we do it is TRADITION!

Yes, many Unitarian Universalist churches do close in the summer months. Many do not. They remain open for Sunday services. The regular minister is usually not on the scene. Frequently there are informal services or discussions led by the members. There seem to be more societies adopting some variety of year-round pattern. Here in Lakeland we cease our regular Sunday meetings in June and resume in September. In May and June our attendance dwindles as our fall-winter-spring members and friends journey north.

So it’s summertime and the U U is easy. We will have our occasional happy get-togethers, but Sunday mornings at 10:30 are a postponed discipline and sharing. Some may be able to participate in Unitarian Universalist activities on a larger scale – Suuusi at Radford, VA, or conferences at the Mountain.

Most of our ministers experience a sigh of relief that for eight or ten weeks the sermon deadline disappears. Speaking for myself, at this time of year if the Sunday sermon schedule continued, I’d yearn to be back in the foundry. The fountain of ideas is but a trickle. The underground reservoir needs to be replenished by reflection, study, playing with ideas, rediscovering who I am, re-confirming what sustains me, enjoying the pause that refreshes. Alfred North Whitehead once said that “religion is what a man (sic) is in his solitariness.” Such a definition is not complete but it is a truth of religion.

We need time for solitary self-knowing. But it is not always easy living. The self can be confused, frightened, torn between contradictory wishes bewildered by the constant concatenation of sounds, disillusioned by the chasm separating life as it is from the life of our hopes. “The transition from consciousness to self-consciousness was one of the critical moments in human evolution.” (William Cantwell Smith). We cannot return to a pre-self conscious experience. But we can use that self-consciousness to understand ourselves an in so doing better understand others.

T.S. Eliot in his poem, “Ash Wednesday” has two lines,

“Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to be still”

It is always a bit presumptuous to read interpretations into the poet’s line, but I will – teach us to be still for in the inner silence there may come guidance in what deserves our caring and what does not.

“Teach us to be still”

Every one of us can become more fully human. Norman Cousins wrote that human uniqueness resides in our ability to create and exercise new options. He calls this a test of education. I would add that it is also an opportunity for those who have a breathing space in summer. A clipping from the Wall St. Journal (Dec. 4) speaks to most of us:

BIG PRIZES & TINY DELIGHTS
Most of us
miss out
on life’s
big prizes.
The Pulitzer.
The Nobel.
Oscars.
Tonys.
Emmys.
But we’re
all eligible
for life’s
small pleasures.
A pat
on the back.
A kiss behind the ear.
A four-pound bass.
A full moon.
An empty parking space.
A crackling fire.
A great meal.
A glorious sunset.
Hot soup.
Cold beer.
Don't fret
about
copping life’s
grand awards.
Enjoy its
tiny delights.
There are plenty
for all of us.

I remember a long time ago when I was a rather inadequate Sunday School teacher, I would cop out on preparation for the first Sunday in September by seeking answers from my bright-eyed but restless charges to the question, “What did you do this past summer?” I learned never to do that again after getting the response I should have expected: “Nothin’.” I’d never make that mistake again.

However, a scholar of world religions (W. C. Smith) noted “to study a great work of art, or a great idea, or a great poem, is to become more fully human.”

Now tastes and training differ as to what is great in art, ideas, or poetry, but I suggest to you that summer time when the U U is easy is a felicitous time to take that advice.

At the Ringling Museum Monday afternoon, when I saw the bronze casting of Michelangelo's David, molded from the original marble. I was a bit overwhelmed by the giant size of the figure, with his sling on his shoulder, towering over we humans. I’ve been thinking about that. The old legend has it that the Philistine Goliath was a giant, and David a young shepherd boy. You remember the spiritual, “Lil David was small, but Oh, My.” Why did the greatest of sculptors, working with hammer and chisel, create a giant David? Was it because David’s conviction of the rightness of his cause made the sculptor create a towering figure? Or why? I shall reflect more on that. [CJW note: there are many works of art which may help us be more fully human.]

The suggestion, also, was “to study a great idea is to become more human.” Well, ideas come and go in our minds in continuous succession, like Kodachrome slides projected by a fast-moving carousel.

I’m a fan of the NPR program “All Things Considered” and will continue to be. Yet, [in] summertime, when the U U is easy, give some time to the “One Thing Considered” - a great idea. The human family on its long, hard road has considered many great ideas – God, human nature, sin, salvation, justice, crime, government, love. Give time to consider one of these or any of the many I have not named. I am reflecting on the idea of the transcendent. Now if I were a believer in God as a super-person who was all-wise and all-good, there would be no need to think deeply about the transcendent. But as an unrepentant advocate of common-sense religion, agnostic about the God images of most people, skeptical of the claims of anyone who professes to know it all, I must deal with the idea of the transcendent [and] how it can have any meaning for me. Is transcendence the meaning at the summit for the believer, agnostic, atheist alike? [CJW notes: The authentic Universalism? “The Force be with you” - what force?]

You, too, are invited to “One Thing Considered.” Play with a great idea in your mind. How does that one great idea cohere with your experience and your ideals? Is there any support for you in your world from that one great idea? “Choose something like a star,” the poet advises.

The third suggestion is to study a great poem to become more fully human. What is a great poem for you may not be for your neighbor. What was a great poem for you in 1975 may not be in 1983. But study what is for you a great poem, now. Read it silently, read it aloud, think about the poet’s images and rhythms. A great poem, whether from the Psalms, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Milton, John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, ee cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, speaks to [the] human condition. Not just the human condition generally but your human condition. My present intention is to concentrate on Robert Frost’s two companion drama poems, “Masque of Reason” and “Masque of Mercy” along with T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses from the Rock” and “Four Quartets.” I will try to remember that the poets and bards preceded the historians and philosophers and I trust and hope they will survive the computer age. The great poets are not just word processors – they were signers of the heart’s delights, the heart’s agonies, the heart’s hopes.

So summertime and the U U is easy – but I hope not idle; but rather by our disciplines of the mind and spirit be a time for growth in wisdom and love.