The Fellowship Of Wild Geese

March 16, 1986
Unspecified Location (probably Lakeland)

The Fellowship Of Wild Geese
(Abbreviated for Annual Meeting)

Perhaps you, as I do, perceive both the likenesses and differences of the flight of wild geese and the members of a Unitarian Universalist fellowship. These likenesses and differences are relevant as we soon convene for our annual meeting.

The geese can fly a 71% longer range when they fly together in the V formation, than when a solitary goose tries to make it alone. I don’t suppose anyone knows, fully, how these birds developed their aerodynamic facility. Instinct in the non-human world is just another name for mystery. How the wild geese navigate on their flyways has never been completely explained, although a variety of instinctual, celestial, and navigational aids have been suggested.

But in our fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, we are aware that being together when we have set objectives, and taking off for their accomplishment, is a necessary condition. Our uplift is not due to any action of wing tips. None of us are wild geese, or for that matter, angels. Our uplift comes from shared goals and the sighting of a flyway that will take us there. We must set the goals. We must find the flyway, we must share the tasks, we must uplift ourselves without the benefit of wing-tip aerodynamics.

Then think how, as the wild geese press on, they have a way of rotating their leadership so that the leader does not get worn out. No one knows how the wild geese rotate their leadership. But it is a reality that in human affairs, decidedly including religious fellowships and churches, [that] too many times, hard-working leadership becomes burned out. When that happens, enthusiasm wanes, and sometimes we see them no more.

Our rotation in leadership is needed both for the sake of the duty-worn and for the never-ending need for the infusion of novel ideas, improved methods, and fresh enthusiasm that rotated leadership can provide. Thus, the yearly process of nomination and election.

But because we are human and fragile, our democratic processes are not always [as] instinctually smooth as the fellowship of wild geese. We do not all think alike, but I trust we all think. Therefore, we proceed by rules and procedures.

Edward Lindemann, the social scientist, once wrote,

“Experience, in the democratic way of life, has it seems to me, demonstrated that under democratic conditions there should never be an expectation of perfect realization of ideals. Democratic solutions, in other words, are always partial, never complete. Perfection and democracy are incompatible.

“Democratic experience appears to have demonstrated that diversity is superior to uniformity.”

Before us are important decisions of growth and expansion; before us, the election of leadership.

One thing more, in the fellowship of wild geese, when one of the flock falters, another accompanies it to earth for a rest. In our human ways, I know that many of you have cared in situations of need that may be known, or may be known only to the one who helped and the one who helps. The need is to continue that caring. Such caring is a strand that, if omitted or neglected, will make any rousing cheers of our progress sound a bit hollow.

As a concluding reminder, let me repeat the words of John Dewey.

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by the grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link.

“Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying, and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible, and more generously shared than we have received it.”