September 2005

Minister's Column
Rev. Sue Phillips
Kearsarge Unitarian Universalist Church

Come, come whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, yet again, come.

Like many of you, I simply adore this hymn, this wonderful adaptation from a poem by the Sufi mystic Jallaladin Rumi, which we sing in a round. It offers the expansive invitation that lies at the center of our faith. And right there, near the end, we get a glimpse of the Universalist theology that underlies this open invitation: we are joyful wanderers, not gloomy escapees. We think we're okay, and you are too! Join us!

In Rumi's short poem, though, this lyrical invitation has another verse - one that offers a deeper summons yet. "Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again come." We don't sing that part. It isn't included in our hymn book. Perhaps that's because of the taint of sinfulness - what vow could you have broken? Whatever the vow, how could you have broken it over and over again? But the invitation to fellowship, issued after this recognition of personal weakness, of ethical struggle, is so much richer. We want you to join us even though you are not the person you want to be. This is so much more than an invitation to join a caravan of travelers - it is a call to a journey of moral significance.

There are journeys that pilgrims go on, and there are journeys that tourists go on. The first verse, the one in our hymn book, feels to me like a tourist trip - a happy expedition into the wilderness to which all are invited. But the second verse, the one we don't sing, contains a kernel of theological depth that calls us to be pilgrims, to embark on a voyage of exalted purpose with the goal of finding somewhere to land at the end of the tired day.

Unitarian Universalist history is a history of leaving home, of leaving behind tradition and old ideas. We even tend to call ourselves a movement rather than a faith . This willingness to adapt and change and challenge assumptions is a wonderful feature of religious liberalism that has served our people well. But there is more to religious life than the journey. The purpose of most every journey is to arrive somewhere . To cast our religious life only as a journey is to debilitate it as surely as if we had never left safe ground in the first place. Tourists observe, they dip their toes into shallow roadside ponds, they take pictures of other people's holy sites. Pilgrims engage in an intentional search for the shrine, the sacred mountain or moment, be it metaphorical or literal.

We surely are a happy band of wanderers, and lovers of leaving. Are we also lovers of coming home? In the year that unfolds before us, may we be pilgrims together. Pilgrims on the journey home.