This sermon was given at Stevens Chapel on July 6, 2003 by Rev. Dr. Judith Campbell.

The Sound of Silence

I cannot get up before you this morning and not say something about General Assembly, at least briefly. My annual GA "T" shirt (I buy one every year). In this year’s model, the art work and the message came together in a very powerful personal message for me and how I try to live my ministry. So I bought it and I will wear it with religious intention. My delegate card and badge, with ribbons and my annual fund purple necklace, and the obligatory and outrageous bumper stickers .

We at UUSMV are "Paid up", meaning, we pay our larger denominational dues of $60 per member to the national association out of our budget and pledge money. We are a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Member congregations, each one slightly different from the next one, but united in our commitment to our social and moral and ethical and environmental purposes and our seven principles of ethical sustainable living and walking upon this planet. I

I’m saving the BIG GA sermon for my "September - returning to the fold Sermon" on September 7th of this year. In it, I will tell you some of what our President Bill Sinkford said in his keynote speech. It was so powerful and inspiring that it deserves more than sentence or two in a report.

I attended a workshop on religious education in small congregations - that’s us - and a musical performance by the legendary Nick Page. It was energizing and uplifting. I will try to go to one of his workshops in the future.

I connected with the minister of our Sister Church in Falmouth, Bob Murphy, and promised to be more intentional about connections between the two churches next year.

But next to our own dear "PREZ", Monsieur Sinkford, the most powerful experience was a talk given by Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of among other things, "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People". That is another sermon, but the one thing I will share with you now is Rabbi Kushner commenting on the fact that, as much as he is in philosophical and religious harmony with UUism, he can’t help be sad over the fact that at the denominational level we have a committee on Palestinian awareness, but not one on Israeli awareness. There was a great silence in the room after he said that, a silence that was not empty space, but a silence full of the uncomfortable recognition of the fact that there are not just one but two aggrieved and wounded peoples living side by side in a deadly animosity that goes back to the time of King David. We, of all religious denominations who claim to be liberal religious, need at least to acknowledge and be educated on both sides of an issue before we take a unilateral stand. And here I refer to our too often unthinking knee-jerk liberalism that I find all to prevalent amongst us - all of us - especially ministers! (which was uncomfortably underscored on Sunday morning outside the Fleet Center)

As we herded into the Service of the Living Tradition on Sunday morning along with close to 10,000 other Unitarian Universalists, there was an older man with a straw hat with a Jesus sign on it handing out little cards that had a fundamentalist evangelical message on them. One of my MINISTER Colleagues brushed past him with a very loud and snide comment that his effort was a waste of breath and cardboard here, and go find another street corner. That wasn’t necessary. Perhaps the heckler was emboldened by being in the company of so many UU’s. But he forgot the fact that a good number of us are declared followers of the teachings of Jesus. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. We are supposed to be better than that.

But the service of the living tradition was something else. Over 10,000 UU’s in one place, singing, praying (or what passes for praying), and celebrating new ministers as they are welcomed into the pastoral fold, and mourning those who have left it forever. Our religion is a "Living Tradition", and I am so very proud to be part of it.

On the lighter side. And there is a LOT of that at GA, here are some pictures I took, Chris with our UUSMV Banner (it is at the back of the church today), our UUSMV booth, where I sold my clerical robes and quilted stoles and banners I make ("Stole(s)-n-Goods" is the name. Can you stand it?) and pictures of Ingrid, who was the other 1/3 of the space, with her husband Jonah and Ingrid’s lovely handmade books, jewelry, CDs and lovely Ingrid and Jonah to complete the picture. I handed out well over half of the brochures that Catherine and Al DeVito had made up for me, advertising our year-round B&B and our Special Columbus day B&B, and our church as a Wedding Chapel. Every one who even dared come anywhere near the booth got one; and anyone who purchased anything got them stuffed into their shopping bags. And, happily, there seemed to be a lot of positive interest. Time will tell, but getting our word out is paramount, and with over 5000 attendees that I did!

But let me move on, before this report turns into the sermon!

Earlier, I spoke of the silence that followed a remark by the wise and gentle Rabbi Kushner. I said that silence was not an empty space between his sentences, rather a space filled with our thinking and dawning awareness of something we need to attend to. If he had rushed on to his next thought, we would not have had the time to really the experience power and internalize the meaning of what he said. He made that deep silent space for us and we needed it.

In cloistered and contemplative religious orders, like the Trappists and the Carthusians, and even the Dominicans, there is a tradition of the Great Silence, a period of time during the ordered rhythm of the day when no words are spoken. This silence is not a place that is simply devoid of sound or speech, it is the rich and fertile place for the opening of the spirit to the voice and the heart of the holy. It is the time of living prayer, meditation and contemplation of the divine.

When I do my Spiritual retreats, I often include a morning or an afternoon of silence as part of the experience. The first reaction can often be something like: well, can’t we just have some music or something. There are a number of people who are desperately afraid of the silent spaces, but I feel these open places are the spaces that frame and give shape to the more active workings of our mind and our day.

It is much the same with music and art. The so-called empty spaces, the rests in music or the "negative space" in a piece of art or photography have just as much weight and importance to the whole as does the subject or main theme of the piece.

How many of us here are familiar with Handel’s great oratorio, "The Messiah" and in particular, the famous "Alleluia" chorus which closes the second section of the oratorio. And, if you will remember it with me, as the music builds to that final Allelulia, there is a 4 beat rest, four musical heartbeats of breathtaking silence before the thundering last Allelulia. Space for us to consider the miracle which has been announced to us and all the world. (And God help the singer who jumps the musical gun and desecrates that space; any of us who sing know that fear.)

And how about that wonderful silence after a particularly moving or engaging performance, when, instead of bursting into wild applause, the audience sits simply stunned by the raw power of what just took place. I have only seen that happen twice in my life. Once was on the Island of Madeira off Portugal, and the piece of music was the Bach Double concerto in D minor. The other was in our own Boston Symphony hall, and the performer was Pete Seeger who got the entire auditorium (me among them) singing all the instrumental lines in the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony. It was transcendent. And then it was quiet.

The empty spaces are not black holes in our day. They are the places of reflection, of pause and, if we allow it, reverence and deep peace.

Most people don’t stop to think about it, but for the artist, the space around the subject in a painting or a photograph or in and around a sculpture is just as important as the subject. Too much space, and the subject is lost, too little space, and the subject is too crowded. This is of course, a gross oversimplification, because we have all seen stunning painting and or photographs with a vast amount of sky and or sea or grassy field, and one little thing set upon it. Here the so-called empty space is really the subject, and the object, whatever it is, is a device to make the viewer aware of the vastness of all that is around us and our own insignificance. It always works for me.

If we can slow down long enough to think about it, it is the open spaces that give shape and power to those things they punctuate, bracket or enclose.

The rests in our western music give shape to a musical phrase or movement. Punctuation marks in our writing are like mini rests in music. Without them, the music and the words would all run together, and the message would be much harder to decipher (ee cummings not withstanding). We need to pay attention to the pauses which are offered to us, and not let our new millennial impatience with anything that isn’t measured in nanoseconds run away with our soul.

The "A" thing.

I used to do this exercise when I was teaching visual art at the University. I would start making these marks on a piece of paper and ask the kids what I was making. It took them a while to discover I was making the letter "A", but I was doing it negatively. That is not with a bad attitude, but drawing the shapes around the letter to define the letter form rather than actually drawing the letter itself. In some ways it was kind of a parlor trick, but the message about how we see things and how we experience things went way beyond that. Some of them got it, and some of them asked if it was going to be on the exam!

The point I was trying to make is: that without the space around the object - be it a musical note or phrase, a flower or a sailing ship, or a human being - the object has no definition. One must complement the other. Without spaces in our lives, we too would run all over the place and have no definition. We can’t work all the time, parent all the time, even make art all of the time. Sometimes we refer to it as "down" time. But I see it as ANYTHING BUT "down" time. The so-called empty spaces in our lives are as vital as our breathing. Empty space is not a void. Fully realized, the spaces in our lives can be the place of our reflection and growth of our creativity and our REST. It is a vital part of being fully human that too many of us brush aside or rush through in pursuit of the next think on our to-do list.

"Give it a rest"

And I’m not talking out of my "hat"

Blessed be.