This is my sermon, which I am giving at my lay-led church service on Sunday. It's a combination of a lot of things I think.
I’ve been coming to this church for over fifteen years. Over that time I’ve come for many occasions – celebrations, memorials, meetings, social events, and of course worship. We come here, to worship in this church, for many reasons. We come for community, for renewal, to seek, to find, to journey, to explore, to connect with something within ourselves and beyond ourselves. It is often difficult to put our spiritual experiences into words, because what we encounter in our sacred space of worship transcends basic language. Thankfully, however, our worship space creates a place where we can come together and share those experiences, with or without words, in community. We come here, together, as a unique living, breathing body, made up of individuals, part of the larger world.
No two people in any community believe exactly the same thing, and that creates billions of realities, a malleable common experience of this earth upon which we live. The religions of the world try to comprehend the common threads among those diverse realities, and Unitarian Universalism is perhaps the most embracing of the differences in our journeys. Yet there are many ways to explore the world around us. For nearly as long as humanity has walked the earth, we have created interpretations of what we see through art – from cave paintings, to sculpture, to literature, to dance, theatre, music, and film. Artists are simply trying to understand the world around them, and share their views with a community, an audience, the world.
Art and spirituality both have the power to transcend the mundane, surface meanings of words and events to help us understand universal human truths. They allow us our unique expressions of our individual experiences, yet works of art and acts of worship both aspire to form a community around a common idea. I have had transformative experiences sitting both in worship and in a theatre, or performing on stage. These moments create a feeling that defies adequate description - when I feel entirely exhilarated and at peace simultaneously. These are moments for reflection and exaltation, individuality and unity, moments to be grateful for simply being alive and being in this world.
I grew up in this church, through religious education and coming of age to YRUU, and I’m now an active part of the young adult UU movement. I have always valued the community I’ve found here in church, the chance to explore my ever-evolving beliefs in a safe environment. The people I’ve had the opportunities to work with, through district leadership, youth group, and now in New York and on the continental level really excite me about the work we’re doing in the world and the effects we’re trying to have. I want to spread messages of peace, hope, and love, through my spirituality and my art, and I’ve found this church as well as my studio environment at NYU to be great places to do that.
Coming into a room of theatre artists for the first day of rehearsal or the beginning of creating a new project is so invigorating for me, and I think for most artists, because it’s a chance to try something new, to create something from nothing. We’re free to try anything. These people have a creative energy and personal vibrancy that I can’t get enough of. Before we get exhausted from too much creating and practicing and revising, my theatre friends and I are full of a life and energy I experience almost nowhere else, that can’t be contained within us. We have to share our passions with the world.
One of the many beautiful things about artistic companies and spiritual congregations is that both can establish communities through their own creation, and those communities can be expanded through sharing their works with the world around us. We are our own stimulation, and our own growth tools. When we collaborate to speak together, as one voice of many voices, we create a work of art, and that art breathes, and has a voice, a spirit, a message, a purpose that it actively puts forth whenever an audience chooses to engage it. It becomes an active part of our world. There’s the beauty: art is everywhere, and its spirit is eternal.
A sermon’s topic or a work of art’s message speaks beyond its surface content. Part of the mystery of the spirituality of art and the art of spirituality is that these entities aren't about their intended topics. In the last year, I’ve basically been taught – and come to believe – that art is about interpreting what it's about. That's what makes it universal, that's what makes it fluid and eternal and omnipresent. And those qualities are what make it art, and make it spiritual. (That’s also what makes it difficult to do homework for theatre school, when you can’t simply sit down and solve equations – not that I’d want to – or read a book and answer content-based questions.) Our Unitarian Universalist faith doesn’t give us specific, concrete answers to the questions of our lives. Our fourth principle affirms and promotes “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” We are a community of seekers, interpreters, students of the world.
There is great freedom in our principles that allows each person his or her own search for an individual truth. This faith has many great liberties, teachings, and values and is invaluable to me, but like all religions, it is not perfect. It does not try to have all the answers, and instead says, "Go, and seek the answers for yourself," which I appreciate as an independent and curious person, but which I find hard to understand on a religious "This is how I explain my faith" level. Most religions try to put labels on everything so we can understand where we fit in with others in the world. But spirituality transcends labels to discover the truths in many forms that connect us all. At both youth and young adult conferences, the most successful worship services I’ve experienced have always invoked a feeling of a spiritually connected community more than focusing on some theological idea. Spirituality is vibrant in hidden ways, disguised in many names and faces of worship, community, devotion, exploration, and divinity, and I think that matters more than semantics.
Still, as a lover of writing, and of language itself, I would never devalue the power of words. Magic occurs when language is used to transcend our typical realities, creating a simultaneously unifying and individually exhilarating experience. A well-done sermon can give we who worship hope, a desire to learn, an aspiration to better ourselves and the world. Similarly, a brilliant work of art, whether written, painted, recorded, sculpted, performed, can inspire its audience to proliferate beauty, community, and creativity in their lives and the lives of others.
I turn to theatre because I don’t know how to share my world any other way. I need the lights and the sound and an audience so I can create my world for them, connect with them and share my understanding of this universe we live in. For me, theatre is a way to celebrate life, and the interaction of our lives. And what is life without our spirits? I hope, with my life in theatre, to be able to inspire the movement of other people’s spirits to find their lives’ callings.
Inspiration is a key part of any artistic or spiritual endeavor. It is both the starting place and an ending goal. Successful works of art and successful worship services both motivate people to affect change in the worlds in which they live. Inspiration also means breath – breath that begins and sustains our lives. Similarly, art and spirituality cannot survive without the breath of life – without inspiration, without some idea that is bursting to be expressed. An artist breathes life into his or her work. A minister, too, has to breathe life into his or her sermon’s message.
When a work of art is inspired, lovers of art can have a spiritual experience. As a theatre artist, I have the privilege and challenge of collaborating with a unique group of talented people who all have different insight into a single project with many elements. We all unite to breathe life into a vision. When the lighting designer and the costumer and the set designer and audio designer work with the director, who works with the actors, along with a whole slue of other production crew members, a community is built, of people working towards a goal that is greater than the sum of its parts. And then, after countless hours of hard work, despite lost sleep, arguments, and perhaps a ride through Manhattan in a taxi van with furniture sticking out of the side door, a show is born. That’s why, to me, each work of theatre is a miracle. It is a collaboration of many people, ideas, influences, and intricacies that creates a cohesive whole.
I see every show I work on as a gift both given to me and for me to give to others. Working with people who have an equivalent passion for their art, who also bring different opinions and personalities, fills me with excitement and inspires me to share my voice and vision. I’ve been lucky enough to also find, in this faith, people spanning the country who share my passion for healthy spiritual development, which I believe is a work of art in itself.
When we come together to worship, we bring with us our ideals, our hopes, our experiences, and a love for our community. In this sacred space, we search for answers to the questions of life, beyond ourselves, beyond this building, beyond what we know. As a faith community we come together to try to transcend the fourth wall and connect with the “other” that’s “out there”, seemingly disconnected from us and yet is an integral part of our lives. The fourth wall term comes from the theatre, the concept of the invisible wall that separates the audience from the stage and the actors. Actors, however, have to balance the function of the supposed wall within the play while still being able to connect past it to the audience, a vital part of a successful production. And just as performers cannot be disconnected from the audience, we as a community cannot shut ourselves off from the interdependent web of which we are a part.
The value, I believe, of both the arts and spirituality is their ability to transcend our differences and the worlds we think we know or are trying to understand to create new communities of people all searching for something in their own ways, with their own views. There is an art to spirituality and a spirituality to art. While we all look at the world differently and hold slightly (or vastly) different beliefs, we are all still seeking similar things – happiness, fulfillment, peace, success, love. And yes, our visions of what those things look like may, too, be different from those of our neighbors, but the journey is a little easier with a community to help us interpret our ideas, whether we are exploring the mysteries of the world through created performance or poem or sculpture, or through the expression of a sermon. Humanity has many questions and many answers and many realities, but we live in one world. And as the great master Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and the men and women only players.”
