Welcoming back our students

No doubt you’ve noticed the buzz in the air around Charlottesville, and it’s not just the rental trucks lumbering down the street, driven by dads hauling their kids’ stuff back to school.

The students are definitely back, and the energy level here on the corner is up ten-fold. As I walk around town, I see a lot of young people and their families and they have a certain deer-in-the-headlights look.

I think I know a little of how they feel. I am beginning my third year here, and I am beginning to feel like a veteran.

Today is our official Welcome Back Sunday for the University of Virginia, and so I want to take a few moments this morning to reaffirm our historical mission to the University community.

I want to mention this morning a few simple things we can do as members of this parish to be a part of that mission regardless of our age or connection with UVA.
First, the students who come through these doors bring many gifts, and many questions.

Many, if not most, are away from home for the first time in their life. We need to welcome these students, as we welcome all new people. To be truly welcoming is to be open not just to their presence, but to their ideas, to their talents and their questions. They will change us, just as we will change them.

Students are not appendages to this parish, but central to the mission of this parish. They are why we are here.

The biblical lessons we hear today, I believe, compel us to begin with compassion for the sojourner – the stranger – because we are reminded that we, too, are sojourners in this life.

The students who come here are strangers, and yet, like us, they too are sojourners on a life-long pilgrimage. They may be at a different place on the road than most of us here this morning, but they are on the same road with us.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
This academic year, I hope we will go out of our way to show hospitality to our students in big ways and small.

We host a free dinner on Sunday evenings for students, and we need some of you to take a turn preparing and serving a meal.

These are more than just dinners, but truly opportunities for students, who are far from home, to spend an hour or two once a week having a meal with a “regular” family.

If you are interested in taking a turn, see me after this service.

I would also like us to take a few more steps to live into our historical mission. I am convinced this parish is located on this unique corner for a unique purpose.

We have the opportunity to not just comfort and nurture young students, but to instill in them values of generosity and selflessness that cut against the values of selfish materialism and careerism in the wider culture at large.

We hear loud-and-clear from Jesus today, who implores us to set aside our fears and embrace the lowest among us: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed.”

There are many ways of instilling those values, and we begin by setting an example in our own life. The Letter writer to the Hebrews implores: “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

St. Paul’s already has shown great courage and strength by sharing our wealth and talent in the community, for example by working on projects like PACEM that give winter shelter to the homeless, and IMPACT that has worked to provide dental care for the poor and translation services for immigrants caught in the legal system.

Let me suggest that our actions in the wider community are integrally connected to our mission to the University of Virginia, for it is by working in the community that we can be role models for the students and new people who come through our doors. When we share our lives generously, others will share theirs too.

Finally, let us not forget that doing is only half a faithful life. The other half – maybe more than half – comes in the humility of our prayer. Indeed, the lessons this morning have a common theme – humility.

This kind of humility comes only by emptying ourselves before God, by bringing the longings of our hearts and the holes of our souls to God in prayer. And then listening for the answers, for prayer is a life-long conversation.

There are many ways to pray, and we will explore some of those ways this fall in our adult education here at St. Paul’s.

It is my hope and prayer that we will be open to exploring not just the stillness of prayer, but also the restlessness that can also come through prayer.

Prayer can – and probably will – tug us in new directions, because we are sojourners – strangers – in this life.

At times, our prayer – like our life – may not look neat and tidy. We are, after all, not the ones in control. This is not our church – it belongs to God – and it is not our earth – it belongs to God – and we are the temporary stewards. Any control we think we have is but an illusion.

Our stewardship rests on the foundation our prayer, and our prayer rests on the foundation of our humility.

When our foundation is firm, our prayers will take wing, we will find that, indeed, we are entertaining angels. AMEN.

So, after teaching a web writing class, one of my students pointed to my neck.

“Is that Mary?” he asked, in a hushed, secretive voice.

I looked down at the small, almond-shaped, tin-colored icon around my neck.

“Yes…” I said.

The excited man’s hand disappeared inside his shirt and surfaced with a large icon of his own – featuring a Mary so big, no one would have to ask.

“Me, too,” he said, nodding and nestling her back safely back behind his cotton shirt, to where I imagined her shifting about, kind of like a fishing lure that’s been lost in the ocean, tangled with seaweed.

I nodded, meekly, not wanting to admit that I wasn’t quite sure to what “me, too” referred. How had I implicated myself? What secret password had we exchanged?

The most obvious answer, I assume, is that this guy believed that my wearing Mary around my neck meant that I am not only a devout Roman Catholic but specifically a devotee of the Virgin Mary, whose worship is not always looked upon favorably by the official church, despite how much it flourishes around the world.

That’s a bit embarrassing. I’m not Roman Catholic – and I didn’t mean to insult anyone by implying I was.

The necklace does mean something to me, however. I found it on my living room carpet one day, in the middle of a crisis. I have no idea where it came from. When she appeared, it felt like a little cosmic gift.

I gladly received it. I’ve always been interested in the theories about Mary as a version of other, older holy mothers and goddess figures, particularly with her name meaning ‘sea’ and her color being blue. Last year I read a book exploring the connections between images of the black Tara and Kali in the East and the black Madonna in the West, and it fed my sense that the female deity represents something deep in our human psyche.

An archetypal mother goddess is precious to me also because of my issues with my real mother. And because Mary in particular is beloved by my beloved, whose name she shares.

I will also never forget when, as a 15 year old, I contemplated the God I knew as being female, and my heart wept with joy. I remember I was on my bed having a kind of mystical experience of being embraced with a maternal grace. Suddenly god got bigger than I had ever imagined possible.

Eventually, as I grew older, god grew so big as to totally disappear, becoming part of everything, becoming everything.

So this icon holds meaning for me. She is the mother who loves us, all of us, with immense tenderness and compassion. She is emblematic of the holiness that we all have been born with. She reminds me to be tender to myself.

But am I appropriating someone else’s symbols for my own use, and is this insensitive?

Not that this is not what people do. I’m thinking of the yin-yang symbol as a fashion design on cheap earrings, for instance.  Certainly, wearing the Tai Chi (as it is sometimes called) on your t-shirt does not at all signal that you are a follower of Lao Tze. It more likely means you like to surf. Good thing Taoists don’t get pissed off easily.

And if I’m appropriating Mary from the RC, one could argue they appropriated her from the previous religions.

I come from a mindset that views the sacred as a result of personal investment. We sanctify what we love, worship, and practice, with our pure intentions and the “secret beauty,” the innate goodness of our hearts.

That is the spirit in which I wear this Mary (or, as Sam calls her, “Da Lady”).

But this guy’s tender, lonely hope that he and I shared something else was so delicate.

It reminds me how hard it is to cross faiths and beliefs to find common ground – it sounds easy, and maybe it should be easy, but it often is not. We may have our hearts all in the same places, but our words are battering rams, and wars erupt when we open our mouths.

I may see that this guy and I share a love for Mary, but if I explained where I was coming from, he might spit in my face for my insolence at not believing her to be the literal mother of the only son of God. And I might get annoyed that he clung to a concrete interpretation and a supernatural abstraction that reduced the boundlessness of her spirit to something restrictive. (Mary as the Virgin, the “pure” woman, in contrast to the other Mary, the harlot, and all that stuff about female religious imagery binding the possibilities of human expression – well, that can be a problem.)

And so, symbols can unite us. And they can divide us.

How we use them and talk about them – how we serve them and manipulate them – it’s all part of how we shape our world… how can we do it in a way that connects us?

Sam Harris joined Coy to discuss his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Smith explores why people are prone to suspending reason in the name of religious beliefs.