Roots Hold Me Close, Wings Set Me Free 
	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	September 10, 2000

Last year at the ingathering service, I preached on the deep wells of
tradition on which we draw, wells that we did not dig.  With this
theme of roots I revisit the world underground, but use a metaphor
that is more organic.

I thought a lot about roots last week, when a great many of my kinfolk
gathered in beautiful glamorous Carmel California for the second
family wedding of the summer, the first having been my own.  My Aunt
Susan was there, and we had a good chat about her decision finally to
sell her house and move into an old folks home at age 85.  I reflected
that this house, a comfortable spacious place with beautiful gardens,
was the last of the grand old family houses of my youth, a place we
often went for Sunday dinners and parties, and its passing out of the
family meant there was one less piece of real estate to which I would
ever return.  Southerners, as you may know, become acutely attached to
places.  My own roots in South Carolina soil, which go down for
thirteen generations, suddenly seemed weaker.

What that has to do with us this morning is that it seems to me that
one of the things we are about as a church is filling the needs of
people for roots.  The pace of change in our modern post-industrial
society is dizzying.  How many of you are still banking at the same
bank you were five years ago?  I opened an account in Harvard Square
when I first came to Divinity School in 1995 with the big bank there,
which was then called Baybank.  I can still go into the same building
to transact business, but it is now a different bank, and there are
different people behind the window.  How many of us are in the same
area code, or use the same zip code, we did five years ago?

And that's just the people who haven't moved.  Those of us who have
moved have seen our entire environment change, physical and social.
And more of us move all the time.  The composition of our schools, our
jobs, our neighborhoods and our churches is constantly turning over as
people's careers, health and life-choices take them different places.

Perhaps this mobility is one of the factors impinging on a problem we
hear a lot about these days, the decline in what is called social
capital.  You see, when Alexis de Tocqueville did his famous analysis
of American Democracy in the 1830's, one of the things he noticed most
about Americans was the extraordinary level of voluntary associations.
We were a nation of joiners.  We not only formed churches we formed
separate Sunday Schools, men's and women's groups, benevolent
societies etc.

In the past few years, commentators have noted a decline in the
participation in these voluntary groups.  Robert Putnam wrote an
influential essay in 1996 called "Bowling Alone," which has now been
made into a book.  Putnam notes that the health of private voluntary
organizations is vital for the maintenance of civil society, that
section of our communal life which mediates between the individual and
the state.  It is that section which is so lacking in the
post-Communist states of the East and which has to be rebuilt.  But
what Putnam and others have pointed out is that the level of civic
engagement is also declining right here in America.

The decline in voting percentages has been marked for decades, so that
our supposedly democratic government is now elected by less and less
of us.  Participation in labor unions declined by more than half from
the 32% of the workforce in the 1950s to 18% in 1992.  Membership in
PTAs dropped from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in
1982 before recovering to approximately 7 million now.  League of
Women voters is off 42 percent since 1969, Boy Scouts are off 26%
since 1970 and Red Cross is off 61% since 1970.  The fraternal
organizations - Lions, Shriners and Jaycees - all report declines in
membership.

But the most poignant statistic, and the one from which Putnam takes
his title, has to do with recreation:

"The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social
disengagement in contemporary America that I have discovered is this:
more Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in
organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so.  Between
1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10
percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent.  (Lest this be
thought a wholly trivial example, I should note that nearly 80 million
Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more
than voted in the 1994 congressional elections and roughly the same
number as claim to attend church regularly.  Even after the 1980s'
plunge in league bowling, nearly 3 percent of American adults
regularly bowl in leagues.)  The rise of solo bowling threatens the
livelihood of bowling-lane proprietors because those who bowl as
members of leagues consume three times as much beer and pizza as solo
bowlers, and the money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the
balls and shoes.  The broader social significance, however, lies in
the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over
beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.  Whether or not bowling beats
balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet
another vanishing form of social capital."

Now, this loss of social capital is much discussed on the talk shows
and in the Ivy covered lecture halls at the universities.  I can't
gauge how much of a concern this is here in Wakefield.  We probably
aren't aware of a loss of social capital on a day-to-day basis.  In
fact, what I hear a lot of you saying is that you feel scheduled to
the hilt with volunteer activities, rushing from soccer to Girl Scouts
to Lions club to church this and that.  Wakefield is in some respects
a throwback to a simpler era, a town where people still put energy
into their churches, clubs and activities.

For those who feel scheduled to the max and part of too many groups,
the yearning may not be for engagement but for disengagement.  The
downside of life in a small town can be that we feel restrained.  One
of the great American themes is leaving the limitations of the small
town for the supposed freedom of the city.

And this suggests what is lacking if we only look at roots.  Roots can
be stifling.  Roots keep us tied down.

Our conservative Christian colleagues often cite Jesus as a paragon of
family values, but modern scholarship suggests that Jesus was the
leader of a band of wandering preachers on the shores of the Sea of
Galilee, as lost to the conventional family life as any runaway kid on
the street today.  One man wanted to join the band but said he needed
to go bury his father first, and Jesus told him, let the dead bury the
dead.  At another point, he was preaching when someone brought word
that his own mother and brothers were outside, and he replied that he
had no mother and brothers, but all who would follow him were his
mother and brothers.

Whatever you may think of Jesus and his mission, as a social movement
it appears to have been one that tugged at the roots of its followers,
and insisted on substituting new loyalties for the traditional ones.

And this is the archetype of many a religious quest, and in a more
general sense, many quests for personal fulfillment.  Abram left Ur,
the city of his birth, in order to follow God's command and promise of
making his children into a great nation.  The Buddha abandoned a wife
a baby in order to go out into the world to seek enlightenment.
Devout Muslims leave home to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.  In the
words of Joseph Campbell, we "follow our bliss," and that journey
often leads away from the milieu into which we were born.

Like a lot of you, I did not grow up Unitarian Universalist, but came
out of an orthodox Christian faith, complete with catechisms and
creeds.  When I was a teenager, that belief system had failed to
answer my needs, and I abandoned it.  I had to pull up my church
roots, and they didn't begin to grow deep again until I found a church
who would accept me in my doubts and questions and would explore with
me the ultimate questions.  That was the Unitarian Church in
Charleston, and the year was 1978.  I still have roots in that church,
but my roots are also portable.

And as I reflected on my family last week, I realized that the family
was still who they were even if we no longer had the grand houses of
my childhood to go to.  Even in posh Carmel California, we could make
a home for a weekend.

Roots and wings.  We need both.  We need the assurance provided by
groups that persist despite change, and we need the freedom to break
away sometimes in order to grow.

I suggest to you that we want to make this church work for us to
provide both roots and wings, and that it is already well set-up to do
this.  As far as roots, it is well rooted in the Universalist and
Unitarian traditions, which traditions themselves are rooted in
interpretations of Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism; but
they are also rooted in the Enlightenment, in a faith in the power of
reason, and in an appreciation for the incredible diversity of the
actual human and natural world.

Socially, this church has the rooted virtues of the small social unit.
We can each get to know everyone else here, and as the years go by,
this ability to know and be known knits our hearts and our lives
together in a rich skein of meaning and support.

However, this closeness need not be stifling.  We already have a
culture where differences of opinion, of belief, are not only accepted
but cherished.  What I would like to see us develop is a facility
where those differences become positive spurs to greater individual
growth, where we make positive use of our diversity.

For, I don't see diversity as an end in itself.  Diversity is there;
diversity exists in the real world.  The more we can see it, the more
we are freeing ourselves from the blinders of our narrow points of
view.

Earl Holt, the UU minister in St.  Louis wrote a review of our current
hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, when the hymnal had just come
out.  Now Earl is on the conservative side in our movement, and he
criticized the hymnal for paying more attention to the wings and less
to the roots.  He said that the hymnbook commission had omitted many
favorite pieces from the Unitarian Universalist and other Protestant
traditions in favor of greater inclusion of non-Western and
non-Christian musical traditions.  In other words, they sacrificed
tradition for diversity.  You may or may not agree, but the point is
that there is a tension between wings and roots.  Wings are agents of
transcendence; roots are agents of authenticity.

And yet though the two values are in tension, I think we need both,
and I think a church can supply both.  We have two new initiatives
this fall, which I think can help.

The first is a history project.  I hope we can unearth and tell each
other the stories of this church, as Jeff has done for the artifacts.
Maybe many of you already know this, but I, as the new kid on the
block, don't know all I want, and I bet there are others in my
position.  Who were the movers and shakers?  How did the church
interact with the events of the town, and the currents of the larger
denominational history?  This church will be 200 in another 13 years.
Wouldn't it be great to get to that anniversary with a good solid
sense of where we've come from?  I envision an intergenerational
committee that would amass the material we have on hand, including
that which is stored in the brains of long-time members, and then
decide what form to present it.  Let's get in touch with our roots.

The other development is the small groups.  This is both a roots and
wings activity, but on a personal level and focused in the here and
now.  It is roots because it may allow those who participate a firmer
grounding in the traditions and in the social unit as a partner with
them in confronting the big issues in their lives.  Wouldn't we like a
place where it was safe to talk about the things that most concern us
as religious people?  The experience of those who have been through
these groups is that they are empowering and liberating, giving us the
wings we need.

Finally, I'd like to say a word to those who have just walked in the
door this morning not knowing what to expect.  This could be a place
for you to put down roots.  A place where you get to know and be known
by a lot of good people who support you in your struggles with the
larger issues of life.

So bring your portable roots here; the soil is warm and well
nourished; we water it regularly with the waters of the spirit.  And
let us fit you for some wings as well.  What size do you take?

Amen.