A Pathless Journey or Budgetless

By the Rev Rali Weaver

For the First Church and Parish in Dedham

March 28^th 2010

I want us to begin this morning by imagining that we have set out on a journey as Mary Oliver suggests that is beyond our knowing.

Imagine leaving your home, or this place after worship, without a plan in your head for where you are going.

Set out without a compass or map without a direction, without a packed bag, with no money or food in your pockets and head into the woods with no time frame or agenda or expectations.

As Mary Oliver describes in her poem most of us would find something in our character, or our knowing to help us along but for our purposes today I think we should leave behind our “knowing” as well.

Now begin by yourself on this unplanned unprepared for journey without a road map or path.

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I imagine that for some of us, at least some of the time, what I just described sounds terrifying.

Most of the time we start our days, even vacation days, prepared with both resources and with some idea of where we are going. And we like it that way. Even if we find a day now and then devoid of a plan, we can still fill it with what we know. We can measure our productivity if we prepare and then map our journey, plot our progression and head in a predetermined direction until we reach our goal.

But today, on this KICK OFF Sunday for our Stewardship Campaign, I thought it might do us some good to imagine instead, setting out for a good old-fashioned Sunday Drive.

Raise your hand if you have been on a Sunday Drive in the past 5 years.

In the days before cell phones and the gas crisis my parents would sometimes take us after church for a leisurely drive around. This was I understand a common occurrence in the 20’s and 30’s. In fact it seems Henry Ford himself encouraged Sunday Drives as a form of recreation back when cars were considered recreational vehicles.

Sunday Drives would find families driving around to no place in particular. After we had set out my family would sometimes end up at the airport watching the planes take off and land, or end up at some restaurant we had never heard of. Our journeys were often unmapped and I would worry that we might never get home. Being hypoglycemic as a child I would often find myself feeling agitated by the lack of food on our journey or the delayed eating time or the discomfort of the back seat. These things combined would sometimes leave me in a panic.

Somewhere in my young mind I knew that Sunday drives were supposed to be leisurely sight seeing adventures but I often felt trapped and I could hardly wait to be back in familiar territory with an objective in view.

I share this story with you today as a metaphor for one way we might approach a pathless journey- with fear and trepidation.

What is also true about Sunday Drives is that whenever we did arrive be it at an undetermined destination or back in familiar territory I had the most marvelous feeling of being found. Once arriving wherever we ended up on our pathless Sunday Drive felt serendipitous and all the anxiety and trepidation that led up to arriving in the end felt ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT.

When I would think back I would realize that Sunday Drives were part o the process of discovery and without the endless winding travel to get no place in particular we might never have found ourselves new liberating alternatives.

I mention this because this too might be a metaphor for how we might approach times of unknowing. When we can remember that discomfort precedes transformative events, that discomfort is a necessary ingredient in transformation, we can learn to better tolerate periods of not knowing.

Michael Roberts our parish treasurer said to me just yesterday that as a teacher of Management he prepares his students to set goals with systematic steps leading to manageable outcomes.

This is a very rational way to go about things.

Stet a destination, plan a journey, pack bags and set out to where you plan to go and arrive.

I think it is safe to say that most of us feel comfortable with this plan of attack. And certainly if we are going to approach our budget and fundraising this way of directing ourselves makes a great deal of sense.

In stewardship drives we talk about what we need and we try to make plans for our church year based upon the resources that are provided. Many of our costs as a church are fixed and so a budget in this context may not seem all that imaginative. But the unknown unmapped resources added by each one of you can transform even our budget.

The word Budget stems from the French word bougette, meaning purse. For our purposes today our Church budget is our knapsack for our church year journey. Without it we are missing an important tool for our navigation.

But for the months of our Stewardship campaign we are in a wonderful time of not knowing. What will be in the coming year can be transformed by what we are able to raise.

It might behoove us to stop here and take a moment to imagine all fo the things that would not be available if we planned everything.

For instance if you want to fall in love you cannot simply set an intention, draw out a map with goals and objectives and achieve it.

I would also say that the best vacations require that same type of non-planning.

From my experience budget planning and stewardship drives are rarely like taking a vacation or falling in love.

In fact this is my third year through this stewardship and budgeting cycle at First Church and my twentieth year in both lay and leadership positions observing stewardship campaigns in New England and there are a few things that I have noticed.

(Just for the record I specify New England because, while I also spent two years in a Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco, I witnessed there a wholly different attitude about money and fundraising and stewardship which doesn’t apply to the stereotypes I am about to offer you today.)

The first of the characteristics I have noticed is obvious- New Englanders in general are uncomfortable discussing issues of money. As I se it not talking about money during a stewardship campaign and in a budgeting conversation is somewhat akin to setting out on a road without a roadmap.

Second New Englanders tend to procrastinate filling out their pledge cards and meeting their pledge obligations so it is often difficult to determine the quality of our purse and plan accordingly.

In my experience both of these conditions lead to some anxiety around the stewardship and budgeting efforts in New England Congregations.

This anxiety often leads to lack of planning and a lack of packing and a lack of clarity bout a church’s destination.

Gilbert R. Rendle from the Alban Institute and the author of our second reading this morning, encourages us to consider the spiritual benefit of this chaos in the act of transformation. In his book he describes the need for congregations to remain in the discomfort and pain long enough to allow that discomfort to realign them.

After I graduated from Bangor Theological Seminary I got word from the Alumni Office that they were making the difficult decision to sell their buildings. Due to some impossible financial circumstances Bangor sold the facility they had inhabited since 1814 and closed their library and moved half of their operations to Husson College and half to Portland, Me.

As you can imagine this created a great deal of anxiety in students and faculty alike. What would life be like without their spiritual home? How could they survive if they moved?

I went back for a visit and encountered a favorite professor (a Catholic Nun named Sister Anne Johnson). When I asked what she thought would happen she responded: “Well now we will find out what is important.”

I love this answer because instead of responding in fear as her workplace of nearly 30 years was being packed up around her, Anne Johnson opened herself to an undetermined possibility.

When we look closely at it I believe we have the same choice of response as we face our budget and stewardship process.

Discomfort when talking about money, when asking for money is natural. It is nature in a difficult fiscal year to want to hole up, to build walls, and put our fingers in our ears and hum so as not to experience discomfort.

But if we can open our hearts and minds long enough to the conversation without answers, realignment has the possibility of happening. Or as Sister Anne Johnson suggests if we can live in the discomfort of unknowing we will naturally begin to clarify what is really important.

The concept of stewardship in our context is one of community leadership for the caring of the institution of this church. We no longer hold to any idea that God is the true owner of all of our resources and so we are each required to share them with the church giving us a definite road map toward salvation. But instead we know that each of us working together providing what we can makes our work possible. Today as we begin our conversations about the finances required to make our church dreams possible we can choose to close our eyes and ears until it is over and barrel through or we can (as Gilbert Rendle suggests) open our hearts and minds with patience and courage and perhaps even some excitement-without an answer remaining as close to the pain and possibility that can transform us.

This Church has already seen cuts in staff and programs over the last decade. As a result, what we are often starting out with these days is a bare bones budget.

The first Sunday in March marked the third anniversary of my Installation here at First Church and in this short time I have seen how this congregation rallies to decide what is important. And how we have made some sacrifices to grow our staff and our membership.

For those of you who have a roadmap from the past, or from other church, I want to encourage you to consider that the benefit of having a relatively empty purse is that you can fill it up in any new way that makes sense. Thoughtfully filling a relatively empty purse can allow us to determine what is important. Filling a relatively empty purse means that nothing is lost and every dollar counts.

So let us leave all anxiety behind and begin our Sunday Drive, leaving some if not all of our knowing behind. Let our ruminations this morning serve as a reminder that those places where we allow our dreams to meander, those journeys that we head out on without a destination in mind, sometimes offer us amazing serendipitous surprises.