These rocks.
They have seen some stuff.
Three million years ago, give or take a millennium, these rocks were buried - like the rest of what we now call Connecticut - beneath 1800-or-so feet of ice. As the ice slowly and steadily receded, these glacier carved rocks emerged into the sunlight along New England’s coastline.
After working recently with the leadership of one of our Connecticut congregations I paused by the ocean and spent time in quiet reflection among the boulders pictured above. I followed the striations on this rock, wondering at the weight of one layer pressed upon the next. I traced the whorls on the boulder below it, like an ancient fingerprint pressed into clay. These rocks, clearly comprised of what were once separate and distinct layers, appear today as a single immutable object.
I thought about the weight of millions of tons of ice carving scars into stone, and about the sustained pressure over eons that fused layers of sediment, one atop another, again and again until there is no way to extricate one layer from another. The individual layers have become a single, unique, beautiful rock.
In my work with that congregation, we had been talking about Covenant. That which we call Covenant in our non-creedal faith tradition is more than the words we recite or print on our orders of service. The practice of covenanting is an essential spiritual practice for Unitarian Universalists. How will we commit to be with one another - in times of ease as well as times of anguish? What promises are we called to make to our congregational community? How will we act in alignment with our highest values? How does our shared covenant hold us in times of conflict, harm, and repair?
When we create our covenants, we often think about its horizontal dimension - how you and I will agree to be with one another in this place. There is also a vertical dimension - what are our covenantal promises rooted in, if not something larger than ourselves? Some call it Spirit of Love, others call it God, the Universe, Transcendence.
But the dimension I was thinking of as I walked among and gave my attention to these glacier carved rocks was the dimension of time. Our covenants, our covenantal promises and practices, are handed down to us from our ancestors in faith, the founders of the congregations that became Unitarian Universalist. Here in New England, some of those ancestors date back four centuries - which is not quite an ice age, but still, imagine all the layers of love and loss and lessons our ancestors in faith lived and worked through. Each of those moments of celebration and each of those struggles that threatened to drive them apart might be traced in your congregation's history as distinctly as the layers in these massive stones.
In the rock I visited, the wide grey base provided a sturdy foundation. Perhaps this represents a congregation’s foundation, laid by founding families with faith enough and hope that their Love of God and neighbor would be enough. And to be clear, our ancestors in faith - almost exclusively European merchants, colonizers, and religious refugees - had a much more limited definition of their ‘neighbor’ than we hope to claim today. They committed to one another and with their first called minister to strive to serve their congregational community.
An orange pebbly layer might represent a time the congregation and their minister lost trust in one another, and the minister left mid-year, with an empty pulpit and no small amount of chaos.
The cool green layer fused above this represents the recommitment and recovery the congregation enjoyed with a new minister, and new families that joined.
The subsequent layers, some wider, some narrow, represent more years, decades, generations. All the stories of ministries and members coming and going. Layers of hard times when budgets were slim fused fast to bountiful years of growth and possibility.
We have congregations in New England that are older than the nation itself. We have Covenanting Communities birthed in this 21st century. We are a living tradition, which means the promises, the commitments, the lessons our ancestors in faith learned, their essence lives still today in our communities, our theology, our covenantal commitments to each other and to the vision of Beloved Community (which our ancestors might have called Heaven).
The foundational rock we have built our faith on is strong enough to withstand the challenges of these days. Together we weave strife and joy together into the next layer of our continuing story. It has always been so. We build on what we have inherited, and we strengthen our commitment to bequeath a strong, hope-full, unwavering faith to a future we dream into being together.
So may it be.
