Natalie Gulbrandsen (1919-2007)

     Every once in a while in the years I worked closely with Natalie Gulbrandsen, and felt like picking on her a bit, or I just wanted to see that wonderful look she got on her face when she was annoyed with me, I would call her, “Mom” - and sure enough, she would assume the look and tell me to “cut that out.”

     It was all in good fun and Nat likely didn’t attach any significance to those little exchanges, but she would probably be surprised that I did. Not because there was any real substance to them - they were a kind or oral cartoon illustrating in a positive, natural way, many of the qualities I saw in Nat.

     In a lot of ways Nat was kind of a “Mom” to the Board of Trustees and to the General Assembly, and to a lot of us out in our congregations as well. A certified positive thinker, she always expected the best of us as individuals and as an institution, and was disappointed when we gave less than our best. Her spirit of affirmation and enthusiasm came not from any lack of critical faculties -- believe me, she knew how to use the sandpaper as well as the silk handkerchief. Her motivating spirit came from an abundance of faith in, and hope for, our religious community.

     Nat was someone with a twinkle in her eye and in her whole manner. She was someone who was serious, but did not take herself seriously. Nat could tell us when we were being foolish without making us feel foolish. She kept her mind open, but also knew when to take a stand.

     Nat was a woman whose devotion to our Association and to what it stands for - and ought to stand for - was strong. She not only acted and spoke for in the name of our Association, but by her efforts gave it class and character. Thanks, Mom!

Metro New York - Annual Meeting - 1982

     We have highlighted this morning the congregations making up this District and the activities which evidence their life forces.
     Doug Rhodes asked me to look at those congregations from a slightly different angle, drawing on some things I said about my faith community at a retreat earlier this year.  To look at them that is, from the perspective of their places of physical being, their congregational homes.
     To build community without place is near to impossible.  Of course, it requires sharing or interaction between people, the identification of those things held in common -- (a relationship of comity -- of unity -- of community) -- but these building blocks of any given faith community do  not readily come together unless there is a place where this can happen.
     Yes, it was once possible to sustain a religious community while wandering in a desert with only the promise of a home -- someday.  But that was then and we are now.
     The someplace of my congregation, The Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut, is on a low wooded ridge -- a relic of the ice age’s casual rearrangement of our local landscape.
     Our building soars upward from the ridge, with our spirit in tow.  The double roof mimics western hands in prayer and the eastern sign of peaceful greeting.  All-glass walls join nature and worship.  The structure speaks in an architecture of the future, leaning into the barrier of time.
     This is the focus for our coming together for corporate and spiritual purposes.  We are tied together in that place -- by what happens there and by mystic chords of connectivity.  That place we hold both necessary and holy is almost as important as the people.  
     “The building as important as the people?  Is he suffering from some sort of edifice complex?” you ask.  “What about the shared values?  The worship experience?  The music?  The RE and adult programs?  The outreach?  Is he ignoring the substance of our religious experience in favor of a preoccupation with the society’s building?”
     Of course, our real wealth is the people who make up our community.  Without each other we would have nothing.  No community.  No mutual support and empowerment.  No safe place.  No platform from which to speak out about the agonies of our world and time.  And I might add -- no paid clergy.
     Any place of our communal coming together is essentially passive, but it will be suffused with our energizing involvement, sanctified by what we do and have done there -- and an ongoing source of renewed inspiration.
     Louis Untermeyer, the poet, anthologist and author, was a most unusual personality.  Of all unexpected combinations, he was also a successful businessman.  He had many books to his credit and his work was frequently socially and politically oriented. In his early years he wrote for and helped to publish “The Masses” and other left-leaning journals, and was arrested and prosecuted during World War I by the Federal government.  He was a professional intimate of poets Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale, and political/literary figures Max Eastman, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson and H. L. Mencken, to name just a few.
     Why am I talking about Louis Untermeyer?  Because he wrote a poem which has always had a tremendous spiritual quality to me -- not just because it seemed to be about my own church building, but because of its evocation of the kind of place we would want our individual houses of worship to be.  The poem appeared under the title “Prayer for a New House,” in a book, “This Singing World,” published in 1923.  Set to the music of Robert Quaile, it appeared in our blue hymnal under the title, “Prayer for this House.”  In “Singing the Living Tradition,” it is renamed for its first line, “May Nothing Evil Cross this Door.”  I don’t know whether the commission laboring on the new hymnal changed the title of the hymn out of fear of prayer as a concept, or whatever.
     We’re not talking “Home Sweet Home,” or “Home, Home on the Range,” which sing sweetly of places of sentimental, but not substantive recall.  It’s closer to the theme from the television series “Cheers,” which goes something like, “I want to go // where ev’rybody knows my name, and they’re always glad you came.”
     Cheers recalled the best of the old time neighborhood pub, the warmth, the bonhomie, the personal affection and support for each other which underlaid the sharp-edged banter.  Their community featured Frasier, the sophisticated psychiatrist, short of love;  Sam, the regular guy/bartender, for whom love was an every-day transitive verb;  Diane, the heroine, serving up her intellectual pretensions along with the drinks;  Carla, the street-smart waitress.  Filling out the cast were Woody, the bartender, of no intellectual pretension at all;  Cliff the pathetic postman, lacking a sense of self-worth and trying mightily to catch up with the humor which has gone over his head.  Finally, there was Norm, the accountant, owner of the corner stool, and symbol of the unreality of it all.  He never seemed to work, and although constantly attentive to the beer which was his steady source of nourishment and inspiration, never seemed to overindulge either.
     But this isn’t about Cheers -- although we all like to go where everybody knows our name.  It’s about a place most important to me, the keystone of my personal support system.  it has the cast of characters, the familiarity, the warmth and mutual affecton of cheers -- but it has infinitely more -- it has meaning.  it requires commitment of us, commitment to be proactive in our individual searches for the true and the holy, as we each are given to see it, commitment to building an institution by application, not contemplation.
     So let’s all join in Hymn #1, to sing about the homes of our respective communities -- those places, which by our individual and collective actions we hallow.

June Z. Gillespie Award - Response (4/29/2000)

     I am, of course, immensely honored and pleased to receive this award.  My sense of appreciation is magnified by it being the first in what I trust will be a never ending series, and by the fact it is named after my good friend June Gillespie who could, as easily be the recipient of this award, as its namesake.
     I said to Carolyn last night, “What should I say?  I need a subject besides myself.”  “Why not the years since you were on the District Board,” she said.  “A few things must look different.”
     It was 1968.  Our church was just completing a search for the new minister;  I had just completed two terms as Board Chair;  had been to one GA and felt a strong sense of need for more glue in our relationship with the denomination.
     Then came a notice about a meeting - the Metropolitan New York District - I went - spoke to folks from other societies.  Those of you sitting here can see it coming - I didn’t - would I run for the District Board?  I have modified slightly a widely used slogan - and it has governed my denominational involvement over the years - “Just say yes.”
     Those were days of fiscal austerity at 25 Beacon Street.  We are now served by two full-time religious professionals, then we shared one with the Joseph Priestly and Connecticut Valley Districts through an awkward, contentious structure called the Interdistrict Council. 
     Now, instead of being a struggling dependent, our District - and others, as well - has become an important focus of power and accomplishment within our Association, an important link between the grass roots growing in our individual congregations and the continental organization which serves and speaks for our common concerns.
     What this award is all about - if I understand it correctly - is that connectedness.  And with the granting of it we don’t honor Bob Lavender as much as we honor ourselves and our commitment to this organization, about which we all care so much, at all the levels of its life.
     Diane Connell tells me that another award will be give to those awardees who complete their responses within two minutes, and so I close with these words which speak to the theme of this award.


     We separate to go our separate ways
     And yet, in some mystery of time and space,
     We remain together.


     We separate to live our separate lives
     And yet, in some mystery of connectedness, 
     Our lives are entwined.
     
     We separate to hold our separate thoughts
     And yet, in some telepathic mystery,     
     Those thoughts are held in common.


     And so turns the earth.   So let it be.

Presentation to the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Society

    As the one elected officer of the Association making no formal response this afternoon to the presentation by the NSUUS, and as a lover of good wine and grand occasions, I should like to raise a toast:

     In the shared sacrament of this common meal,
     In the drink of celebration consecrated by centuries of use in our social and religious histories,
     I give you a toast which does not attempt a quantified response to what has happened today.
     Which does not deal in amazement at the magnitude of your gift or its potential for strengthening our ministry.
     I give you a toast to grace - -
     To the grace which accepts good fortune with humility,
     To the grace which recognizes our individual human obligations to all of humanity.
     To the grace which responsibly seeks effective ways to provide encouragement, aid and succor to and through institutions that people have established for themselves.
     To the grace which works not in a spirit of dominance, but of cooperation and support.
     In short - to that grace animated by good taste and good sense - through good people.
     And therefore, in addition to grace, I give you ----and the other good people in the NSUUS.