Coming Full Circle
A Sermon/Reflection by Reverend Carole Martignacco
8 January 2012
Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle.
The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth
is round like a ball, and so are the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.
Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.
The sun comes forth and goes down in a circle.
Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing,
and always come back again to where they were.
The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood.
And so it is in everything where power moves.
- Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux
Coming full circle, my friends, isn’t the same as dizzily “going around in circles.” Though it feels as if I’ve done a bit of that in the past week, getting settled in my new digs here in Montreal, learning the UCM routine, finding where to park and trying to get my car restarted.
Perhaps in your own story, if looked at as one grand epic sweep, you might find some symbolic image, an organizing pattern to your life. For me, it’s a circle widening out into larger and larger ripples, as long as I live an open spiral, encompassing the new in terms of the familiar. So by way of introduction today, I share something of my story and what has formed me, so that you may know, as we do ministry together over the coming months, who I am and maybe even something of where I’m coming from.
Every circle has cardinal points we call the four directions. Were I to name four directions around which my spirit turns, themes that give my life meaning, they’d be: 1) The Arts - Dance, Music, Poetry and the Visual Arts; 2) a Sense of Calling - to a life of purpose, to serve some Greater Good, 3) a Lifelong Love of Learning, 4) a fascination with Mystery and Mysticism in all its myriad expressions. Like Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” chosen for today’s music, this particular life seems to return again and again in different ways to the same basic themes.
Minnesota, 1945: a small rural village north of what we call the Twin Cities, St. Paul/Minneapolis. The circle begins with family. On my father’s side, a handful of German Foreign Protestants who landed originally in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, shipbuilders in the mid-1700s. A generation or so later, some migrated into Quebec and intermarried with the French, then proceeded westward during the famine of the mid-1800s to settle in northern Minnesota; somewhere along the way they acquired relatives among the native Ojibwe. Among them were farmers, artists, miners and one prolific woodcarver known for creating elaborate altars and communion railings. My grandmother spoke French Canadian with her friends, which we children were scolded for trying to learn.
On mother’s side, the Waites came from the British Isles. Among them was a railroad tycoon who owned the huge granite quarries in St. Cloud that furnished stone for building the Minnesota state capital; one of my great-grandfathers was a poet-turned-politician who helped the territory earn statehood and became a founding senator. There were also scoundrels, a few poets, artists and medical people, and several nuns and priests. In December of 1945, I arrived, the second child and eldest daughter of what would become a large Catholic family -- three brothers and three sisters -- all living still, with children scattered through the US and all the way to Africa. In our tiny post-war cottage a half-block from the Mississippi River in Riverview Heights, we were no poorer than countless others in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII.
My father Virgil – named for the Latin poet - was a flight instructor for bomber pilots who, among other things, designed and repaired airplanes; my mother, a traditional homemaker. Were we a close family?
Elder brother Tom likes to point out – with a house so tiny and cramped, close was hardly a choice! Yet we were surrounded by open land, much of which my father gardened to help feed his family. He planted both vegetables and flowers in equal measure – teaching me early the importance of feeding both body and soul. From father, I gleaned a love for nature – gardening to geology. My passion for learning came from my mother Jeane – who in another age would have made a fine university professor. Between household and child care, she read voraciously – literary classics,
philosophy and psychology – whole stacks of books I later learned were on the Vatican index of forbidden reading for Catholics. Both parents were active in local community and parish leadership; both taught religion classes with children and youth. Alas, this apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.
My father died in 2000 just before I came to Montreal, and my mother two years ago. Ever strong Catholics, they each in their own way gave their blessing to my present ministry.
There’s an African proverb that if you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing. I seem to have been born knowing that. How did they know to name me Carole – which in the French means a round of singing, a dance? Family legend is the parents worried I might be a bit slow, behind schedule with the usual practice babbling – ‘til one day they woke up early to find me awake in my crib, gripping the rails and swaying, singing away in full sentences. Toys were in short supply in that household. I learned to play with words and music, later spent hours making up endless convoluted songs and stories to entertain younger siblings – my first captive audience. No surprise that poetry has been with me from the beginning, and music, too.
Admittedly, it was a love of music and art, more than theology, that led to an early interest in religion and a strong sense of being called to serve. Sunday High Mass was a weekly cultural highpoint in my childhood – full of pageantry, music, the drama of the liturgy. I memorized whole cadences of Latin – mysterious words more sung than spoken. After Mass, we’d pack into the car and drive across town for dinner with grandparents – always a banquet, the large L-shaped table surrounded by assorted aunts, uncles and cousins, everyone asking us little ones: What do you think you’ll be when you grow up? So one Sunday, the summer I was five, during a lull in the dinner conversation, I announced proudly: I know what I want to be when I grow up – a PRIEST! That
very morning I’d watched the priest at the altar in his shimmering satin vestments, lift his arms and intone the blessing, as choir voices from the balcony filled the dome and everyone answered “Amen”. I knew clearly -- I wanted to do that. As I looked round the table, there was stunned silence; no eye contact, not a flicker of response. Then, after a long pause, silverware clinked once again, and the talking and eating resumed. “Wait!” I thought, “I’m sure I said it out loud!”
That fall I started parish school, where it didn’t take the nuns long to inform me, in no uncertain terms, that of course I wasn’t destined for the priesthood; I was a girl. Yet they were equally quick to affirm a possible call to religious life; I should consider the sisterhood. I spent my growing up
years tolerating school but absolutely in love with learning -- math, science, geography – but especially the arts, poetry and music. Grades were always good, but frequently in confession I admitted to squandering study time for music practice. I sang in every choir and musical that came my way, and in fifth grade took up the cello, not just because of its mellow mahogany sound, but also because I liked sitting next to a beautiful boy named Cecil who played first cello in the school orchestra. One semester, I made a dramatic choice; although I’d loved trigonometry, instead of calculus I chose a class with the visiting artist-in-residence -- an impulsive decision, but
in retrospect clearly a point of no return.
In my teens, father had taught me how to paint with oils; my mother and I discussed the classics. Following my own spirit’s lead, I discovered the world poets, the mystics and contemplative prayer. And so the die was cast … instead of heading off to college or getting married after high
school, I entered a Franciscan monastic order on Chicago’s west side. Though aspects of that life remain with me still, I left before ever taking vows, and spent a good part of my early adult life learning how to balance a nearly equal need for solitude and society.
Back home from the monastery I moved into the big city, worked as a bookkeeper to finance voice lessons at McPhail Music School and art class at the University. Eventually I met and married a fellow singer, a bright and talented bass-baritone 15 years my senior, whom I met between lessons in the waiting room of a prominent voice coach we shared. What did we have in common? We were both Catholic and studying French art song and German lieder. Though we often sang for the same functions – weddings, memorials, musicals and light opera – John and I never actually sang together as a duet. Only in retrospect did that become a metaphor.
Between the birth of the second and third of our four daughters, unable to balance the demands of public performance with the care of small children, I gave up singing. About that time my inner music also became mute. The marriage though strained from its earliest days, lasted eleven years … and ended painfully with my husband’s shift from chronic depression into psychosis.
Suddenly I was a single mother, and needed more than music and art to support four very young children. I applied for and, miraculously, was awarded a series of grants for four years of university study, majoring first in journalism and later changing gears to language and art education. My first semester simultaneously marks my first course in anthropology and leaving the Catholic church. Hmmm … religion as a part of culture, not absolute truth? Suddenly a dark cloud lifted, and my mind opened up.
In the following years, I took anthropology electives whenever possible, went on to do graduate work in comparative religion, psychology of religion, world faiths. Sunday mornings were spent studying with the girls, writing poetry, drawing, listening to cello concertos. And somehow, with freedom to learn and reinvent myself, finding my voice in other things, I began to sing again.
So, when one of my classmates, also a former Catholic, remarried, I sang for her wedding. Now, to sing a wedding again was on so many levels like coming full circle. After the ceremony, I approached the minister, who just happened to be a Unitarian, to compliment him on the unique ceremony. In our long, intense conversation, he encouraged me to seek out the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “you’ll fit in -- they’re all atheists and agnostics, like you!”
Although I’d vowed never to darken another church door, when I finally found the courage to check them out, it was not for a service but a concert of – imagine this – sacred music. Turns out, this chorus of rationalists could sing a Mozart Mass! And so, another turn of the circle. I joined immediately -- the choir, not the church – but that meant naturally singing at Sunday services.
Struggling to keep a teaching job during the budget cuts of the Reagan years, I soon became involved as an RE volunteer and, grateful for the retraining, was eventually hired by another area church as Director of Religious Education. We held monthly meetings of UU religious leaders from all over the Twin Cities area – and one day, as I looked around the circle, it struck me how many of our ministers -- now my good friends -- were UU women ministers. Something clicked; from way back in childhood, an old idea re-emerged. I left the meeting thinking, “I could do that! Why, that could be me!” And this time around, being female was no barrier. I’d circled round to a familiar place, from a slightly different direction. Now a whole new adventure was opening before me….
Seminary had to wait until my last daughter was launched into adulthood. Then it was back to school again. When I announced my plans to my daughters, there was little surprise. As my eldest pointedly remarked: “Mother, when in my life have you not been in school – on either side of the teacher’s desk?”
Seminary was all about integrating poetry and prophecy, preaching and ‘pastoring’. Resurrecting – if I may use that metaphor – whatever in my Catholic roots had led me to a sense of ministerial calling. Exploring both belief and doubt, I recalled an earlier religion class in my teens. Back in the late 50s, Father Ardaugh, an amazingly liberal priest, one day cautioned me: “Never be afraid to question, but neither let your doubts dominate you. We cannot know everything; you will always reach into the unknown. Remember to keep a small door in your mind open to mystery and wonder.”
In shaping my theology, instead of the theologians, I found myself turning to the whole tribe of spirited poets through the ages. At that United Church seminary, they were liberal Christians, with whom I learned to become religiously multilingual, and to do my own translating, broadening
out religious words and concepts to define a universal spirit. One of my professors was the Unitarian minister who’d performed that wedding. As it turns out, he had Sufi leanings, and through him I rediscovered the mystics from a whole new angle. Recently at a UUA General Assembly in Portland, Oregon, I wandered past a display table and signed up to become a “card-carrying” UU Mystic.
It’s all a great circular dance.
How, you might ask, does all this inform my ministry with you? In designing worship, I believe music is as important as words. The poet in me loves the spaces between the lines as much as the lines themselves. The contemplative knows that silence is the closest we have to a coherent language for the sacred. All words are metaphor, even and especially religious words -- what your minister and my colleague and friend, Rev. Diane Rollert calls “wounded words”. I’ve no trouble reframing, redefining or translating them into liberal terms. ‘Grace’, ‘resurrection’, ‘blessing’, ‘miracle’ or ‘holy’: they are all symbolic, pointing to some meaning that is not fixed and never meant to be taken literally. Trained in the arts, I can’t help but wish religion were more about a search for beauty than for truth … the spirit rather than the letter of the law, as one great prophet
once said 2000 years ago. And this storyteller is always seeking the “heart truth.”
What’s important is not only what’s said, but what it points us toward. Like poetry, half the value of a sermon is what happens within you, in response.
I’ve recounted this odyssey before, a few years ago for the UU Ministers of Canada during our annual retreat. Adapting it for this morning, I discovered another twist to the story, one of those cyclical returns, turning back to an earlier theme. Turns out that the wedding I sang for my college classmate was my first encounter with Unitarians, the beginning of my long romance with our liberal tradition, sans dogma, sans credo. How appropriate then to celebrate my gratitude almost from the beginning of my ministry by working to build a strong Lay Chaplaincy program here in Canada. In training lay celebrants, my faith in shared ministry is renewed, over and over again.
Which leads me to conclude: My image of ministry has evolved about 360 degrees from that early glimpse of the priest before the altar. Whatever that five-year-old thought she saw, today it’s not about being at the front and single-handedly orchestrating the spirits. I still value the beauty of vestments (as you can see from my stole) but I want ministry to be a song and dance we do together, as Rev. Diane and I spoke of in our service last month. The age of the “lone ranger”, or priest as ‘first among equals’, is past. As Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams reminds us, in this “prophet-hood and priesthood of all believers” we are each of us called to minister to each other, and together in the larger world. Just as cooperative learning did back in the 1980s,
sharing the ministry excites me now as a Universalist Unitarian. I’m clear about which modifies what – ever the English teacher, word order still matters.
Seasons change, revolve in ever widening circles. My friends, from you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and by this we live. Now as a minister in final fellowship, I return to this beloved place where I began as your intern minister in 2000/2001. May our turning together again be for blessing.
Closing Words
I.
What we call a beginning is often the end
and to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
II.
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, #685 SLT
Copyright 2012
