Lost And Found

In January of 2002 I voluntarily went to our therapist solo. I was in great distress, as you would have surmised if you knew me well and learned that I went to any form of doctor voluntarily.

A year earlier I had dusted off an old 1993 sermon entitled "Life And Death Tangled In The Interdependent Web," updated it with a couple of excellent books that had been published in the interim and renamed it "Leading The Way To Hope." In it I described our disastrous environmental situation, and ended up by describing how Unitarian Universalists were poised to be the leaders of the movement toward sustainability and responsible stewardship. At that moment I could see the tipping point ahead, where we would lead the world into a better tomorrow.

I already had a small local circuit that I toured: our Orlando UU congregation; the lay-led University UUs - a congregation birthed from the loins of the Orlando church; and the little lay-led Eustis congregation. If one of my offerings was well-received in Orlando, the others would hear of it and invite me to speak. Lay-led congregations are always hungry for speakers, even if we're just lowly carpenters (and who ever heard of a carpenter being a religious leader?!)

This particular sermon was so well liked, I was approached at District Annual Assembly by a representative of the Nature Coast congregation on the west coast of Florida. He had been asking around the other lay-led congregational representatives for suggestions of speakers. This sparked a germ of an idea in me. I had a District Directory that told me the names of all of the people in charge of lining up speakers in the district churches and fellowships. I printed up a flyer describing my sermon and mailed it out to every congregation in the Florida District, knowing that even churches with settled ministers had periodic lay services during the year and usually during the whole summer. Well... I got a pretty good response. Many had heard of me, and those who hadn't were directed to the many congregational leaders who had already experienced a Jim Emerson sermon.

During the spring and summer of 2001 I was out of town nearly every Sunday. I went to Lecanto, Ocala, Port Charlotte, Clearwater, Bradenton, and even Key West. Ocala asked me back for a date in early October, and Daytona signed me up for mid-November. I was on top of my strange little world, riding a wave of appreciation for my writing and my public speaking skills.

And then those damned four airplanes got hijacked into a huge high-profile big body count attack on the very same American wasteful value system I had been envisioning being phased out by peaceful example-led change from within. At that moment I watched my vision of a sustainable culture crash, explode, burn and die.

I was scheduled in Ocala to deliver a talk about humans and the blurring of the lines that we have drawn around ourselves separating us from the other animals. I tried to write that - really I did - but I couldn't pull my head out of my despair. So I wrote about what I really felt. What a mistake that was! Yes, I stayed for the "talk back" portion of the service, and felt as though the mood of my audience would have been more eloquently expressed by a barrel of hot tar and some feathers. Were these the same UUs I had recently invested with so much hope?

In November I mustered the gumption to go to Daytona and deliver "Leading The Way To Hope" as scheduled, but I did so with a very heavy heart. That is when I learned that I did not believe it any longer. My hope was gone.

Doctor Hughes listened to my tale of woe, and did what he could to help me dig out from my despair. He told me that EVERYONE had lost something on September 11th, 2001. I had lost my hope.

Life gradually got better for me, although I became more reclusive, and I was pretty introverted before. I withdrew from Unitarian Universalism just as Carmen was poised on the threshold of her quest for ministry. As we moved to Massachusetts and became immersed in the history of the UU movement, I gained a huge amount of respect for the things about it that I had admired years before, but now saw with mine own eyes. We visited dozens of churches that had been ongoing since the 1640s and directly involved in many upheavals in our culture.

At church this morning, Carmen's sermon was about the dynamics of cultural evolution, resistance to change and fiery determination to take it to where someone thinks it ought to be. Religious freedom and religious pluralism was the focus of the sermon, and the events leading up to recent anti-muslim sentiment were spelled out. Her point was that Unitarian Universalists were poised on the threshold of tipping the scales toward real religious pluralism, because this is what we are all about and have been for decades. I was forcefully reminded of the events leading up to the day my hope was lost.

Today, I think I found it again.