Deeply rooted in human nature, in the nature of human existence, are characteristic and undeniable needs. We need food, water, oxygen, comfortable temperature. We need safety, and a sense of security. We need love, affection, and a sense of belonging. We need self-esteem, and we need to be esteemed and valued by others. Only when these most basic needs, called “instinctoid” by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, have been satisfied are we able to turn our attention and our energies to what Maslow called “self-actualization:” to being and doing what we were born to do; to reaching beyond the confines of what we might call “existence,” and unfolding into the richness of – shall we call it “living?”

And still we are able, sometimes, to transcend our striving to meet our needs. We are able, sometimes, to pause in the middle of reaching for what we need, and instead pay attention to what we have. We are able, sometimes, to share what we have with others, or even to sacrifice in order that others might benefit.

Sometimes we can do this alone, cultivating a practice of mindfulness and thanksgiving, really noticing flashes of insight and moments of grace that overwhelm us with a glimpse of the fullness of our lives. Sometimes, we cannot even name the impulse that moves us to reach out to another, as comforter or savior, teacher or seer.

Sometimes, it is the presence of others in our lives that draws us out of ourselves. One of my favorite readings, from Unitarian Universalist minister Kathleen McTigue, speaks to this enlarging power of community:

We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves
Awareness and gratitude,
Taking the time to look into one another’s faces
And see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.

However it happens, we ourselves are enriched and deepened by awareness and gratitude. We ourselves are enhanced and refined in the process of reaching out to others: to share what we have, to offer something of what we are. And, in community, our small efforts are multiplied and magnified in ways we cannot readily foresee.

So it was in the far-flung community of the American Unitarian Association in the years just before the Second World War. In a world darkened by the shadows of economic depression and political oppression, Unitarians came together to regroup, to re-vision a role for liberal religion that might speak to human needs at home and in the larger world. One focus of attention was outward-looking; with a renewed spirit of mission and sacrificial giving, new emphasis was placed on humanitarian service.

In 1938, a committee to aid Czechoslovakian Unitarians was dispatched to Prague and arrived just ahead of Hitler, meeting with local Czechs to assess their needs for rescue and relief aid. The work soon broadened out and, in cooperation with the Quakers, became nonsectarian. Within two years, this work with Unitarian and Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe led to the formation of the Unitarian Service Committee, an event that Dr. Frederick May Eliot, then-president of the American Unitarian Association, once referred to as “the most important Unitarian event in this century.” [quoted in A Stream of Light: A Short History of American Unitarianism. Edited by Conrad Wright. 1989. p. 135.] Nearly unique among faith-based service organizations, the Unitarian Service Committee undertook to meet the needs of people in many parts of the world without regard to their religious beliefs, without resort to catechism or conversion.

By January, 1941, Lisbon, Portugal was the only port in Europe open to refugees attempting to escape from Europe. The Rev. Dr. Charles Joy directed the Lisbon office of the Unitarian Service Committee, reaching out to people from many countries and all walks of life, many of whom were forced to leave their homes and home countries without the identification papers needed to cross borders. Working with a secret network of couriers and agents, disguises and secret identities, across political boundaries and language barriers, the Service Committee smuggled children and adults, artists, intellectuals, and dissidents out of Eastern Europe, many to the United States.

The Service Committee began issuing replacement papers, travel documents that Charles Joy called “navicerts to pass emigrants to the new world through the British blockade. We are certifying that they are politically safe and sound.” [Dan Hotchkiss. “Wartime Origins of the Flaming Chalice.” UU World May/June 2001]. But the Unitarian Service Committee, still in its infancy, was an unknown organization in a cloak-and-dagger world where, in the words of Unitarian Universalist historian Daniel Hotchkiss, “establishing trust across barriers of language, nationality and faith could mean life instead of death. Disguises, signs and countersigns, and midnight runs across guarded borders were the means of freedom in those days.” [“The Flaming Chalice” pamphlet by Daniel Hotchkiss. 1993 (UUA)].

So Charles Joy began to think about a symbol for the Committee which, in his own words, “could be placed in a seal and used in our documents. When a document may keep a man out of jail, giving him standing with governments and police, it is important that it look important.” [Dan Hotchkiss. “Charles Joy and the Flaming Chalice Symbol.” The Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, Volume XXVI, 1999. p. 114. ] Joy turned to Hans Deutsch, an Austrian artist who, in Paris in the 1930s, had drawn cartoons critical of Adolph Hitler. When the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, Deutsch abandoned all he had and fled to the South of France, then to Spain, and finally, with an altered passport, to Portugal.

Deutsch agreed to work with Dr. Joy to design a seal for the documents issued by the service committee. He later wrote to Joy, describing what had impressed him about the Service Committee and the Unitarian values that underscored its work: “There is something that urges me to tell you... how much I admire your utter self denial [and] readiness to serve, to sacrifice all, your time, your health, your well being, to help, help, help.
“I am not what you may actually call a believer. But if your kind of life is the profession of your faith---as it is, I feel sure---then religion, ceasing to be magic and mysticism, becomes confession to practical philosophy and---what is more- --to active, really useful social work. And this religion--- with or without a heading---is one to which even a `godless' fellow like myself can say wholeheartedly, Yes!” [“The History of the Flaming Chalice” at http://www.uua.org/aboutuu/chalice.html]With pencil and ink, Deutsch drew a design, which Joy described in a letter to the Service Committee board back home in Boston. “It represents,” he wrote, “a chalice with a flame, the kind of chalice which the Greeks and Romans put on their altars. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice… This was in the mind of the artist. The fact, however, that it remotely suggests a cross was not in his mind, but to me this also has its merit. We do not limit our work to Christians. Indeed, at the present moment, our work is nine-tenths for the Jews, yet we do stem from the Christian tradition, and the cross does symbolize Christianity and its central theme of sacrificial love. … It is simple, chaste, and distinctive. I think it might well become the sign of our work everywhere.” [Dan Hotchkiss. “Charles Joy and the Flaming Chalice Symbol.” The Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, Volume XXVI, 1999. p. 115. ]
The symbol of the flaming chalice, easily recognizable regardless of language, was made into a seal for papers and a badge for agents moving refugees to freedom. And, like all good symbols, it soon lent itself to multiple associations and interpretations.

Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Belletini tells a moving story of the power of the chalice symbol to strengthen and save lives. Priscilla a member of Mark’s congregation, was born and grew up in Eastern Europe. One Sunday morning, as he was finishing his sermon on the Czech roots of our Unitarian Universalist faith, Priscilla stopped Mark in the hall outside his office. She wanted to show him her beautiful antique book about Jan Hus, the greatest of Czech reformers, who was martyred for, among other things, insisting that the communion cup be shared with the laity and not restricted only to priests. “Then,” Mark says, “setting the book aside, she started to pour out the story of her life. She described the day the Nazis came to town. ‘There are the Jews!’ the townsfolk said, pointing to her house; and so the Nazis shot her parents before her very eyes. She elaborated the terrors of surviving in a concentration camp … She spoke of her losses, and her life-distorting grief and rage.”

“But most of all,” he continues, “I remember her remarkable testimony about the Hussite freedom-symbol which we now call “the flaming chalice.” You must know that the Czech version of our symbol has a motto underneath it, ‘Pravda vitezi,’ which translates ‘Truth overcomes,’ or ‘Truth prevails.’ Every single morning in that terrible camp, Priscilla told [Mark], she traced a picture of a flaming chalice in the sand with her finger. Then she wrote the motto underneath it. ‘It gave me the strength to live each day,’ she said to [Mark]. ‘Whenever I drew the chalice in the dirt I knew in my heart that the assertions of Nazism would one day be overcome by the greater Truth that no human being may claim power over any other human being.’” [www.uua.org/ga/ga99/402.html]

In the years after the War, the chalice symbol spread from the Unitarian Service Committee to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which formed by the consolidation of the Unitarian Service Committee and the Universalist Service Committee, similarly founded in 1945 as the humanitarian arm of the Universalist Church of America. In the last 20 or 30 years, the chalice has moved off the paper into a 3-dimensional incarnation, an actual cup or bowl holding an actual fire, its lighting signaling the opening of worship or work in Unitarian Universalist congregations and homes in the United States and Canada.

Likewise the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC for short) continues to operate as an independent human rights organization whose work is grounded in Unitarian Universalist principles and in empowering partnerships with local people who know best what basic needs in their communities remain unmet. UUSC and its partner organizations work for peace and health and education in Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo, defend indigenous rights in Burma and Guatemala and human rights in India, engage people of all ages in the United States to speak out against injustice, defend civil liberties, rebuild or strengthen broken communities.

Some of you have worked with UUSC, rebuilding burned-out black churches in Alabama. Many of you have supported UUSC with donations of money, and more than 60% of our members are UUSC members.

Each year at this time, UUSC offers each of us a simple way to support their work, to live for a little while what Hans Deutsch called “[the] kind of life [that] is the profession of [our] faith.” Beginning at Thanksgiving, UUSC sends us a collection of little cardboard boxes and an invitation to each of us to place one on our dining table. Several of these boxes are arranged on a little table in front of our Chalice Table this morning. For a month or six weeks, we are invited to imagine that the box represents a Guest At Our Table – one of the people who partner with UUSC in the struggle for human dignity around the world. At each meal, we are invited to place in the box money that represents the cost of feeding one other person whatever we are eating. In early January, we are invited to bring our boxes, heavy now with coins or bills, back to church, where our small contributions will be combined and sent to UUSC headquarters in Boston.

Last year, our Fellowship contributed $1057. This year, perhaps we will contribute more than that. Before you leave today, please make a point of picking up a Guest at Your Table box, and the accompanying Stories of Hope and pages of introduction to this year’s UUSC partners. They will be available at the front door and in the Social Hall today, and for the next few weeks.

This year, perhaps we will be moved to stop at each meal and give thanks, for food and shelter self-esteem which satisfy our most basic human needs. Perhaps a Guest at Our Table will stand in the place of community and remind us…
“To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves / Awareness and gratitude,”

Until we open our hearts in Thanksgiving for what we have, for who we are. Until we begin to transcend the striving for more, and emulate, in some small way, Charles Joy’s “self denial [and] readiness to sacrifice [not all but only some of] [our] time, [our] health, [our] well being, to help, help, help.”

For Thanksgiving and service are like two sides of the same coin. Each begins with that moment of resting on the forming edge of our lives, of seeing clearly just what we have, and just how we might make a difference in the world. Each calls us to look beyond, to live beyond our basic human needs, our basic human neediness. Each begins deep within us, then grows, like the living flame that rises up and shows to us beauty, vision, and joy.

So let us now prepare ourselves for whatever service we may be able to give, by pausing in community for a moment of Thanksgiving. Let there be a pause from speaking and listening, from reason and logic.

Silence for 10 seconds

Let us pass from one to another baskets of bread, sacred fruit of the rich earth, hallowed by the labor of human hands, symbol of all that feeds our bodies and our spirits. Will those who have agreed to pass the baskets, please come forward and collect them?

As the basket comes to you, take the time to look into the face of the one who passes it to you, seeing there communion, the reflection of your own eyes. Then take a morsel and savor the taste, letting it fill you with awareness and gratitude, with well-being and generosity. When all have been served, the baskets will be collected along the outside aisles. Then the bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.

Bread Communion, with music
Bell
Silence
Meditation music

Amen, and blessed be.

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