as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, February 22, 2026
There is an ancient story from India with which you might be familiar. It appears in numerous scriptures. It is found in the Upanishads and might be as many as three thousand years ago. The Buddhists have a version of it in one of their most venerable texts. There is a Jain version. The great Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, had his own take on it. European colonialists created their own variation.
Do you know which story I am talking about? The Europeans called it “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” I, however, prefer Rumi’s version. His adaptation is not ableist. In it, he imagines that an elephant has been placed in dark room. Several people are led into it and, in the pitch, are unable to perceive the magnificent pachyderm in front of them. They can only use their sense of touch to try and decipher the nature of the gentle beast.
The first touches the elephant’s trunk. When asked about the essence of the animal she replies, “an elephant is like a flexible water-pipe.” The second feels its ear. When questioned about the giant, he responds, “an elephant is like a rough carpet.” The third brushes their hands across a leg. “An elephant is like a sturdy pillar,” they observe. The fourth handles a tusk. “An elephant is like a sharp spear,” they state.
And so it goes, each person, unable to perceive the whole of the animal, reduces its enormous essence to a small fraction of the whole. That fraction is further reduced by the narrowness of the familiar. One understands the elephant to be a like a flexible water-pipe because he has some experience with plumbing. Another conceives of the elephant as similar to a sharp spear because they know something of war.
“The whole of the object is not grasped in the palm,” advises Rumi in his reflections on the story.
In some variations, the observers, unable to reconcile their differing interpretations of the elephant fall into violently quarreling, possibly unto death. “Flexible water-pipe! Rough carpet! Sturdy pillar! Sharp spear!,” they each shout, insisting that their individual partiality is encompasses the totality.
In other tellings, those who cannot perceive the all of the elephant recognize that they each have something to learn from the other. “An elephant is like a flexible water-pipe and a rough carpet and a sturdy pillar and a sharp spear. An elephant is like all of those things and it is so much much more,” they tell each other in unison.
“Truth is one, the wise call it by many names,” some of the variants from India with positive conclusions connect to that line from the Rig Veda. Rumi interprets it through great poetry and an observation about the nature of religion.
The sea itself is one thing, the foam another;
Neglect the foam, and regard the sea with your eyes.
Waves of foam rise from the sea night and day,
You look at the foam ripples and not the mighty sea.
We, like boats, are tossed hither and thither,
We are blind though we are on the bright ocean.
Ah! you who are asleep in the boat of the body,
You see the water; behold the Water of waters!
Under the water you see there is another Water moving it,
Within the spirit is a Spirit that calls it.
“We are blind,” here great poet succumbs to ableist language, a reminder that even the wisest have their limitations. “[T]he Water of waters,” advice that we always recall that whatever small portion of infinite universe we perceive is but a small shimmer of star dust caught in the unending light of all.
A small shimmer of star dust, our subject today is “the truth spoken in love.” Speaking the truth in love is a spiritual practice that lies at the core of that process that I sometimes name the resurrection of the living, the waking up to the world as it is.
The resurrection of the living, I have reminded you in the past, is that teaching, found in so many of the world’s religions, that the purpose of life is to open ourselves to the unceasing beauty of the world around us. It is the Buddha’s answer to the question, “As you a god?” with the words, “I am awake.” It is Jesus’s statement, uncovered in a gnostic Christian text, that resurrection is “revelation of what is” and his insistence “God is not God of the dead but of the living.” It is the Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s claim, “All actual life is encounter.” It is the Indian poet Mirabai’s enjoinment, “Get up, stop sleeping–the days of a life are short.”
The days of a life are short, this morning we probe the practice of the truth spoken in love with two points. The first marks the passing of a great life, the civil rights icon Jesse Jackson. Last of the pride of lions who stood with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Jackson died earlier this week.
The second point I want to probe the practice of speaking the truth with love is with reference to the difficulties in July. It was a moment when each person had their own interpretation of events–their own partial grasp of the elephant.
But before we lift either probe, I want to share that the subject “the truth spoken in love” is connected to our covenant. You might recall that a sentiment similar to it is found within that text. You probably know the words. You can find them in your order of service, if you do not, and say them with me:
Love is the spirit of our congregation.
Service is our prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
to seek truth in love,
and to encourage one another,
thus do we covenant.
Thus do we covenant, it is part of my covenant with you to spend one Sunday a year explicitly considering the meaning of our congregational covenant. I do this because the practice of making, and struggling to keep, covenants lies at the core of who we are as Unitarian Universalists. We are not united by our shared beliefs–as stated in a collective creed. We are united by our shared commitments–as put forth in our congregational covenants.
This has been true of our tradition since even before we called ourselves Unitarian Universalists. Some of you might know many of the oldest churches in this country belong to our religious communion. The First Parish Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, founded by the pilgrims who you probably learned about in elementary school, and the First Church in Boston are each part of the Unitarian Universalist Association. They both were founded some two hundred years before the Republic of Texas.
Their foundational acts were similar to ours. When they gathered, almost four centuries ago, their members chose not to unite around creed. Instead, they decided to come together around what Alice Blair Wesley called their “mutual shared loyalties.”
That is what a covenant is an expression of, our shared mutual loyalties. It is not a statement of what we believe. It is a statement of what we are loyal to, committed to, what we choose to center our lives upon. We are loyal to the spirit of love. We are loyal to peace. We are loyal to the truth. We are loyal to each other, which is to say we commit to encouraging each other.
Those are the sentiments we have chosen to place in our covenant. Our spiritual ancestors thought such sentiments had great potential to empower us to engage in the practice of traveling together through the metaphorical journey of life. They thought it was better to come together over our mutual shared loyalties than to divide along the lines of doctrinal difference.
Doctrinal differences, when we adopted our covenant we adopted, alongside it, a statement of covenantal intent. It is on the website and in various congregational documents. We do not refer to it all that often but I find it helpful when I seek to understand the implications of our covenant. You might discover it to be similarly useful.
Our statement of covenantal intent is structure so that each phrase of our covenant is accompanied by a couple of sentences that are meant to clarify our shared purpose. The line, “to seek the truth in love,” is expanded on with two phrases. The first is “Hear one another through active listening and assuming good intentions.” The second is “Seek the truth together by being connected with each other and the world around us as explore meanings from diverse viewpoints.”
Diverse viewpoints, our capacity to hold together a community of theological difference is one of things that makes Unitarian Universalism distinctive. With the exception of our theological cousins over at the Shrine of Black Madonna, Houston’s Unitarian Universalist congregations are the only ones in the city where you are likely to find people who identify as atheists, agnostics, liberal Christians, Jews, Muslims, neo-pagans, humanists, Buddhists, people who refuse religious labels, adherents of forms of African spirituality like Yoruba and Santeria, just plain old Unitarian Universalists, and probably two or three things I forgot, gathering together for worship on a Sunday morning. As Conrad Wright once put it, we do not just believe that we can travel “together despite disagreements,” we actually “go a step further, to say that diversity of opinion is a good thing … [that it] can be a source of creativity, even of life itself.”
Diversity of opinion can be a source of creativity; a recognition of this reality is attested to in the versions of the story about the dark room and the elephant that end in collaboration rather than competition. Diversity of opinion can be a source of creativity, understanding this is one of the gifts that Unitarian Universalism offers us. It is like Victoria Safford tells us, “life of the spirit is solitary, but … [we are called] to live, in the plural.”
To live in the plural, when we say, “love is the spirit of our congregation,” we are committing to love each other despite our differences and disagreements. This is not easy. It is hard. It can be painful. But the pain and difficulty both contain within them the possibility of pointing the way towards what Theodore Parker called “divine living”–the habituated patterns of action that cause our individual sparks to shine all the more brightly and can sometimes prompt us to undergo the resurrection of the living and wake up to the world as it is.
I am not sure about you, but I had an experience of the difficulty and the pain of living in the plural this past year. Without rehashing the events of July at length, most of you know that I got caught up in a media maelstrom that ultimately involved white supremacists targeting me. They phoned the church hundreds of times demanding my resignation, harassed our members online, and called for a protest of our building. There is a lot more that could be said about this elephant. Rather than going into the details, I want to confess that one of the most difficult things about it was that we approached it like the people in the lightless room with the pachyderm.
Everyone had their own perspective of, and set of information about, what had happened. This became clear to me as I went through the process of calling those of you are members in the aftermath. I spoke with more than half of the membership directly about your experiences. It felt a bit like a Rorschach test. Just about everyone I spoke with perceived the events through the lens of their own experience, the lens of their family of origin, the lens of their relationships with previous clergy, and the lens of their involvement in congregational life. I heard about concerns around mental health, the divided state of this country, white supremacist violence, my personal life, and my failings as a minister.
My failings as a minister, caught up in the maelstrom as I was, I was reminded that in the Unitarian Universalist tradition I am just another person trying to understand the elephant. My perception of what had happened was shaped by my own limitations, earthly struggles, and access to information. Because of the nature of episode, some of that information was not appropriate for me to share. The security measures we take at First Unitarian Universalist, to offer one example, become less secure if we share them beyond a narrow band of staff members and lay leaders. Someone targeting us will want to know exactly what we do and do not do to preserve our safety. It is unwise to make those details easily available.
Most substantively, I painfully had to recall that each of you engage with your senior pastoral leadership, which is to say me, from your own particularities. In a hard way, in the maelstrom First Unitarian Universalist and I each became a bit like the elephant. There were some who felt “flexible water-pipe” and others who felt “sturdy pillar.”
It was very difficult to provide pastoral care in a situation where some people were upset with me, others were concerned about me, more than a few were angry and scared, and many were confused because they did not really know how everyone else in the congregation felt or understood the situation. I am grateful, and you might be as well, for the work of congregational leaders, the Unitarian Universalist Trauma Response Ministry, and Restorative Houston for helping us use some processes that ultimately allowed to move through the situation as a community committed to loving each other despite our differences. With their help, and your collective efforts, we were able to come to a place where we did not say, “Flexible water-pipe! Rough carpet! Sturdy pillar! Sharp spear!” Instead, I think, though you might not agree with me, that were able reach some point where we could say, “An elephant is like a flexible water-pipe and a rough carpet and a sturdy pillar and a sharp spear. An elephant is like all of those things and it is so much much more.”
The diversity of experiences we each had became, I think, a source of strength. When we actively listened to each other, paid close attention to each other’s experiences, we were able to each perceive the event a little more fully.
Your perspective, of course, might be different—that is the difficulty of the elephant again—but, overall, it does seem that most of the congregation decided to stay together and continue trying to live by our shared covenant. Only one person resigned their membership as a result of the events, though a handful more have paused their engagement or started attending services less frequently. Nonetheless, I think the episode is an important reminder that love comes first in our covenant and truth second. The love comes first because we commit as a congregation to our shared mutual loyalties even if we might understand the truth differently.
Understanding the truth differently, I was also reminded throughout the episode we each express our love in different ways. I can say, I love you as my congregation. But as I do I have to recognize that I process my emotions and share my emotional state in ways that are different than other people. I can feel myself being vulnerable when I offer my perspective–informed as it often is through my readings of history, my love of poetry, my quest for beauty–and others can view the tools I use to make sense of the way I feel about the world as implements for distancing, rather than sharing. But for me, there are few acts more intimate than considering together the full weight of a verse like’s the Greek poet Glykon’s:
Nothing but laughter, nothing
But dust, nothing but nothing,
No reason why it happens.
For others, well, we are hand to elephant again.
Hand to elephant again, in our religious community we eschew creeds because we recognize that ultimate reality is beyond our individual–and likely beyond our collective–keening. We cannot fathom the sacred unbeing from which we come. We do not understand the sacred unbeing to which we will return. But we do what we can to make sense of the span we share in between.
The span we share in between, our second probe for understanding the truth spoken in love, the possibility of living in the plural, comes from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Born in 1941, he died this week at the age of 84. It is impossible to encapsulate a life that spanned segregation in the Jim Crow South, height of the civil rights movement, numerous citizens diplomatic missions, two runs for the presidency, the experience of being mentored by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the experience of mentoring President Barak Obama, and well, so much more, in a few words, a few paragraphs, or even truthfully, a few hours.
But we can leave that work for others. Instead, we can honor him by taking a lesson about how to speak the truth in love. That lesson is not found in one of his victories. It is discovered in one of his defeats. He lost both times he ran to be the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. In 1984, Walter Mondale beat him. In 1988, Michael Dukakis beat him. In each instance, he provided, on the floor of the convention, not bitter words of despair but soaring lessons in how we might come together across our diversities.
In 1988, he called for common ground for his party. Invoking a quilt made by his grandmother, he said that the country and the world is stronger when we come together despite our differences. He imagined a country where farmers, workers, women, students, mothers, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, conservatives, progressives, gays, lesbians, the whole spectrum of the rainbow nation, could come together and form “a great quilt of unity and common ground.” Invoking those who are most marginalized in our society, he shared his own biography of growing up having nothing, and said, “Call you outcast, low down, you can’t make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass; when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.”
When my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination, Jesse Jackson understood something at the core of our covenant. It is not just about speaking the truth in love. It is not just about living with pluralism. It is that our shared mutual loyalties demand that we unite to do what we can to make of this world a paradise.
“Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive! … tomorrow …. and beyond, keep hope alive!
I love you very much. I love you very much,” he said.
In our covenant to each other we say the same thing too. We embrace diversity. We keep hope alive. And we say to each other, I love you very much.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
