As in most denominations, we Unitarian Universalists come out with a new hymnbook every generation or so. Favorites from the old book are carried on, sometimes over and again, like two hymns still in our latest book, written by long-departed predecessors of mine in this pulpit, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" and "Mysterious Presence, Source of All." Our first hymn this morning, "O Life That Maketh All Things New," has been one of the most popular hymns for many and many a hymnbook.

 But with each new hymnbook, some new hits develop. As the new book is explored, experimented with, and as suggestions spread, some new hymns establish themselves as ones often sung and enjoyed and sure to make it into at least the next hymnbook, and maybe survive for many another.

 The committee that prepared our latest hymnbook, introduced here in Wayland and continentally five years ago, conducted a survey to determine what the hits from the last hymnbook were, that should for certain be included again. "O Life That Maketh All Things New" finished high. Number one was clearly "Morning Has Broken."

 But its success in those years pales in comparison with the success of one hymn in the new book, the one the choir just sang, as Catherine Bailey expressed the words in dance, for which fact the radio audience will just have to take my word. We ourselves will sing the song ourselves at the end of the service, and Catherine will lead us all in some simple dance motions of our own.

 How popular is this song among Unitarian Universalists? Well, I was in a room full of forty or fifty UU ministers last June in Rochester, discussing contemporary worship; and the subject of ritual came up, and the larger place it is coming to have in our movement. Now actually, there was already a goodly number of rituals that we and many other UUs do, like child dedications, communal prayer, and of course the collection (except among the radio audience). We even have a few of our own here in Wayland, like turning to face the back of the room for the benediction.

In recent years, other rituals have become commonplace among Unitarian Universalists, like the water ceremony at the start of the church year, and flower communion at the end. One speaker cited three other practices introduced fairly recently as ones that had become all but universal among us, all but defining the special way that we do things. They are the lighting of a chalice at the start of worship, a time during services for the sharing of personal news, and the singing of "Spirit of Life."

 Of course, Unitarian Universalists being as delightfully diverse in their worship as in most other things, several ministers in the room promptly reported that in their congregations, none of these things ever happened. But in most they do. In fact, in quite a few congregations, not only are chalice lightings and times of personal sharing regular weekly events, so is the singing of "Spirit of Life" – every week, often as a prelude to the prayer or meditation. I recently heard it referred to as our Unitarian Universalist anthem.

 Those of you sitting here in the pews can look it up in the hymnbook; it’s number 123. For those in the radio audience, let me recite the words. It won’t take long; there is just one verse:

"Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me."

 But I think Ms. McDade’s faith in the power of images is well-founded. For most of us, they work, roots and wings and all, not as literal descriptions, but as expressions of our yearnings, as poetry, as the stuff of emotion, of a deep form of prayer.

 So she doesn’t just say, Make me more compassionate; she says, sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion, and we’re moved, and the words stay with us. I want to feel those stirrings. I’m not even sure I know what the shape of justice is, but the phrase reverberates and beckons, but I want feel like my hands can help create it, in the world or in me. I want to feel like my life is rooted, bound securely to the earth itself. I want to feel like my life is free, as if I were a phoenix rising or an eagle aloft. I want to feel myself alive with the spirit of life itself.

 McDade gives poetic voice to our prayerful desires. My colleague in Concord, Gary Smith, has written, "Spirit of Life, I sing this song, Sunday after Sunday, eyes closed, never quite remembering all the words, never holding onto the tune at all, but aware of how much a prayer this song truly is." [2/19/95]

 To anyone – at home, in their car, or even here in the room at the First Parish in Wayland – who thinks of a prayer as something addressed to God by name, or to a Goddess, or to Mary, at least to some being who might be thought to attend our supplications, let me note that the notion of God not as person or being but as spirit is hardly novel. After all, it says in the Gospel of John, in words just this simple, "God is spirit…." [4:24]

 For Unitarians in congregations like this one, it has been common for well over a century to address prayers to a spirit – the spirit of love, or of truth, or truth and love, or whatever. For example, this beginning of a rather long mid-nineteenth-century prayer by the Rev. Octavius Brooks Frothingham: "Infinite Spirit, for whom we have no name, of whom we have no adequate thought, we ask for light in our minds and for strength to our spirits."

 A fine example from earlier in this century was written by Dan Huntington Fenn, who served this church in the latter ‘50s. Again, this is the beginning of a much longer prayer: "As we come together here to praise Thee, O Thou great Spirit in whom is the source and fulfillment of all truth and the goodness of beauty, may it not be in words alone, but in an inner response to Thy creative life."

 Writing in the ‘60s, UUA-president-to-be Paul Carnes expressed some of the same social passion that infuses the work of Carolyn McDade in a prayer that began, "O Thou spirit of righteousness that in the hearts of men and women pleadeth the cause of the just, and defeatest the devices of the cruel, we pray that thou wouldst reign supreme in our hearts also, so that in the presence of cruelty and wrong we may remain steadfast and true."

 Finally, this modern example, from Bruce Southworth, the start of opening words we might have used today, "We pause to honor the spirit and to accept ourselves as fragile humans, equally full of nobility and strength."

 But more specifically, for Carolyn McDade, it is the Spirit of Life to whom she addresses her prayer, Spirit of Life, capital-S, capital-L, a spirit that lives in nature, in wind and in sea, and also in us, not just as thought or belief but in our bodies, in our hands and the acts they can do. Albert Schweitzer once wrote, "We ask a heart of compassion/and gentle hands/and kindly words." It inspired the UU minister Kim Crawford Harvie to write a prayer for the kind treatment of animals, a prayer addressed to and titled, "Great spirit of life."

 Many of us talk that way now. Not long ago, another colleague began a long prayer with these words:

"Spirit of life,
Known by many names,
Spoken of by many tongues,
Bring our attention to you as we gather this hour
 to expand our minds,
 to renew our faith and
 to strengthen our fellowship."

Some of us may choose to call that God or Goddess or some Higher Power, some of us just think it is a fact about a naturalistic universe. But I think most of us believe that there is a spirit of life that flows through shrub and bird and humankind, an animating force that empowers our action and struggles to uphold us in our despair, the "life that maketh all things new."

 In this way and that, we try to invoke its creative, regenerative, sustaining power. For Carolyn McDade, her prayer of a song, her song of a prayer, was a part of the effort. We all have our own ways, which sometimes work better than others, and sometimes barely at all. To some degree, the spirit seems to come with its own quirky timing, as that random blessing, welcome and wondrous, sometimes called grace.

As Jesus said, speaking of being reborn in the spirit, "The wind bloweth where it listeth" [John 3:8] – it blows where it will. I once heard a minister describe as succinctly as she could the gospel, the good news, that she had to offer: "Sometimes we feel just awful, but then we feel better." Call it human resilience, personal will, deity at work in the world, luck, or what have you, in our lives there is a spirit of life at work whose persistence is a saving mercy, whose triumph is cause for thanksgiving, whose existence is worthy of worship.

 Let me confess that my own version of this faith – one I think that many here share -- has two aspects not as widely held as the general notion that there is a spirit of life at work in us, and in the course of human relations. The first of these particular outlooks I have already laid out before you: I think that it is the same spirit of life at work in all of nature that is at work in us. I do not think we’re special in the eyes of the spirit – of God, if you want.

I think whatever tenacity there is in you or me is evident more abundantly still in tundra lichen, deep-sea protozoa, and that darned squirrel at our bird feeders. I think whatever joy the spirit brings to us is of a sort, but smaller than, that of sliding otters. I think the spirit of life was just as alive before we humans were here to give it a name, will be just as alive long after we’re gone, and all the while will be just as alive throughout the universe, of which we are so wonderful but trifling a part.

 Okay, for those of you keeping score, I am still talking about the first of two common Unitarian Universalist theological positions I think Carolyn McDade’s song expresses and from which its draws its popularity, the existence and importance, indeed perhaps the sacredness, of the spirit of life. I have just confessed to one idiosyncratic rendition of that faith to which I happen to hold, that all of life is of a piece.

There is a second such confession. When I speak of the spirit of life, I am not always consistent. For there is a sense in which life for me includes death as well, and decay, the whole cycle by which life goes on. I chose this Sunday late in November on purpose for this sermon, rather than the verdant days of May. I wanted to sing the praises of the spirit of life especially at this time of year, as its power seems to be in retreat, as the green of the summer, the crimson and gold of autumn, give way to the brown and white of winter. Because this is life, too, this dormancy and waiting, this part of life’s sacred cycle.

Even as, all the while, in seed and bud and resting root, there persists the promise of that spirit of life of narrower definition which I also often speak of and celebrate, as today – the generative, enlivening, healing, sustaining spirit of life that Carolyn McDade invokes.

But if she gives voice to that faith so commonly held among us, that people are upheld and vivified by the spirit of life, there is a second theological stand case being made: that the spirit comes to dwell in us that we might make the world more kind and fair.

Now I know that there are people who have taken to this song with a passion without noticing that fact, who think of the song as a lovely appeal for greater personal peace and place and freedom, heart and roots and wings. And it’s funny – in the piece of Ms. McDade’s from which Robin read earlier – which is mostly a plea for people to stop rewriting her words – McDade notes how songs "walk into the world. As living beings they form relationships…. What happens with songs like Spirit of Life … is that people are inspired by the inner conversation with this song…."

Which I suppose means that she knows that people who hear or who sing it are free to know it in ways other than she intended. But rumor has it that she’s none too happy that its social action emphasis is not coming across loud and clear to all. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it would make sense if it were.

Because Carolyn McDade is not just a very talented writer of songs, but a passionate social activist, as Spirit of Life should make clear (especially with the added insight of our knowing how and why it was written). She does not ask the spirit of life to sing in her heart all the stirrings of contentment, well-being, or delight. She does not ask it to move in her hand to shape beauty or order.

Not that I think Carolyn McDade is against contentment, well-being,

order, beauty, or delight, any more than you are or I. But those are other songs. In Spirit of Life, she gives us the words to ask for the inspiration, the en-spiriting, the indwelling of the spirit of life itself, that we might feel compassion in our hearts, and devote our hands to justice.

In her own words,

"Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me."

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