Minilogue - September 2008

We’re All in This Life Together

By the Rev. Bruce Johnson

I spent a week on Star Island this summer, attending a conference on the theme of Emergence, sponsored by the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS). Star Island is one of nine small, rocky outcroppings about ten miles off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that together make up the archipelago known as the Isles of Shoals. People who had been there before told me, ‘you’ll love Star; it’s a special, magical place.’ They were right.

Used by fishing fleets since at least the early 17th century, Star Island has been a popular site for Unitarian church conferences since the late 19th century. The grand and creaky old Oceanic Hotel seems pretty much unchanged since that era (except for a million dollar upgrade of the electrical wiring last summer to bring it up to code). I have to admit that I underwent an initial period of panicky withdrawal when I realized that I would have no internet access during the week, but I gradually learned to settle into a different sense of time and space. I can’t really say that I felt isolated, since there were about 250 other conferees sharing the island with me, but I did feel a sense of distance from the mainland, from the routines of ordinary life, from normal perceptions of reality that was quite powerful indeed. Add to that the intense intellectual stimulation from the discussions taking place at the conference, and I was really beginning to enjoy myself. I didn’t have a watch with me, so I learned to pay attention to the tides, to watch for the mail boat, and to listen for the chapel bell and the dinner bell, each syncopated with the sound of the foghorn from a nearby lighthouse. And so the rhythm of life on Star Island began to penetrate my psyche.

All this was rudely interrupted when I learned— from a days-old copy of the Boston Globe that had made its way out to the island on the mail boat— that a gunman had walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and killed several people before being tackled and subdued by parishioners. Instantly, my grieving heart was connected to that place and those people. I felt, with immediate existential force, the truth of John Donne’s poetic statement that “no man is an island, entire of itself.” I happen to know the minister of the Knoxville church, as well as another colleague who I later learned was in attendance at the time of the shooting. But even without that personal connection, the truth is, as Donne declared, that we are all inextricably connected to one another at levels that transcend time and space. Sometimes it takes a bit of distance to realize that relational truth.

Of course, there was nothing that we could do on the island but to hold the people of Knoxville in our hearts during morning chapel, to be with them in the solidarity of prayer. So that’s what we did: scientists and ministers, theologians and physicists, agnostics and mystics, atheists and Muslims and Jews and Christians alike, all mixed up together, but not confused. We were clear about the one thing that mattered that we’re all in this life together, on a very small island.

In faith, hope, and love,

Bruce