 It all started with a hatch. When he was just nine years old, Matthew went into his dad's workshop, got out some wood and some loose pieces of metal, and he made himself a hatch. Now, like a window or a door, a hatch doesn't really mean anything on its own. It can't truly be what it is supposed to be unless it is a part of a larger hole. So what Matthew had at the end of his labors was really more of an odd box, a five-sided frame of plywood and particle board connected by a rusty hinge and set with a squeaky metal handle. He continued his work on it for days after the hatch was assembled. He sanded it lovingly and carefully, pouring a startling amount of effort and energy into this strange project. When his father asked what he was building, Matthew explained that he was working on his submarine. With what I can only imagine was amusements and maybe just a little concern, his father asked the natural follow-up question. If he was building a submarine, why had he started with the hatch? The nine-year-old Matthew explained simply without missing a beat because you have to start by getting inside. Matthew Richter is all grown up now. He told this story as a sort of confession of his lifelong fascination with submarines, designing them, building them, dreaming of them. It comes at the opening of an article he published about the Personal Submersibles Organization, which he describes as an international support group for people who build submarines in their backyards. Most of them have been designing submarines since childhood, if only in their heads. One of these folks, a man named Frank, caught the bug when he saw the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Another member, Rick, got his start when he first saw a picture of Jacques Cousteau, the famous French undersea explorer and ecologist. And yet another, Cliff, traces his fascination to an old tin-tin comic book from his childhood about a submersible shape like a white whale. Older now, he's built his own sub that's a rough recreation of that fictional ship. What unites all of these folks with each other is the capability to entertain the possibility of something that I, and I think many of us, would dismiss as impossible. To look at some far-out, high-tech underwater contraption on a movie screen or a comics page and think, yeah, I could probably build one of those. To look at a rough-edged, five-sided box with a rusty hinge and see a gateway to something wonderful and awesome. Yes, imagination is an amazing thing, but I want to say this morning that it is something more than simply amazing. It is holy. As Unitarian Universalists, our ancestors are our ancestors because they embraced new and often crazy-seeming ideas. They made the interpretation of Scripture subject to reason, even where this led them into what others call heresy. They made the practice of religion to hold into the stirrings of their conscience even when this led others to ridicule them. They followed the dreams of their hearts and the truths they found in the world around them, even when doing so cost them the lives that they had dared to live. We have inherited from these ancestors a legacy of holy imagination. I call it holy because it is a powerful force and because it is capable of changing the world or even just one life in it for the better. Imagination is often thought of as a completely internal process which produces thoughts and ideas out of nothingness totally disconnected from the world outside of the person doing the imagining. But this is not so. To live with imagination, to be imaginative in truth means to be receptive to the world's wisdom and possibility even the strange, even the ridiculous. George Bernard Shaw, later quoted by Bobby Kennedy said that some see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. But even our dreams, our reflections jumbled and distorted of our waking lives. Experiencing the world draws us into creative relationship with it asking enough why's will eventually lead each of us to a why not. When the Unitarians got their start in Europe they didn't invent the idea that God is one without division or separation they didn't cook that one up all on their own they had Jewish and Muslim neighbors to talk with, argue with and borrow books from. The idea was already out there. They were just willing to try it on and when they found that it fit to make it their own. When the Universalists started to challenge the fire and brimstone doctrines of their day it wasn't strict innovation. They looked at the pain that such teachings caused in their communities in their families and themselves. They looked at their scriptures which taught them that religion was meant to give meaning to life and not to destroy it. Seeing all these things they chose life over death. It was a radical and wildly controversial move but it wasn't something that happened entirely in their heads it was a decision born of lived experience. The great Unitarian writer Joseph Priestley had his house burned down he was basically chased out of England and you may have heard of Olympia Brown who dreamed of becoming a Universalist minister at a time when no seminary in the United States would admit women and no denominational body would ordain them. Yet she fought her way into the classroom and later into the pulpit despite a parade of indignities and disappointments. The willingness to risk that much and to struggle against such long odds cannot come from a calculation or an intellectual argument. It comes from something deeper inside crying out in the blood calling us to some new vision even when no one else can see what we see. We engage our holy imaginations when we move out of an attitude that is narrow and closed off and into a spirit that is open and expansive. We have shared a devotion to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It is a commitment that has always struck me as just a little bit similar to the continuing mission of the Starship Enterprise to explore strange new worlds to seek out new life and new civilizations to boldly go where no one has gone before. It's not easy though. There is a reason why we tend to live in the narrow place or at least retreat there, reflexively. That reason is fear because the narrow place feels safe. It's not safe. It's stifling and complacent with little room to change or grow but its sameness is familiar and familiarity is comforting. The attitude of openness on the other hand is not familiar and I'm not going to pretend that it's safe either. Being open to possibility means being open to both the good and the bad. And friends, we know that a terrible number of terrible things are terribly, terribly possible. For most of those things you can be utterly open or totally closed and they can still happen either way. So why not be open? But going beyond the familiar and facing what is we develop the possibility in ourselves of what might be. John Locke, the English philosopher taught that the human mind is a blank slate and everything that we are and can become is a result of what we learn by living in the world. Today, given what we know about genetics we can appreciate that Locke didn't have it all quite right. Each of the slates that we are born with is different and distinct. But I believe he still touched on something true in the way human beings are capable of tremendous change and growth over time. When we shut ourselves off and move back to that narrow, limited place we sacrifice possibility and diminish imagination. We destroy little bits of what we might be. We forget sometimes. When we are hurt or afraid that risk is an inescapable reality something we can live with or rail against but which we can never fully eliminate. The practice of democracy after all is the ongoing collective practice of chosen risk. It requires exposing important issues to free and public debate and allowing the decisions that affect a community to be made by that community. Democracy demands that every participant accept that the final decision may not be the one which they would have made on their own. It asks for an openness again to the good as well as the bad. But I truly mean both sides of that. The practice of democracy does not merely mean trading the possibility of bad decisions being made or bad candidates being elected for some personal, private liberty. It means believing that. Though the community as a whole may make poor and even terrible choices it is also capable of being wiser than any individual or faction could be on their own. There is a still emerging understanding of the way very young children filter their experiences that boils down to the idea that they simply do not. There is no filtering going on for them. The conventional adult mind recognizes routine and repetition and knows to turn down the volume what is familiar, dependable, already known can be taken for granted just a bit more than what is new and different. So our minds don't take in the details of everyday life in the same way that they process unusual experiences. This is why it is probably easier right now for you to remember a vacation you took four years ago than to call up a specific memory from last Tuesday. It's why so many of the days have seemed to blur together during the sameness of the pandemic. But for very young children that process doesn't seem to be happening. Nothing fades into the background. Everything is foreground. The way of seeing the world that we associate with an adventure or an emergency is just the baseline. Imagine what life could be like if each of us lived life in this way, so open to possibility, so aware of each moment, so full of wonder, so very exhausting. I would guess that most of us do not yet feel ready to live life in such an utterly unfiltered way. But the good news, friends, is that religion provides us with tools to help us break out of that automatic pilot approach to live in. It is one of the great gifts of Unitarian universalism. But the toolbox of our faith is drawn from many sources. And there is a teaching from one of these sources, from the Hasidic masters, the Judaism, that applies here. The teaching is that a person ought to go through life with a piece of paper in either pocket. In the first, it should say, you are but dust and ashes. And on the other, it should say, for you the universe was made. That is the scope of living imaginatively and embracing the world's possibility, the wonder and the ashes, the nothing and the all and all of it at one. Living in the sorrow and the joy of what the world is and what it could be means living with a constant tension, but it is a fruitful one, filled with possibility. To realize those possibilities, we need one another. We need each other because we are stronger together than we are apart, even when you consider all the time and energy it takes to get us to agree on something. We also need each other because to toil alone makes for lonely work. When we seem to see what no one else sees, when we feel a hope that no one else seems able even to imagine hoping for, the work grows heavier and harder to do. We need communities of people who are able and eager to practice openness to possibility who seek to engage their holy imaginations together instead of just huddling for warmth in that narrow, comfortable place. I believe that this congregation is called to be such a community. For our spiritual ancestors counsel us that the possibility contained in each moment is limitless. It is never too late to begin again in love. But to do all this, we must have a starting place, a beginning. When so much is broken and wrong and so few people in the wider world seem to share the vision we have for what hope is possible in this life, what are we to do? Each of us has wisdom to share ways we might answer that question. Here is mine. We've got to start with the hatch because that's how you get inside. So I want to invite you now into a place of meditation and of prayer. Take a breath. Take a few if you need it. Shift around a bit. Get into right relationship with wherever you are in this moment. When you've found that place inside you where your patience is waiting, patience enough even for this long-haired stranger in your midst, I want you to imagine with me where the hatch is on the side of your life right now. It might be something in your job. It might be in your family life. Something here in your congregation. I don't know. It's your hatch. Not mine. But whatever it is though, it's a place in your life that is closed. Somewhere where you have a wall in your habits, in your relationships, and what you need is a door. This week, I want to challenge you to open that hatch. Maybe not all the way. I may not be ready for it all to come rushing in, but open it and look at what's on the other side. What possibility is waiting there? Like an imaginary submarine, our lives are always under construction, eternally being built and never fully completed. So let us start in this moment with the hatch and see what is waiting for us on the other side. Blessed may you be in the holy work of living. Amen.