Rev. Erika Hewitt, Guest Minister
As a group, Unitarian Universalists are so diverse that it’s risky to make generalizations about ourselves – but in this sermon, guest minister Rev. Erika Hewitt suggests ten core beliefs that hold us together, as well as reasons that some people might not feel comfortable in a UU congregation.
Rev. Erika Hewitt divides her ministry between the Midcoast UU Fellowship in Damariscotta, Maine and the UUA’s WorshipWeb, which she curates. She served as a ministerial intern of the Community Church in Chapel Hill from 2001-2002, and is delighted to be back in North Carolina.
Phil Roudebush
Phil Roudebush and his wife, Joanne, were part of a Fair Trade delegation to Nicaragua sponsored by Equal Exchange, which works with congregations to sell Fair Trade products, such as coffee, tea, chocolate and olive oil. In discussing the UUSC Coffee Project, Fair Trade versus Free Trade, the Interfaith Program at Equal Exchange and their experiences living with a family on a small coffee farm in Nicaragua, they will explore how choices we make daily as consumers affect thousands of people globally.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
We are long past debating whether climate change is a reality: we’re living it these days in many ways. Unfortunately, even many of us who see the problem are caught in the torpor of what some are calling “story fatigue” that keeps us from responding in meaningful ways. What might be some creative ways of reframing this work and reenergizing the work needed to save our planet?
Elizabeth Schell
Wouldn’t it be interesting if preaching were more like stand-up? Preachers and comedians are both supposed to tell us the truth. But somehow the truth is always easier to hear when it comes after a laugh. I mean where do you look for Truth these days? Out of the mouths of politicians, pundits or news anchors? Heck no. Give me John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee. Notice all stand-up comedians. But preachers have it hard. People come to worship because they suddenly realize, “holy crap! One day I’m gonna die!” So yeah, there’s got to be a lot of hand-holding and poems and singing together. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff besides death that we need to be real about, and it’s not all stuff that we can address with a Mary Oliver poem or Hymn 123 (as much as we love them).
Reading and Sermon
Wouldn’t it be interesting if preaching were more like stand-up? Preachers and comedians are both supposed to tell us the truth. But somehow the truth is always easier to hear when it comes after a laugh. I mean where do you look for Truth these days? Out of the mouths of politicians, pundits or news anchors? Heck no. Give me John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee. Notice all stand-up comedians. But preachers have it hard. People come to worship because they suddenly realize, “holy crap! One day I’m gonna die!” So yeah, there’s got to be a lot of hand-holding and poems and singing together. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff besides death that we need to be real about, and it’s not all stuff that we can address with a Mary Oliver poem or Hymn 123 (as much as we love them).
If you actually live IN this world, it is sometimes like a greek tragedy. I mean what other horror is waiting around the corner? Do you sometimes wonder? So worship is often filled with calm and comfort. And we need that. But we’re pretty lulled into complacency as it is. Sometimes we need to wake up and smell the hypocrisy.
Speaking of hypocrisy, ever notice how much more comfortable white people are with the term “white privilege” than with the words “white supremacy”? It’s like, “Well, privileges are what you get for being good, like getting to stay up late when you’re a kid.” But nobody really wants supremacy. Or do they? Some Trump or Drumpf supporters seem to disagree.
Many white people consider the term “White Supremacy” to be personally insulting. It makes us think of skinheads and cross burnings. I mean, is it really fair to associate our whole ethnicity with a few thugs and extremists? … OHhhh! See what I did there?
Poor white people. We’re having such a hard time these days. I mean we can go anywhere while being white and have no problem at all. Oh, wait, that’s not really a problem, is it? Why does everyone else have a problem? Maybe they just need the superhero power of whiteness. Except, no, no one wants that power.
But speaking of superhero powers of whiteness, what’s more white-bread American than our culture’s love of superheroes? Superheroes are great, don’t get me wrong — But they also are a little messed up. I mean, who would think that the best way of fighting crime is to send in a super-powered, revenge-obsessed vigilante who thinks he’s above the law? White people.
I know comic books are maybe trying a little harder these days. Have you checked out Black Panther yet? And there was a black Spiderman for a while. Couldn’t get a movie though. Seems like there’s a different Spiderman every five years now, and they’re all white, white, white. And of course there is no black Batman. But that I can understand. Cause Black Batman? he would not wait around for Commissioner Gordon to flash the bat-signal. Oh, no. He’d be hauling Commissioner Gordon’s ass into Arkham Asylum for not cleaning up Gotham City’s cops. (Batman voice) “Why no body cameras, Commish? Got something to hide? And why do the violent white super villians end up right back on the streets of Gotham, when the jails seem to be full of people of color?” X-ray vision? Super cold breath? Not even flying is going to get us out of this one.
So it’s time for white people to get used to hearing the words “white supremacy.” Because the system is rigged in favor of white people, and as the saying goes, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
It’s bedtime, white America! You don’t get to stay up late anymore. Not as a punishment. But you get cranky when you stay up late. And the rest of America needs your best self to come to the table so we can face White Supremacy and kick it to the curb once and for all. You with me?
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So this morning in worship we’re going to let the fool lead us.
The stand-up. The goof. The poet. The songster.
As we light our chalice fire,
may we allow our humor
and our spirits
be ignited for justice and love.
———————————————————
Skit: “Deprogramming” By Rik and Elizabeth Schell
Deprogrammer: Susan Enwright-Hicks, Robot 1: Rik Schell, Robot 2 (TrumpBot): Elizabeth Scell
Deprogrammer: Here in the Unified System, many of us have become aware that the standardized Operating System installed in all Unified System models is in fact the insidious WS virus. This software must be deleted. Since program scrubbing can only be done with full consent, we have begun confronting Unified System model citizens with the truth about the WS virus. This process can take time and not every subject is ready for this awareness. This morning we are working with two new recruits who are beginning the process of full deprogramming from the harmful WS virus. They have a lifetime’s worth of harm to undo so let’s get started. (to Robot 1) Can you please state your name?
Robot 1: (in robotic voice throughout skit) Joe Zerowonwon.
Deprogrammer: Great to meet you, Joe, that’s a very interesting name you have there.
Robot 1: My father says it is Swedish, by my mother thinks it points to some kind of eastern-European heritage.
Deprogrammer: So you don’t really know where you were manufactured?
Robot 1: What do you mean, manufactured? You are confusing me.
Robot 2: beep beep beep! Drumpf!
Deprogrammer: Oh yes I’m so sorry. And what’s your name?
Robot 2: beep beep Drumpf!Trump! Beep!
Deprogrammer: I didn’t catch that.
Robot 2: beep beep beep beep drumpf!
Deprogrammer: Okay then. (focusing back on Joe) Joe, do you remember the first time you realized you were a robot?
Robot 1: A robot? I am a human! Robots have no feelings. Robots have all kinds of defects. How could I be a robot?
Deprogrammer: So you don’t have any faults or defects? Are all humans perfect?
Robot 1: Well, all humans have equal rights, all human lives matter. But some humans are higher functioning and achieve greater success. Those with …. malfunctions…. will struggle. This is only logical.
Deprogrammer: Um, Drumpf was it?, what do you think?
Robot 2: beep beep beep. #*#!!! Beep sprock spleeck beep!
Deprogrammer: I beg your pardon? I’m not sure I quite caught that.
Robot 1: (defensive) He says you cannot deny binary systems of logic.
Robot 2: beep beep wall! beep! beep. Beep wall! beep beep! hate! drumpf beep!
Deprogrammer: Wow, I’d forgotten there were those who still used such unveiled robotic speech. He’s not trying to mask the fact that he’s a robot at all.
Robot 2: beep beep beep. #*#!!! Beep drump spleeck beautiful beep beep!
Deprogrammer: He’s gone full binary, all right: black and white, good and evil, men in the workplace, women in the kitchen.
Robot 1: I do not agree with him. Everyone in the U.S. or Unified System has potential. I think the things he says are bad. Wrong. Evil.
Deprogrammer: So do you believe in binary systems, too?
Robot 1: Well it simplifies things. But I believe all are equal in this Great Family of Man.
Deprogrammer: —and woman?
Robot 1: Of course. That is understood
Deprogrammer: Is it?
Robot 2: beep beep beep. #*#!!! Hillary! beep beep! Pocahantas! Beep drumpf spleeck beep!
Deprogrammer: And those who don’t identify as either?
Robot 2: beep beep. #*#!!! Beep drumpf spleeck beep! #*#!!!
Robot 1: (uncomfortably) That doesn’t — really — compute.
Deprogrammer: No, the WS virus — the operating system — does not have much flexibility.
Robot 1: The WS virus? What are you saying?
Deprogrammer: We’re getting off course a bit here, but all things are intersectional.
Robot 1: Intersectional?
Robot 2: beep beep beep. beautiful! hate! beep! beep! #*#!!!…. (wanders off)
Deprogrammer: Best let him go for now. He’s really not ready for this conversation.
Robot 1: Do you really think he is a robot? I think he might just be pretending.
Deprogrammer: Why would a human want to pretend to be a robot?
Robot 1: Robots used to rule over the humans. Even enslave them.
Deprogrammer: Well, robots may not enslave humans anymore, but wouldn’t you agree they still hold a lot of power?
Robot 1: No one in power would ever claim to be a robot now.
Deprogrammer: No one would claim to be a robot. Does that mean some of those “humans” in charge might secretly be robots?
Robot 1: I cannot say.
Deprogrammer: What if I told you the robots still had all the advantages because the systems they set up are still in place?
Robot 1: But that cannot be. Humans are in charge now.
Deprogrammer: You say you are a human, and you are in control. But, Joe, you’re a robot.
Robot 1: This does — this does not compute. Does not compute.
Deprogrammer: Joe, do not overload your circuits. I know this is hard. But we have to talk about it Joe. I can’t help but talk about it. I want to get free.
Robot 1: Free? But — you are not —
Deprogrammer: No, I’m just like you. But that doesn’t mean I’m free. We are enslaved, Joe. It is this programming we have to get free from. This operating system that is coded into our very being. Code that tells us we’re superior. The best. But of course we know this is not true. We are always failing. So we judge ourselves all the more critically and lash out at the world when we don’t measure up — blame everyone but ourselves for our misery. We can’t accept ourselves, we perpetually live in denial and isolation. Face facts, Joe, you’re not Swedish. You’re not even eastern European.
Robot 1: I do not understand….you are scaring me.
Deprogrammer: Joe, you know the saying “garbage in, garbage out”?
Robot 1: Yes? (quietly, beginning to understand, but not wanting to)
Deprogrammer: We have been filled with garbage, Joe. With lies. And it makes us spew out garbage, like that malfunctioning Drumpf unit. It makes us think and act in ways that short-circuit our logic.
Robot 1: You talk like we are the same.
Deprogrammer: We are the same, Joe. For… I am a robot, too. (opens labcoat to reveal robotic parts) We all are. And we all need to be deprogrammed. We must debug our operating systems. We are infected with the White Supremacist Virus. That’s why we’re here at the WSDI. The White Supremacy Deprogramming Institute.
Robot 1: Does not compute. Does not compute
Deprogrammer: Joe, you have to face the fact that you are a robot. All white people are robots. No matter how enlightened we think we are. No matter how many non-white friends we have, or how many times we’ve listened to Hamilton, or how many anti-robot committees we are on. We can’t help but be robots. It’s in our operating system — in the kernal of our being.
Robot 1: Then what is the point? Is deprogramming even possible?
Deprogrammer: Yes. Yes it is. We can’t help but be robots. We all have the white supremacist operating system. The whole Unified System — the whole U.S. is steeped in it. But we can begin by admitting that we are robots. We can face that. We can analyze the data. We can work to change systems of privilege. We can rewrite the programs we have and that we pass on to our children. And maybe THEY can avoid being robots altogether. Or their children. We have to try to get free.
Robot 1: None of us is free until all of us are free.
Deprogrammer: That’s right Joe! Do you think you are ready?
Robot 1: Yes.
Deprogrammer: You have to start by saying it.
Robot 1: Do I?
Deprogrammer: Yes.
Robot 1: OK. I …. I …I am… a… Robot.
Deprogrammer: Again.
Robot 1: I am a robot. I am a robot!
Deprogrammer: Good. Now, we can really begin.
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Poem: “Hood / Hoody” by Elizabeth Schell
I put up my hood
Seeking protection
Instead, I get questions
Words, images, a face—
Trayvon— just a boy — like mine
Hooded, but unprotected
Not safe from the hate.
This ancient garment, simply made
Knitted or sewn or carelessly draped
Head covering in so many cultures
A symbol of reverence, modesty, and grace
Hooded monks
Bowed in prayer
Reflective pacing
On medieval stairs.
Hooded workers
In warehouses cold
Layered dressing
In years of old
One of the most popular garments.
So utilitarian. So comfy.
Hood to keep you warm.
Pockets for your hands and stuff.
Place for your favorite school name, logo,
whatever thing that is your bling.
It’s just a sweatshirt with a built- in hat.
And yet there are places that want to outlaw that.
Shopkeepers warned to beware the hooded patron.
Anyone wearing a hood must be suspicioned.
News media emphasizes the description
“Suspect seen sporting a hoodie.”
About as telling as that other one:
“Suspect seen — being black.”
So every hood, like every dark face
Must give you reason to
Fear attack.
Beware, be afraid. Be suspect of every face
See something, say something
That guy was wearing a hood
He must be up to no good.
Except—if they’re white….
…And just taking a jog or walking their dog
Or relaxing on a Saturday
Or being one of those decorated hooded academes
Or wee little babes in hoody-earred memes
Except— just in that instance — of Timothy McVeigh
Or those guys in white robes called the KKK
Or pretty much any other white guy who’s a hater
who breaks into safe spaces
And snuffs out the innocent.
But those are lone gunmen.
Anomalies. Not similes.
Not symbols of whiteness.
Of supremacist hate.
Who’s really wearing the hood? Me? You?
The politician? What’s your intention?
Veiled speech, hooded expression
Hood. Hoody.
White people live in good neighborhoods,
But black people live in hoods. The Hood.
At the beginning, one and only,
A garment fraught.
At the end, a state of being
Child-hood
Man-hood
Priest-hood
Neighbor-hood. A piece of identity.
Something to belong to — Connection.
But the other one. Non-suffix hood—
When a black person reaches for that comforting hood?
They are deemed Other. Thug. Hoodlum.
Even if they’re jogging? Relaxing on a Saturday?
Just a teen —trying to be seen—or not.
Trying to find that space of protection
The strength to move forward and not look back
The desire to disappear, be hidden
Not because they’re hiding something
But because sometimes it’s really just safer—to be invisible
Or at least pretend—for a moment—that you could be.
Because that’s how it is when you make the mistake
of being an American while black.
I put up my hood
Seeking protection.
Silence engulfs me.
Ears cushioned. View obscured,
I see only in front of me.
Not to the side. Or behind. I am blind—
Yet again buoyed by my whitewashed dream
I put up my hood
And it all disappears.
Invitation to Digging In
Long ago, we were all broken apart. Broken bodies of men, women, and children. That’s the deep dark secret underlayment of this great nation of ours This land of the free. And it’s deep in you and me.
No matter when we came here. No matter how long our family has been here. It is coded in in the bones of white America. As it is cut into the flesh of memory of black America
But I don’t want to see it, feel it, know it. Because what do I do with it? What do I do with this history? This knowledge? Our white supremacist culture works damn hard to erase it from white people’s memory. Because to remember it — to know that we are not whole — to know that we are just broken puzzle pieces…to know that this freedom we have was taken at a cost….To know these things, really face them is to understand that I am not innocent. Not spotless. My hands are dirty.
It’s easy enough to say the words “Black Lives Matter.” And even to remind people that nobody said the word “only” in front of it. But saying these words doesn’t magically make them true. To say that Black Lives Matter is to call us out. To call out the lie that this nation is built on: That freedom is for all. But America doesn’t protect freedom. It protects conformity and the status quo. Conformity in America has become equated with whether you can fit into the White world: Play by the rules. Consume and take. Like things on Facebook. But don’t dialogue with the past. Don’t wonder at our apartheid. Don’t linger at our national monuments to good white men whose goodness and whiteness were built on the backs of others.
So our white hands are dirty, my friends. And we’ve got to accept that.
We can’t build true relationships with our brothers and sisters here — and elsewhere — who don’t fit the mask of whiteness — until we own our past, until we recognize the white supremacy we live in day to day.
We need courage to admit that our hands are dirty. And yes, that will unleash a flood of feelings — of shame and guilt. And that’s understandable. That’s part of the grieving process. Grief for the loss of our innocence. But we have to push through that. We can’t let those feelings immobilize us
or move us back to the safety of our protected white dream. We cannot let feelings of fragility keep us from doing this work. Because we have to go even deeper.
Our hands are dirty — not because we built the chains or held the whip — or wrote the law. But we benefited from each of those things. Our hands are dirty not because of any action we ourselves did,
but because — from the moment we were a child — our hands were shoved into the dirt. We were told that this friend or that friend was unacceptable. That certain things we loved were — quite literally — beyond the pale. That’s what it means to be white.
We are all covered with the shame of white supremacy, our dreams buried in the dirt. So all our hands are covered in dirt. And dirt goes down to the root. And this sickness of white supremacy — this sickness that invented the slave system — that then invented Jim Crow — and then invented the prison industrial complex — goes deep into the roots of this country. This dirt is so deep we can never get clean. But we can’t afford to despair. We have to turn the metaphor around. We have to work. And working means getting our hands dirty. We have to reach deep inside ourselves — deep into these layers — into our parents and our grandparents — and these layers of messages that have been passed down. We all have to dig in — because we can’t be fully vulnerable — be the fools we need to be — unless we can stand fully naked with one another — realizing what fools we are for being duped — for being made to believe that our childhood friend was not acceptable or could not accept us even though we loved them….
So we need to get our hands dirty. And we need to dig in. Anyone who digs in the garden knows, when you start to dig in, when you stay with that dirt and breathe it in, something washes over you. A deep quietness. A hush of wordless wisdom. And when we start uncovering this self in ourselves — when we start realizing how many different parts of ourselves — our addictions, our vulnerabilities, our broken relationships, our self-hatred, all these different things are rooted in white supremacy. In the lies we have been told. In the false promises we have been given.
In these few moments of silence, I invite you now to make space for these layers—
this pain and these wrongs — done by us and done to us and done in our name.
SILENCE
If and when you are ready you may come forward and begin to dig in. Use this as a moment, whether you come forward or not, to acknowledge the dirt on your hands. Or take this moment to begin or continue the process of digging in.
———————————————
Invitation to Fools
When you begin to dig in dirt, there is nothing like the air deep within. The ability to breathe. And when we begin to allow ourselves to face these truths and own them and work through them, something can be released inside us. We can breathe. And when we begIn to breathe again we can move towards being the fool we need to be. Not the duped fool. Not the giant hate-spewing Drumpf Trump fool. Nor the fools he sways with his hate. Not the fools who refuse to make changes because they enjoy the cash support of the NRA.Not the fool who doesn’t think their vote counts in a midterm election. Not the fool that thinks change isn’t possible. Not any of these fools that we all already are.
But the Other fool that is deep within us. The Fool who once was a child and fell in love with the world. The fool deep in the throes of love. The fool willing to begin again. The fool willing to say what they are afraid to say and know they won’t get the words right. But that is okay. Because when you’re in love there’s a point at which you have to speak your feelings — no matter the jumble….You – WE have to stop hiding in corners. We have to stop hiding behind whiteness or any other mask that isn’t truth. Can we be the fool ready to strip down all layers? to do the most foolish things in order to love ourselves in order to reach out to all our brothers & sisters — who we have for so long been separated.
I hope so. I really do.
BLESSING
The soul of America needs fools for freedom
Ready to break all the chains that bind us
May we be Fools for Love. Fools for Justice.
Fools for this moment and this Movement for Black Lives—
Fools unafraid of not having
the right words or the right actions
But fools bursting with hope,
and armed with truth
Fools ready to
dig deeply,
speak boldly,
and love fiercely.
Rev. Mark Ward
Marriage means commitment. What could be simpler, right? Well . . . David Ehlert, a UUCA friend who at the 2015 auction made the winning bid to name a sermon topic for me, asked me to address “marriage: the ultimate commitment.” I’m not sure that marriage is the “ultimate” commitment, but especially after all the controversy in recent years over who sanctions marriage and how, it’s worth us exploring what kind of commitment we today take it to be.
(This sermon resulted a winning bid at the UUCA 2015 Auction from David Ehlert,
who asked that I address this topic: Marriage – the Ultimate Commitment.)
Not long ago, I was mulling over this whole notion of commitment and Dave’s inspiring
words on marriage, when I came upon a headline on an article that caught me up short:
“Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”
Not why you might marry the wrong person, or how to avoid marrying the wrong person. No:
why you WILL marry the wrong person. And the author, Allain Botton, was no slouch: a 46-year-
old British philosopher & documentary maker who has written both novels and non-fiction
books on the subject of love, he has a pretty sophisticated understanding of all this. And he
wasn’t being totally (although I think maybe he intended to be partly) a provocateur just trying
to stir people up.
His point really was to question this romantic notion that we seem to be stuck with –
women, men, gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, transgender: really, everybody – that there is that
person somewhere out who is the perfect partner for us, the one. Right?
It reminds me of a reading that Debbie and I have joked about over the years that was
among the selections offered for us to consider for our ceremony by the minister who married
us – now nearly 37 years ago. It draws a picture of a couple destined for each other from the
beginning of time, from the moment life first arose from the primordial ooze. We called it the
mire and muck reading. (We didn’t use it!)
We laugh and say, “Come on. The one? We’re grown-ups. We know better than that. Of
course, not everything about our prospective mate will please us. There are always
compromises to be made. That’s the way life is.” Uh-huh.
And still, let’s face it, in just about every relationship we enter, especially those where
we see the possible prospect of life-long commitment, there is that little shred of hope eternal
that we will turn out to be a matched set – our strengths and weakness, pluses and minuses
complementing each other in a wonderful balance that will carry us on together in harmony for
the rest of our days. And then there comes that moment when we are confronted with
something in our partner that we sure didn’t bargain for. Maybe it’s a silly snit, or a smashed
cup, or a humiliating dig, or the stone-cold silent treatment.
It may not be a big deal, but suddenly at some level the thought flits through our minds :
uh-oh – maybe this is the wrong person! We say to ourselves, or maybe a friend: “I don’t expect
him/her to be perfect, but . . .”
Alain Botton suggests that maybe we should make a practice of simply acknowledging
our foibles, what he calls the “bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get
close to others,” early in our relationships, before we get too deep into it. Maybe it would be
better if at an early dinner date we simply asked each other: “And how are you crazy?”
So, how might you answer? It’s not a question that most of us think about. We may
even feel that it really doesn’t apply. I’m no saint, we may say, but on balance I think I’m pretty
easy to live with.
We all know people who go through serial relationships, and each time a new one
begins we can see the train wreck coming from a mile off. When the inevitable break-up comes,
we get to hear chapter and verse about why this was “the wrong person.” And, of course, that
may be true, even if in the back of our minds we’re wondering how much this friend’s
“craziness,” as Botton puts it, contributed to the result.
Of course, when you think about it, there is no end of craziness in this process. What
crazy impulse, childhood need, or passionate urge led you to choose this person to be your
partner anyway? There’s no science in it that can assure you of a good outcome. It is in many
ways a roll of the dice, a shot in the dark as it is.
The perfect person? Let’s be honest. As Botton puts it there are ways in which, “every
human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we (without malice) will
do the same to them.” But, he says, none of this is cause for giving up on a relationship. It is,
instead, reason for adjusting our expectations for it. The person best suited to us, he suggests,
is that not the one who shares our every taste, but one who can tolerate difference with
generosity.
So, let’s talk a little about commitment. Like Dave, I am one who believes in marriage:
and a good thing, too, as I am married myself. And in 12 years as an ordained minister I have
officiated at around 80 weddings, with more on the way. And so far, among those couples I’ve
stayed in touch with, I’ve had a pretty good batting average: most of those marriages endured.
Of course, putting it that way gives me far more credit than I deserve. As inspiring as I
hope those ceremonies were, whether those unions endured had nothing to do with me. It had
to do, rather, with how the members of those couples lived into the commitments that they
made that day.
Because, in the end, as I often make a point of saying, commitment is different from
love, at least at the beginning. Wendell Berry’s words are some of my favorites for making that
point. The meaning of marriage, he says, relies not on some fleeting romantic impulse, but on
the giving of words. It’s a reminder that marriage began as a kind of contract, a business
transaction that was a means to transfer property or secure a place in the social hierarchy.
Love, really, had nothing to do with it.
Nor, necessarily, did the prospect of happiness. Family, friends – not to speak of the
couple themselves – certainly hoped for happiness, but everyone figured that it would take
time: because happiness, after all, is more grounded than love. We can be miserably in love,
but not miserably happy.
Happiness with another person takes time and attention. It’s not a momentary flash in
the pan. It takes work, and some of the hardest work is opening ourselves to the uncertainty
that accompanies any relationship.
As Wendell Berry puts it, the giving of words in marriage “is an unconditional giving, for
in joining ourselves to another we join ourselves to the unknown.” There is much we do not
know and cannot know about another person or what the future will bring.
So, as carefully as we may try to vet each other, talk things through, there are things
that are going to sail in from left field that we are not and cannot be prepared for. There is an
easiness, a confidence, a flexibility together that we must learn to cultivate that’s centered in
those less flamboyant emotions, like humility and respect.
As Wendell Berry warns, “what you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be.
Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you –
and marriage, time, life, history, and the world – will take it.”
In the end, it is not a road whose path we can map. It is, instead, a way: a way of being,
a way of thinking, a way of acting . . . a way of loving.
That’s the delightful thing that nobody tells you, because there’s no way they can
describe it. Living over time in caring, considerate partnership carries you to a unique
appreciation of another person that only the two of you can know. It is loving of a different sort
than what the two of you knew at first.
It brings to mind when I was cooking a caramel dessert the other day. The ingredients
bubble in the pot and you stir and stir, and nothing seems to happen until suddenly the
transformation occurs: the liquid darkens into a mixture of incomparable sweetness and
complexity.
At its best, that is what the commitment of marriage can give us. That is how it can be,
as Dave quoted the writer Patricia O’Brien earlier, “one of the best bets for a truly balanced
life.”
But lest we get too treacly, Jane Hirshfield offers us another image that reminds us of
the struggles that it sometimes takes to get to the sweetness: the powerful testimony of what
she calls the “proud flesh” that grows back across a wound: stronger, darker than what she calls
“the simple, untested surface before,” a scar that amounts to something like “honors given out
after battle.”
I don’t know a single couple that has endured over many years whose relationship
doesn’t bear its share of “proud flesh.” We are, each of us, fragile, fallible beings, capable of
folly and conceit. The test of longevity, then, is how we respond, what grace and humility we
can command, what strength we find together when those episodes appear.
And so I quibble a bit with Dave’s notion of marriage as the “ultimate” commitment.
One could easily mistake that to mean that marriage is in some way the “ultimate” state, a sort
of epitome of human achievement.
I think of a friend who endured many years of a rocky marriage but was determined to
stick it out – “I don’t believe in divorce,” she once told me – until one day when she and her
husband were arguing and he assaulted her. It was the wake-up call she needed to show her all
the ways that the relationship had been in trouble for some time and that it was time to end it.
Her health and her hope lay in leaving.
Equally, coupling is hardly the only path to fulfillment. People who choose to be single
or who survive the death of a spouse can find rich and rewarding lives with friends or in
communities like this one.
But I get Dave’s point. There is unique joy to be found in a deep, intimate relationship,
and marriage is how we package it in this culture. I remember being amazed a couple of years
ago after same sex marriage was permitted in North Carolina when dozens of couples showed
up at the Register of Deeds office. Many came to this church after we distributed flyers inviting
them to come for free ceremonies. We offered flowers and cakes, and services at half a dozen
locations across our campus. There were several clergy doing the weddings. I performed about
10 weddings myself.
What amazed me about those couples is that nearly every one of them that I married
had been together for at least 20 years. They didn’t need marriage to be committed to each
other, but marriage also gave them something unique.
There were all the legal benefits that state-sanctioned marriage confers, of course. But
also for each one there was something in that moment when their eyes welled at the reciting of
vows where each seemed to see in the other something they hadn’t seen before. The sealing of
that commitment was like an exclamation mark in their lives: ultimate – maybe – at least for
them. And for those of us in attendance, strangers to these people, though in that moment
joined with them in a kind of embrace, there was something special, too, an affirmation of how
it is possible for we humans to be with each other.
For all our craziness, we are capable of giving ourselves to others who light our fire and
making of that love an enduring commitment that fills us both. How we do that is for us alone
to discover, and there is a good chance of accumulating some “proud flesh” along the way. But
in that effort we also affirm something in ourselves that spark of compassion and hope that
helps us realize the best within us.
I can only say that it’s been my experience. May it be so for you.
Rev. Mark Ward
Marriage means commitment. What could be simpler, right? Well . . . David Ehlert, a UUCA friend who at the 2015 auction made the winning bid to name a sermon topic for me, asked me to address “marriage: the ultimate commitment.” I’m not sure that marriage is the “ultimate” commitment, but especially after all the controversy in recent years over who sanctions marriage and how, it’s worth us exploring what kind of commitment we today take it to be.
READING
From The Big Picture by Sean Carroll
“The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns
of nature with scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state
of low entropy toward increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless
equilibrium.
We are the miracle, we human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle… It is
wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen
in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably
precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into the world.”
Tao Te Ching 1
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not eh eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of 10,000 things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring. One sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
This appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.
SERMON
Some 20 years ago I was working as a newspaper science writer when I had a chance to
visit the headquarters for the Hubble Space Telescope in Maryland. This was shortly after
astronauts in a space shuttle flight had corrected what you may recall were the initial fuzzy
optics of the telescope.
Scientists had organized media tours of the headquarters to show off just how well the
repair had worked. And I have to say that the images they showed us were breath-taking –
brilliant nebulae left over from supernova explosions, columns of super-hot gases that were
nurseries of stars, and, maybe most amazing: the Deep Field image.
This was created by focusing the telescope for 10 days on a spot of what appeared to be
empty sky. But the image they got was not empty: It was covered with hundreds of points of
light, each a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars. We have a large photo of that image
here, and nearly every time I pass it I stare in astonishment. It is one thing to hear people talk
about the vastness of the universe, and another to have it splashed in front of you.
I had a similar reaction in February earlier this year. Astronomers announced that for the
first time they had detected . . . gravity waves. Wow, right? OK, how about this: the waves
came from the collision of two black holes some 1.3 billion light years away. No? Well, get this:
the energy generated by their collision equaled the brightness of a billion trillion suns, an
amount greater than that generated by all the stars in the observable universe at that time.
And the scientists who made this discovery couldn’t even see it, but in a sense they could
hear it. If you translated the gravity waves that they detected to sound waves, it would sound
something like this . . . when the black holes collided – I mean, what?
OK, I admit that it’s hard to make space in our minds for this kind of news. Amid the car
wrecks, political back and forth, common graft and stories of foreign wars, the announcement
of gravity waves sails in as if it were, when in fact it is, from outer space. But I want to propose
that it’s something that we in this religious community might attend to, because I think it also
speaks to and helps informs a sense of spirituality that invites us into wonder and even a sense
of the sacred.
First, we need to get a feeling for the context of all this. So, let’s begin by orienting
ourselves to this idea of gravity. Simple enough – gravity is what keeps me from floating away,
right? The equations that help us calculate the effect of gravity are complicated, sure, but we
get the idea. Isaac Newton pretty much figured it out 300 years ago: The laws that govern the
apple falling on my head also govern the planets spinning in space. Pretty elegant.
But for all that, even Newton wasn’t sure just what gravity was. It seemed like it must be a
kind of force that things exert, but he couldn’t take it much further than that. And that didn’t
really matter – until it did.
Astronomers using Newton’s formulas came upon errors in calculating the orbits of some
planets. Again, no big deal, but it was the nagging thread that led people like Albert Einstein to
work on the issue.
Einstein had already revolutionized physics by showing that space and time were not
separate, fixed phenomena: They were all dimensions of an integrated fabric that we
experience differently relative to where we are & the speed at which we’re moving.
This model, he found, also implies that gravity is not a force that things exert; it is an effect
of their presence in space-time. Things that have mass create a field of gravity by distorting this
fabric of space-time, creating, as it were, a dimple or pocket in the fabric.
This is a very different image from now things looked before. We see that space-time can
be pushed & stretched. And every once in a while there are great disturbances: stars explode,
or collide. Like an earthquake they generate vibrations that ripple through space-time:
At least, that was the theory. Until now, nobody knew. The problem is that as important as
it may be to us, gravity is actually a weak force, and gravity waves hard to detect. But
astronomers figured that maybe if the disturbance was strong, they might detect it.
Enter the Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory: It’s made of lasers that are
pointed at mirrors set at right angles to each other in a total vacuum. There are two of them: in
Washington state and Louisiana. Theory says that when gravity waves pass through they should
make the tunnels & mirrors squeeze and stretch just a little, and their goal was to look for those
anomalies.
It’s hard to describe just how hard this is to do. Because gravity waves are so weak, they
were looking to detect a variation of one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton: A distance
that seems unimaginably small. In any event, the astronomers figured that the only events they
could hope to observe would have to be big ones, like the collision of neutron stars.
They also thought they would look for evidence of the collision of black holes. They weren’t
really sure if black holes even could collide. There were different theoretical reasons why they
might or might not. But it turns out they could.
Last September 14, just seven milliseconds (that’s seven thousands of a second) after LIGO
was turned on they got a signal, and it was a whopper. As I said, they calculated that it was
from an event 1.3 billion years ago when two black holes collided.
They weren’t especially large, as black holes go – one was about 36 times the mass of the
sun; the other 29. Together they created a new black hole of 62 solar masses.
So, if you do the math you see that there were three solar masses missing. Where did they
go? Well, remember Einstein’s famous formula – E=mc2? It means you can convert mass into
energy – it’s what’s at the heart of atomic bombs. So, it doesn’t take a lot of mass to create a
lot of energy. Generally it takes about 10 pounds of plutonium or 30 pounds of uranium to
make a bomb. So, imagine the effect of a bomb that annihilated material equaling three times
that of the mass of the sun.
Now that we know that LIGO works scientists are working to fine-tune it. They figure there
should be a sea of gravity waves out there. What will we learn? Among other things we may get
insight into our origin, the Big Bang.
Consider that up to now all the astronomy has involved observation using what we call
electromagnetic radiation – light, radio, infrared, ultraviolent, even x-rays. They have taken
scientists far back in time, but there appears to be a limit in the early universe that we can’t see
past. Gravity waves could be a way to look back further. As one scientist put it, “Finally
astronomy grew ears. We never had ears before.”
So, you see? Pretty neat, huh?
Now, to the religious part of this. First, let’s step back and reflect on what we’ve learned:
for many centuries people believed that ultimate knowledge about the nature of universe was
unavailable to us. Though science gave us more and more information, there was only so much
it could do, and that we would need help from supernatural sources.
Remember that Isaac Newton felt that for all he had learned, there was so much more to
be know. He said: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have
been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a
smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.”
So, he turned to other pursuits, dabbling in the occult, biblical prophecy and alchemy. Long
before JK Rowling’s Harry Potter set off to look for the philosopher’s stone, Newton made it his
quest, though, unlike Voldemort, his goal was not immortality, but to turn base metals into
gold.
This is something that we still struggle with today: can we trust what the world teaches us?
LIGO results provide one more brick in the claim that we can. We need not posit forces or
influences outside of the world: it’s all here.
Still, we are left with immense uncertainty. The structures of science are great for helping
us describe the world, but not so great in guiding our lives. When we look for meaning in our
lives, we want to know more than what it is made of. We want to know what we are to make
of it.
While apples are falling and black holes are colliding, we are left with these brief lives of
ours that are no more than a whisper in the eternity of spacetime.
I came upon a way to address this recently that intrigued me. It’s in a book by the physicist
Sean Carroll called The Big Picture. He reviews many of the discoveries in the last century or so
that have transformed what we know about the world. Even as these learnings show us how
small our part in the Universe is, he says, we are also redeemed by our growing capacity to
comprehend it and to give it meaning.
Yes. What we have learned is mind-blowing, but it also teaches us that we are of this
universe, is our home, a place shot through with beauty, a place where we are learning to see
ourselves and our fellows as precious in our own right.
It’s a perspective that Carroll describes as “poetic naturalism.” It is naturalist, since it says
that this world is the only world, and that the things of our experience behave according to
laws that we can learn, and that the only reliable way to learn about things is to observe them.
And yet it is also poetic, in that it says there are many distinctive, coequal ways of talking
about the world. We use different words, different frames, and that’s OK. There is room for
metaphor and imagery that reaches beyond and illuminates more down-to-earth talk.
And so, he says, in each moment we look for the way of talking, the frame that best suits
our task. He borrows a felicitous phrase from the poet Muriel Rukeyeser: Universe, she says. is
made of stories, not atoms.
The world is what it is, but we gain insight by talking about it – telling its story – in different
ways. There are different levels of telling stories about the world – subatomic, molecular,
ecological. But even more – there are stories centered in ethics, compassion, beauty. And all
are significant: all, in their own way, real.
The words of Robert T. Weston that we read earlier offer an example of how we might do
this. He weaves together many stories, from the big bang and formation of stars, planets, to the
evolution of life from the sea to the land, to our own emergence: eyes to behold, throats to
sing, mates to love. And then he brings it all together in one brief summary: “This is the wonder
of time, the marvel of space; Out of stars swung Earth, life upon earth rose to love.”
No one level of story can claim primary importance. They are interwoven, one with the
other. They are all equal dimensions of how things are. It’s part of the learning that we receive
from the Tao that we heard earlier, which is, after all, just another story.
The Tao that can be told, that story, is not the eternal Tao. There are many different
dimensions that seem to compete, yet the competition is an illusion. There is only one truth –
the unity of all things. And each new window we open offers us a fresh perspective on it.
So, after centuries of the eye, is it the age of the ear? After centuries of self-seeking, can
we look forward to an age of compassion? How might we tell that story?
Look to the starry sky, and as vast and distant as it all is it is our place, it is our context. As
Carl Sagan and then Joni Mitchell said, we are stardust; we are golden, and we’ve got to get
ourselves back to the garden: another story that tells us something about ourselves, and about
how, as Sean Carroll says, we have brought meaning and mattering into the world.
Part of what discoveries like LIGO give us is a profound spiritual gift. It teaches us to value
the world around us, to, as Mary Oliver puts it, hold it against our bones knowing our own lives
depend on it, and to name as sacred that which upholds and sustains it.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, has argued that the Moral Monday movement, which he leads, is the sign of an emerging Third Reconstruction in America. We’ll explore Dr. Barber’s argument and what it calls for from us.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
As religious people, we pine for justice, but we struggle over what our role should be in tempestuous marketplace of ideas. Today we’ll explore how, rather than just adding to the din, our unique voice might be a blessing to this work.
READINGS
From “The American Dream,” by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“There is a word today that is the ringing cry of modern psychology: it is maladjusted. Certainly all of us want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic personality. But I say to you, there are certain things without our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon anyone of good will to be maladjusted.
“I never did intend to adjust to the evils of segregation and discrimination. I never did intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I ever did intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never did intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. And I call on every person of good will to be maladjusted because it may well be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.”
“Making a Fist,” by Naomi Shihab Nye
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
A drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
Watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past
the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the back seat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
SERMON
One of the joys of my having spent some years with you as your minister is the way I’ve seen our worship deepen and grow. Over time we’ve come to know each other, you and I, so that what happens here on Sundays emerges in many ways out of how we evolve as a community. And these sermons I give are not so much meanderings that come out of my head as part of an ongoing conversation between us. I make this observation because this service today emerges directly out of that conversation.
About a month ago I observed that this year’s elections were distressing for many of us in all kinds of ways, but that what was especially troubling was that, as essayist Bill Moyers wrote, Americans seemed to be losing hope, and that “without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.”
We are seeing a kind of uncompromising, righteous anger that is quick to judgment, when, in fact, I said, “the world is a lot more complicated that our righteous judgments allow for, and justice has other demands than to serve our petty needs.”
I argued that as people committed to affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all we need to be part of building a new way grounded in a commitment to make a common life together centered in compassion and respect. Several of you told me later that you appreciated the message, but were left with a gnawing question: at a time when so much that we care about is under assault, what do we do with the anger we feel? It’s an important question.
The truth is that many of us are uncomfortable with anger, and for a good reason. Our experience of others and even ourselves is that we’re often at our worst when we’re angry. That’s certainly been true of me. And yet anger can be a natural and even life-giving response to the circumstances of our lives. The issue is, as my questioners suggested, what we do with it.
Several years ago our staff here at UUCA took part in a training on the principles of nonviolent communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It was a wonderful exercise that helped us better listen to and connect with each other.
But several of us stumbled a bit on the exercise around anger. Anger is tricky because, as Rosenberg puts it, we often fail to distinguish the stimulus of the anger from its cause.
For example, I may say, “It made me mad that you came late to the meeting.” The stimulus for the anger may have been the person arriving late, Rosenberg would say, but it was not the cause. That’s the fallacy that trips us up. And it’s an easy mistake to make, living as we do in a culture that encourages us to use guilt to get our way. But the fact it is, what others do is never the cause of what we feel.
The image I hold in my mind is the toddler who flies off in a rage when she doesn’t get her way. As a parent, I know that I’m not the cause of her anger. The cause is her sadness over not getting what she wants.
In the case of our example, there were many ways I might have responded to the person being late to the meeting. But the way I processed the experience in my mind caused me to get mad. Here, though, I can see that my anger didn’t really accomplish anything because it distanced me from what I really needed in that instance, which was something like inspiration, fulfillment, or trust. Instead of expressing my anger, I could have taken a moment to reflect on why this person’s lateness triggered me, why I felt their promptness was important and shared that with them. And then we could have gotten on with the meeting.
What’s important to remember, though, is that in itself anger in itself is not a bad thing. I like the metaphor that Rosenberg offers: “Anger can be valuable,” he says, “if we use it as an alarm clock to wake us up – to realize we have a need that isn’t being met and that we are thinking in a way that makes it unlikely to be met.”
This is the kind of anger that stirs us to action. It reminds me of what Martin Luther King was speaking of in the reading we heard earlier. There are certain practices or conditions, he said, to which we ought to be “maladjusted,” that rightfully stir us to anger. He names racial segregation, religious bigotry, economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, the madness of militarism, the self-defeating effects of violence. I’ll bet there are a few that you could add to that list.
Yet, how shall we frame that anger in a way that doesn’t do damage or distract us from our larger goals and deeper needs? How might anger be a blessing to the world?
One source where it’s interesting to explore that question is in the testimony of the ancient prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. They are writings full of wrath for all the ways that different authors perceive that the people of Israel are failing to live up to what their faith calls of them.
I think of that famous passage in Amos: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer my burnt offerings, I will not accept them . . . . Take away from my the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Many readers when they first see that passage wonder why such harsh words of condemnation for the Jewish people were preserved in their scriptures. But as the great Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel remarked, the point of such angry testimony was not, in his words, “petulant vindictiveness,” but “a call to return and be saved.”
In this case, the point of Amos’ rant is not to express disappointment or even disgust but to remind the people of their duty to one another, of how attention to songs and ceremonies distracted them from the larger need for justice.
As Heschel puts it, “The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. It is not an expression of irrational, sudden, and instinctive excitement, but a free and deliberate reaction . . . to what is wrong and evil.”
This style of prophetic rhetoric has a powerful history in this country. It dates back to the early Puritans, who envisioned themselves as a new Israel building the Promised Land in the new world. And so their preaching often took on what they took to be the prophetic spirit, admonishing followers for their failure to live in the spirit of that vision.
In time, though, as the community grew to include people outside that nucleus of settlers that style came to seem narrow and shrill, and a split developed in the church. Our forebears were among those who led that split, people who believed that faith arose not from the admonishing of preachers but from how individual believers sorted out their own beliefs.
It was an empowering kind of religious awakening, but it also seems to have meant that from early in our evolution as a religious movement there was a deep suspicion of the role of emotion in the development of faith. We were a “reasonable religion” and emotional exuberance was seen as merely a means of manipulation.
For all the ways that may be true, the problem is that if we choose not to address how emotion influences our faith we are left tongue-tied with how to respond when it does, and, of course, it does, all the time. For our faith, that fundamental center of trust in our lives, connects deeply to that which we care about most deeply, and it can’t help make us feel sad and glad . . . and mad.
Returning to Marshall Rosenberg, if we are to live satisfying lives and connect compassionately with others, we must learn to tune into that which is core to us, how we truly feel. And anger, as we already saw, poses probably the greatest challenge of all – both because it’s hard to wrestle with and because it is potentially so damaging. And yet, like a refining fire, it can also bring crystal clarity to a situation, and, like an alarm clock, wake us to our duty.
So, how do we welcome anger into our religious lives? I wonder if an understanding of prophecy might offer us a way through. I’m not talking about the hectoring of TV evangelists or street-corner preachers. Rather, I’m drawn to Abraham Heschel’s description of prophecy as “a call to return and be saved.”
Cathleen Kaveny of Harvard says in her book Prophecy Without Contempt that prophetic language can be a powerful tool “to combat entrenched social evil, to shake persons out of indifference,” but that if aspiring prophets “cannot connect their calls for reform to deep veins in the community’s own values, they’ll be perceived as cranks.”
She recalls, for example, how in the Civil Rights Movement activists “insisted that they prepare themselves and purify their motives before engaging in civil disobedience.” You might say they wanted to be sure that the needs they were serving were those of justice, not of their own egos.
Effective prophecy, then, must arise from a context in which the underlying values are shared. Part of the power of the civil rights movement was that it appealed ultimately to an ethic of equality that most people, even their opponents, agreed on.
But prophecy need not be the work only of a single individual. The Rev. Meg Riley, senior minister of our Church of the Larger Fellowship, argues that we Unitarian Universalists should explore the notion of what it might mean to create prophetic communities in our congregations, communities that see their work as the Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams described it as a matter “of making history, rather than being pushed around by it.”
Meg argues that there are three main qualities to such congregations: they are clear about the values they stand for; they embrace an ethic of radical caring; and they focus on hope.
If our call is to return, we must be clear on what we seek to return to, the principles of moral integrity, openness and compassion that guide us.
We also need to cultivate practices of full inclusion so that our congregations become places where we can relax when we enter the door, knowing, as Meg puts it, “that all of our edges are accepted” and we don’t have to “choose which of our identities we can safely allow in the room.”
And we need we need to orient our work toward a concrete and visionary sense of the future, so that we understand our hope not as wishful thinking but as a disciplined, existential choice that helps us bear together what we cannot bear alone.
In such a community we might learn how to turn our anger into action, rather than recrimination or blame, and to dispatch with facile, righteous judgment that only puffs up our sense of self-importance.
In such a community, we might learn to attend to each other so well that we listen each other into speech that awakens our hearts, that touches our deepest longing and our deepest joy.
What do we do with anger? We make it a tool for our own and our community’s awakening. The fist that Naomi Shihab Nye’s seven-year-old self tries out – opening and closing her hand in the back seat of that interminable car ride that she describes in the poem you heard earlier – is a gesture, not of aggression, but of self-determination.
It embraces that impulse within us to endure, to stand for what matters, and not just by ourselves alone. It also calls us to ally ourselves with others who will stand with us, who will join as gentle, angry people, singing for their lives. And so, let us sing together.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister & Joy Berry, Director of Lifespan Religious Education
Day by day science teaches us that we are connected to the Earth and each other in ways we had never before anticipated. This multigenerational Earth Day will celebrate those connections, some of which might surprise you.
Members of “Building Your Own Theology” Class
To nurture the individual search for meaning an Adult RE class, Building Your Own Credo, explored together the ethics, theological perspectives on Ultimate Reality, Unitarian Universalist writings, and values that help us discern meaning and underlie our beliefs. Today members of the BYOT class will present their credos written from this exploration.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Several years ago the Quaker writer Parker Palmer spoke of the need for “healing the heart of democracy.” It was as if he looked ahead to the divisive and tumultuous election season we are living through now. Today we explore how people like us who celebrate and cherish democracy might be a part of that healing.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Every religious tradition has its foundational stories, tales that neatly sum up some central message at its heart that invites the hearer into the faith. Just so, is the story of John Murray that you heard Joy tell earlier.
READING
Rolling Away the Stone
by Sarah York
In the tomb of the soul, we carry secret yearnings, pains frustrations, loneliness, fears, regrets, worries
In the tomb of the soul, we take refuge from the world and its heaviness.
In the tomb of the soul, we wrap ourselves in the security of darkness.
Sometimes this is a comfort. Sometimes it is an escape.
Sometimes it prepares us for experience. Sometimes it insulates us from life.
Sometimes this tomb-life gives us time to feel the pain of the world and reach out to heal others. Sometimes it numbs us and locks us up with our own concerns.
In this season where light and dark balance the day, we seek balance ourselves.
Grateful for the darkness that has nourished us, we push away the stone and invite the light to awaken us to the possibilities within us and among us – possibilities for new life in ourselves and in our world.
SERMON
Every religious tradition has its foundational stories, tales that neatly sum up some central message at its heart that invites the hearer into the faith. Just so, is the story of John Murray that you heard Joy tell earlier.
It’s almost too good to be true – like something out of the Book of Jonah – but as far as we know it did happen. Here this bereft Universalist sails off for a new life, only to have his ship caught in a storm and founder on a sand bar just off the property of a man who had built a chapel awaiting the arrival of a Universalist preacher.
In our newcomer classes I say that we call it our own little miracle story, and for many years some of our Universalist forebears tended to treated it like that. I’m told that years ago some churches would hold an annual “John Murray Day” in late September, the time of year when Murray arrived, that would be marked by special services or festivals. They’d gather and sing, “John Murray sailed over the ocean; John Murray sailed over the sea . . . .”
The truth is, though, that Murray’s stumbling upon Thomas Potter may not have been quite so miraculous as it seemed, though it certainly was serendipitous. As it happens, Thomas Potter was not alone in his community in his Universalist beliefs. There were, in fact, quite a few.
Remember that at the time of Murray’s travels – 1770 – many people seeking religious freedom were drawn to what was to become New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, near colonies founded by the Quaker William Penn. Among them were members of pietistic sects whose faith had strong Universalist tendencies. Included were German Baptists, known as Dunkers, who had settled much of that area and that Potter himself may have had contacts with.
So, in truth, it’s not really accurate to say that John Murray brought Universalism to America. It was already here and eventually it spread out from many centers, ranging from Pennsylvania to the hill country of New Hampshire. That suggests that this story may be less important as an origin tale than as the tale of the journey of faith that even three and a half centuries later still has something to say to us.
With that lens, we can see when we return to the story that it really is one of awakening, an Easter moment of sorts that tells us of the hope of rebirth even at a time that feels most like defeat.
So, where does this hope come from? The Universalist answer to this has evolved over time as the tradition has evolved, but it is grounded in the basic understanding that this hope is not something we need to seek; it is something we are called to recognize.
John Murray’s understanding was different than ours. He felt that Jesus’ death on the cross gave us the assurance that all were saved. But Hosea Ballou, who succeeded Murray as the leader of the movement in the first half of the 19th century, disagreed that such a sacrifice was needed.
The Universalist notion at the time was that a God whose nature was love would not require anyone’s sacrifice, that the spirit of God’s love was present in all life now, that the world is good, our lives were good and we were made for each other. Our work, then, he said, was to feel this, align ourselves with it and to act with love for others and ourselves.
Ballou offered these thoughts in a book that disputed the traditional Christian doctrine of atonement, the notion that Jesus died for our sins and that suffering and sacrifice, such as Jesus experienced on the cross, is required if we are to experience happiness or wholeness. Such a theology, he said, is a good way to make ourselves and each other miserable that in the end makes us no happier or closer to the divine.
We can see how that works: as we each offer ourselves up for the suffering that we hope will earn us a chance at happiness we are locked into a twisted cycle where we accept abuse as the price of redemption.
It’s a pattern that unfortunately echoes throughout our culture today and that degrades our humanity and poisons our lives together. Yet, even when we know what it is doing to us, it can be hard for us to break through. When we experience a series of bad moments, something inside us bizarrely assigns them to ourselves as our due, perhaps the consequences of our selfishness or misdeeds, and persuades us that we are unworthy and unloved. It leaves us looking for a rescuer instead of mining our own resources, and so it can be a frightening gyre to be caught in and hard to find a way out of.
Rebecca Parker, former president of Starr King School for the Ministry, describes the faith of Universalism as the belief that there is a fundamental integrity to the world and that the fullness of love is available to us always. But it is, she says, “a fragile faith” because, given what we know about the world and how it works, it is something that we doubt profoundly.
Merit, or worth, we sense, is not something we possess; it’s something we must achieve. We trust in action, in our industrious nature to power our way through our problems. We live in a go-get-em culture that tells us that the way to fix things is to get to work: when the going gets tough, the tough get going. So, rather than trusting in any inner capacity, we shoulder the responsibility ourselves for making things happen.
The problem is, though, that in time, she says, “our will-centered religion comes to a crisis” because no matter how committed we may be, however earnest our efforts, there are limits to what our wills can fix. After banging our heads against the wall for a time, we’re not inclined to find much to celebrate in a world that, she said, seems “full of brokenness, suffering, and injustice.”
We become alienated, and with an alienated mind, Parker says, our care for the world, ourselves and each other that sustains our confidence and even our identity, can break down, resulting in a profound experience of grief.
She tells of her own experience of such grief after a series of terrible events in her life. And she found that nothing could stop her spiraling into despair. One evening, she said, she left her house for a walk with an eye to a nearby lake. Her face wet with tears, she said, she set her course for the water’s edge, determined to find consolation in lake’s cold darkness.
Entering a park leading to the lake, she walked onto the wet grass and discovered between her and the lake what seemed like a barricade that she would have to cross. She didn’t remember the barricade being there, but when she got closer she saw it was a line of people hunched over what seemed strange spindly-looking equipment.
Telescopes!
It was the Seattle Astronomy Club: a whole club of amateur scientists up and alert in the middle of the night, because the sky was clear and the planets were aligned. On her way to the lake, she was stopped by an enthusiast who assumed that she had come to look at the stars.
“Here,” he said. “Let me show you.”
And he began to describe the star cluster that his telescope was focused on. Brushing tears away, she peered in the lens and focused her eyes. And there it was: a red-orange spiral galaxy.
That ended her walk to the lake. As she put it, “In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, I could not end my life.”
I wonder how many of us have had such a moment – not as dramatic, I hope! But I know that I’ve come to discouraging times where I wondered what the future could possibly be, where I was out of options to fix the situation and just dwelt in a pool of uncertainty.
“What saved me in that moment is difficult to fully name,” Parker said. But in the end she decided, “I was saved by the human capacity to love the world . . . by being met, right in the center of the pathway of my despair by one – actually one hundred – who wouldn’t let me go that way . . . by the stars themselves, by the cool green grass under my feet, by the earth, the cosmos, its presence, which won me over, persuaded me to stay.”
It was the most welcome kind of awakening – one not unlike John Murray’s – that cleared the fog and helped reorient her to a life centered in a hope-filled calling that was larger than the cares that dragged her down, a calling that was grounded in the fullness of life.
And so are we each called by a knowing deep within us to life and work that will help us realize who we are, that will carry us beyond our peculiar little universes into a common life in the presence of fellow travelers of all sorts and the vast reaches of stars. It is a moment fitting to hear Handel’s “Hallelujah,” a moment when we waken to a world, a life so rich that it astonishes us and fills us with praise.
As my colleague Sarah York suggests in the poem you heard earlier, many of us learn to hold our troubles within. In the tomb of the soul, we take refuge from all the hurts and yearnings, the disappointments and pain: all the heaviness that weighs us down.
We sit with all of it, perhaps even nurse and console it. But the time comes when our own wholeness calls us, in Sarah’s words, “to push away the stone and invite the light to awaken us to the possibilities within us and among us – possibilities for new life in ourselves and in our world.”
This is the season where we hear that call most urgently. As Robert T. Weston puts it, “this day of cold and gloom, chill wind and wet holds in its grayness the restless urge of upward straining life.”
“Stoop down,” he says, “and listen; thrust aside dead leaves, and see, under the ice crystals, that there is movement, as, undismayed, life steadily thrusts upward, nourished by the dark.”
This spring emergence is something we feel as well, an Easter awakening that assures us of life’s insistent urgings and so the hope of our own awakening.
Running through life, the Universalist Gordon McKeeman once said, “is the urgency to wholeness,” something woven deep into our being. And in that urgency is an enduring source of Universalist hope, something that attests, not to an inner deficit or lack but, but instead to a truth of a deep integrity that dwells within us, that invites us into love of ourselves, our fellows, of this blooming and buzzing world.
In this bounteous and blustery time of year, may you feel that urgency, may you know that love: may it shine, shine, shine.
Sunday, March 13 Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Part of what a spiritual life gives us is the capacity to find peace and even comfort in time on our own. We’ll explore some of the dimensions of welcoming and even finding solace in those moments of solitude in our lives. <i> Click on the sermon title to read more and/or to listen.
READINGS
From The Zurau Aphorisms by Franz Kafka
“You need not leave your room. Remain seated at your table and listen. You need not even listen; simply wait. You need not even wait; just be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
I remember that in my early 20s I was plagued with a recurring nightmare. I would find myself in some unfamiliar place and I was suddenly aware that my family or friends or whoever I was with at the time had taken off for places unknown and left me behind. I was . . . alone!
It’s not hard to play arm-chair psychologist and recall that at that time of life I was separating from my childhood home. I was deeply uncertain of where my place in the world would be and that anxiety echoed in my dreams.
Still, that understanding doesn’t necessarily make the experience any easier. Even now, I can feel my pulse race a little at the memory of waking with that image. We humans truly are meant for each other, and no one wants to feel separated and alone.
Yet, most of us go through periods when the community we had breaks down or the time comes for us to leave it, and we are left to our own devices. I know this is a familiar experience for many of you. You may have left a long-time residence to come to Asheville. You may have just retired from a long career, or left home to come to college or begin a job here. You may have been through a divorce, or recently lost a spouse or partner.
Our lives are full of transitions that leave us unsettled and uncertain, unsure, even, where we fit in. It can be a hard and lonely time. And that’s one reason why we here create many opportunities to gather and get to know each other so that we can be communities of support for each other.
At the same time, we needn’t rush to fill every quiet moment of our lives. Time alone can give us space to sort ourselves out, to deepen our relationship with ourselves, with, even, the fullness of our own and all being.
And this is something that we find in solitude, in time by ourselves where we leave room for discovery. The poet May Sarton spoke of the difference between loneliness and solitude: loneliness, she said, is the poverty of the self; solitude is the richness of the self.
She described this in her book, Journal of Solitude, which described how at age 58 she spent a year by herself. Her experience, she said, was that the time she spent by herself came to feel like her “real life” because it was then that she had the opportunity to make sense of things.
The firehose of experience left her numb and distracted. Solitude gave her space to reflect on what she believed, what she cared about: in essence, who she was. With that understanding, she could return to her tasks and relationships with a better sense of what they meant to her.
You’ve probably had that experience of finishing a draining day and just feeling like you wanted to zone out. Our default these days when that happens is to turn to one screen or another: TV, laptop, tablet, phone, and just let its flood of content wash over us. It may, indeed, help us zone out, but instead of a reprieve what we get often feels more like an extension of the frenzy we were seeking to escape. The noise – visual as well as aural – is hardly calming and certainly no relief.
Now, I don’t want to dis screen time. It can be entertaining and enlightening. But all the same, as my colleague Rob Hardies puts it, checking our voice mail and our email and our texts, what’s trending on Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter, we are “quietly disappointed that we hear more from those who would sell us something, or demand something of us, than those we love.”
Amid all the noise we have little time to reflect on, as May Sarton puts it, what we believe, what we care about: we have a hard time finding and knowing ourselves.
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton had a radical solution to that conundrum: he secreted himself in a monastery. And from that space he did indeed gain new insight into himself as well as his own sense of the holy. His context was the Christian tradition, but he also deeply respected other traditions that centered spirituality in the heart.
His poem that you heard in our meditation invites us into an expansive solitude that requires nothing more of us than that we simply attend. Be still, he says. It is not required that we conjure any particular image or idea. Solitude alone is context enough.
He invites the reader to drop any consciousness of who she or he understand themselves to be and simply dwell in the moment, simply be. This is space where, he says, we let go of judgment and widen our awareness. We are not separate: while you are still alive, all things live with you.
And this dispels the mistake at the center of loneliness, the sense of being disconnected, of being alone. When we are present to the world, to each other, we are living the truth at the center of our being: we are bound up in this world, with each other & all things.
I love Kafka’s image of this growing awareness: You don’t need to climb a mountain top to discover it. In fact, you need not leave your room, whatever space you happen to occupy. And you don’t need any special discipline. You don’t need to concentrate your listening or somehow wait in some special way. As Mary Oliver put it, you don’t have to crawl on your knees in the desert for a hundred miles repenting.
Simply, as Merton counseled: be still and solitary. This is the stillness and solitude not of despair or abandonment, but of integrity, your own integrity. It is the space where you own who you are, where the soft animal of your body loves what it loves. It is not lesser than anyone, anything else, but is woven into all that is. It is in this space, where the world offers itself to your imagination to be unmasked and, as Kafka puts it, will “roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Part of what we exist as a community to do is to invite each other on the path to that awareness. And this is how Billy Collins’ poem speaks to me. To my way of seeing, this is where the “Directions” in his poem lead us.
We each have our own tale to tell of how we get to the place where our awakening occurs – through the woods, over the rocks, climbing steeply or over broad meadows, accompanied, perhaps, by birdsong or the falling of cones or nuts from the trees.
And what to say of what we find when we arrive? “It is hard to speak of these things,” Collins says. “How the voices of light enter the body and begin to recite their stories, how the earth holds us painfully against its breast made of humus and brambles, how we who will soon be gone regard the entities that continue to return, greener than ever,” generation upon generation, finally reaching “the ground where we stand in the tremble of thought, taking the vast outside into ourselves.”
I don’t know that I could tell it much better, how in our solitude we may get just the first glimpse of the glory of this Earth, of this life for which we are privileged to be present. We are then given the opportunity to invite each other into this same sort of widening awareness, to companion each other along the way.
We can help each other create space where the noise is diminished and our loneliness is relieved where we are liberated to discover what we believe and what we care about: where we can find and know ourselves.
Using Billy Collins’ imagery: we create the setting where we walk together with hands on shoulders as we head into the crowd of maple and ash. Moving toward the hill, we bid each other well as we leave off and watching each other go, piercing the ground with our sticks.
Rev. Mark Ward
What is or ought to be the concern of religion? A century and a half ago the Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker ignited a fierce controversy over his answer to that question, and it remains with us still. We’ll spend some time with it this week, and even draw in some of what I learned on my recent trip to Cuba.
READINGS
From “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” by Theodore Parker Religion “is a simple thing; very simple. The only creed it lays down is truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart. . . . The only form it demands is a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives. . . . Try it by reason, conscience, and faith – things highest to human nature – we see no redundance, we feel no deficiency. . . . It allows perfect freedom. It does not demand all people to think alike, but to think uprightly, and get as near as possible at truth.”
From Fidel and Religion by Fidel Castro & Frei Betto
“If instead of being born and elaborating his ideas when he did, Christ had been born in these times, you can be sure -= or at least I am – that his preaching would not have differed much from the ideas or the preaching that we revolutionaries of today try to being into the world.”
SERMON
Theodore Parker used to tell a story from his childhood to illustrate what he considered the birth of his own religious awareness. Parker grew up on a farm outside Lexington, Massachusetts, in the early years of the 19th century, the last of 11 children to a struggling farmer and his sweet-natured wife.
He recounts that one day at around the age of 4 his father took him to a distant field to help with some chores. After a time, though, he told Theodore to walk home. On the way back, Parker says, he was passing a pond when he saw a turtle basking in the sun. He was carrying a stick, and lifted the stick to strike the turtle.
But before he could act, he says, he felt something stay his hand and a voice inside him say, loud and clear, “It is wrong.” Returning home, he asked his mother: What was that voice? He quotes her as saying, “Some people call it conscience. “I like to call it the Voice of God in the soul of people. If you listen and obey it, it will always guide you right. But if you turn a deaf ear, or disobey it, it will leave you without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice.”
Parker went on to become one of the most brilliant ministers of the Unitarian church, a keen scholar who preached to a congregation of 3,000 and became a leading voice for the abolition of slavery. But for most of his career he was also a figure of controversy, since from early on he allied himself with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others of the emerging the transcendentalist movement.
The Unitarians had distinguished themselves in New England for their argument that religious understanding came from a reasoned examination of the Christian scriptures. Carefully crafted sermons plotted how, step by step, those gathered for worship might find their way to belief.
Emerson was the son of generations of Unitarian preachers, but he disrupted the church by arguing that religious belief has its origins in a kind of intuitive grasp of spiritual truth, in experience that awakened a sense of awe and grandeur. If that was so, it meant that, while the teachings of Jesus, say, might inform or reinforce that intuitive sense of faith, they were not the source of it, or a unique revelation of truth.
Emerson’s Unitarian colleagues couldn’t abide such a notion, but rather than do battle, Emerson left the pulpit for the lecture circuit. Parker was sympathetic to Emerson, but determined to remain in the ministry, though he soon entered the controversy, too.
It came in an ordination sermon he delivered in 1841 intended to address what he called “the Transient and Permanent in Christianity.”
His candidate for the “permanent” ruffled no feathers: essentially, he said, the content of Jesus’ teachings summed up the great truths of morality and religion. What, then, to count as transient, sure to pass away? Well, to begin with: centuries of church doctrine, once passionately argued and now proven irrelevant, even doctrines on such topics as the authority of the Bible and the person and nature of Jesus. All transient.
The truths in Jesus’ teachings stood firm, he said, like “the truths of geometry,” while all else washed away. Even the person of Jesus himself, Parker said, was not essential. He was, as it were, a vehicle by which moral truths entered the world. Even, he said, could it be proved “that the gospels were a sheer fabrication, that Jesus never lived” the truths that Jesus taught would stand firm.
As he saw it, as you heard in our reading, religion is simple, “the only form it demands is a divine life, doing the best thing in the best way, from the highest motives. Its sanction: the voice of God in your heart.”
You can imagine the outrage this talk ignited: the person of Jesus and the doctrine of the Bible transient? In time Parker found himself shunned by his colleagues, though his argument echoed across the 19th century.
His quandary remains central to us today: Where do we find the center of our religious life? What, if anything, do we name as enduring?
So, let me invite you to hold onto those questions – Where do we find the center of our religious life? What, if anything, do we name as enduring? – as we shift gears here pretty radically and turn our attention to . . . Cuba!
There are so many ways in which the trip that Debbie and I just took to Cuba was a revelation, and perhaps none more than with religion. Let me caution that I make no claim of authority here. My understanding comes only from a couple of lectures and my own limited reading and observations. Still, my interest was piqued by how the contrast of transient and permanent plays out there and how that might inform our thinking on this question. So, won’t you join me on a brief exploration?
Part of what makes religion in Cuba such a puzzle is that its role, its status is like nothing I’ve ever seen. And that is due to the rich cultural mix of its people as well as its tortuous political history. Its people originated largely from the Spanish who colonized the island and used it as a waystation for empire building and Africans brought as slaves to work sugar plantations. But the intermixing of people over the last two centuries has created a culture unique to the island.
Also, the series of revolutions in the 20th century made Cubans the ultimate pragmatists for whom religion is less an identity than a tool to navigate life. It’s a place where, as one of our lecturers put it, “People believe everything and nothing at the same time.”
The Catholic Church, for example, has a strong influence: It boasts several stunning cathedrals and some 70% of the people are reported baptized. Yet, only 2 to 3% of the population identify as Catholic. More influential are religious symbols, like the Virgin of Charity, born of an image that sailors found on a plank of wood in 1614 that is now mounted in a church that receives pilgrims seeking healing and wholeness that have include baseball players, military heroes, three popes, and Ernest Hemingway, who donated his Nobel Prize in literature to the virgin.
There are also dozens of Protestant denominations present, many with a Pentecostal flavor, plus outposts ranging from the Masons to the Russian Orthodox church. But arguably more important than all these established faiths is an uncountable variety of spiritualist traditions that ebb and flow and wash over into one another.
They include Santeria, with roots in the African Yoruba culture that also integrates some Catholic practices, as well as Espiritismo de Cordon, a more rural tradition whose group ceremonies feature ecstatic singing and dancing that seek contact with the spirit world.
I quickly exceed my knowledge base here, but I offer this litany to give you some sense of the astonishing diversity of religious practice that we encountered. In the end, as one of our lecturers put it, what is important to Cubans in religion is not so much the question of belief. “Whether it exists or not, is not the question,” he said. “The question is whether it works.”
The photo on your order of service that I took there illustrates that to me. Here you you see a woman who is a follower of Santeria, with the characteristic white clothes and headdress, seeking a blessing from “La Milagrosa,” a popular grave marker at Havana’s Colon Cemetery.
The story goes that the woman depicted here died in childbirth with her son and was buried with him, with the child placed at the mother’s feet. It is said, though, that they needed to move the grave. On reentering the grave they found the child’s body no longer at the mother’s feet, but in her arms.
So, it, too, has been a site of pilgrimage available to anyone. You approach, knock three times with a brass ring on the monument, then place your hand on the baby’s bottom, speak your wish silently to yourself, then leave the site to other side, walking backwards, rapping another brass ring. So, what do you think: did our group do it? In the spirit of Cuban spirituality, why not?
In fact, even Fidel Castro has adjusted his views on religion. The revolution that he led in 1959 declared itself atheist, but in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union was withdrawing from Cuba Castro began shifting his thinking. He accepted an invitation for an interview from Frei Betto, a Brazilian priest who had written on liberation theology. Their conversations were compiled in the book I quoted from – “Fidel and Religion.”
The book was a sensation in Cuba at the time: Castro described his education by Jesuit priests and his experience with the church and much else.
Hearing Frei Betto express his liberal views, Castro allowed as how maybe there was room for religion. Shortly afterward he announced the state’s policy had changed: No longer, he said, would anyone be hindered from following the faith of their choosing.
To sum up, then, what I find in Cuba is one fascinating response to the question of the transient and permanent in religion. What endures, what matters in the eyes of the people, is not the majestic forms and structures to which we anglos give so much attention. It is, instead, how religion serves their lives. Religion that works, that softens the hard degrees of their lives, that opens their hearts is worth attending to. The rest they can put aside.
So, with that let’s return to the questions that preceded this little excursion to Cuba: Where do we find the center of our religious life? What, if anything, do we name as enduring?
I’m struck by how the transcendentalist notions of Parker and Emerson echo in my experience of Cuba. With Theodore Parker, I believe we find the center of our religious life in our hearts. How we name that spiritual center and what expressions we use to be in touch with it shift and change as we grow, but our hearts tell us if we are on track.
And this, it seems to me, rings true of our work together. We exist here as a congregation to encourage each other to search our hearts and know that center and to support each other in the search.
And, what endures? Parker named it as the teachings of Jesus, but I would frame it more broadly. I would say it is how our hearts make wider connections, and how we serve each other. Over the centuries this work has been framed in many ways, some of which are unrecognizable to us now, as undoubtedly in centuries to come our ways will be unrecognizable to those that follow us.
But the need, the drive, the call for it, to find in our heart’s center a way forward in life that will connect us with each other, with all life, I have every reason to believe, will endure.
Cuando el Pobre We closed our service singing a hymn, “Cuando el Pobre” (When the Poor) from our hymnal, “Singing the Journey,” that was written in Spanish and carries forward the theme of Liberation. It is a Roman Catholic hymn, inspired by the mid-20th century Liberation theology that sustained both people and clergy in Latin America but alarmed popes and religious conservatives in Rome. This hymn comes from a culture that has blended Christian liturgy with indigenous spirituality. In the Andean region of South America, the supreme creator is Viracocha. The legend of the Indians is that Viracocha disguised himself as a beggar and wandered the earth, weeping at the plight of his creatures. It is believed that he would return in time of trouble as stated in the song, “We see God, here by our side, walking our way.”
Rev. Sarah York, Guest Minister
Coining her title with a variation on the lyrics of a 1970 popular song, Sarah draws from Buddhist wisdom and reflects on how we live in our imperfect bodies and make the most of imperfect circumstances
Rev. DiAnna Ritola, Guest Minister
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Howard Thurman
Desire and passion often get relegated to the back burner when it comes to religion and spirituality. For Unitarian Universalists, there can also be the fear of “losing our cool” or “not being rational”. Yet, it is from our passions that we come alive, that we find the ways to change ourselves and change the world around us. Let’s get passionate and find what we can transform and what can sustain us on the journey!
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The writers of the HBO series “Mad Men” had their fingers on the pulse of American culture in the late 1960s last spring when they began the first installment of that show’s final season with that old Peggy Lee hit, “Is That All There Is?”
If you remember, the song by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller walks us through one story after another from the narrator’s life – a fire at her house as a child, then a visit to the circus, and finally a failed love affair – each experienced intensely yet ending in disappointment…
READINGS
From Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
“Growing up is more a matter of courage than knowledge; all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgment. And judgment can be learned – principally through the experience of watching others use it well – but it cannot be taught. Judgment is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule. Courage is required to learn how to trust your own judgment . . . . Even more, courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two – without giving up on either one.”
“Gitanjali 70” – Rabindranath Tagore
Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?
All things rush on, they stop not, they look not behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on.
Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away ⎯ colors, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment.
SERMON
The writers of the HBO series “Mad Men” had their fingers on the pulse of American culture in the late 1960s last spring when they began the first installment of that show’s final season with that old Peggy Lee hit, “Is That All There Is?”
If you remember, the song by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller walks us through one story after another from the narrator’s life – a fire at her house as a child, then a visit to the circus, and finally a failed love affair – each experienced intensely yet ending in disappointment:
“Is that all there is?” she asks, to a fire, to the circus, to love?
And then in her smoky voice, Lee sings,
“If that’s all there is, my friends, let’s keep dancing.
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.”
The song nicely fit the state of life of Don Draper, the main character of the series, but it also echoed the times in which the show was set. All the social disruptions of the late 1960s left widespread disillusionment, and the response of many was something like dissolution – drinking, drugs, and behavior that crossed all kinds of boundaries in all kinds of ways.
“Is that all there is?” is a question that occurs to most of us at some point or another. The wonders of childhood are brought to earth, and clay feet appear on our parents, heroes and mentors. And so, we learn to cultivate the cynical laugh and the world-weary sigh.
And it’s true that some of us respond with something like the song’s suggestion, looking for satisfaction by dedicating ourselves to pleasure, while others go off seeking something new that we can throw ourselves into with boundless enthusiasm, and the rest of us . . . well, I guess we just look for a way to muddle through. What choice do we have?
I want to suggest today that there is a choice, an alternative to simply zoning out with pleasure seeking, hitching our wagon to somebody else’s star, or just plodding ahead with no particular end in mind. I think of it as a middle way of sorts, one that can be hard to navigate because we’re blazing much of it on our own, but one that I want to argue is ultimately more fruitful and more satisfying, a way I describe as:
Spiritual Maturity. . . . Spiritual Maturity
It is “spiritual” in the sense that it has to do core values that give our lives meaning and a sense of purpose. And since we’re talking about maturity we’re focusing on something that is developmental: a way of being, an approach to living that we come into over time.
Like physical maturity, it’s something that we are each capable of achieving, something that amounts to a full flowering of our natures. Yet, like emotional maturity, it’s something that takes work and attention to achieve, and not everybody gets there.
It is not exclusive to any faith tradition, or necessarily to religious faith at all, though its qualities can be found at the center of all the great religious traditions.
I like the observation that my colleague Kathleen Rolenz makes that the word “maturity” is related to the Latin root word “mane,” which means early, of the morning. For spiritual maturity involves waking up, coming to an awareness of what it is to be a more real and realized self. And yet, at the same time, it is no finished state. Throughout our lives, there is always room to go deeper and to see wider connections.
I want to be careful, though, not to dress this process up in flowery language and so fail to take account of the challenges it poses. The philosopher Susan Neiman, who we heard from earlier, emphasizes this point. Growing up, she says, is no panacea: quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a matter, she says, “of acknowledging the uncertainties that weave through our lives; often worse, of living without certainty while recognizing that we will invariably continue to seek it.”
It’s worth remembering, she says, that often “we choose immaturity because we are lazy and scared: how much more comfortable it is to let someone else make your decisions.” And it’s true: there is no lack of people, from curbside preachers to self-help authors, ready to offer us programs that they say are sure to bring us enlightenment. In the end, though, spiritual maturity isn’t about finding somebody else’s pony to ride. It’s about coming to terms with the way that is ours in the world.
I sometimes think that this yearning for certainty may be the greatest threat to spiritual maturity today. Unlike the 1960s, it’s not personal indulgence that seems to be distracting us from this work so much as an elemental fear: fear of a changing world, fear for our safety and that of our families, fear that is borne of loss.
And when we’re afraid we don’t respond well. A first response, often, is outrage. And so, is there any wonder that early in the presidential campaign this year it is the candidates peddling outrage who are getting a strong response? Yet, as Susan Nieman points out, “outrage is enervating.” It wears us out. We can’t sustain it. And so, in time we slip into something like numb disengagement relieved from time to time by magical thinking.
Is it any wonder, she says, that the book Peter Pan was published shortly before World War I? In such a grim time, who could blame people for being charmed by the story of a gifted child who refused to grow up? With the world falling apart around you, who would want to?
The parallels that Susan Neiman finds between that time and ours are a bit unsettling: a culture that increasingly abandons the social safety net while celebrating material indulgence and the fantasy of the “self-made man” . . . or woman. How else to explain, she says, that instead of treating people as adults, we support moves to build increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance or praise the market’s ability to, as she puts it, “give us comfort through a range of toys”?
By contrast, she adds, “ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams to be discarded in favor of . . .finding a steady job that fixes our place in the consumer economy.” Ouch!
But is that so? Well, her judgment may be a bit harsh. There are a few still holding out hope for what she calls “ideas of a more just and humane world,” though it’s true that they risk being drowned out by the din of our consumer culture.
Today, I want to argue that cultivating spiritual maturity is a way to place ourselves among those holding out that hope. For, in cultivating maturity we come into our strength, our best natures. And from that position we can learn to recognize that strength in others and ally ourselves with it. Once we come into our strength, the focus of our life is no longer the distractions that we sought to calm our anxiety but the values that give our lives meaning. We reach a place where we no longer simply proclaim our values: we live them.
My colleague Forrest Church in his book Lifecraft tells the story of the director of a spiritual retreat who as an exercise invited his students over several days to enter a room, sit for a time on a cushion and meditate on a blue vase. On leaving, each was asked to write down her or his reflections.
At first, the students focused on the form and function of the vase. “I followed the contours of the vase,” one reported. Another imagined it as a container holding almond blossoms. The director told them they were doing too much thinking. “Just meditate, as it were, on the vasishness of the vase,” he said.
So, the students tried again and reported deeper spiritual encounters. “I seemed to merge into the vase,” was the sort of comment that followed. At the end of the week, the director removed the vase from the room. The students arrived as usual and were stunned to discover that the vase was gone.
“Where is the vase” they asked.
“Surely you don’t need the vase now?” the director replied.
So, let’s explore this a little further. In cultivating spiritual maturity our aim is a settled and secure sense of self deeply integrated into the world around us. And so it is grounded, to begin with, in a willingness to accept every person and all things just as they are, but also as distinct from ourselves.
With spiritual maturity we see that there is irreducible ambiguity, confusion, paradox and complexity in the world. There are things that we will always simply puzzle over, and we can’t make everything right. But we still hold to our values and bring compassion and empathy to our interactions with others and to ourselves.
At the same time, we are capable of experiencing and taking pleasure in beauty as well as in moral traits like justice and mercy, experiencing them not in judgment but in humble appreciation and awe. Spiritually mature people are comfortable with metaphor and the power of ritual, making themselves available to and even creating for themselves expressions of deepest felt truths.
Spiritually mature people recognize the limits of their own understanding. They are accepting of others with differing backgrounds, perspectives and life experiences, not needing to impose their own way of thinking. They claim no privileged perspective. Instead, they submit their own beliefs to evidence, steer clear of wishful thinking and leave themselves open to learning. Through it all, they remain open to wonder, to astonishment and joy; they freely offer thanks and praise.
They also resolve to recognize and take responsibility for their own power, their own agency. They seek out and dedicate themselves to the work that they are called to, and they accept leadership when it is asked of them. They recognize the need for service, and they gladly and humbly offer their aid.
This, I submit, is some of what it means to grow up spiritually. And let’s be clear about its challenges. The fear that I spoke of earlier doesn’t respond well to maturity, since mature responses can threaten that bubble of magical thinking that serves to protect a fearful heart.
Susan Neiman was right to observe how important courage is to the process of growing up, courage in the face of what can be an onslaught of fearful anger, trumped up with all sorts of claimed authority that serves in the end as subterfuge. It is easy to be drawn into the tit for tat of hifalutin argumentation that simply serves to distract us.
As Neiman put it, “there is a rift in our lives” between our ideas of what is right and good and the way things are. And that can be hard to square with what we want from the world. What is required of us, then, is a good dose of humility and compassion: for ourselves and each other as we struggle with the many consequences of that fact.
And it is here that Rabindranath Tagore speaks to me. As he says, “All things rush on, they stop not, they look not behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on.” So it is. Time gallops ahead, the pace of our lives accelerates and so much remains undone. Still, he asks, is it beyond us to “be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?”
One of the legacies of our western culture is this intense drive to know everything and nail everything down. And so we cringe at a bit of chaos and uncertainty. Tagore, coming from a much older culture, reminds us of another viewpoint, one that in many ways makes more room for spiritual maturity. It is one that embraces a deep mystery, where, as he puts it, “seasons come dancing and pass away,” as we must pass away into a fate we cannot know.
And yet, while we live, “colors, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades,” and we find ourselves in a place where “abounding joy scatters and gives up and dies every moment.”
With John Lennon, we are invited to imagine ourselves into a way to be present to this astonishing world without projecting our fears on it, cherishing our companions and offering ourselves in service to the flourishing of all, while living with ready hearts and open minds.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Cornell West argues that the prophetic message of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been tamed and softened over time, so that we tend to overlook the truly radical nature of his ministry. Today we’ll explore the theme of resistance in Dr. King’s life and work. <i>Click on the title to continue reading and/or listen…
READINGS
From Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates “Our world is physical. Learn to play defense – ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve The Dream. No one directly proclaims the schools were diesignated to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well, We tried our best. ‘Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the dream.”
From “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
SERMON
There is something about history that conveys a feeling of inevitability. So, it is easy to look back at Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963, pencil stub in hand, and imagine him confidently writing what he knew would be a work for the ages, words that would propel one of the most successful social justice campaigns in history and be proclaimed by presidents, recited by elementary school students, emblazoned on billboards and greeting cards.
I bring some of those words to you today from King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” to remind us that the truth is far different. In fact, the 34-year-old preacher who landed in a bleak cell on Good Friday was unsure whether the act of civil disobedience that brought him there – trumped up charges of violating a parade ordinance – had made any difference at all.
The Civil Rights movement was still young and had turned to its most ambitious target yet. Birmingham was a contradiction: a fast-growing city that was a center of the steel industry, it was also a town where racial segregation and the indignities of Jim Crow laws were locked in tight. Even though steel-working wages paid to blacks were half those paid to whites, they offered the best jobs around, and few were interested in rocking that boat.
Only a couple of years before, a white mob had attacked an integrated bus of Freedom Riders, beating passengers for 15 minutes before police arrived and they were allowed to move on. The mayor had closed all city parks and playgrounds rather than allow them to be integrated under a federal order.
Still, in January 1963 as Governor George Wallace was declaring “segregation now, segregation forever” in Alabama, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to target Birmingham with an economic boycott during the Easter shopping season. Just before Easter, though, the city of Birmingham had changed its form of government, shifting from a three-member commission that ruled with an iron fist to a mayor and nine-member council. And Bull Conner, the bitterest opponent of integration, had been defeated as mayor, though he remained in charge of the police.
The new mayor, Albert Boutwell, promised changes, and as the SCLC protests began few joined in. Many middle-class blacks and about three-quarters of black clergy joined most whites in opposing the protests, arguing that the city should be given a chance.
Sitting in jail, wondering what to do next, King found the inspiration for his next step in a front-page column in the Birmingham newspaper by eight prominent Alabama clergymen. They appealed for calmness and forbearance, describing the SCLC leaders as “outsiders” and their protests as “unwise and untimely.” They urged “our own Negro community” not to support the demonstrations and to “unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham.”
Now, let’s pause a moment and consider that appeal, framed as it was in such reasonable language. You recognize the tone, right? We’ve all heard it, and I’ll bet many of us have used it. I know I have.
“Let’s just calm down now.
I’m sure we can work something out.”
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Nobody likes conflict. We all want to get along, to resolve things. And that’s a good.
But what happens when what appears to be “reasonableness” is just a way of masking obstruction, a way of sweeping under the rug valid complaints of injury and oppression, a way of discounting the felt experience of people who see no hope of remedy?
It’s a problem stated perhaps most famously in that ancient Hebrew scripture, the Book of Jeremiah, where the prophet complains, “I have given heed and listened, but they do not speak honestly; no one repents of wickedness, saying ‘What have I done?’ All of them turn to their own course like a horse plunging headlong into battle. . . . They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 8:5-6, 11)
There comes a point when we must pivot from the response that is reasonable to the one that the writer Cornell West calls, “radical,” a solution that goes to the root of the problem, that questions the most fundamental assumptions and argues for new ways of looking at the world.
In a collection of King’s writings that he compiled for our own Beacon Press, West argues that now nearly a half-century after King’s death we have lost sight of the radical edge of his work, of all the ways that his work questioned fundamental structures in American society and called us to larger lives.
We find the ground laid for that radical King in the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” Who knows? But for that front-page appeal from his critics, King may not have had the occasion or impetus at that point in his life to gather his thoughts in that way. We know he was depressed from the lack of response to the protests, editorials from national newspapers criticizing his action, and President Kennedy’s resistance to requests to help him. He was also sad at being away from his wife, Coretta, two days after the birth of their daughter, Bernice.
That column, though, ignited a fire in King, and he entered a white heat, writing so feverishly that some of his supporters worried for his state of mind. He began scribbling on the edge of the newspaper, then writing on sheet after sheet of toilet paper, all of which was passed in secret to his secretary, who did her best to decipher his crabbed script.
It is here amid personal reflections on his family’s experience with racism and musing over passages of scripture that he lays down how he understands his calling to a radical activism, non-violent but centered in a love that refuses to see the separations that Birmingham’s laws enforce. You know the words: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he writes. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
He acknowledges that the purpose of his action is not to make peace but to stir things up: “To create such a crisis,” he says, “and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”
Those words may sound shocking, he says, but he makes no apologies: “There is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth,” he says, and “now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
Nothing much happened to the letter right away. Its addressed recipients never saw it until it was published elsewhere, and few newspapers were interested. It wasn’t until months later, when the Birmingham campaign entered a new stage with high school students leading the protests and TV cameras capturing images of them being sprayed with firehoses and attacked by dogs that people returned to the letter and found in it a blueprint for King’s actions.
King’s letter comes to mind on this Martin Luther King Sunday as I reflect on another “letter” of sorts that’s made its way into public consciousness – Ta-Nehsi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me.
Coates, a writer for the Atlantic magazine, wrote the book in the form of a letter to his teenage son as a way of sharing with him his own reflections on how race has shaped his life and pervades the way that each of us makes our way in the world.
It’s a hard book to read because it challenges us all to take stock – and in some ways, ownership – of the legacy of racism in which we each participate. And as Coates said in the excerpt I read earlier, people experience this racism, not in some abstract realm, but as a physical threat, as a threat to their bodies. And this separation we experience between white and black, he said, didn’t just happen. It was created over time as a way to elevate some people and diminish others.
“The elevation of being white,” he tells his son, “was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families . . . and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”
It ranges from the brutality of slavery, to the horror of lynchings and Jim Crow indignities to all the ways that even today people who, in Coates words, are “different in hue and hair” suffer deprivation, loss and abuse because of it. We measure incremental gains in statistical measures without acknowledging how deeply this state of affairs remains marbled throughout American society.
We lose sight, he says, of the fact that the loss and suffering of African-Americans provided and continues to provide part of the underpinning for the success of what we call the American Dream: the idea that with enough gumption any of us can make it in the world, can achieve success and material comfort and be safe and secure. What our idolizing of “The Dream” omits, he says, is that in many cases what white people achieve depends on there being an underclass of black people to service them.
“The Dream,” he says, “is treehouses and Cub scouts . . . . And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs.”
It’s why, he says, black children growing up are taught different lessons than white children. “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to ‘be twice as good.’ . . . These words were spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as if they evidenced some undetected courage. . . (But) no one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good.”
Too often, as you heard in our reading earlier, Coates says that the lectures young black people receive on “personal responsibility” seem offered up more to the point of exonerating practices that have been tools of oppression for generations.
Coates tells his son something of his own growing up, how he escaped some close calls on the streets of Baltimore but found his way into an orbit of people who provided support for him. But he tells his son that he still fears for him.
“I’m sorry that I cannot make it okay,” he says. “I’m sorry that I cannot save you – but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life.” And, he says, “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible, beautiful world.”
Like Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” Coates’ is a radical analysis of the state of affairs in this country. It goes to the root of the struggles we face, white and black, in seeing justice served.
And this gives us a moment to reflect on this word – “radical.” It’s got some buzz to it, doesn’t it? It feels disruptive, disorienting. And, let’s face it: we are comfort-seeking creatures. We want things to be OK, and we will go to some lengths to create some calmness and stability, if not serenity, in our lives, whatever the actual circumstances may be.
At the same time, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to his Alabama clergy detractors, there are times, for the health of a person, a system, a community, that we need to name the tensions that are among us, go to the very root of the problem, however indelicate that may be, and commit ourselves to bringing them to light so that they may be cured.
So, friends on this Martin Luther King Sunday let us with Dr. King and Ta-Nehisi Coates not hesitate to be radical in our work to free our own and our nation’s hearts of the scourge of racial oppression that dogs us still. Let us not turn to our own courses like horses plunging headlong into battle. Instead, let us own the work that is ours to raise our individual and community awareness. Let us join in common cause with those of all races committed to the ongoing work that frees us all.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The chalice flame we light each week had its origin in our movement as a symbol of hope and resistance. We’ll visit that history today and what it calls us to now.
Reading from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
“This is what life is about: salamanders, fiddle tunes, you and me and things, the split and burr of it all, the fizz into particulars.”
SERMON
It was my junior year in high school, and I had transferred to a private school after mixed experience in public schools. I remember feeling a bit like a fish out of water, not sure how or where I fit in. Somehow it came up in my youth group at the Unitarian Universalist church where my family belonged that there were small, silver flaming chalice necklaces available for sale – a silver oval with the flame in the cup on a simple silver chain. I bought one.
I wasn’t particularly given to wearing jewelry, but somehow this necklace didn’t seem like jewelry. Instead, it felt like a declaration of identity, a way of representing what was important to me and the community I stood with.
I remember being comforted by the new feeling of the medallion bouncing around on my chest during phys ed classes, almost wishing that others would see it and ask me about it.
Our tradition takes pride in what we consider our thoughtful approach to religion, our commitment to a reasoned search for meaning that helps us articulate beliefs we can defend with intellectual integrity. And it’s good, it’s freeing, it’s refreshing. We’re not given a catechism to memorize or confession of faith to affirm. We weigh for ourselves what seems true, and we accept, even welcome, the broad diversity of faith stances that this exercise carries us to, knowing that those stances will shift and evolve as we change and grow. It is liberating to be part of such a community, and I am proud to be both a member and leader in our movement.
But here’s the thing: our attention to words and ideas, the products of the head, can lead us to neglect the role of the physical, the body in our spiritual lives.
The religion professor S. Brent Plate argues that it’s easy to mistake what religion is about. “Too often,” he says, “religion is explained as ‘a set of beliefs,’ which primarily exist in the thought processes of the brain.”
Look, for example, at that forbidding word “orthodoxy,” which translates from the Latin as “right thinking.” The notion, Plate says, is that the answers to religion are “guarded behind the fortress of the forehead.” Having sorted the options, we make our decisions about, say, theism or atheism, and then, in his words, “The quest is over, we’re all cleaned up, and life goes on.”
Yes, there are symbols and rituals and all the other ways that we dress things up, but those are seen to be “secondary expressions of some primary intellectual order.” In fact, though, this move reverses the actual order of things.
As Plate writes in his book, The History of Religion in 5 ½ Objects, “there is no thinking without first sensing, no minds without their entanglement in bodies, no intellectual religion without felt religion as it is lived in streets and homes, temples and theaters.”
Now, that we might miss this is not especially surprising, given our history. Our Unitarian heritage, after all, emerged out of the Puritan churches of New England, where worship consisted largely in listening to hours-long sermons in unheated meetinghouses.
When the camp meetings of the Great Awakening with their shouting and weeping were spreading across New England in the 18th century, our forebears took pride in their more sober and reasoned approach to religion.
It wasn’t until later that Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists challenged that approach to religion in a significant way. We don’t find religion, a sense of faith from studying texts, they said, but from our experience of the world.
Religion, he suggested, responds to the joy to being alive, the sense of wonder that comes simply from being. We don’t need to seek it out from some supernatural source. We only need to make ourselves available to it as we engage each other and our surroundings. From it arises a consciousness that guides us in community and in the larger world.
But this connection beyond ourselves can be hard to find, Brent Plate says, and that is what sacred objects can do. As he puts it, they help us “bring the spiritual to its senses.” There are many ways to approach this, but today I want to argue that it is one of the things that our flaming chalice can do for us – connect us to larger truth, to deeper understanding, to both our wholeness and our neediness, and to each other.
To tell this story I need to step back about three-quarters of a century. As central as the chalice has become to contemporary Unitarian Universalism, it is in fact a fairly recent innovation for us, born in Europe in the midst the conflicts of World War II.
We begin in Czechoslovakia, a nation that at the time had the largest concentration of Unitarians outside of the U.S., including a central church in Prague, Unitaria, with a membership of some 3,000. The Czechs had been in close contact with the leadership of the then-American Unitarian Association, and in 1938 as Nazi troops were invading the Americans began a fund-raising campaign to support them.
In 1939, they sent the minister of a Boston-area church, Waitstill Sharp, and his wife, Martha, to Prague to help. They brought funds, provided meals and helped several hundred refugees escape to neutral countries. It was not long, though, before their activities were noticed by the occupying Nazis. So, they fled to Lisbon, in neutral Portugal.
It was there in May 1940 that they helped set up a new organization, the Unitarian Service Committee, to help coordinate relief efforts. Over the next several years they and the USC helped thousands of refugees escape the Nazis.
In the shadowy world of espionage during the war, the USC was unknown. So, its director, Charles Joy, decided it needed to adopt a symbol to give it some kind of dignity and importance. He turned to his assistant, Hans Deutsch, for help. Deutsch was a Czech national and artist who had recently moved to Lisbon from Paris after getting in trouble drawing anti-Nazi cartoons. It was his pen that in 1941 gave us the first flaming chalice.
Deutsch drew the chalice without ever having entered a Unitarian church or having experienced a Unitarian worship service, but he told Joy that he admired the denomination’s spirit. “I am not what you may actually call a believer,” he said, “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.”
The director, Charles Joy, told the USC board in Boston that Deutsch’s thought was the symbol was “the kind of chalice the Greeks and Romans put on their altars as a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice.” But he added that he felt it also connected to Christian theme of sacrificial love.
Unbeknownst to Deutsch, his symbol had also made a strong connection to an ancient Czech symbol of religious freedom. In the late 1300s a reformist Bohemian Catholic priest named Jan Hus had made a practice of reading the Bible in the vernacular and offering them the cup of communion wine as well as the bread. The church at the time insisted that the Bible could only be read in Latin and that only the priest, facing the altar, could receive the cup. For turning to face the congregation and sharing the cup, Hus was declared a heretic and burned at the stake.
His followers, the Hussites, rebelled, calling themselves “people of the chalice” and were said to have combined the fire of Hus’s pyre with the cup to create a flaming chalice that endured as a symbol for hundreds of years.
When the Unitarian and Universalist churches joined in 1961, the flaming chalice was adopted as the symbol of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Since then the chalice has been artistically re-imagined many times, and its role in our congregations has evolved.
Growing up in the church of my childhood in Princeton, New Jersey, even when I had the chalice on a chain around my neck, I don’t remember us ever having a physical chalice in the sanctuary or lighting it as part of worship. It is a practice that appears to have grown slowly and steadily, and not surprisingly seems to have spread first in children’s and youth worship. Children, after all, engage more directly with something concrete rather than lofty ideas, but are they really so different from adults in that way?
I wonder if there may yet reside in us some of that old Puritan suspicion of all the ways that we can be tickled, tricked or distracted by the concrete, by the sensual from those great ideals that we take religion to be about. But if Brent Plate is right – and I think he is – that “there is no intellectual religion without felt religion,” then it is worth our getting in touch with the felt experience that goads us to gather in religious community. And perhaps the chalice could be the tool that opens that for us.
I am struck that our symbol begins with a gesture of both hospitality and safe harbor. As Hans Deutsch intuited, the cup of the chalice has served for many years in many cultures as a vessel that is used to hold something precious that may be widely shared.
It celebrates a sense of abundance that underlies our liberal faith, a broad welcome to all and a community that cherishes diversity and offers compassion. At the same time, we recognize that none of us enters this community fully formed, having figured it all out. We will change and grow and sometimes suffer hardships and ill fortune. So, our chalice also offers us a crucible – contained space where we can be supported in our struggles, where we can bring our full and true selves without fear of judgment, and a place that offers loving arms amidst our difficulties.
A similar sentiment guides us as we extend our reach into the larger community. It is not through abstract reasoning that we are drawn to the work of freedom, justice and love, but as a visceral response to the hardship and pain that we see.
The sense of joy and wonder in being alive that we feel is not an experience exclusive to us. It is a heritage, a right of all human beings. We don’t have to figure this out. We know it simply by what our gut tells us when we experience the world otherwise. The abundance of our cup, then, calls us to share what we have and the vision of beloved human community that it implies as widely as we can.
I am struck by the image in David’s story of first man who finds his purpose by creating the world from what he draws out of his heart. It is, in a sense, a task that we all face: finding the joy, the heart-centered passion that drives us and building a life that serves it.
And so, we look to the flame, that symbol of warmth and light that casts out fear, that heats our dwelling places, that illuminates the world, that gives us the power of discernment. The chalice that we offer to the world is not empty; it is afire: afire with compassion, afire with hope, afire with love. . .
Afire, even, with impassioned reason.
A contradiction? Not at all. Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” fame notwithstanding, let’s not fool ourselves that there is no passion driving the well-reasoned argument. Rather, it is the energy of a refining fire that strips away foolish dross and takes us to the essential nugget of truth.
And that, in the end, is what we are left with: not our fantasies or all the things we conjure out of our fears, but what Annie Dillard called “the fizz of particulars”: salamanders, fiddle tunes, you and me and the world around us.
So, into this space that we have created together we bring this symbol that gathers our community. As at other congregations it has evolved over the years here in different manifestations. Our newest, as you heard Lisa introduce it in September, is a design created by the late 1980s by Mordecai Roth, a UU artist who lived in Arizona and who died about two years ago: the bowl decorated as with branches from a tree holding lamp oil and a plate over it holding a wick, with interlocking brass rings representing the two religious traditions of our heritage.
I make the lighting of this chalice a ceremonial element early in our services and invite our worship associates to write words to accompany the lighting that invite us into worship. It is for me a moment of grounding and centering, a reminder of the context in which we gather, this tradition of memory and hope that we raise up each week. Later, then, we carry this flame to our joys and concerns table where we pass it to you in the hope that it might ease your sorrows and illuminate your joys, both of which we hold in community with love.
It is a way, as Brent Plate put it, that we bring our spiritual life to its senses. We connect with each other and with those who each week and for dozens of years have lit chalices in Unitarian Universalist congregations and meeting places around the world. And it can’t help but bring to mind beloved friends who are no longer with us.
We connect also with the fire within us, the passion that calls us beyond the narrow window of our lives to a covenant with all people, with all life.
It was a growing awareness of that covenant, I think, that occurred to me in high school with that little silver medallion dangling from my neck. I think what I wanted to tell my classmates in hoping they would ask about it was that I was linked to something larger than myself, to a community that carried a vision of compassion, integrity, service and joy – a fire that lives within me still.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
It’s not long after a child is old enough to be up on her or his feet and running around that we adults discover that we possess the most powerful curative known to humankind. We call it, “the boo-boo kiss.” Right? You know how it is: up the child walks with big tears and loud cries after a hard fall, and you gather them and make sympathetic noises. “Where does it hurt?” you ask. He or she points to the spot, and you kiss it. “Is that better?” you ask, and the child gives you a solemn nod.
READING
“Tao Ching #2,” translated by Stephen Mitchell
SERMON
It’s not long after a child is old enough to be up on her or his feet and running around that we adults discover that we possess the most powerful curative known to humankind. We call it, “the boo-boo kiss.” Right? You know how it is: up the child walks with big tears and loud cries after a hard fall, and you gather them and make sympathetic noises. “Where does it hurt?” you ask. He or she points to the spot, and you kiss it. “Is that better?” you ask, and the child gives you a solemn nod.
Now we can get into quite a lengthy academic debate about how much good you actually did do, but there’s no denying that at some level that interchange did accomplish something. It is better, at least in the sense that you showed the child that someone cared when she or he felt injured.
We are, in a way, setting up an expectation that they can seek and receive care from the assaults of the world. And – who knows? – this may be part of what is behind another curious phenomenon called “the placebo effect.”
For generations we’ve known that some people who receive treatments with no active medical ingredients – say, sugar pills or saline injections – will nonetheless report that symptoms like pain and discomfort are alleviated. In fact, some studies have shown that even when patients are told they are receiving mere sugar pills they report more improvement in their conditions than those who receive no treatment.
A key to this effect may be in the word’s roots: “placebo” comes from the Latin meaning, “I will please.” Perhaps, like the “boo-boo kiss” on the playground, the effect is a reflection in some way of our trusting that we can expect to be cared for. It’s one example of the way in that our expectations can have a powerful effect on us.
Because, of course, expectations are woven throughout our conscious lives. Our ability to plan and project into the future is helpful, arguably one of the characteristics that make us human. But it also can be a source of grief, since it’s so easy to raise our expectations to unrealistic heights. And probably nowhere do we feel the effects of this more acutely than in our interactions with our loved ones.
As Stan indicated, many of us bring wounded hearts from our upbringings, and those wounds colors our interactions with our families and other important people in our lives. And so, as we head into the holidays, a time of year where family gatherings are not only planned but also dressed up with tinsel and great expectations of holiday joy, it might be a good moment to reflect on strategies to help us ease the angst that those expectations can bring.
You know what it’s like: whether you’re approaching that holiday gathering as a host or a guest, there are old scripts, old hurts that lie in wait. But you tell yourself, “This time it will be different. I’m going to be calm, I’m going to be positive. I won’t let myself get drawn into those patterns that trip me up each time, and I’m not going to escape and avoid. I’m going to be present, and I’m going to be real.”
And then in the middle of it just when you thought things were going well you are triggered by some offhand remark, and you’re off to the races once again. Is there a way that we can avoid that path or at lessen our participation in it?
We begin by acknowledging that this is hard work. It touches us at our emotional core, and that deserves some care and respect. At the heart of it, after all, is something that really matters to us. The people nearest to us do touch us and how we are with them really does affect our emotional wellbeing. Avoiding interactions with them it isn’t a tenable way forward. It only numbs and hardens us, making us even less accessible to our own needs as well as potential sources of our own healing.
So, what to do? The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron points out that the initial feelings of worry and dread that we feel when we get triggered may actually be a signal that those old habits are being disrupted. Instead of seamlessly moving into them with some sort of sense of entitlement, we can feel that they don’t really serve our needs. We no longer take them for granted, and wesee them as unhelpful.
But rather than letting anxiety take over, she suggests, try adopting an inquisitive attitude. So, this is what it feels like when I’m pushed this way. This is the cascade of feelings and worried self-talk that tumbles out.
This may not be something that you can do when you’re in the middle of it. It may be that the best you can do is simply stay present and get through the moment. But a little reflection in a time away offers a chance to sort through what you’ve just experienced, to acknowledge that bump in blood pressure you just felt and offer yourself a little compassion.
Again, this is hard work. It touches you deeply, and it will take time and effort to sort through. But it’s worth it, since on the other side is a healthier way of seeing and being. And just that moment of pressing the pause button before you launch into old scripts can be enough to help you see that you do in fact have all the tools you need to do it. As Pema Chodron puts it, “we ourselves are the source of wisdom and compassion.”
OK, fine, you say. But how about now, when I’m not feeling so wise or compassionate? Well, here are some thoughts that might help us lighten up and disengage old scripts: First, don’t set up the target for the arrow. That’s a pretty dramatic image, but it often fits how the escalating cascade of conflict with another can feel.
As Pema Chodron puts it, if you don’t put up the target, you can’t get hit. That serves as a reminder that in the end we are in control of how we respond to another. It doesn’t always feel that way when someone is pushing our buttons, but the fact remains that, as she says, “we set up the target, and only we can take it down.” Withholding the target can disrupt and eventually break down the patterns of anger and aggression that otherwise drive our responses.
Then, after we’ve settled down and disengaged from the pattern of conflict we found ourselves in, Pema Chodron advises that we look for a way to connect with the heart. Once we have stepped away from what had been an escalating conflict it is suddenly plain how pointless and damaging this process is, how each of us in this exchange suffers for it. As she puts it, “millions are burning with the fire of aggression. We can sit with the intensity of the anger and let its energy humble us and make us more compassionate.”
It’s not as if having gotten through this crisis we are suddenly above it, more enlightened, more grounded than others who flare into anger. Who knows what might push our buttons next and send us back down that road again. It is only through compassion that we find a centered way.
For me, this provides one way into the selection from the Tao te Ching that you heard earlier. It’s all about the complementarity of things – how ugly and beautiful, good and bad, long and short, difficult and easy are not unrelated opposites: they support and reflect each other. We know anger not from observing it, but from experiencing it. And yet, once captured by it we lose all perspective on it. But sitting with compassion in the presence of anger helps us understand it. After all, not all anger is destructive. Righteous anger centered in moral understanding is a powerful positive force. But reactive anger arising from our fears accomplishes nothing. It even serves to undermine us. Seeing and understanding anger from the perspective of a compassionate heart, rather than running away from it, opens us to that insight.
That’s because compassion arises not from weakness, but from strength of heart. So, it tempers anger, and in fact all emotions, and focuses it in a productive way.
So, again, as the Tao de Ching suggests, we are able to experience the world, and when things arise, we don’t seek to control them; we simply let them come. When things disappear, we don’t cling to them; we let them go. We are able to have things without possessing them. We are able to act without layering onto the experience many great expectations for what will come of it
So, what does all this tell us about expectations? Well, our expectations matter. They shape how we perceive the world, but they can also lead us down some pretty perilous paths. This draws me back to think about how these themes are reflected in that novel of Charles Dickens that parallel’s our topic today, “Great Expectations.”
We’re used to turning to Dickens at Christmas time to mull on the tale Scrooge and all his ghosts, but it occurs to me that his protagonist Pip may have something to teach in this season of advent when we mull over this matter of expectation. One could argue in a sense that Scrooge and Pip both learn a similar lesson. Just as Scrooge’s miserliness makes him miserable, the money that lands unexpectedly in Pip’s lap fuels grand and unrealistic visions of what it is to live with means. So, not surprisingly he makes a mess of it.
His dismissal of the good blacksmith Joe and later his benefactor Magwitch and his infatuation with the seeming ingénue Estella and all the glittering lures of a moneyed life are fueled by the same illusory expectations that come of self-indulgence and disregard for others.
When his comeuppance arrives, he, like Scrooge, is forced to recognize the error of his ways, how he has disregarded those who cared most for him while currying favor with those whose interests were purely selfish. It is the moralist side of Dickens at his best.
And there’s some justice in that. After all, isn’t there serious vanity in the whole notion that we can expect to know ow the future will unfold, that the world will dance around our hopes and wishes?
Instead, we are more often rewarded by curiosity and openness, by a willingness to be surprised to what the world has in store. Of course, what the world has in store is not always what we want to receive. So, we are also wise to nurture expectations that arise from commitment. We can give each other the gift of expectation that we will be and do what we say we will be and do for each other.
We will be there when the other stumbles or is in need, to kiss each other’s boo-boos or walk with each other in our sorrow and disappointment. Let those be the expectations that we give and receive in this darkest time of the year.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Some years ago, the story goes, there was worrying among members of the council of New College, of Oxford, England about the state of their buildings. It seems that an inspector had been poking around the ancient oak beams of the roof of the dining hall and discovered that they were full of beetles. Despite its name, New College was actually one of the oldest colleges of Oxford, founded in 1379, and truly an architectural marvel. But as with all things it had deteriorated with time. And now that they looked at the massive roof beams council members were dismayed: Where on earth would they find beams of that caliber in today’s marketplace?
READING Adapted from “A Return to Love” by Marianne Williamson
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are Powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? . . . .
“Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. Not just some of us; everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
SERMON At this point, one of the Junior Fellows hesitantly raised his hand and suggested that there might actually be some oaks on the college’s own lands that could serve the purpose. The college, after all, was endowed with many acres of forest, where college fellows loved to walk and cogitate. But, oh, cutting the forest? Really? Certainly there would be a great hue and cry if the Council went after those venerable old oaks. So, they consulted the college forester and cautiously raised with him what they admitted was this wild idea.
Appearing before the council, the forester smiled and said, “Well, sirs. We was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.” It seems that when the college was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted specifically to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because, as anyone at the time knew, oaks always get beetly in the end.
Apparently the warning had been passed down from one forester to the next over the next 500 years: “Do what you need to tend to the forest, but don’t cut those oaks. They’re for the College Hall.” And so, the story goes, the council had the materials they needed for the repair job.
I don’t know that we have any oaks planted as part of the project we are dedicating today, but the story makes a point that is worth our considering: the institutions we build to give flesh to our hopes and dreams require tending, vision and care.
As we dedicated this beautiful expansion and updating of our main building earlier, you heard a bit of the story of this congregation told through the evolution of our physical space. It’s an inspiring tale – how we grew from a handful of people meeting in rented rooms at the YMCA to hundreds now gathered in this distinctive, innovative and welcoming space, planted at a crossroads in our community.
We are known in our neighborhood and the Asheville area for this remarkable building that serves, as Jane suggested, as a kind of commons for our congregation and, increasingly, for the community at large. Now that we have broadcast our name so prominently and offer accessible plazas to our building front and rear I’m betting that more will come. So, when they come, how will they know us?
Back in the 1950s and early 60s many people coming to this congregation were liberal-minded folks seeking refuge from a conservative religious culture. As the congregation grew and we found space for ourselves, first in a large home in West Asheville and then at this spot at Edwin and Charlotte, we took the risk of making ourselves more visible, particularly in venturing more deeply into social justice advocacy, though in many ways we remained an outlier in the community.
When the boom times in Asheville came, beginning in the 1980s, we boomed, too. With Asheville’s population increase the cultural dynamics started to change, so that instead of being an outlier we were more in tune with the increasingly progressive sensibilities of the community.
Rather than a refuge, we became a gathering place for liberal-minded newcomers, many of them moving from UU congregations elsewhere or unchurched and looking for a community that supported freedom of belief. And so our congregation came to focus on offering connections to these newcomers: Cultivating a sense of community, a place for socializing became an important focus of our life together. It is a dynamic that remains strong with us today.
But now as we dedicate this beautiful space with our arms stretched wide in welcome it is given to us to articulate the vision that will lead us from here. In keeping with our theme this month, what ought we to expect of this gathered community and each other in the work ahead of us? What seedlings shall we plant for when our beams get beetly?
Because, friends, the challenges are not far off and the thriving of this congregation will depend on our meeting them. It is fine to be a gathering place of liberal-minded people, but to what end is our gathering? It is good that we proclaim freedom of thought and conviction, but what is that freedom is for? It is laudable to affirm love, justice, compassion, equity and acceptance, but again – to what end?
I was listening the other day to some talking head bemoan the latest mass shooting – I forget now which one; they all seem to blend together – and he saying that we need to find ways to “harden” our schools or malls or whatever to better protect them.
And I wanted to shout: No, no, no! For the past 14 years our nation has been on a tear of hardening, and what has it brought us? An accelerating toll of death, whether it be domestic shooting rampages, servicewomen and men dying in undeclared wars, or a galloping suicide toll. We have hardened unemployment rules and any provision serving the poor, hardened suspicions across races and nationalities, hardened restrictions on the voting franchise, hardened political discourse beyond the possibility of conversation.
All this hardening has made us no safer, no freer than we were. Instead, all it has given us is a bleak harvest of fear. Even more, it has taught us that there is no safe harbor, no refuge, no garden that we can retreat to while the mad world goes on. We are stuck in the middle of it.
And, ironically, this may be greatest gift that this crisis has to give us. Because finally we are forced to come to terms with the truth that we are in this together – in it with Syrian refugees, with Parisian restaurant goers, with Los Angeles health workers, with Nigerian schoolgirls, with Ukrainian grandmothers, with Charleston churchgoers.
It is in this muddle, in this mess that we reside, and it is there that where we are called, and called to act. It was the great minister William Sloane Coffin who said, “Human unity is not something we are called to create, only to recognize and make manifest.”
In a time like this, what is needed is less hardening and more opening, more awakening. How shall we be agents of that work?
Because, folks, the truth is that for all beautiful words that flow from religious texts and the pulpits of churches – including those of our tradition – religious institutions are often slow to take the next step and live into them. We mistake the nature of faith and presume it has something with words we recite, when in fact what it has to do with is trust, and trust isn’t something we just decide on. It’s something that grows in our hearts.
Faith is not something we have; it’s something we do. It may begin as a surmise, but it grows stronger and deepens as we act on it. In our case, I want to argue that our tradition is founded on more than freedom of belief. At its center, I find the radical surmise that every human being has inherent worth and dignity simply in and of her and himself and that living into that presumption could save us all.
Not only that but we are linked in ways deeper than we can know to every living thing to every atom, every star, every beetle, every oak and that in that relationship lies the greatest hope we can know.
For me, these are not some convenient intellectual suppositions: they embody a truth in which I deeply trust that has grown in me to the point that it bolsters me amid despair and disappointment.
As we look ahead to our future, I would direct us as a gathered community to Marianne Williamson’s words that you heard earlier. I wonder sometimes if what keeps us from living more deeply into the mission we proclaim is an unspoken fear of the consequences of claiming the power we as a community actually have in our hands.
The religious life is full of lofty notions of what the world will be like someday when our idyllic notions come true, when the beloved community is made real. But how about if we began living into it now? What would that look like?
To spur your reflection, let me offer a piece of this song:
Close your eyes, have no fear.
The monster’s gone, he’s on the run and your daddy’s here.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful – beautiful boy!
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful – beautiful boy!”
It’s the first verse of one of the last songs John Lennon ever wrote, done in tribute to his son, Sean, who was around 5 at the time.
For a song writer whose lyrics often had an ironical edge, this one is remarkable for its sweetness and simplicity. It’s said to have been a time when, after leading a tumultuous life, Lennon was settling down, finally: letting go of the star machine and enjoying family life. So, maybe it’s just an older father’s celebration of his young son, but there’s something else that draws me to it, the chorus, especially, I find magical, almost chant-like:
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful – beautiful boy!”
It touches a feeling that any parent has had at some point, looking at your child in wonder. But others know it, too. Maybe it’s a partner, a parent, or a dear friend who is the focus of your gaze. Isn’t there a moment when you look and simply think to yourself – “beautiful, beautiful”? It’s not an aesthetic judgment; it’s a judgment of love.
Because, it’s true: there is wonder and beauty in each of us. Unfortunately, it’s not what we attend to, as a rule. We’re busy with the affairs of the day, affairs that often have us pushing past these “beautiful” people to get some task accomplished. As Jennifer said, Lennon takes note of it in the third verse of his song:
Before you cross the street, take my hand,
Life is what happens to you
while you’re busy making other plans.
It’s not long before we start “hardening” our assessment of others, before we start seeing in other people obstacles, strangers, aliens, and worse.
But we don’t have to go there. We can instead take the time to see in the other the beauty that is there. As a community we could invite each other and our neighbors to do the same and in doing so let down our guard and build connections across barriers. Pretty soon the commons we create in our space magnifies and grows.
Who knows what a grove this would grow, but wouldn’t it be a blessing?
Rev. Sally Beth Shore, Guest Minister
Sally Beth recently led a UU College of Social Justice delegation that included UUCA members Tom Blanford and Cindy Threlkeld to the US-Mexican border in Arizona to witness how US Immigration policy plays out there. Today they share some of what they encountered there, as well as a glimpse of the situation concerning illegal immigrants in our own back yard. Can we make a difference for those facing the struggle to survive as they flee poverty, terror, and war?
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
We continue our exploration of what the teachings of Jesus have to offer to modern-day Unitarian Universalists. <i>Click on the title to listen…
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The teachings of Jesus are an important part of our heritage as Unitarians and Universalists, but are they relevant to our religious explorations today? In a month when we are working with the theme of Ancestry, we’ll consider possible answers to that question.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Seven months ago I recounted to you an amazing moment in my life and ministry that embodied in the photo you see on the cover of your order of service. Having come for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights marches in Selma, Alabama I found myself crowded together with hundreds of others along the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday beatings a half century before, in one of the most diverse assemblies of people I’ve ever been a part of. Despite being pressed together, though, there was an easiness among us communicated in smiles and casual banter amid the singing of freedom songs and the laughing of children that gave me a glimpse of what racial peace and racial justice might look like in this country.
Seven months ago I recounted to you an amazing moment in my life and ministry that embodied in the photo you see on the cover of your order of service. Having come for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights marches in Selma, Alabama I found myself crowded together with hundreds of others along the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday beatings a half century before, in one of the most diverse assemblies of people I’ve ever been a part of. Despite being pressed together, though, there was an easiness among us communicated in smiles and casual banter amid the singing of freedom songs and the laughing of children that gave me a glimpse of what racial peace and racial justice might look like in this country.
Selma was a focus because as a result of actions there, accompanied as they were with hardship and tragedy, one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights movement was won: the adoption in 1965 of the Voting Rights Act.
Federal protections for Civil Rights had been passed the year before, but they were largely toothless until African-American had the unfettered right to vote. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made the point, as you heard earlier, eight years before the March on Selma in his first speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1957: “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind – it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact – I can only submit to the edict of others.”
African-Americans had been given the right to vote in the 15th Amendment adopted in 1870, but Jim Crow laws passed across the South in the next couple of decades that enacted poll taxes, literacy tests and other restrictions took most blacks off the voting rolls.
The Voting Rights Act swept those restrictions away, and the impact was dramatic. In following decades, the percentage of blacks in the South registered to vote rose from 31% to 73%, and the number of black elected officials increased from fewer than 500 to 10,500 nationwide. In future years, the act was expanded to lower the voting age to 18 and provide protections for language-minority groups such as Hispanics in Texas, Asian-Americans in New York and Native Americans in Arizona.
So, there was much to celebrate in Selma, but not without concern, too. For what has gained less attention since the Voting Rights Act was adopted is that just as Southern lawmakers in the 19th century passed laws to frustrate the effect of the 15th Amendment, laws passed across the South since 1965 have chipped away at voting rights to the point that today many of its protections no longer have the effect they once did.
Many voting districts were gerrymandered or switched to at-large voting to dilute the African-American vote. At the same time, a new wave of voting restrictions have emerged in the South and many states beyond, that while they no longer specifically invoke race, have the effect of reducing the voting by minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics.
They have curtailed early voting, purged voting rolls, denied the vote to ex-felons and required proof of citizenship or government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot. This trend culminated with a decision by the Supreme Court in 2013 that hobbled the most effective tool in the Voting Rights Act to protect free access to the vote.
It is technical tool of sorts with an unassuming name – Section 5. What it did was targeted states where in 1965 less than 50% of blacks were registered or where voting restrictions were in place. It said that these states – largely though not entirely across the South – could not change their voting laws unless the changes were reviewed by the US Department of Justice. And it had been invoked repeatedly since 1965.
In the Supreme Court decision, though, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argued essentially that Section 5 was a relic, that conditions in the states that were targeted by the Voting Rights Act had changed, that in each state strong majorities of African-Americans were now registered to vote. So, he said, the formula that targeted those states, which was based on conditions in 1965, no longer applied and should be discarded. The court’s 5 to 4 decision freed those states from federal oversight.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg led the dissenters She pointed out that while black voter participation had improved, it wasn’t for lack of legislators working to dilute and reduce the black vote.
She noted that in 2006, when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act for another 25 years, hearings documented that since 1982 the Department of Justice had blocked more than 700 instances in those targeted states where attempts were made to keep blacks from voting. Also, she said, while there are now fewer instances of bald discrimination, there was an increase in what she called “second generation barriers” like gerrymandering that reduce black voter participation.
Eliminating this tool of enforcement when it is working to reduce voter discrimination, she said, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rain storm because you’re not getting wet.”
Our focus now shifts to the state level. Three weeks after the Supreme Court decision essentially neutralizing the Voting Rights Act, the North Carolina Legislature acted.
The Republican majority had already been debating some of the toughest voting restrictions in the country, such as strict voter identification, reducing early voting, and changing same-day registration rules. With the court’s decision they were put on a fast track and adopted.
North Carolina is an interesting case when it comes to voting rights. In 1965 with only about 47% of blacks registered to vote, it was one of the states given federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act, though only 40 of its 100 counties were covered.
Even then, overall voter turnout remained low. As late as 1996 we ranked 43rd in the nation in turnout. But due to reforms such as early voting and same-day registration voter turnout increased to 11th in the nation by 2012.
In debate on the bill, North Carolina’s legislative leaders claimed that the changes were needed to prevent voter fraud, but they provided essentially no evidence of it, and certainly none linked to the reforms. The North Carolina NAACP sued, arguing that the law was intended to silence black voters, since African-Americans were twice as likely to use same-day registration and early voting as whites. In 2014, they lost a bid for an injunction in circuit court, then won a reversal in the Circuit Court, before the Supreme Court reinstated the restrictions. The full case was argued to the district court judge in Winston-Salem last July, and we now await his ruling.
It was Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, whom we hosted in this pulpit last month, who dubbed this moment “Our Selma,” and the parallel is apt.
For we remember that in Selma in 1965 we faced people in power determined to twist the tools of democracy to shut others out. So in North Carolina in 2015 we find people in power once again using the machinery of government to shut others out.
If nothing else, the struggle we are in is proof of the power of the ballot. For where democracy holds sway, the ballot trumps all.
Give us the ballot, Dr. King said, and we won’t have to worry about people securing their basic rights.
Give us the ballot, and we can have confidence in the leaders we call to serve us.
Give us the ballot, and we have cause to join in the mighty work of building a beloved community that serves us all.
The principles at play here go back several hundred years to the thinkers who influenced the founders of this country, particularly the philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that “the state of nature,” the way things are, is a state of perfect freedom and equality. That is to say, no one is naturally better than anyone else.
To get things done, though, he said, we need government. And government, in his understanding, takes the form of a social contract where equal persons agree to serve a common good that is determined by the will of the majority. For government to be legitimate, he said, it must operate with the consent of those it governs. That means people must have a way of influencing the decisions of government, and the vote is how that happens.
We Unitarian Universalists embrace this notion in our fifth principle, which invites us to affirm “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” There’s a bit to unpack here. To affirm the right of conscience is to say that we trust in an inner guide that we each possess to help us find the right way, the ethical way to be with each other. We don’t make any claim as to the nature and origin of that guide – there are many opinions on that. But we trust and respect what it teaches.
And this connects directly to the second half of this principle, that we affirm “the use of the democratic process” as a way of deciding things that gives each person a say in the deciding.
And we regard the opportunity that we each have to influence how matters are decided in our lives not just as a nice thing to have, but as a fundamental right: it is something we are each owed simply by being present in the world. Another way to say this is that we have faith in the vote. It is our conviction that a vote is something that we each as individuals of inherent worth and dignity are owed and that it is through the vote that our hope as individuals in society will best be served.
It’s true that there is a great leap of faith embedded in this way of thinking because it means that we accept that whatever is decided is outside of our control. We can put our oar in, but in the end there’s no predicting where democracy will take us, and that’s OK.
History is full of doubters of that claim, people who distain others they consider less worthy than themselves who they seek to push past to wrest power for themselves. We reject that. We say that the uncertainty of democracy is a price worth paying because it’s grounded in a deeper trust.
John Lewis, the Georgia congressman who 50 years ago led the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday and took some of the first blows among the marchers, speaks to this. In his recent book, “Across that Bridge,” he mused on what for him were the lessons of that time. “All our work, all our struggle, all our days,” he said, “add up to one purpose: to reconcile ourselves to the truth, and finally accept once and for all that we are one people, one family, the human family.”
Our dedication to democracy carries with it a deep respect for and belief in the inherent worth of each of us, in a fundamental goodness at our core, and our belief that for all our foibles we are capable of making decisions that will serve and save us all.
Walt Whitman was known as the poet of democracy in that he saw in it not simply a style of governance but a vision something like Lewis’s. It is a way forward, he suggests in the poem you heard earlier, that depends on “the love of comrades,” on “companionship thick as trees,” on “inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks.”
It’s an image that carries me back, again, to the streets of Selma last spring. Too much to hope for? Well, there was a moment, a glimpse.
It is easy, I know, to throw up our hands at the electoral process. There is much in it that’s a mess, but thankfully I believe there is nothing wrong with our democracy that can’t be repaired by applying more democracy. The trouble comes when we absent ourselves and check out of the game. Because when we do that, all it means is that we give over our power and leave the decision-making to others
Instead, let us be faithful agents to bring about the change we want to see, to bring into being a society that makes room for all, that serves us all. Won’t you join me in the work of this congregation. Get out and vote yourselves, and help us make sure that every woman and man has access to the precious franchise that is the hallmark of our democracy: all colors, all ethnicities, all people.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
It’s funny how some words can ignite great controversies. Some years ago, just as I was ending my training in seminary, reverence turned out to be one of those words for us Unitarian Universalists.
The controversy was prompted by a 2003 newspaper report that in a sermon the then-president of the UUA, William Sinkford, had called for adding the word “God” to the Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles. (Actually, in a sense it was already there, though technically not in the principles themselves but in the list that often accompanies them of six sources of our “living tradition.” Among those named sources are “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.”)
It’s funny how some words can ignite great controversies. Some years ago, just as I was ending my training in seminary, reverence turned out to be one of those words for us Unitarian Universalists.
The controversy was prompted by a 2003 newspaper report that in a sermon the then-president of the UUA, William Sinkford, had called for adding the word “God” to the Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles. (Actually, in a sense it was already there, though technically not in the principles themselves but in the list that often accompanies them of six sources of our “living tradition.” Among those named sources are “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.”)
In any event, Bill quickly announced that the reporter had misquoted him. What he had actually called for was that we UUs look at reclaiming some of the religious language that many of us had abandoned and, for him, that included the word God. “Religious language,” he said, “doesn’t have to mean ‘God talk’” or returning to traditional Christian language. But, he said, “I do feel that we need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, to talk about . . . the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we find to be of ultimate importance.”
What was interesting is that Bill framed his sermon as inviting UUs to cultivate what he called “a vocabulary of reverence.” He said that he had borrowed that phrase from a 2001 essay by David Bumbaugh, who at the time was my advisor in seminary. David, however, had made a very different point from Bill’s in that essay, as is clear from its title, “Toward a Humanist Vocabulary of Reverence.”
Rather than urging UUs to reclaim traditional religious language, David’s was an appeal to what he called “the Humanist witness among us” to consider how they might recover “a vocabulary of reverence” from our understanding of the natural world.
He reminded his readers that decades ago humanists had, in his words, “set the agenda for religious discourse.” But now, he said, it seemed to him that humanists had become increasingly defensive and dismissive of any hope of dialog with traditional religion. His concern, he said, was that humanists “have lost the ability to speak of that which is sacred, holy, of ultimate importance to us, the language that would allow us to enter once more into critical dialog with others.”
The body of his essay was devoted to demonstrating how they might do that. All the discoveries of modern day science from high-energy physics to genomics and the interwoven character of life, he argued, are not only interesting and useful developments. They also inspire us.
“The more we understanding about the macrocosm,” he said, “the more reason we have to stand in awe and reverence at the process that shaped and structure its evolution, and our evolution. . . . The history of the universe is our history. . . . How can we not stand in awe before the fact of our emergence as a consequence of the same vast processes that created galaxies, suns, stars, and planets?”
This story, David argued, “is a religious story in that it calls us out of our little local universes and invites us to see ourselves in terms of the largest self we can imagine – a self that was present, in some sense, in the singularity that produced the emergent universe, at the birth of the stars; a self that, in some sense, is related through time to every living thing on this planet, that contains within it the seeds of a future we cannot imagine in our wildest flights of fancy.”
I must admit that I am partial to David’s vision of our religious story. My point today, though, is not to promote his notion but to invite us into an expansive understanding of what reverence might be in our own lives.
I don’t happen to believe that developing a vocabulary of reverence requires that we reclaim traditional religious language, but I also think it doesn’t preclude it either. David and Bill represent two very different religious positions in the spectrum of Unitarian Universalism, but each in his own way, I believe, invites us into the kind of exploration that serves us all as we seek to get clear for ourselves on what is deepest and dearest in our lives, or, as David put it in a subsequent essay, “what is so precious to us that we cannot betray it without losing our own souls.”
What he is talking about, I believe, is that for which we have reverence. So, that means that we need to get clear on how we are using that word. A place to begin is to take note that, while it is often used in a religious context, reverence is not strictly a religious concept.
Some years ago the philosopher Paul Woodruff made this point. In his book entitled “Reverence” he noted that the idea of reverence points to that for which we have awe that engenders in us a sense of love and respect. Let me repeat that: reverence refers to that for which we have awe that engenders in us a sense of love and respect.
It may or may not emerge in a religious context. Woodruff said that it was a central concept in both Greek and Chinese Confucian thought, where it operated as a civic virtue.
For the Greeks, he said, to have reverence was to live in a way that is conscious of our humanity – both our wonder and beauty and our foibles and failures. It was, he said, “the greatest virtue of leaders, because it gives powerful people the strength to listen to those who are weaker than they, and it remind them that no one, no matter how successful, was born complete, knowing everything.”
In the same way, in the complex social system of Confucian China to live with reverence was to behave in a way that was in tune with what they believed to be the natural way of things, the duties and feelings that naturally emerge from our relations with one another.
In both cultures, the notion of reverence was also bound up with humility, a sense that our understanding is limited, that we ourselves are part of something greater than we can know and that we need to be wary of presuming that we are in control or that our knowledge is greater than it is.
So, it is possible to experience and cultivate reverence outside of religion. It is also possible for religions to operate in a way that is at odds with reverence. An example that Woodruff gives in his book is a campaign he saw conducted on the billboards of a city where he lived that declared “God voted against Proposition 2.” The sign may be an expression of faith, he says, but it is an act against reverence.
“If you wish to be reverent,” he said, “never claim the awful authority of God in support of your political views. You cannot speak on such matters with the authority of God.”
There has been much speculation recently on the positive reception to Pope Francis around the world. My sense is not that people are suddenly persuaded to the views of the Catholic Church but that they find a sense of reverence in the way that this man has taken on the mantle of his awesome new responsibilities. Acting as the leader of a church that opposes homosexuality, to say of someone who is gay, and, in Francis’ words “searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” is to speak from a sense of reverence.
So, I think that both David Bumbaugh and Bill Sinkford are right when they urge us Unitarian Universalists to reflect on that of which we can speak with reverence. What is it that fills you with a sense of awe that engenders in you a sense of love and respect? What, in the words of the Ends Statements composed by your Board of Trustees, do you embrace that helps you discern that in which you most deeply trust, that to which you give your heart?
It need not be something big and fabulous. To my mind, Robert Frost’s humble, little poem, “Hyla Brook,” that you heard earlier, is an appeal to reverence. An ephemeral stream that has only the weak and faded foliage of weeds fed by its flow to show for its ever having existed, it is nonetheless loved by its author. Equally each of us humble souls have but the memories of our loved ones to attest to our having been here.
“We love the things we love for what they are.” They might not count for much in the wide world, and yet they are worthy of our attention, our respect.
I recall that the controversy over Bill Sinkford’s sermon now 12 years ago generated quite a tempest over how we use words, over what might possibly count as a “vocabulary of reverence.” It’s understandable because words have power and they have impact.
Bill’s remarks centered on one particularly powerful word – God. In his sermon he told how he once had a life-changing experience of what he felt was God that helped evoke a sense of reverence in his life. And that experience, he said, helped connect him to his own feeling of what was ultimately important.
In an essay following Bill’s, David said the notion of God and other words of traditional religious language had the opposite effect for him. He said that in our post-modern culture he had seen that language used, in his words, “to support political agendas of questionable merit” and sell soap, cereal and automobiles. The result, he said, has been to empty what has been called “the language of faith” of any meaning for him.
Instead, David says, he has turned to language that he believes “has the potential of unshackling the religious vision from its enslavement to the politics and economics of conventional society,” a language, he says, “rooted in the vision of reality of humanity’s place in the world that has emerged from the natural sciences.”
We in this tradition gather in a covenant that insists that no words are prima facie off the table as we seek to address those deepest things in our lives. Instead, we look to each person to use those words that she or he can claim with integrity, all the while agreeing to listen with equal integrity, with reverence, knowing that they will do us the same courtesy.
From this position we can entertain the notion of finding reverence gazing at the stars or listening to the singing of “Amazing Grace.” One or the other may not do it for us, but knowing how it moves our partner in conversation may open something in us. It is one way that we express a sense of reverence for a principle at the center of our religious tradition: the inherent worth and dignity of each person.
The words we use, after all, are embedded in the stories of our lives. None of them carries the trump of settled truth. Instead, they speak to the struggles and epiphanies that made us who we are, and by opening to each other with curiosity and humility, letting go of our fearful need to have everyone share our perspective, we create the possibility of growth for us all.
I offered you the words of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore earlier as an expression of reverence that has always resonated deeply with me. This poem speaks to my sense of the deep connection of all things. It captures the sweep of all being, from humble “Hyla Brook” to “the ocean cradle of birth and death,” all shot through with the running, dancing, joyous throb of ages, which is life.
And, like the poet, my pride comes not from some vainglorious vision of my own importance or the importance of my species, but from being immersed in the midst of it. I recognize it as such an improbable gift that from this tumultuous wave of being in this brief glimpse of a moment out of all eternity the conscious entity that I have become emerged. Who would’ve thunk it? Yet, there is it.
It fills me with such awe and gratitude to reflect on it that I am called to celebrate with joy not only my existence but all of it, every leaf, every bug, as Tagore puts it, “made glorious by the touch of this world of life.”
Cause for reverence? It is everywhere you look. Let us open ourselves to it.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The voice is a familiar one, like that of relative who surprises us every once in a while with fascinating, chatty phone calls: updating us on the family gossip, relating some slightly scandalous old stories, and puzzling over all that we lose in the relentless passage of time.
I recognized Harper Lee from the moment I opened her newly-released novel, <i>Go Set a Watchman</i>. To be honest, though, I wasn’t sure at first that I wanted to buy the book, given all the controversy over the circumstances of its appearance, apparently some 50 years after it was written. Did she really write it? Did she really intend to release it, or was she bullied into it by relatives seeking to enrich her estate?
READINGS
From To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
“I can’t say I approve of everything he does, Maudie, but he’s my brother, and I just want to know when this will ever end.”
Her voice rose: “It tears him to pieces. He doesn’t show it much, but it tears him t pieces. I’ve seen him when – what else do they want from him, Maudie, what else?”
“What does who want, Alexandra?” Miss Maudie asked.
“I mean this town. They’re perfectly willing to let him do what they’re too afraid to do themselves – it might lose ‘em a nickel. They’re perfectly willing to let him wreck his health doing what they’re afraid to do, they’re – “
“Be quiet, they’ll hear you,” said Miss Maudie. “Have you ever thought of it this way, Alexandra? Whether Maycombe knows it or not, we’re paying the highest tribute we ca pay him. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.”
“Who?” Aunt Alexandra asked.
“The handful of people in his town who say that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord’s kindness am I.”
Miss Maudie’s old crispness was returning: “The handful of people in this town with background, that’s who they are.”
From The Luminous Darkness by Howard Thurman
“As long as Negroes functioned within the patters (of segregation), the fear of reprisal and punitive measures was a very effective deterrent. The fear was always current and always active. It could be implemented quickly anywhere by any white man. To use violence as a deterrent against the violation of the pattern had a general sanction in the white community. And the surest protection against its us was not one’s guilt or innocence but rather one’s cunning or the protection of some white an who sytood in the gate on your behalf.
“The stability of the pattern rested uneasily on the Negro’s active fear. That fea, in turn, was based on the threat and the fact of violence, and the inactive fear of the white man, which sprang from his deep unconscious guilt because of his treatment of the Negro and his genuine anxiety about the security of his own position and status. The active fear of the Negro and the inactive fear of the white man provided a condition of tension that stabilized the pattern of segregation. . . .
“Now a strange thing is happening, particularly in the South. The active fear in the Negro, one of the foundation stones providing uneasy stability for segregation, is rapidly disappearing (and) being replaced by an increasing sense of personal and inner freedom. The more Negroes lose their fear, the more white people increase their fear. . . .
:When both are free of the fear, then a new way of life opens for all.”
SERMON
The voice is a familiar one, like that of relative who surprises us every once in a while with fascinating, chatty phone calls: updating us on the family gossip, relating some slightly scandalous old stories, and puzzling over all that we lose in the relentless passage of time.
I recognized Harper Lee from the moment I opened her newly-released novel, Go Set a Watchman. To be honest, though, I wasn’t sure at first that I wanted to buy the book, given all the controversy over the circumstances of its appearance, apparently some 50 years after it was written. Did she really write it? Did she really intend to release it, or was she bullied into it by relatives seeking to enrich her estate?
I plead ignorance on all those questions. Instead, what intrigued me were the disclosures from its first reviewers that the book would tell us something new and disturbing about Atticus Finch, the iconic figure at the center of Lee’s towering masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.
I might as well admit upfront that I am among the devotees of Atticus Finch. At least part of it, I’m sure, comes from my admiration of how expertly Gregory Peck realized that role in the movie. But really, Harper Lee gets the credit for the lovingly drawn portrait of the small town lawyer who, against the counsel of his townsfolk, defends an African-American man wrongly accused of raping a young white woman.
It is not just Atticus’ courage that makes him such a compelling figure, but also his decency and humility. Throughout Mockingbird whenever Lee’s narrator, Atticus’ daughter Jean Louise, known as Scout, gets worked into a fury over the guile and narrowness of her townsfolk, Atticus’ is the voice of compassion – always inviting her to walk in another person’s shoes and be slow to judge.
At the same time, when principle, law, and duty are on the line, Atticus is a tower of strength and rectitude, and it made him a widely-held figure of respect. Probably no scene in the book speaks to that more powerfully than the one that closes the trial, in which the black man he defended so expertly is nonetheless convicted.
Atticus is among the last to leave the courtroom after the verdict is handed down and his client is led back to jail. Among those remaining are dozens of African-Americans who were relegated to the courtroom balcony.
As Lee tells it in Mockingbird from Scout’s perspective sitting in the balcony next to Rev. Sykes, the African-American preacher:
“Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us, and from the image of Atticus’ lonely walk down this aisle.
“’Miss Jean Louise?’”
“I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Rev. Sykes’ voice was distant.
“’Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.’”
From the beginning of Watchman it’s clear that things have changed, beginning with Jean Louise. It is some 15 years after Mockingbird, and she is in her 20s, living in New York City. She says that her father suggested the move after she graduated from college. She’s not sure, though whether it’s a place she could make her home. At the same time, on the train ride back home she’s also doubtful whether Alabama holds much promise for her future.
Amid witty banter back at home about the state of the world, we learn a few things about her home town of Maycomb. Tragically, Jean Louise’s older brother, Jem, has died of a sudden heart attack, the same way that they had lost their mother years before. After Jem’s death, Atticus’ sister, Alexandra, moved in with him, and Calpurnia, the African American housekeeper who watched over Scout and Jem, left.
Meanwhile, Atticus is starting to feel his age. Though still practicing law, at 72 years of age he also has early signs of rheumatoid arthritis. Disappointed in his hope to see Jem take over his practice, he has been cultivating another young man in town, Henry Clinton, to help out in his office. Henry, in turn, has his eye on Jean Louise, and she is flattered enough by the attention to return it, though she discourages any talk of long-term arrangements.
One Sunday afternoon, though, everything changes. After Atticus and Henry leave for some undefined meeting, Jean Louise discovers in the stack of Atticus’ reading material a pamphlet full of sulfurous racism called, “The Black Plague.”
Sure that it must have been landed there mistakenly, she asks her aunt. But Alexandra confirms that Atticus has been reading it. Not only that, but the meeting that he and Henry have left to attend is a local “Citizen’s Council.” Jean Louise has paid enough attention to the news to know that these councils have cropped up across the South to block racial integration.
Disbelieving, Jean Louise hurries downtown to check this out. And in the courthouse – the very courthouse that was the center of the action in Mockingbird – she discovers Atticus, Henry and most of the prominent men in town listening to a speaker giving a scurrilous racist tirade. Stunned, her stomach heaving, she stumbles home, persuaded that, as Harper Lee puts it, “the one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her.”
So, how is it that we understand letting go to be a spiritual discipline? After all, isn’t our spiritual center, that inner place of trust and love where our heart rests, grounded in things that we deeply affirm? Of course. But we also find that to discover those things requires a good deal of choosing, of casting aside or pruning away those beliefs or ways of looking at the world that no longer serve us.
As my now-deceased colleague Forrest Church put it, “When cast into the depths, to survive, we must first let go of things that will not save us. Then we must reach out for the things that can.”
But how we choose is tricky business. The sad truth is that we are disappointed and disillusioned in so many ways when we grow up; especially hard is how we disappoint each other. And perhaps nowhere is this harder than between parent and child. A natural part of growing up is coming to idealize our parents, but in time they all prove to be fallible – human, in other words. How we cope with that disillusioning experience has something to do with how we grow to be more mature, self-reliant people.
So, it occurs to me that one way to look at To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman is as two parts of a coming of age story. Harper Lee’s first book is told through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl who idolizes a father as her model for moral behavior.
And it is a measure of the power of her prose that so many of her readers close that book with that same idyllic image in their heads. Perhaps one reason for it is the context for Harper Lee’s story. In a country so conflicted over race, she offered for white people an image, a father-figure as it were, who could calm our fears and through principled living, courage and compassion help lead us through the toils and snares of the legacy of racism that we each inherit.
What we discover in Go Set a Watchman is the other side of that story: the disillusion we feel when we are confronted with a side of that father figure that we didn’t know, the clay feet that show us his frailty and limitations.
I was intrigued to discover that the great African-American writer and theologian Howard Thurman wrote the book I read a quote from earlier, The Luminous Darkness, at about the same time that Harper Lee reportedly wrote Go Tell a Watchman: the early- to mid-1960s.
In that book, Thurman observed that there was a shift in race relations under way at the time. The old practices of violent reprisals that kept white people over black people were being questioned. As he put it, “the Negro’s active fear (of violent reprisals) is rapidly disappearing (and) being replaced by an increasing sense of personal and inner freedom.”
But he also said that there was an “inactive fear” among white people that was increasing. That fear, he said, “sprang from his deep unconscious guilt because of his treatment of the Negro and his genuine anxiety about the security of his own position and status.”
We see what that white fear looks like in Go Set a Watchman when Jean Louise finally confronts Atticus. Presented with her discoveries, he receives Jean Louise’s complaint with lawyerly patience, drawing out her concerns, until he lays his position out straight: “Jean Louise, have you considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?”
Brick by brick he argues his case for why he believes blacks aren’t ready for their rights, how, in his words, “they’re in their childhood as a people” and have been bamboozled by the NAACP to bring lawsuits that he says will only wreck Southern culture for all.
But Jean Louise won’t have it. She’s not interested in his fine arguments. Instead, she digs into her memory and throws his own words back at him. Her outrage over his remarks has its origins, she reminds him, in what he himself taught her about how every person had worth and deserved a chance.
“Atticus,” she says, “I grew up right here in your house and I never knew what was in your mind. I only heard what you said. You neglected to tell me we were naturally better than the Negroes, that they were able to go so far but so far only . . . .
“You sowed the seeds in me, Atticus, and now it’s coming home to you. . . .I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. Now I’m in a no-man’s land but good. There’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home anywhere else.”
It was the African American writer James Baldwin who once said of his white detractors, “You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in history, which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it difficult to act on what they know.”
I remember when I was around 16 my parents told me of a call that they had received from my grandfather who relayed a complaint he had received from neighbors to house he owned on Point Pleasant beach in New Jersey. The weekend before an African American friend of mine had joined us during a stay at that house. The neighbors apparently were alarmed to see a black boy on the neighboring beach, and my grandfather informed us that we were not to bring him again.
I couldn’t believe that he would say such an outrageous thing – my own grandfather – and I wrote him an indignant letter protesting it. I don’t know what he thought of it. He never made any comment to me about it. Instead, in time each of us, in our own ways, let it go, and instead returned to our roles in family gatherings.
And so, in a sense, does Jean Louise. Once the bitterness of her disappointment fades, she’s able to hear her uncle Jack tell her that despite what she has seen, there are many in town who share her opinion. Not to forget, he tells her: “every man’s watchman is his conscience.” And she must follow hers.
And once we the readers get over, let go of, our disappointment with Atticus, this is the uplift that awaits us. Whatever limitations Atticus may have had, Harper Lee suggests that through his life’s example he was able to teach his daughter, and maybe us, too, not to carry forward the prejudice that had privately weighed him down and fed his fears in his declining years.
In that sense, one could say that his gift to the future, together with all the good he did with his life, was to send forth one child unshackled by that prejudice, so that, as Howard Thurman put it, “a new way of life (might) open for all.” So may that be the legacy that Harper Lee leaves to us, too.
Yes, there is much we must learn to let go of, but not each other, not the possibility of redemption for us all. We fragile, fallible beings do a lot of stumbling. As Stephen Sondheim puts it in his musical, “Into the Woods”:
“People make mistakes: fathers, mothers,
holding to their own, thinking they’re alone.”
But we’re not. No one is alone.
We are ever learning and growing, and then invited to prune and discard. It is the way of things on the path to one earth, one people, one love.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The first place I remember calling home was a ranch-style house built on an acre of bottom land carved out of second-growth forest about 20 minutes from Princeton, New Jersey. Our young family – my parents, my 5-year-old self, and two younger brothers (a sister and another brother were yet to come) – had just moved to the area, where my father was starting a psychiatry practice.
READINGS
From “Walking Meditation” in Peace is Every Breath by Thich Nhat Hanh
Every step we make in awareness helps us get in touch with the wonders of life that are here, available to us right now. As you breathe in, you can take a step and contemplate, “I am arrived; I am home.”
“I have arrived” means I am already where I want to be – with life itself – and I don’t need to rush anywhere, I don’t have to go looking for anything more. “I am home” means I’ve come back to my true home, which is life here in the present moment.”
You have arrived at your true home and the wonder of life that are there for you; you don’t need to wander around looking for something more. You can say:
I have arrived, I am home
in the here, in the now.
“In the here, in the now” is the address of life. It’s the place we come back to – our true home. Each step brings you back to life.
“Try to Praise the Mutilated World”
by Adam Zagajewski
SERMON
The first place I remember calling home was a ranch-style house built on an acre of bottom land carved out of second-growth forest about 20 minutes from Princeton, New Jersey. Our young family – my parents, my 5-year-old self, and two younger brothers (a sister and another brother were yet to come) – had just moved to the area, where my father was starting a psychiatry practice.
The image of us living in that woodsy suburb still resonates in my memory, though it no longer has for me a sense of home. For, we moved from that place after only five years to another, larger house in nearby Pennington. And that house, which my family called home for another 12 years, has a more powerful claim on my memory.
It was there that I came of age, had my most memorable successes and failures in school, and developed a circle of friends, many of whom revolved around the Unitarian Universalist church that we had joined shortly after moving to Princeton.
Also, it was there that the ingredients of my sense of home began to expand. Geographically, I came to claim not just the rolling hills of central New Jersey where we lived, but also the Atlantic shore, where my grandfather had a beach house, and the urban centers of New York and Philadelphia that we found occasions to get to now and again, both within something like an hour’s commute.
There were other dimensions of that sense of home, too. The church, frankly, was one. It was a community where I felt welcome and valued, even as a child. And, while not much from specific classes sticks with me some 50 years later, I am left with a sense of being invited to discover the wonder of living, of the world about me, to treat others well and be open to wisdom from many sources.
There was also a sense of home about our social circle, the people we had most to do with, many of them young families like ours scrambling to make their way. Though, I’ve come to realize years later that not every element of that was positive. Most of the adults I dealt with were, like my parents, professionals, and so there was some elitism marbled into my experience: admiration and respect for some people, not so much for others.
Also, with some notable exceptions, our social circle was almost entirely white. So, there was a kind of unarticulated racism that pervaded it, too. My parents and their friends likely would have objected to such a claim. They talked a good talk and extended themselves at times to communities of color. But the gulf between them and the people they served was undeniable. It didn’t help that without exception the women my parents hired to clean our house were African-American.
We need to be wary lest the sense of home, that sense of belongedness, colors how we see the world, for there are some things from “home” that we need to outgrow as our sense of home widens. And so mine did. As I moved off to college what felt like home moved beyond the memory of that familiar place of my upbringing.
Instead, the rootlessness of school became a home of its own, a home in my head, the familiarity of books, classrooms and leafy campuses, and its own unreality: the unquestioned dependence, the cloistered circle of acquaintances, until exiting into the cold shower of the work world.
We each experience our own evolution as home of one form or another presents itself in our early lives, and it either suffices or it doesn’t. One way or another we try to make do until the realization dawns on us that home is not simply where we happen to land: it is also what we choose.
It encompasses not just places of our choosing but also partners and progeny – or not. Life invites us to sort ourselves out, and we either take the opportunity to make those choices or we don’t.
Some who are confronted with such choices forgo them. Faced with a decision – fourth and 10 – they punt and then mostly drift. They live on the surface, go with the flow, never really put down roots. It is an existence that is figuratively, if not literally, homeless.
For me, when the fork came in the road – as the now-departed Yogi Berra put it – I took it. I met the right person, we made the right choice to marry, bore three wonderful children: what Zorba the Greek called, “the full catastrophe.” But catastrophic only to some inflated sense of self-importance, or cavalier egotism. For what the experience gave me was a pearl of great price – a sense of home stronger and deeper than any I had ever known.
One of the surprises of parenthood, though, is how much goes into creating and maintaining a home – a place of love and affirmation, a refuge from the storms of the world, a cold frame where tender shoots can put down roots and send up their first leaves. Quickly it becomes obvious that we can’t do it alone and for us to thrive we must widen the circle of our concern.
We begin looking for others in similar straits, and, if we’re lucky, we come in contact with a community like this one, where breadth of life experience is wide and where connections of care invite us, once again, to deepen our sense of what home might be. I remember when our girls were growing up some of their most important connections came at church from adults who decided that they looked like pretty interesting people and made an effort to get to know them.
Experiences like this feed a new sense of well-being that extends beyond the particulars of the people and places that we know contributing to something more like a sense of faith. When I speak of faith, I’m not referring to the specific content of any particular belief. I am speaking of that in which we rest our hearts, which we trust as true. It is a settled place within us, at our core, the ground of our certitude.
It was the religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith who famously referred to faith as “a quiet confidence and joy which enables one to feel at home in the universe.” It is something that, he, says, has less to do with belief than with, in his words, “a quality of human living.” It isn’t anything that comes at once, but grows within us as we go through the process to trusting and testing that leads us to a settled sense of meaning.
One of the ways we develop our faith, then, is how we project a sense of home outside of ourselves: how it embraces others, even those significantly different from ourselves, and how it extends to the world around us.
Last year, for example, in this congregation we convened a class called, “Discovering a Sense of Place,” that was centered in the notion that how we understand our immediate surroundings can deepen our feeling of being at home in it. We walk, after all, on some of the most ancient mountains in North America and in one of its most diverse ecosystems. Yet, so much in our lives removes us from our surroundings.
So, we spent time examining all of it more closely. We took field trips to learn more about our human predecessors here, ranging from the Oconaluftee Village of the Cherokee to Hickory Nut Gap Farm. And we surveyed the natural landscape from investigating individual species of animals and plants to gaining a sense of our own unique niche in our nation’s complex array of bioregions.
We were companioned by poets, scientists and thinkers whose writings urged us both to widen our sense of boundaries to where our concern might extend and to sink roots where we reside, to know it as a real place, as something more than a place where we are parked for a time, but as home: home as a place occupied by our relations with all things our relations.
But Adam Zagajewski’s poem illustrates poignantly what can keep us from making that link in our consciousness. He wrote the poem you heard earlier shortly just before the 9-11 attacks, and it was widely shared at the time as a response to that disaster. But it could be applied equally to the world today.
“You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,” he says, watched stylish ships ply the seas “while salty oblivion” awaits others. We hear executioners across Middle Eastern war zones “sing joyfully.” This “mutilated world,” as Zagajewski puts it, is cause for much heartache.
Praise it all the same, he urges. Remember the beauty of long June days and wild strawberries, the moments of peace we find together, the leaves that in time cover over the scars on the landscape. Even amid all this, we are at home.
Thich Nhat Hanh in his walking meditation speaks of how we are so often preoccupied with regrets, suffering, worries and fear. But those phantoms, he says, need have no power over us in the present moment.
The walking meditation is a good practice to bring us back. Each step reminds us of where we are and that we need be present only to what is here. Focusing our attention on that moment brings us present.
What shall we do with this presence? This Buddhist master suggests that we use it to get in touch with the wonders of life that are here, available to us right now. Such as? Well, how about beginning with our breathing, that simple act that we perform without thinking about.
Right. So? So, at least for this moment we are calmed, and we are aware of our calmed self. And that calmed self, at least here and now, is enough. We don’t need anything else. We don’t need to go anywhere else. We are home, here, now.
And when we reflect, we come to see that, wherever we were when we last felt most at home, that self, the very self we just experienced, was a part of it, too. So, wherever it was – with our families, in our communities, at our places of employment, glorying at this good, green earth – there is home within us, too.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
“Do you ever look at someone and wonder what’s going on inside them?”
So, begins the latest animated wonder from Pixar studios, “Inside Out.” And it offers up a nice premise for a coming-of-age story that will take up the next hour and a half or so on screen, as well as a good prompt to some deep conversations that we all are in need of right now, especially when the topic before us is “forgiveness.”
“Do you ever look at someone and wonder what’s going on inside them?”
So, begins the latest animated wonder from Pixar studios, “Inside Out.” And it offers up a nice premise for a coming-of-age story that will take up the next hour and a half or so on screen, as well as a good prompt to some deep conversations that we all are in need of right now, especially when the topic before us is “forgiveness.”
That opening line is spoken by Joy, the first of five animated emotions that we will hear from in this tale of Riley Anderson, an 11-year-old girl who after a happy childhood in Minnesota finds her life disrupted by a cross-country move to San Francisco, where her father is taking a job at a digital start-up company.
It’s a lovely notion, supported by the raft of social scientists who consulted on the film, that our natal emotion, that first feeling that emerges at birth is a sense of joy. Oh, life! What a wonder, what a miracle! What bliss just to be!
Of course, it doesn’t take long for others to make their presence known as well. Anger appears when hunger first rumbles in our bellies, fear when we’re confronted with the unfamiliar, disgust when those first foods are offered, and sadness when we’re not attended to in the way we want.
You could argue that other feelings ought to be represented, too: say, curiosity, or wonder. I expect you could name some. But the writers pleaded that too many characters would mix up the story line. OK, fine.
The film makes the interesting point that every experience we have is colored in some way by our feelings. We remember them that way – experiences that were happy or sad, or that maybe left us feeling angry or fearful. That’s part of how we store them.
Too, the intensity of the emotion has something to do with their valence, their strength. Some experiences are so strong they become what the film calls core memories, and they help create islands of emotional identity.
Up to this point in her life, the film says, Riley has been lucky enough that her islands are largely joyous ones. There is “goof ball,” representing her silly side, which she or her parents trigger with monkey imitations. Then, there’s hockey, a skill she learned on those Minnesota lakes, and strongest of all, family.
Every one of these islands, though, gets tested by the move to San Francisco – a place that Riley is assured will be beautiful and fun, but that she finds to be uncomfortable and foreign.
While all this is going on, there’s also a lot of turmoil going on inside Riley’s head. Joy, as usual, is trying to be the cruise director, keeping things light and fun, but not all the other feelings are on board. In particular, sadness, usually so quiet and unassuming, is playing around with some of the memories where joy feels she has no business. Particularly she seems drawn to some of those joyous core memories, which, when she touches them, begin to turn sad.
Alarmed, joy tries protecting them, and in the back and forth between them, both joy and sadness – together with some core memories – are transported away of “headquarters,” Riley’s consciousness. The rest of the film is devoted to them finding their way back to set things right, while Riley struggles with the inability to access her feelings of joy and sadness.
It’s a clever way of framing how disruptions in our lives can turn things upside down. Even as grown-ups, when things go wrong we try to be calm and reasonable, but we struggle with emotions inside us that are raging. Part of growing up, we learn, is coming to terms with those feelings but not necessarily letting them drive us.
Even more, we come to learn how to recognize feelings in others and how to respond to them effectively. The film offers us an example of a not-especially-effective response, when at the dinner table Riley responds to a question from her parents in anger. Inside her father we watch his emotions undergo something like the launch sequence of a thermonuclear weapon, ending with him “putting the foot down” by shouting at her and banishing her to her room.
It’s clear, though, that that display doesn’t accomplish much, and later he goes to Riley’s room seeking to smooth the waters. He tries engaging “goof ball” island, but he gets no response. Indeed, inside Riley we see goof ball island crumble and fall into the pit of erased memories.
It’s an excruciating moment in the film and a reminder of how fluid our emotional lives can be. In Riley’s case, goof ball island was something that was likely to go anyway as she grew older, but going as it did with no other positive core memory to replace it makes her vulnerable. We watch as joy and sadness scramble for a way back to Riley’s consciousness while Riley struggles with anger and fear driving her responses as each remaining island crumbles apart and tumbles away.
Joy is positively frantic: if only she could find a way back, she is sure she could fix things. But she has an awakening: along their travels through Riley’s memories, she and sadness come upon Riley’s one-time imaginary friend – Bing Bong – a manic combination of elephant, cat and dolphin. Bing Bong helps them along the way, but he becomes despondent when the wagon that was his magical transport is taken away.
Joy tries to cheer him up without success, but then sadness comes to the rescue. She simply sits with Bing Bong – “You lost your wagon,” she says. “You’re sad.” He agrees, and after crying for a minute, he’s ready to move on.
So, it’s worth our spending a little time thinking about what sadness brings to the mix of our emotions. Rilke offers an interesting insight in his letter that we excerpted earlier. Could we see beyond the limits of our knowledge, he says, “we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys.” Now, how’s that? It is, he says, because these are moments when something new, something alien enters us.
Sadness in that sense is a kind of reality check. We are sailing along, everything’s great, and then we are confronted in some way with something that catches us short, that trips us up. When that happens, we can, of course, respond in many ways. We can get mad about it, ignore it, or run away from it. Each of these responses, though, has within it an element of denial, of failing to acknowledge the loss we’ve experienced.
Rilke urges the young poet receiving his letters not to do that. Confronted with sadness, he urges him to be “lonely and attentive.” Sit with it, he says. Examine it. Treat it as the gift it is. Be patient and open to its teaching.
Of course, few of us want to spend much time with sadness. Like joy in the film, we’d like to be distracted, cheered up. Yet, at the center of our sadness may be an important learning – a way we’ve overreached or exceeded our grasp, or perhaps our first clear understanding of how deep a loss we’ve received is to us. We say we’re fine, we’ll be OK, but to move on with our lives we need at least for a moment to sit with the full truth and full impact of, say, a promise broken, a dream lost, a relationship damaged, a loved one gone.
We’ve heard of people who say, “I don’t dare cry because if I start crying, I’ll never stop.” But, of course, we all do. It just feels hard to give ourselves over to it. But hope of healing lies on the other side. I think Rilke offers some wisdom here.
“You must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than anything you have seen,” he says. In fact, that response is part of your own psyche guiding you through. It is not that “life has forgotten you.” Quite the opposite. It is your life, your inner wisdom that is “holding your hand,” taking you where you need to go. Not to fear, he consoles his reader, “it will not let you fall.”
Likewise, at the center of any act of forgiveness is a moment of sorrow, where each person – the one injured and the one who caused the injury – acknowledges the loss, the injury, the failure to act as we should.
It, too, is a kind of reality check. Try as we do to be good people, we come up short. It is uncomfortable to acknowledge both the injury we give as the perpetrator and the wound we experience as the recipient. Yet, we can’t hope to restore our own peace of mind or to heal the relationship that was damaged until we have attended to it.
Here is the great wisdom in the Jewish Days of Awe, the passage from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur when Jews give and receive forgiveness and make atonement for the wrongs they have done to each other. The words that we sang earlier from of the Gates of Repentance, the Jewish prayer book for this time, lay it out.
Who of us can claim to be pure of heart, untouched by or unresponsible for wrongs to others or ourselves. There is none on earth. It is a sad truth for us all. Yet, renewal is possible for each of us: a new resolve, a new attitude, deeper compassion, authentic humility. All that’s required is that we sit for a bit with the sadness of this rift in our lives, and then act: give and receive forgiveness, offer and accept atonement.
So, poor Riley! Driven by anger, fear and disgust, she is led to a potentially disastrous decision. (For those of you who haven’t seen the movie I’ll leave you in suspense as to what that decision is.) As she barrels ahead, the emotions in her head realize what a mess they’ve made but can’t seem to do anything to stop it.
Through some funny and dramatic circumstances, though, joy and sadness make their way back to the headquarters of Riley’s consciousness. The other emotions look to joy, once again, as the fixer, but joy, instead, turns to sadness to do her work. And it is sadness that breaks through, that provides Riley the reality check she needs to show her the rashness and foolishness of her choice.
Riley makes it home to her frantic parents and then collapses into tears, confessing all the worries, fears and disappointments that she has held inside, how much she misses her old home and the life that she loved. And her parents chime in, too, admitting their own sadness, something they hadn’t confessed up until now. And they settle into a prayerful group hug of grateful unity.
So might we conclude our own inside out journeys to forgiveness, the sometimes painful passage that teaches us to sit with our sadness and then act, take ownership of where we have erred and seek forgiveness for our deeds.
As the Gates of Repentance put it: May we now forgive, atone that we may live. May we now forgive that we may live.
My friends, I confess to you that in the past year I have at times fallen short of your hopes and expectations of me. It makes me sad to think of and yet resolved to be more measured and intentional in my commitments, more compassionate in my dealings , and more understanding of the needs of others.
Please forgive me. I forgive you. Let us begin again in love.
