Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
We never know where the invitation will come from. For Mary Oliver, it came when she chanced on a clutch of gold finches, chittering and warbling in a patch of thistles:
“Their strong, blunt beaks drink the air, she said, as they strive melodiously
not for your sake or for mine, not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude.”
We never know where the invitation will come from. For Mary Oliver, it came when she chanced on a clutch of gold finches, chittering and warbling in a patch of thistles.
Their strong, blunt beaks drink the air, she said, as they strive melodiously not for your sake or for mine, not for the sake of winning but for sheer delight and gratitude.
In that display Oliver read something deeper than just a momentary distraction on the way to wherever she was going:
Believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.
And so, she urged the reader, before going on:
I beg of you, do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance. It could mean something; it could mean everything. It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote you must change your life.
Does something like that ring a bell with you? Have you ever had such an invitation? I’m guessing that most of us have in one way or another. It may not have been golden birds dancing in the thistles. It may have been having our attention drawn suddenly to a gentle fold in the soft skin of an infant’s neck. It may have been at sunset when the clouds shift and open into shades of deep magenta. It may have been watching an aging parent’s face suddenly break out into a beaming smile.
D.H. Lawrence describes this as being “born to humanity,” a moment when we are drawn outside of ourselves to a new perspective on the world. He says that what he calls our “first birth” is to ourselves. The world is our nursery: pretty things are to be snatched for, pleasant things to be tasted. Some people, he says, never leave this state. But most of us open eventually to a larger perspective. We become conscious, he says, of all the laughing and the never ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that each reverberate across the world.
It is here, he argues, in what he calls this second birth that we begin to formulate our religion, “be that what it may be.” And here he introduces an interesting phrase: “A person,” he says, “has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together.”
From his perspective, then, religion is something that we come to know not so much by joining a church or affirming some statement of belief. It comes with how we gather together and make sense of all the ways that we are stirred by what he calls “the low, vast murmur of life . . . troubling our hitherto unconscious selves.”
Lawrence was a controversial figure for the sexual themes that emerged in his writings. But it’s worth knowing that, while he had little use for organized religion, he called himself “a passionately religious man” whose work is written “from the depth of my religious experience.”
It’s something we share with him in how we frame the first of six sources of our living tradition: Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, which moves us to renewal of the spirit, and openness to forces that create and uphold life. So, our religion, our faith is a response to how we experience the world. It is, as D.H. Lawrence puts it, something we are always shaping and adding to; it is never complete. We are ever being invited into new ways of experiencing it.
My colleague Victoria Safford offers one way to look at this:
“What if,” she says, “there were a universe, a cosmos, which began in shining blackness, out of nothing, and into it came billions and billions of stars, and near one of them a blue-green world so beautiful that learned clergy couldn’t even speak of it cogently and scientists trying to describe it would sound like poets. And into that world came animals and elements and plants and the imagination. If such a universe existed and you noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises, what whirling dances, what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world every day that you were in it?
I hear a similar invitation in the passage I read earlier from Isaiah: how might we learn to live in such a way as to see the world infused with wonder. It isn’t easy, for our lives are too often mired in the pedestrian and pecuniary. “Here,” he says, “come buy without money, without price.”
Come in, come in: attend to the goldfinch, to a blue-green world so beautiful not a one of us captures it cogently until we begin to sound like poets. “Why labor for that which does not satisfy?” There is goodness before you without a price tag attached. And there is goodness within each of us that calls us to larger life, that invites us into service whose value is beyond what we could ever charge.
On a different occasion, Victoria Safford wrote of a conversation she had with a friend who worked as a counselor in the health clinic of a college. The woman told how not long before, a student she had known and counseled, committed suicide. It was a difficult loss, one that hit close to home.
At one point, she said, the woman looked up with tears running down her cheeks with a tone of what Victoria could only call defiance, as she spoke of a new resolve she had found, a new understanding of what Victoria called her vocation, and ours:
“You know,” she said, “I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or save the planet. All I can do – what I’m called to do – is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in, and sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day, and I call out til my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them to beautiful life and love.”
Beautiful life & love. I tell you when I first heard that story the mountains and hills before me burst into song and the trees of the field clapped their hands.
We are each laborers in the field with limited scope. We put in our hours, we do our jobs, we attend to our loved ones and our households. But there is more of which we are capable. There is a larger way of being to which we are invited if we would be born to humanity and accept our calling to beautiful life and love.
These are the words I want to place before you as we look to the worship year ahead of us. What invitations are calling to you? And how might you respond?
Is the craziness of your schedule getting to you? How about some experience with mindful meditation? Are your heart and mind telling you to dig deeper, to find a way to connect better with what truly matters in the company of others who share your hope?
Oh, there is so much! Theme groups, classes, spiritual practice groups . . . Well, you just need to find a place and jump in. Are you ready to put your heart and your hands into work that serves your values? Let me tell you, that will open your eyes and fill your soul like nothing else. It can be a little daunting to jump in by yourself so hop on board one of the projects we have going now, then perhaps you can help lead us to the next step.
I offer all this not as marching orders but as an invitation, an invitation to live into the promise that you are, the gifts you bring into this world, the hope that we realize when we join in common cause to give flesh to the great vision of beloved community, where we let all that divides us fall away like the insubstantial froth we know it to be and affirm the unity that is ours.
It is not easy, and because it’s not easy we stand together and support each other. It’s too much on our own, we need others to be in it with us: to cherish and teach each other’s children, to listen with full presence and speak with full respect, to help us celebrate our successes and grieve our losses, to reach beyond our comfort zones and put ourselves in places where we have the temerity to think that we just might help change the world.
Revs. Kerry Mueller & Dave Hunter, Guest Ministers
Rev. Kerry Mueller
“SBNR.” You’ve probably heard the term: “Spiritual But Not Religious.” It’s the coming thing. The future of the church for the Millennials and their children. I’ve been hearing it for years.
Often it comes from young couples looking for a Unitarian Universalist minister to marry them. “We’re not religious, but we’re spiritual – very spiritual.” I understand that they are feeling nervous about dealing with a clergy person. They want to get married, they can’t relate to the standard denominations, maybe they have already been turned down in some unpleasant way because they don’t meet some requirement of baptism or belief. They’ve heard of Unitarian Universalism in a general way; they don’t know much about us, but they’ve heard that we will marry all sorts of people.
We were happy to celebrate same sex unions long before Marriage Equality became a legal reality – our evolution came a little earlier than the rest of the culture. But sometimes couples know they don’t want only a civil ceremony, to be married by a justice of the peace; they want something more. . . And so they come to me, not sure what rules I may have, trying to impress me with their sincerity about . . . something. That’s when I hear it, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”
What do you suppose they mean?
I’ve heard it from more traditional Christians as well. Some years ago I was working on an anti-racism project with Avis, a lovely, elegant woman, a sharp lawyer, an activist, an African American and a devoted Baptist. She operated out of a strong Christian faith, with all the creedal beliefs. Yet she said to me one day, “Religion won’t save you.”
Well, that surprised me. If a Baptist doesn’t believe in religion, who does? When I asked her about that, it seems she meant that what I might call “religiosity” won’t save you – not going to church or reciting prayers or repeating creeds. The trappings are not important. What saves you in Avis’ view is a deep personal relationship with the ultimate realities of the universe – which she would name as God. Not “religion.”
I have a certain sympathy with Avis’ point of view. Not necessarily her take on theology, but her direct connection with the unvarnished spiritual reality of the universe. After all, religions may be a little distant from the reality they deal with, and always subject to all the pains and difficulties of institutional life – meeting disparate needs, paying the bills, getting the plumbing fixed. They can easily become too structured or too loose, too hierarchical or too ineffective, too burdened with rules or so vague that nobody knows what they stand for. And even under the best of circumstances, everybody gives up something to live in community. A vital spiritual life is a lot more fun. It’s constantly self-renewing, a source of energy, an inspiration for engaged living. And it doesn’t need any committees to keep it going. So I, too, sympathize with a preference for spirituality over the daily reality of “religion.”
Yet I’m always a little taken aback when I hear that declaration. I am, after all, a person who has organized my whole professional and personal life around nurturing religious community within an institutional denomination. I love this religion, this denomination, this faith, even when it sometimes makes me tear my hair out. And so I want to urge us to look a little closer at the issues of religion and spirituality, and at the related questions of religious language and religious engagement.
The late liberal Protestant theologian Marcus Borg writes about the necessity of the institutions of religion.
[But] the contrast between spirituality and religion is both unnecessary andunwise. . . . Religion is to spirituality as institutions of learning are to education. One can learn about the world, become educated, without schools, universities and books, but it is like reinventing the wheel in every generation. Institutions of learning are the way education gets traction in history; so also religion (its external forms) is the way spirituality gains traction in history. Religion – its external forms – not just spirituality, matters. Its forms are the vessels of spirituality, mediators of the sacred and the way. [Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 219]
I agree with Borg. Somebody has to mind the store. Somebody has to keep the church going so that it will be there when those spiritual but not religious people need a wedding. Or when they come around later looking for a baby dedication, or religious education. Somebody has to preserve the home where we come together to work out our spirituality and to act out our faith. Without an institution, how would our values have a reliable presence in the culture? How would brilliant but isolated spiritual Millennials keep from going off the rails without a community to provide nurture and challenge?
But it is the last line of this quote of Borg’s that caught my attention and encapsulated the questions for me: Religion’s “forms are the vessels of spirituality.” I’ve been taking pottery courses for the last decade, making vessels of one sort or another. I even made a teapot recently, a dragon teapot – but because of an infelicity in the glazing process, you can’t actually make tea in it. I’ve been thinking about containers, about holding things, about decoration and utility, about structure and strength, about art and creativity. Something clicked. I remembered a little saying, a mere sentence fragment I found in Evensong, a lovely Unitarian Universalist curriculum for nurturing our spirituality:
Worshiping the teapot, instead of drinking the tea.
There it is in a nutshell, or at least a teapot. There’s the trouble with religion. Too often we worship the teapot, instead of drinking the tea. It’s so easy to get distracted from the precious tea, the thirst quenching, energy restoring, delicious tea, to get caught up instead in the virtues and flaws of the vessel, to spend all your attention on worshiping the superficial. People understand this in a deep way, and so they tell me they are spiritual, but not religious.
But this is not the whole story. Have you ever tried to make tea without a teapot? Or at least a mug? Without some sort of container, your tea will not brew and the hot water will run all over the table. It’s hard to embrace spirituality without some vessel to hold it and shape it. So drink the tea by all means. Brew it well. Try different kinds of tea, plain black tea and green tea, and exotic flavored teas. Don’t forget herbal tisane, which isn’t exactly tea but can be wonderful stuff. Share your tea with friends. Offer it to strangers as hospitality. Don’t get all hung up worshiping the teapot.
But do have a care for the vessel of your spirituality. Don’t break it. Appreciate your teapot. Did you inherit it from your great grandmother? Is it a museum reproduction? Did a friend make it for you? I’m trying again with my beloved dragon teapot. Maybe this time the glaze will work. Does it represent a year you spent in England? Does it keep the tea hot? Is it beautiful? Homey? Filled with nostalgia? Appreciate the other teapots of the world as well, even if the shape of the pot or the decor are unfamiliar. The teapot is not to be worshiped, but it holds and shapes and makes the tea available. And so it deserves its share of care and respect.
Rev. Dave Hunter
One of the things I had hoped to learn in seminary was “What is spirituality?” I had heard of it, of course, spirituality. I knew that a lot of folks considered it a good thing. But I didn’t know what it was. And I was embarrassed to ask. Asking about spirituality felt like asking about the missionary position. I figured that everyone else already knew, since that’s the sort of thing you should know, if you’re preparing for the ministry.
There wasn’t any course at Wesley Theological Seminary on spirituality, no exam questions on it, no one asked me to write a paper on spirituality. If it was covered in class, I must have missed that day. During my internship, with the UUs in Princeton, my seminary adviser pressed me to have spiritual practices. I knew what practices are, even if I wasn’t sure what made them spiritual. I told her that I played hymns every evening, and I offered to read passages from the Koran every morning, and that satisfied her.
As I see it, spirituality is not about how you feel. It’s not a feeling, or perhaps I should say, it’s not just a feeling. When people claim to be spiritual, or when people are striving to be spiritual, or more spiritual, they’re not talking about a certain feeling that they have, or that they’re looking for – or at least they shouldn’t be, if you ask me. If feelings were the issue, then the answer might be pharmacological. If feelings were the issue, the key to spirituality might be in the right drugs, or in alcohol, or in sexual gratification.
According to Benedictine monk Father Daniel Homan and his colleague Lonni Pratt, in their book Radical Hospitality: [Benedict’s Way of Love (Brewster, Mass: Paraclete Press, 2002)], what people are looking for when they say they’re in search for spirituality is often, really, comfort. Here is how Homan and Pratt respond to the idea of spirituality as comfort.
Genuine spirituality [, they say,] seldom makes you comfortable. It challenges, disturbs, unsettles, and leaves you feeling as if someone were at the center of your existence on a major remodeling mission. Spirituality is meant to change you. If it doesn’t, it is something less than spirituality. [p. 35, edited]
For me, whatever spirituality is, it has to be tied to our experience in the world, it has to be tied to our response to the world, it has to involve relationships. Spirituality isn’t comfort as much as discomfort. It’s not feeling good; it’s doing good. It’s not about trying to change yourself, but about engaging in the world, and finding that you are changed in the process. It is about looking for the meaning of life, not through introspection, not through devising a program called “the search for the meaning of life” but by participating in life, participating fully.
For me, spirituality is related to integrity, to wholeness. That’s what the responsive reading was about. [adapted from Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004)]
Here’s an example of what I would consider a spiritual experience. It’s one of Father Dan’s stories, from the book I mentioned a minute ago. One of the families in his parish has “just had a terrible tragedy.” The son has killed himself; the mother is “inconsolable;” the father has “lost himself in a drunken stupor.” And there’s a six-year-old little sister. Here’s how Father Dan tells the story:
I went over to check on the family. The mother was locked in her bedroom. The father was sitting in a chair, completely intoxicated and basically unconscious. Their young daughter was sitting on the floor sobbing, with her frail little shoulders heaving and her eyes red from so much crying that you wondered if her little body could handle the force of all the pain. She was completely alone in her grief, not because her parents were cruel or uncaring, but because they were shattered.
I picked up the child, and without saying a word, I put her on my lap and sat in a rocking chair. I held her and rocked, while she cried for a couple of hours. A bond formed between us instantly. [pp. 138-39, edited]
Need I say that Father Dan did not set out to have a spiritual experience? As he sat rocking, he did not think to himself, “This is the most spiritual I’ve felt all week.” No, he was there to be with the family in their time of need. He was there, as it turned out, to provide the physical comfort that the little girl so urgently needed – a couple of hours of being held, of being rocked.
We don’t know what was going through Father Dan’s mind, as he sat and rocked. Perhaps he was giving the girl his full attention, practicing the mindfulness that Thich Nhat Hanh recommends. [see The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (Beacon Press, 1987)] Or perhaps he was mentally preparing a shopping list, or brain storming possible tax deductions. I don’t think it matters.
Rev. Kerry Mueller
Held and shaped and supported by the structures and practices of his church, Father Dan was able to enter a moment of deep spirituality, giving what was needed on a human level, while being connected to the source of love and comfort in his life. Our vessel of spirituality – by that I mean both our personal credos and practices, and the community we help to nurture – helps us to brew our faith and to share the tea of spirituality in a friendly, sometimes life sustaining way. But what is that tea? How do we name our spirituality?
The heart of spirituality is being aware of your connection with something bigger than you are. Liberal Protestant theologian James Nelson calls it “the patterned ways we relate to what is ultimate in our lives.” [according to Thomas Ledbetter, 1/23/06 conversation; see James M. Nelson, Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (2009)] That spirituality comes in many forms, held by many vessels, some of them explicitly religious, some of them brewed in secular language.
I think about my late father, Fred, who called himself an atheist. Well and good. He was deeply and passionately bound to the sources of goodness, truth, beauty, justice, compassion. He experienced these in the music of Beethoven. He raged over the state of the world and wrote papers on foreign policy, finishing one just before his final illness. He read voraciously – politics, religion, science, mysteries. . . and gardened devotedly – he took up organic gardening in the 50’s, long before it was trendy, when he knew so little about plants that he thought peas grew underground. He traveled with enthusiasm, and loved meeting new people and learning new cultures.
Fred was connected to a whole universe that was bigger than he, and he participated with passion and good will and caring intention in that something bigger. Fred was clearly a spiritual person, though he would not have used that language. And as a committed and active Unitarian Universalist, a long time supporter of our churches and elder statesman at the Main Line Unitarian Church in Devon, Pennsylvania, he was clearly a religious person as well, though he called himself an atheist.
It must have been from Fred that I absorbed an understanding of the spiritual life. The spiritual endeavor is much like creating art.
You begin by paying attention to the real world or the world of hope or fear or dreams, worlds that have at least one foot firmly in the everyday world. Take some small bit of that world, focus on it and shape it lovingly towards the best, towards beauty or truth or justice or compassion. Take risks, be generous, share yourself. Focus on something precious, within yourself or beyond yourself. Engage with it – through meditation or prayer or reflective thinking and then move towards action – social justice or hospitality or compassionate care – wearing a Black Lives Matter button, gardening or writing letters to the editor or picking up trash in your neighborhood or taking part in Moral Monday, or assisting in a tutoring program. Just the things you are doing with children, youth, and adults here.
Reflect on what you have done, evaluate it with others, look at it through the lens of your deepest values, and then turn to the refreshment and renewal of your energy, reach together for the next layer of action. The whole cycle of attention, action, reflection, renewal – together it adds up to spirituality, if done with intentionality and integrity and a sense of connection.
Too often we think of spirituality as only the reflection part of the cycle, or as the acts of renewal. Journaling, art making, prayer, meditation, worship, rest – these are a vital part of our lives. We need that time apart, to connect again with what moves us towards the divine. We need time to refill the well of our creative energy, whether through music or church services or a candlelight vigil or a peace march or pep rally. But they are not the whole of our spiritual lives. We also need the active part of the cycle, to use our renewed energy to reach out once again to the world, to bless the world with our care and attention. That teapot comes in many styles, made of many materials. Some of them look religious, some secular. Some are for solitude, some for group work. All will brew a good cup of spiritual tea.
Rev. Dave Hunter
Kerry’s father might have argued with you, if you’d suggested that he was a spiritual person. My father – he’s been dead now for more than 45 years – I don’t think he would have known what to make of such a suggestion. He was an institutionalist, the kind of person every congregation, every denomination needs. Given the choice between the motivational mystical meditation movement workshop and the budget planning meeting, he would take budget planning every time.
Spirituality is often thought of as an individual matter, as opposed to what goes on in an organized religion – or even in a disorganized one. But that’s a false dichotomy. Remember what Unitarian Universalist congregations have covenanted to affirm and promote: on this short list is “spiritual growth in our congregations.” We do not see spirituality solely as an individual matter, divorced from a religious community, but more as what we strive for, as what we do – together.
Spirituality requires institutional support. Congregations, in my view, have the duty, and, fortunately, they have the ability, to encourage and challenge their members to grow in the maturity of their faith, to deepen their spiritual roots, and to broaden their religious imaginations. [Loren Mead, More Than Numbers: The Way Churches Grow (Alban Institute, 1993), p. 42]
Here’s how one congregation took advantage of an opportunity for spiritual growth. It’s not a Unitarian Universalist example, but you wouldn’t have to change much to give it a UUframework.
Donny would have loved nothing more than to lead the worship service himself, but, because of mental problems, his skills were limited. Besides, he was not ordained, and thus he wasn’t eligible.
During communion, Donny had an annoying and distracting habit of repeating the last phrase of everything the celebrant said. He had heard the liturgy so often that he had it practically memorized. Sometimes he tried to say the prayers and formulas before the celebrant did.
But how does a religious community – a community committed to compassion and hospitality – how does it deal with such a problem? Donny was not mentally equipped for extended reasoning or careful conflict resolution.
There were temptations for the group. Some no doubt wished that Donny would disappear. Some wondered about silencing him, or even evicting him. Resentment and annoyance would have made it easy to resort to criticism, avoidance, name-calling, or labeling.
The congregation wrestled with the issue for a long time. The solution was brilliant.
Donny was given one phrase in the service, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” [agnus dei, qui tolit pecata mundi] This was his line and no one else’s. At the appropriate moment, the celebrant elevated the loaf of bread in silence, and waited for Donny to say his line, which he did, with gusto and devotion. The congregation’s solution was brilliant; it was good for everyone. [Arthur Paul Boers, Never Call Them Jerks: Healthy Responses to Difficult Behavior (Bethesda: Alban Institute, 1999), pp. 134-35, edited (Boers is a Canadian Mennonite minister)]
Everyone involved experienced spiritual growth. Of course, they didn’t characterize the situation as a spirituality opportunity. They saw it as the problem of how to worship properly, without compromising their principles of compassion and hospitality.
So here’s the bottom line, as I see it, if you are looking for more spirituality in your life: open your eyes and look around you. Don’t look for a mysterious feeling; don’t imagine that you have to take a pilgrimage to Tibet. You can even forget the word, spirituality, it’s only a teapot; it doesn’t matter.
But here’s what I recommend: seek justice in our nation, strive to maintain a community of compassion and hospitality in your congregation, practice loving kindness toward both family and friends and toward strangers, and take advantage of the opportunities for personal growth that obstruct your path.
Rev. Kerry Mueller
May we care for the many teapots of the world. May we cherish those teapots with which we have a special connection. May we appreciate also the teapots of others. But may we remember that they are vessels for tea, not the tea itself. And, finally, may we drink the full, rich tea of spirituality.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Experiencing the death of loved ones is universal, but how we live with those losses varies from culture to culture. This Sunday, at the request of UUCA member Michele Gregory, who offered the highest bid for the chance to name a sermon topic at last year’s auction, we will explore some of the ways we remember, focusing particularly on the “Obon” ceremony of Japan. <i>Click on the on the title read more and/or to listen.
READING
“Letter in Autumn” by Donald Hall
SERMON
We are the ones who grieve – we, the living, that is. It’s not something we like to dwell on, but most of us learn early that bound up with the joy we find in the people we love is accepting the fact that we will lose them, as they will lose us.
It is part of the ebb and flow of existence. And yet, we can be forgiven our reluctance to own up to it, to look in the eyes of those dearest to us and know that the time we have with each other is brief. And still, it is given to us to make peace, to find meaning, even in those losses we find it hardest to bear.
All of this begins with how we grieve. My colleague Mark Belletini notes that the word “grief” serves as a handy abstraction, rather than as an expression of anything precise. For, everyone’s grief is different since it emerges from our own unique experiences of and relationships to the people we’ve known and lost.
And not only that: it changes. Donald Hall’s poem is a good expression of that. Sixth months after his wife’s death, the immediate intensity of his loss has faded, yet still she inhabits the space around him. A certain quality of light at dusk, the slips from fortune cookies, mixed-up dreams, the dog carrying a slipper from the bedroom, all such things can revive a memory, a moment in time, and a new strain of sadness wells in our chests again.
As the poet Kevin Young puts it, “grief might be easy If there wasn’t still such beauty – would be far simpler if the silver maple didn’t thrust its leaves into flame, trusting that spring will find it again.”
Once again we feel the sharp edge of loss, something we had imagined ourselves over with. But the path of grief, we learn, is not linear. It may double back or flame up with an intensity we had never experienced before. And it shapes how we go about remembering.
This fall will be the 10th anniversary of my father’s death, and while much of the intensity around it has faded I’m often surprised by how at times he’ll just pop into my life. One of the ways I remember him most fondly is as a gardener, and so it’s not uncommon, especially at mid-summer when the flowers are at their fullest that I imagine him in the garden with me surveying the scene with undisguised pleasure.
Grief is odd in the way that it is at once so intensely personal and yet also universal. There is a Buddhist story around that: It seems a grieving mother once went to the Buddha and begged him to raise her dead child back to life. He refused at first, but she continued to plead with him. Finally he agreed to work the magic if she would provide for him a certain kind of mustard seed found only in the homes of families who have never been visited with death or grief.
So, she headed off to the village and visited home after home. But, of course, she could not find the life-restoring seed because no household had been spared death or grief. Learning this, she herself offered the families comfort. She cooked for them and reached out to them in their grief. She returned to the Buddha, and together they buried her child.
So, part of living with our sadness is accepting our grief, and also opening our eyes to its universality. It doesn’t lessen our sadness to do so, but it can provide a way for our compassion grow, to help us see that not only is grief a universal experience but also that we, too, may be the comforters, our experience can open our hearts to others.
This is part of the special learning that we can find in an ancient ritual of remembrance that our service today is centered in arising from a Buddhist tradition in Japan. It’s called Obon, and it, too, is centered in a story. Here it is: It involves a direct disciple of the Buddha known as Mogallan, one who was especially known for his keen powers of insight.
It seems that Mogallan was curious to know how his mother was faring in the afterlife. So he used his powers to search her out. To his dismay, he discovered that she was suffering in the realm of hungry ghosts, people who had died in violent or unhappy ways. Mogallan made several efforts to release her, but each failed. Finally he asked the Buddha how he might free his mother. The Buddha told him that the way to do that was to give a special feast to a gathering of disciples who were just ending a summer meditation retreat. The feast, he was told, must be given with no concern for himself, but entirely out of compassion for the disciples.
Mogallan did so, and the story says that as the disciples ate, Mogallan was able to see his mother being released from the hell where she had been trapped. His joy then spread to the disciples enjoying their meal, making it a festive occasion in the community.
Each year the Obon festival is held at around this time of year, at midsummer, in July or August, and it is seen as a time of celebration and remembrance, a moment to take a break in the flow of daily life and invite our ancestors back into our lives. It is a moment to appreciate them and send them our joy, while reminding us also that the compassion we feel mustn’t end with our families but extend to all beings.
Obon is celebrated in private homes and public ceremonies. At their homes, people often hang lanterns by their front doors to invite the spirits of their ancestors to return. Many also visit gravesites, where they wash the markers and burn incense or leave food offerings. Celebrations held in public parks remember the feast that Mogallan offered the disciplines with food, fireworks, drumming and stylized dancing.
The dances often invoke the Flower Garland Sutra, a Buddhist text that contains the famous image of Indra’s net: a net stretching infinitely in all directions, with a jewel positioned at each “eye” or intersection, each jewel reflecting and reflected by every other jewel, showing that all things, while distinctive in themselves, interpenetrate all other things through space and time.
So, while the festival is a celebration of remembrance, it extends that remembering beyond individual descendants, to offer honor to all in the great chain of being.
Among the words often spoken at Obon observations are those contained in a passage called the Golden Chain:
I am a link in the chain of love.
I must keep my link bright and strong.
I will try to be kind to every living thing.
I will try to think beautiful thoughts, say beautiful words and do beautiful deeds.
May every link in the chain be strong, and may we have peace.
The ceremony closes with floating lanterns being placed into rivers, lakes or seas to guide the spirits back to their world.
The period of the Obon ceremonies, which date back to around the 7th century, is one of the busiest holiday seasons of the year in Japan, full of travel and family gatherings. How many still hold to the literal stories of the spirit world is unclear, but it remains a season of gratitude and giving.
Our culture, meanwhile, suffers for the lack of remembrance. Scattered to the four winds, many of us lose any sense of coherence and history, of being a part of something larger, and with that we lose a deeper sense of connection across time and distance with a larger humankind and ultimately the great Web of being.
Years ago, the writer Thomas Berry argued that “we cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the Earth, and the imperatives of our being.” What Berry called “the dream of Earth” has as its premise that everything working within us, down to our genetic code arises from the processes that connect us deeply to all things. “The human is less a being on the Earth or in the Universe,” he says, “than a dimension of the Earth, of the Universe itself.”
Indeed, when we get in touch with our descendants we are carried deep into time. This is a good time of year for it, because at this moment in the turning of the seasons we can feel the Earth well past its equilibrium point at the summer solstice tipping toward autumn, with its many losses. In tune with the seasons, we can turn back again to our loved ones and the busy lives we share.
We and all things are bound up together and it is something to celebrate, so that while in time we lose the ones we love from our presence they are, in fact, never lost. They persist in our memory, in our hearts, in all of the ways that they changed our world. And those endure as they are remembered.
Mark Belletini, who I spoke of earlier, in his new book, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” relates what seemed to him at the time an odd experience. His mother had died a few days before and he was in the car driving to deliver her eulogy. Listening to music as afternoon light filtered in the window, he said, he was suddenly filled with a sense of joy and thanks.
Images of her life, images of her face raced by, he said. “I felt in my bones and tingling on the surface of my skin a deep, deep gratitude, a joyous sense of satisfaction that my life had been so blessed.”
He felt a voice inside question him: “You are driving up to deliver the eulogy for your mother and you are spilling over with joy and thanks?” But the answer came easily: this, too, was grieving. He had shed the tears and felt the sadness: they were still there. But the joy was real, too.
Our grief and the remembrances that come of it, Mark argues, is a gift that, he says, “blesses and illumines our mortality and our very existence in this world.” It is ultimately an affirmation that our lives and the lives of those we love, and in the end all lives – matter.
How we grieve, how we remember clears the way to compassion that opens and soothes our hearts, that reanimates our tired souls, that shows a way when it seems there is none to be found.
Rev. Julianne Lepp, Guest Minister
This sermon explores how we can break away from well-worn patterns that no longer serve us. What does it mean to trust yourself to follow the road less traveled? In Patti Digh’s <i>Life Is A Verb: 37 Days To Wake Up, Be Mindful, And Live Intentionally</i>, she writes, “Natural human purpose. What is mine? Yours? Maybe if I look at the paths I’ve worn, over and over again, I’ll see that purpose show itself, the way cornfields create patterns I see only when I’m flying over them.”
Monika Gross, Guest Speaker
Religions throughout time have included gesture and movement as important parts of liturgy. Can motion embody meaning for us as religious humanists, separate from specific religious dogma? What is the quality invoked by pressing my palms together, by lowering my head, by opening my palms upward and outward? While choosing to look beyond the supernatural as a basis for worship, can we retain physical forms of spirituality? Can we honor the profound human need for embodied intention and emotional expression that inspired the creation of archetypical gestures of joy, devotion, request, compassion, awe, humility, thankfulness and consolation?
This sermon/storytelling by Elizabeth Schell was shared in small pieces throughout the service. Elizabeth began the service with a giant backpack on her back that she eventually takes off and “unpacks” during her storytelling.
PART 1:
Some people do a lot of travelling in the summer…my son’s going to 3 different camps. Luckily, I love to pack. When we were kids, my grandmother instructed my sister and I in how to best pack for a trip—not so much what to bring, but how to fold or roll or generally fit whatever you wanted to take into whatever vessel you had to squeeze it in. I am known in my family for being the Master Packer—the one who can fit … it …. in! So I brought my baggage with me this morning.
The older we get, the more STUFF we have. Both literal…and emotional. Moving helps pare down the literal stuff. Anytime you have to stop and fit it all in a truck or fit it into a smaller home….well, it makes you question what you’re holding on to, right? Kind of like emptying closets in Sandburg Hall…. But what about the emotional stuff? What helps us with that? What helps us winnow that down? We carry it around with us everywhere. We feel its weight. But we don’t much like unpacking it.
It’s like when you’re moving and you pull out all the boxes you have of stuff from college or some other formative period. You go through it. You remember stuff. You realize you might have remembered some stuff wrong. You see some of it in a new light. You throw a bunch of it away. Or recycle what you can.
I’ve been doing a lot of unpacking lately. Emotional baggage unpacking, I mean. Especially since taking the Building Bridges class last winter. This is a workshop they do here in Asheville over 6 weeks that helps participants understand racism better: the history of racism in Asheville; the way systemic and institutional racism works; and our individual relationships to racism.
We’ve all got just a little bit of baggage in this area, right? Well, it’s about time we start dusting some of it off or change is never going to really happen ’cause we’re still carrying all this crap around. I’m going to unpack a bit of my personal baggage with you today. (take off backpack & open) ‘Cause I know this is a safe place and I can do that, right? I promise I won’t unpack anything too embarassing….well, maybe. Rubber chicken?! What’s that doing in here?….
PART 2:
The Irish tune they just sung to is also known as “If Ever You Were Mine” and it’s one of my favorites. It reminds me of something I’ve got in here. somewhere… Ah, behold, the Family Tree project. We all have a few unfinished projects, right?
The majority of students in my 1980s Los Angeles magnet jr. high classroom were first and second generation: Vietnamese. Korean. Japanese. Russian. Iranian. Indian. Israeli. Mexican. L.A.’s attempt at integration. It was a very rich and diverse education. But the richness and the diversity did not much include people of African descent. We were told to research our family trees and trace our family’s immigration to the U.S.. I don’t think the teacher expected the project to take too much time.Go home and talk to your parents or grandparents. You should be able to get the whole story.
I found out that my family came from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, & France. There were definitely many people who were running away from something bad or perhaps running to something good. Depends on which American tale you like to tell. But all these nations and cultures of origin were so far back in the family tree, there certainly was no living memory of them, let alone much recorded memory. I pieced together what I could. From researching and interviewing many family members, I found out a strand of my family came on the second boat to Jamestown.
My family’s been here a long time. As the only redhead in a sea of blondes, I found myself wanting to claim my Irish heritage. My grandmother had visited there. She said the Callahans (her people) had come from Cork. But many, many generations ago. I liked the Irish postcards in her album: Of fiddlers and dancers. Of green fields and stone walls. Of lots of pale faced, freckled, redheads like me. Something about these images beckoned to me. I wanted to say “I’m an Irish American.” But it just seemed pretty hollow. Mostly, I just felt bland.
The family tree I turned in went back more than 12 generations. It was definitely a lot more than my teacher asked for. I got an A+. But I was not satisfied. Where did I come from? I would visit my friends at their homes where other languages were spoken. Where there were beautiful colors, images, food, music…so many things that were foreign and enticing to me. But what was my culture? Most of my extended family was in Georgia, where my parents and grandparents were from. We’d visit there almost every summer, but somehow it never felt like a “coming home” but more like an alien visitation. Especially as I got older.
When I was little, these visits to the south weren’t too bad. I’d play with old toys in the suffocation of my grandparents’ sealed up air conditioned rooms. But sometimes we’d venture out onto the screen porch. We’d have watermelon eating contests. Uncle Bob would barbecue somethin. Uncle Freeman would fry trout and call me “Libby” with his pipe in his mouth. We’d have to get all starched and washed and ruffled up when we went to church (which never seemed necessary at our Methodist church back in L.A.). Maybe this was my culture. I definitely liked the food part. Starched and ruffled part, not so much.
Then I discovered there was a little girl next door I could play with. Her name was Crystal and we were the same age. And like me, she liked to lay under the hanging laundry and watch it blow in the wind. And she liked to crawl under shady bushes and stare at pill bugs, too. And she liked watermelon. I bet she could win the watermelon eating contest! But when I tried to bring Crystal onto my grandmother’s screened-in porch, I was sternly told to wash up and Crystal was sent away.
A lot of angry under-the-breath words were said between my parents and my grandparents that night. I didn’t understand any of it. Something about how “Crystal may be a Cole, but she was still colored, and it just wasn’t right her getting uppity and playin’ with Elizabeth that way.” I don’t think my parents agreed, but this was not their territory. This was the land they had fled. The land with issues they didn’t know how to address. I didn’t know any of that then. All I knew is that I had done something wrong. I had done something displeasing that sweet voiced Grandmother didn’t like.
We left the next day to visit other relatives and then on to home and other things so I never got to play with Crystal again. Seems like my grandparents visited us in California the following summer and then they moved. They moved from that wonderful big rambly house in Cascade Heights with all the acres in back. They’d lived through a major fire there and fully renovated. My mother and her sister had lived there through high school, college, and weddings.
And now they were moving. Because the neighborhood had “gone black.” It was one thing to have the Cole family next door (yeah, that’s Nat King Cole’s daughter Natalie and her family, including sweet little Crystal), but when Hank Aaron’s family moved in and all these other rich black families followed…. well that was just too much for my white… southern… grandparents.
I think I was 12 or so when I learned all this. And suddenly my eyes started to open a bit more. I started seeing black and white. But, to be honest, I had probably already been “seeing” it for some time. I think a part of me was introduced to “black” and therefore “white” that day on my grandmother’s porch. And my white shame grew.
White shame is something UU theologian Thandeka talks about in her book, “Learning to be White.” She challenges white people to think back to their first experience of knowing they were “white” which inevitably occurred the moment they learned that someone was “black.” Our caregiver’s negative response teaches us 2 things:
in order to keep the love and care of my family I must reject this person;
rejecting this person doesn’t feel right, but I have to do it.
So just as our internalized racism is built, so is our white shame. Because we didn’t start out as “white” just as the other child didn’t start out as “black.” We were just babies with feelings processing the world around us and we responded with delight or fear to everything and everyone around us based on how they made us feel or how they responded to us. We are not born racist; we learn it.
White Shame, Thandeka concludes, exists in Euro-Americans because “the persons who ostensibly loved and respected them the most actually abused them and justified it in the name of race, money, and God.”
This is simplifying hugely her argument. But basically: the majority of people that came to America, came in chains. Both Africans and Europeans. Half and possibly as many as ⅔ of all white colonial immigrants arrived as indentured servants. The 1% truly existed then. Perhaps only 0.5%. The land owners.
To keep their power in a land of Native Americans and African slaves and European servants— they had to lay down the law—you had to know that if you crossed them you would be whipped, separated from your family, lynched. You had to stay in line. Which meant that to rise above your present circumstances (always the promise of America!) you had to do things that went against your moral compass. Even if you felt sympathy for someone, you had to curb that sympathy if you wanted to keep your job or any kind of standing you might enjoy in the community. Or maybe even with your life. And THIS— this clarifying who was “in” — and therefore “white” and who was “out”— and therefore “black” —became THE way of insuring the success of your family, your community, your self. And it is shameful. And we need to unpack this shame.
As we come to our time of Meditation, we pause and breathe into these bodies—these bodies that carry us and all our joys and sorrows, all our baggage gathered up and lugged about, packed and hidden away.
Take a moment, silently, within yourself, to consider some of that baggage.
For those who are considered “white” in this room, when did you first know you were white?
For those who are considered “other” than white in this room, when did you first know you were not white?
What were those experiences like? How did they make you feel about yourself? About the person who made you claim this identity? What shame or baggage do you carry because of these identities?
SILENCE
I invite you now to bring some of what you carry, inspired by these questions, or whatever you walked in with this morning—whether it be joy or sorrow, confusion, wonderment, or shame.
Bring it forward and lift it up in silence in this space by the lighting of a candle from our chalice fire
and know, that all of us here, are with youin both your joy and in your sorrow.
Candlelighting & Music “Hard Times”
PART 3
Baggage.
We can learn, especially I think as we get older, the benefit of packing lighter. Traveling lighter. When I traveled in Great Britain after college, I learned to winnow down what I needed to what I could carry on my back. When huge portions of your traveling includes walking on stony roads or squeezing yourself onto crowded buses or trains, you want your baggage to be as light as possible.
But no matter how light you pack, you never want to forget your passport. Your ID. This is my first passport. From when I was 23 and I did my first big traveling…to Ireland and Scotland! with a wistful thought that maybe I’d find a bit of myself. Maybe.
During these travels, I worked in Edinburgh w/Volunteers for Peace. I lived with 10 other volunteers—all young adults from various countries—we slept on the floor of a local women’s center and staffed a summer program for children in Edinburgh.
We shared our small stipend in common for food and we all had pretty different ideas of what good affordable food meant. With Italian, French, Scottish, Irish, American, and German volunteers, not all of whom could speak much english, day to day communicating and “getting along” was hard even before we arrived at the school location of the youth program.
I learned a lot that summer. And I’m still learning from the experience. But in unexpected ways. That summer I became good friends with a young man from Ireland. After the program was over I visited him at his home in southern Ireland. Even until recently, the narrative I’ve given our friendship has been “oh, Jim (or Seamus, his Irish name), he was this sweet Irish lad who was totally gay, but unwilling to admit it. He’d smoke ‘fags’ (as they call cigarettes in Ireland) while I snickered. But he’d never admit his sexual orientation. Of course I was the enlightened American college grad who tried to help him come ‘out.’”
Though I was a good friend and supporter—an ally of sorts, I really had no idea the depth of pain and struggle this young man was facing. As a privileged, white, hetero”normal” cis-woman, how could I? But I didn’t see it that way. I was sympathetic and supportive, but couldn’t for the life of me understand why he didn’t just proclaim who he was and get on with it.
Because it’s not that easy. It’s not easy at all. To get “on” with it.
I reconnected recently with my Irish friend via Facebook. He’s been out for many years now and is a therapist, helping young people and adults face many struggles ….. Our FB relationship is pretty surface so I have no idea what his coming out experience was finally really like. I wasn’t there. Because “coming out” is not a singular summer epiphany— not something that can be done in one dramatic cinematic proclamation.
I imagine it’s more of a day in, day out, long haul, painful, forever on a spectrum type experience. One can be “out” in one place and time, but not elsewhere. It depends on what is safe. It depends on what’s at stake. It depends on who you are willing to offend or hurt or expunge from your life. And Ireland in the 1990s—there weren’t that many safe spaces for gay people then. Nor really in the U.S. either. My privilege of acceptable sexuality made me blind to the struggles he faced, which included huge cultural and religious layers.
Over the past couple years, as our 2 countries have wrestled with marriage equality and general acceptance, my friend Jim and I have shared about high and low points in our respective countries. I don’t think either of us ever dreamed that it would be HIS country that would first grant equal marriage and related rights to its gay citizens. Thankfully we weren’t too far behind! It’s just MARRIAGE now, people! Not gay marriage—that was a game we used to play (some sadly are still playing it). Marriage is marriage! Love is love!
I don’t often feel patriotic enough to fly the US flag(bring out flag from baggage), but this weekend I did. After 9-11 living in NYC with all the flag waving, we felt really uncomfortable with it. The flags felt less like symbols of patriotism and more like signals of hate and fear towards our Muslim brothers and sisters.
Our family sewed this flag and took it to President Barack Obama’s first inauguration because that was a moment of such deep patriotism for us. I think a little bit of my white shame was healed in the campaigning and voting and then the gathering on the Mall that cold morning.
I love these 2 flags. The rainbow one(pull out flag)—we proudly display in our store downtown. We know that it lets our LGBTQ brothers and sisters know they are welcome. But what flag can we put up to let our African American brothers & sisters know they are welcome? I know what flag NOT to put up.
We still have a long way to go. For LGBTQ rights. And all our so-called “non-white” brothers and sisters who have been waiting FAR too long for true and lasting inclusion and citizenship.
So don’t forget your ID, people. You may need it to vote. But also, you need to keep checking who you are and not just the stats printed on a government-issued page. But WHO you are, within. The Good and the bad. Including your blinders, your ignorance, your privilege.
PART 4:
When I was in college, my mom & dad joined a United Methodist congregation in northern California that was determined to become a welcoming space for its gay members.
My reserved, straight-laced, engineering dad was quiet at first. As treasurer, he could see the financial impact of this mission. Good pledgers were leaving over the welcoming stance. My dad was first to admit that he always voted based on how it impacted his finances. But something about this congregation was changing him. He and my mom had become good friends with an older lesbian couple. One of them had become quite ill and was hospitalized. And her partner kept being denied the right to visit and advocate for her loved one. As my dad watched his friends struggle in this way….Something in him broke. Like a levy, I imagine, a flood of feelings he’d held tightly closed away.
As a kid growing up outside Atlanta, he’d been put in military academy because of his parents’ fear over the possibility of school integration. At Georgia Tech, in his Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, he’d been aparty to the rejection of an African American pledge that he’d actually wanted the fraternity to welcome. He and my mother did not participate in the civil rights movement, but moved right after getting married— to New Orleans, then Arizona, and finally California.
My dad had remained silent. He had not spoken out against his parents or his church or his community. He admitted that sometimes he felt uncomfortable about things he witnessed, even things he did, and that sometimes he realized he didn’t even see what was going on. But as he witnessed the struggles of his new friends and as members of his United Methodist church spoke up about their love for one another and their desire to be recognized in the church and, even more so, by their government—with visitation rights and adoption rights and marriage rights…. I think my dad realized he might be able to redeem himself a bit.
And so, even though it really wasn’t that popular in the 1990s, especially among his engineering buddies, he started expressing his opinion. Expressing his support. He even started voting Democrat. It was a real and unexpected joy for he and I to be able to share what our respective faith communities were doing in the fight.
It was around this time that Susie Biggs died. And I wonder now how her death might have contributed to his need for redemption. I’d always heard my father speak fondly of Susie. As a kid I thought she must be an aunt or some other family member. And, from an emotional point of view for my dad, she was. But she wasn’t. Not at all. She was my father’s family cook and maid. She took care of my dad. Mothered him most likely in ways his mother never did since she worked full time. Her daughter came to my grandmother’s funeral. I think it was the first time my dad realized “his” Susie had her own children. Children whose needs had to be met on top of those of my father and his family.
I don’t think he ever fully processed his relationship to Susie. I really wish he’d been able to participate in a workshop like Building Bridges before he died. I think there was so much he really wanted to work through about growing up in the Jim Crow south. But, for him, speaking up and stepping out for gay rights within his faith denomination and country was a healing process.
I wish he were here for this moment in our history—for the celebration of marriage equality. For this frank conversation we are beginning and very much needing to have in this country about race. I wonder where he’d be with the rise (at least in visibility) of police brutality. With the Black Lives Matter movement. With the murders last month in South Carolina, church burnings that barely make it into the news, the debate about the Confederate flag… I wish I could talk to him about these things.
[pull out briefcase from baggage] No wonder everything’s so crammed tight in here: there’s baggage IN my baggage! Actually this is a briefcase. My grandpa Schell’s briefcase (that’s my dad’s dad). He was a lawyer in Atlanta.
He died before I was born but I always loved to hear stories about him. In pictures, he looked like Alfred Hitchcock. Bald pate. Giant belly. He wore a white suit to my parents’ wedding where all the other men wore black. To cause trouble. His interest in the law began with an interest in debate. Grandpa Sid’s love for debate came in High School. He was a bad egg, my grandmother used to say. Failing all his classes. Always in trouble.
One day during detention he was sitting in the back of the school auditorium writing “lines” while his teacher led the debate team on stage. He kept heckling the students and criticizing their debate skills. His frustrated (and I think a bit bemused) teacher finally told him to “come down and show them how it should be done (if he was so smart)”, assuming he’d fail. He didn’t. He was great at it. Turned his life around. Became captain of the debate team. Put himself through law school.
As a kid, I always imagined him as an Atticus Finch type lawyer. You know, Scout’s dad from To Kill a Mockingbird? Representing people even if they couldn’t pay. That’s how my grandmother got most of her pretty antique furniture—as in-kind payment from divorce cases. Supposedly in the early years of my grandfather’s practice many a meal at the Schell table was bolstered by in-kind payments of potatoes and the like from African American clients who couldn’t otherwise pay for his representation. Atticus Finch.
But families, like history, are never so… simple. See, not long before he died, Grandpa Schell was appointed a judgeship in Georgia. A very high office to achieve for a poor misbehavin boy from Kentucky. But Governor Lester Maddox handpicked my grandfather for the position. Because Grandpa had been one of his lawyers in 1964 when Lester Maddox owned the Pickrick Restaurant that refused to serve non-white customers. Refused while wielding an axe handle at any who tried to oppose him. Yes, my grandfather defended the arch segregationist Lester Maddox. And this is his briefcase.
My dad fled the south. Fled his father and expectations of following in his footsteps. I’ve carried this briefcase—literally—since HIgh School when I absconded with it for a theatrical prop. We were doing To Kill a Mockingbird and I was the costume designer. It made a perfect briefcase for Atticus Finch. I’ve quietly carried it with me all these years, trying to hold on to the Atticus Finch memory—and not the other ones.
But I pulled it out and took it to Building Bridges earlier this year to help tell the story of my grandpa’s role in the Lester Maddox case. My family’s part, a not so proud one, in the civil rights movement. It’s a piece of my white guilt. But it was—literally and emotionally—my dad’s baggage first. Expectations of his father—of him and he of his father—both disappointed.
Sometimes we carry baggage that is not even our own. But it becomes ours. I mean, should I keep carrying it? What can I let go of? What is actually helpful? What do I want to pass on to my son? Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m trying to unpack it and see what meaning I can find. See what progress I can make. Within me. I really hope I can begin to let go of some of it. Leave it by the side of the road. Make my baggage lighter so I can actually get some stuff done.
On the Friday evening after the Supreme court ruling on marriage, many of us gathered downtown near the Vance monument. We waved rainbow and US flags, sang, cheered, and cried. A giant step had been taken towards equality for LGBTQ Americans—for our children and generations to come. Hopefully they will know far less pain and suffering when it comes to who they love or how they identify or express themselves. But as we stood in the shadow of the Vance monument, one of many tributes to famous white men of the Confederacy in this town—just blocks from the YMI and a former thriving African American community destroyed by redlining and other discriminatory, POST Jim Crow institutionalized racism—as we stood there, I noticed a little memorial candle laid at the base of the Vance monument—with a card listing the names of those slain at the Charleston AME church. And I think of the 8 churches burned since then.
Virginia Ramig, Guest Speaker
The journey of aging begins at the moment of conception, so we all have expertise on the subject. I’ve asked some middle-aged and older UUCA members, and a few nonmembers, to share their concerns and discoveries about successful aging, and I’ve led a Covenant Group discussion on the subject. I’m sure you all join me in thanking the generous people who contributed time and thought to help others. I’d like to tell you their names, but there are way too many. I’ll mention only one: George, my husband, who contributed his ideas and support during the time of preparation.
The journey of aging begins at the moment of conception, so we all have expertise on the subject. I’ve asked some middle-aged and older UUCA members, and a few nonmembers, to share their concerns and discoveries about successful aging, and I’ve led a Covenant Group discussion on the subject. I’m sure you all join me in thanking the generous people who contributed time and thought to help others. I’d like to tell you their names, but there are way too many. I’ll mention only one: George, my husband, who contributed his ideas and support during the time of preparation.
A number of our thoughtful contributors spoke with great satisfaction about the perspective their years of experience have given them, finding it a powerful source of continuing personal and spiritual growth. They have little doubt that others find them more interesting because of this growth. Some have dropped illusions about themselves and are happy to see their lives more realistically. One spoke of her sense of deep fulfillment when she helps young people achieve a better understanding of aspects of life that puzzle them, particularly their personal relationships. Her perspective in middle age tells her not to shelter them from pain but to help them come out of it safely while learning something of value.
Several contributors pointed out the importance of warm, loving family relationships. “You have to get started early,” said one man, “maintaining good relationships with your siblings and then your children. Your self-discipline and consideration will pay well at the time and reward you even more as you get older.”
One woman advises, “Friendships are important. Don’t just wait for them to happen. Look for people who share an interest with you. It may be playing tennis or cards, knitting, cooking, volunteering to help an organization, anything you enjoy. It will lead to finding congenial people.”
Some older contributors have a warning: There’s no getting around the fact that there will be differences in your life. Your friendships will feel different from those of your youth. Your body and brain will start having difficulties and deficiencies that can’t always be remedied. For the rest of your life you’ll have to make decisions based on increasingly limited abilities. Our contributors tell us that you may meet these changes with despair, or anger, or acceptance. Choose acceptance, they recommend—serene acceptance if possible, maybe even joyful acceptance. However, you may need to remind yourself from time to time about how desirable a positive attitude is, and what helps you to renew it.
One woman told me about an aunt who had loved to paint ever since she was a child. Some of her happiest hours were those she spent creating colorful images on canvas. As she aged she developed macular degeneration, leaving her with only peripheral vision. She was not deterred; she continued painting. Then she had a stroke which kept her from using her right hand. As soon as she was up and around she began painting again, now using her left hand. She joked, “This will be my abstract period.” Nothing could keep her from her enjoyment of painting.
One of our contributors recommends an attitude of openness to mystery and wonder. “The older I get,” she says, “the more I find to wonder about. It’s like part of me keeps on growing. I don’t ever want to be finished!”
I find this to be so in my life. For the past year or so I have ended my morning yoga sessions by gazing thoughtfully at a big maple tree. I have seen it in our back yard for twenty years. But now I find myself taking it in with my eyes. I feel myself as erect as it is, as capable of growth, as much a part of the interdependent web of all existence. I focus on its roots, connected to the local skin of our planet—Western North Carolina red clay mixed with pebbles, flakes of mica, bits of decomposing plants. My feet become roots powerfully connected to the planet. I wonder whether in the universe around me there are other planets with other conscious entities living on them. Are they too wondering about the possibility of other planets?
Walt Whitman wrote a poem about the universe as an open road. Late in the poem he calls the universe “many roads for traveling souls”. We can hear it as his version of the journey of aging. Please turn to Reading No. 645, “Song of the Open Road”, in the gray hymnal. Pat will read the standard type and you can respond with the italic type.
One contributor of ideas about successful aging reminds us, “You can be amazed over and over by the same simple things that caught your attention as a child, but with an adult’s perspective. Let your heart be lifted when you watch the rising sun light up the clouds. Feel the power of the wind as it makes the trees bow, and the strength of the resisting wood.”
Some contributors said their feeling of success in aging comes mainly from their continued ability to be of service to other sentient beings—not just other human beings but animals too. Service makes these folks valuable and valued. Even those who need walkers or wheelchairs or are bedbound can continue serving, offering to people or to companion animals the unique understanding and abilities that come from their years of living. Their value doesn’t come from their vigor but from their loving generosity.
Some contributors have very practical advice about successful aging:
Choose a house or apartment that will help you maintain your independence as long as possible.
Live where there’s a mix of ages, not just older people.
Choose a physician whose views about continuing a painful life, or ending it, are the same as yours. If you need to choose a nursing facility, make that congruence of views one of your criteria.
Be aware that laws which allow self-ending of one’s life tend to lead to longer lives, as several studies have shown, since people are likely to put up with more discomfort when they know they may end their lives.
Be sure to have all your end-of-life documents filled out, signed, notarized if necessary, and placed where they are accessible to the people who will use them to follow your directives.
I have a story from my own life to illustrate that point.
Many years ago my father was admitted to a hospital because of pneumonia. My mother stayed with him for the three days that ensued before his death. She desperately wanted to hear whatever last words he might say to her, but because of an apparatus to deliver oxygen it was not possible for him to speak.
His passing was not only sad for her but also a great source of frustration. She was determined that her death would not be like that. So a few weeks after his funeral she made out her living will and gave me her health care power of attorney.
Twenty years later she needed the care of a nursing facility. My brother Bo and I accompanied her there, together with her end-of-life documents.
By that time she rarely spoke—it was just too much effort. As Bo and I were sitting with her she whispered, “I’m…too…tired.” As far as we know, those were her last words.
Later the head of the nursing staff said to Bo and me, “We’ll have to put your mother on supplementary oxygen and a feeding tube.”
I saw Bo snap to attention. “Those are forbidden in her living will,” he said.
The nurse replied sadly, “I’m sorry—the living will can take effect only when her condition is clearly terminal. We don’t know that right now. We are required to make every effort to keep her alive.”
I spoke up. “I have her health care power of attorney. I believe it gives me the right to see that our mother’s living will is followed.”
The nurse brightened. “Indeed it does! Now we can do what we know your mother wanted.”
Because my mother had planned so well, her life was allowed to ebb away at its own pace. She died that night with her hand in my brother’s. If she could have spoken, that’s what she would have asked for.
I find that to be successful aging right up to the last moment.
The Reverend Forrest Church, Unitarian Universalist minister, had this to say about dying:
“Death is not life’s goal, only life’s terminus. The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.”
What makes a life worth dying for? Dr. Church had an answer: “…the love we give away before we go.”
And that insight brings us to one last category of ideas on successful aging—love. Our love is a blessing to ourselves and to our life partners, families, friends, everyone we interact with. Love is a motive for service and a source of meaning in a life with less and less physical energy.
The Reverend Dr. Carter Heyward says, “Love is a choice—not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.”
One contributor pointed out that a loving attitude makes us attractive to others, keeps us connected to the people and companion animals in our lives. Another said she sees people, especially children, who need to know they are worthy of love. She said, “I try to fill that gap in whatever way the circumstances allow.” One contributor said that in his experience, thinking about what makes another person lovable leads him to think about what makes him lovable. It’s a powerful boost to his belief in himself.
What I’ve told you in the past few minutes doesn’t nearly cover all the thoughts about successful aging that people gave me to pass along to you. Fortunately, the printed version of this sermon will have many of them added. Copies are available in the rack on the east wall of the foyer.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke had this to say about aging:
I live my life in widening circles
That reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
But I give myself to it.
We too can give ourselves to it. May we feel a sense of fulfillment in this widening and this giving.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Early in my reading for this sermon I chanced on a recent book with a provocative title that intrigued me: “The End of Men and the Rise of Women.” It’s not that the male gender is in danger of disappearing, Hanna Rosen says. Instead, she points to recent trends suggesting that the patterns of male dominance that have been central to, at least, Western culture for millennia are shifting. We live at a time, Rosen argues, when by any number of measures women are not only gaining on men but are moving ahead.
READINGS
Adapted from Exodus 18:13-23
One day Moses sat as judge for the people, while the people stood around him from morning until evening. When Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, “Why do you sit alone, while all the people stand around you?” Moses said, “Because the people come to me to inquire of God. When they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another.”
Moses’ father-in-law said, “What you are doing is not good. You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone. Now listen to me, you should look for others to help you, so they will bear this burden with you. Then you will be able to endure, and all these people will go to their home in peace.”
“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171752
SERMON
Early in my reading for this sermon I chanced on a recent book with a provocative title that intrigued me: “The End of Men and the Rise of Women.” It’s not that the male gender is in danger of disappearing, Hanna Rosen says. Instead, she points to recent trends suggesting that the patterns of male dominance that have been central to, at least, Western culture for millennia are shifting. We live at a time, Rosen argues, when by any number of measures women are not only gaining on men but are moving ahead. And, what’s especially troubling is that in many areas it’s not really a competition because men aren’t playing. They’ve checked out and instead are drifting: in and out of jobs, in and out of relationships. Many are “missing,” in a sense, from the mix.
An important factor in this, of course, is the economic transition we’ve been moving through. Since the turn of the century, millions of jobs, especially in manufacturing and related fields – areas that traditionally employed men – have disappeared.
For her book, Rosen visited Alexander City, Alabama, site of prosperous blue-collar jobs until early in this century when Berkshire Hathaway closed a premium maker of athletic wear that employed 7,000. The closing, she says, “ripped out the roots of the middle class,” and along with mass joblessness came a decline in marriage and an increase in divorce and single motherhood. Some men found jobs at the end of long commutes, others scrambled for this and that when they could find it, and others still quit looking and left the bread-winning to their wives.
And women did step up, moving into the few service jobs that opened up. Recently, the town elected its first woman mayor. The long-term effects of these losses, Rosen says, are being felt in the next generation. She interviews the school superintendent – a woman – who tells her that girls have taken to fighting, drug use is up among all students, and there’s a rash of unintended pregnancies. At the same time, every candidate for election to student government is a girl, and of the students taking part in a city-funded program to prepare them for future careers, 65% are girls. “I’m not sure where the males go or what happens to them” the superintendent told Rosen. “I think they’re just not as motivated.” It seems to be evidence, Rosen says, of a transition time for men. But what’s unclear is what the transition is to.
It’s a pattern that we see played out among more affluent men, too. Sociologist Michael Kimmel describes the evolution of something he calls “Guyland” that has emerged among white, middle class men. They move into communal housing with college buddies, work dead end jobs, devote many hours to the bar scene and hook up with women but steer clear of lasting relationships.
At the same time, the long-term disparity in the achievement of men and women at higher levels of the academic ladder is evening out and even shifting in the other direction. In the U.S., for example, women now earn 60% of bachelor’s and master’s degrees and around half of all PhDs as well as law, medical, and business degrees.
Of course, just because women have made gains doesn’t change that fact that the power differential in our culture remains heavily skewed in favor men. That enormous social overburden that has been described as “the patriarchy” – all the privileges and unspoken preferences that attach to men simply by virtue of their gender – is as strong as ever, though it, too, is shifting and evolving. And the process of change brings pain to men as well as women along the way.
We remember, after all, that each of us growing up didn’t invent the notion of what it means to be a man or a woman. We absorbed it from everything around us, from our families and communities, from the TV shows and movies we watched. And to varying degrees each of us struggled with the sex roles we were assigned with varying degrees of discomfort.
The excerpt from Exodus you heard earlier reminds me of one of the most enduring expectations that I know I absorbed early in life: that as a man I would be expected to be a long-suffering servant who, like Moses in that passage, would take on an unending stream of work uncomplainingly, even to the point of exhaustion.
It was something my father modeled for me with 60-hour weeks as a psychiatrist. I recognize it in my own work patterns – and I’m left to wonder how many others are afflicted with this notion that overworking not only serves society but somehow proves our manhood. How few of us listen to the Jethros in our lives who try tell us to slow down and share the load for the sake of our own endurance and, even more important, for the very peace of the world.
But behind all these social constructions there remains the question: Is there an essential essence to being a man, and is there a gift to be found there as well?
To look at the essence of manhood we might begin with biology. As a rule, maleness requires that the bearer have a Y chromosome that at about six weeks of gestation causes the body to be flooded with the male hormone, testosterone. Most such children head down the path to maleness, genitalia and all. I say most, because there can be variations on that theme. Another flood in the early teens completes the process with secondary sex characteristics like facial hair and the rest. Of course, having the standard male genitalia says nothing about more complicated things like an individual’s sexual orientation, or even necessarily how one might eventually identify one’s gender, as the story of Caitlin Jenner amply demonstrates.
The biology of sex and gender, we have learned in recent years, is far more complex than many of us had ever imagined. But still, biology matters. Let’s look at testosterone. Both men and women produce testosterone, but men produce much more – often 10 times as much. High testosterone correlates with the behavioral traits that stereotypes would lead you to expect: self-confidence, competitiveness, strength, self-confidence, sexual drive. But it’s not a constant thing. Levels of testosterone in the body change in response to changing circumstances, such as physical confrontations or arousing situations.
High testosterone levels are not necessarily linked to violence, but they can be a risk factor. At those times, men are more likely to be reactive and impulsive and less likely to be thoughtful and deliberative. That may work fine in action films, but day to day in our work lives and interacting with others we need our wits about us, and in relationship we need to refine the skills that lead to lasting commitments not just quick thrills. It tends to be after those moments of testosterone-fueled rage or sexual acting out that you hear comments that echo our topic today: Ugh! Men: what are they good for?
It’s worth remembering, though, that part of the advantage that testosterone can confer is strength not just for quick action but also for endurance. We do, after all, have a choice in how we respond. The spiritual that we began with, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” makes that point. It is said to have been a song that African-American slaves sang to encourage each other to stick it out in the hope that they would be freed someday.
It’s a hymn to endurance. The steep and rugged road to freedom was a challenge that they saw their work preparing them for, and each stroke, each hammer blow, each step strengthened them further. “We are climbing on.”
There are many stories that remind us of such lessons. Back in the 70s and 80s a men’s movement arose in the U.S. that looked to ancient fables for guidance on finding a more fulfilling and resonant vision of manhood than our culture seemed to provide. Perhaps the most famous of these was the story of “Iron John,” a Western European coming-of-age tale raised up by the poet Robert Bly.
“Iron John” tells of a boy who comes upon a mythical wild man in the woods who by assigning one task after another encourages the boy to learn disciplines that cultivate courage, endurance and strength that leads the boy to become a mature, confident and compassionate man.
Bly argued that a number of helpful practices that the tale pointed to, such as male mentoring, have been largely lost in our culture and encouraged men to look for ways to reinstate them in the coming-of-age process.
For a time, the archetypes in these stories became the center of retreats, full of dancing and chanting and drumming around campfires. In recent years, though, much of this “men’s movement” has faded from view.
Looking back, we can see that as a teaching tool “Iron John” had its limitations and that the way that Bly and others interpreted the stories often reinforced traditional gender roles. They also provided no way of framing anything but the heterosexual experience.
Still, they served a role by opening the conversation into a way to understand gender identity not simply as a fact of biology but also as a resource for our own awakening, a gift that shapes who we will be and what we will give to the world.
We men look to the wisdom of millennia that tells us that it is not our impulsive energy but our enduring strength that holds whatever greatness we are to achieve. It is not our power over but our steadfast love that will win what is worth keeping.
The “gift” that Li-Young Lee both receives and dispenses in the poem that you heard earlier is just such love, a gift that inspires courage, which is to say strength of heart, in those who receive it. And this may be the greatest gift that men have to give: a gift given from strength and confidence that affirms the ultimate worth and the essential capacity of others.
Hanna Rosen closes her book with a few glimmers of hope among the lost and drifting men she was following. She tells about reconnecting with Calvin, the boyfriend of a young woman she’d met in a Virginia beach town. The two had had a child together, but Calvin had drifted off and the woman, Bethenney, was fine to let him go. She was getting on with her life, studying for a nursing degree and raising her daughter. Calvin just couldn’t seem to find anything.
Checking back with Calvin some months later, Rosen learns that he is recovering from a car wreck that got him thinking about what he wanted from life. “Do I really want to spend the last days of my life smashed between two guys in the front seat of a truck?” he said.
He tells Rosen that he remembers back to when he was 11 and an uncle who was sick came to live with his family. He recalls that after the uncle recovered he started paying attention to Calvin, taking him on fishing trips and teaching him carpentry. The experience, she says, reminded him how just a little care could do a lot to mend people and relationships.
He tells her that he finally got up the nerve to get his papers together to apply to a local college, and how terrifying he found it to walk it into the admission office.
But he did it. And Rosen says Calvin told her that when he crossed the threshold of that office, “I also got this little thrill: like I’m finally doing it.”
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Years ago Unitarianism was known as “the Boston Religion,” with its attention focused ever on New England. Today we’ll explore some of the stories of Unitarianism, Universalism and Unitarian Universalism in the South, where our impact may be less noted but is important all the same.
Gordon Gibson, who we heard from earlier, tells this story of a couple who moved from Washington, D.C., to Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. The husband was standing on his lawn supervising the unloading of the moving van, when a car pulled up. A man emerged from the car and greeted the husband. He introduced himself as the minister of a nearby Baptist church and invited the couple to attend. The husband thanked the minister for the invitation but said they would be attending the Unitarian Universalist congregation in town. The minister hesitated for a moment and then said, “You know, they shot the minister of that church.”
The reception for Unitarian Universalists in the South has not always been so chilly, but the truth is that even today our numbers in this part of the country remain relatively small. For many reasons, those who seek to make a place for our faith in the religious landscape here can find it to be uphill struggle. And yet, as we know directly there many people here and across the South who hunger for religion in the kind of different key that we offer. At a time when congregations of other denominations are closing we are holding our own in this part of the country, with some congregations growing and new congregations being added. We believe there is room for growth here in western North Carolina, and you’ll be hearing more about that in the future.
Today, though, I want to acquaint you with a bit of the story of how liberal religion has made its way here and some of what I see as the promise of our chalice’s Southern flame. Our numbers in the South may be small, but it’s worth remembering that in some locations our roots go deep.
The first Unitarians in the South arrived as the early commercial centers were being developed – Charleston and New Orleans being prominent examples. In 1817, the Independent Congregational church of Charleston took on a Unitarian identity after one of its ministers announced that he been persuaded by the Unitarian theology of Joseph Priestley.
A couple of years later, that minister was succeeded by a Harvard-trained seminarian, Samuel Gilman, who had deep connections with the Unitarian establishment in Boston. Under Gilman, the church grew to prominence, serving some 400 members and prominent figures like the secessionist Senator John Calhoun. In 1854, Gilman goaded the congregation to remodel its building into the impressive structure that remains today. But the debate over slavery created difficulties. Gilman privately supported the union, but he and his wife had house slaves, and she was a public champion of slavery. His death in 1858 resulted in many years of turmoil for the Charleston church.
New Orleans followed a similar path. Theodore Clapp was called to the First Presbyterian Church in 1823, but soon after arriving began expressing his reservations about Calvinist doctrine. In 1832 the Presbytery convicted him of heresy and ordered him expelled.
But the congregation stuck with him and in 1837 declared itself Unitarian. Clapp was a popular speaker and was said to have a drawn a thousand or more on Sunday mornings. Unfortunately, he was also a vocal apologist for slavery, though he later shifted his position, arguing that the essence of religion was against slavery. But he opposed efforts at abolition.
Clapp retired to Kentucky shortly before the Civil War, though he was later buried in New Orleans. Lay members of the New Orleans congregation kept it alive, though: making it one of only two southern Unitarian groups to survive the war.
The experience for Universalists was different. The faith was spread largely through circuit-riding, saddle-bag preachers. But in a country dominated by Calvinists they encountered deep suspicion of hell-denying religion.
In some cases, towns where they found welcome had been seeded with Universalist thought of German Baptist settlers known as Dunkards. Dunkards, who shared the Universalist theology of salvation for all, immigrated to America in the early 18th century and many settled in the South. In those communities they would form the nucleus of early Universalist churches. Indeed, here in western North Carolina it appears that John Plott, who helped found a Universalist church in the Pigeon Valley in 1865 and persuaded James Inman to be its first minister, came from a Dunkard family.
It didn’t help that many viewed Universalism as a northern import that took a dim view of slavery. As it happened, though, as with the Unitarians, when the churches organized many of the new Universalists had no problem accommodating slavery.
This conflict developed into a rift that divided the denomination. In the end, few congregations survived the Civil War, and it took decades before the faith spread south again.
The late 19th century, then, was a time of rebuilding, although the Universalists devoted bit more attention to the task than Unitarians, whose outreach to the south was limited. Toward the end of the century, a self-designated Universalist missionary, Quillen Shinn, moved through the south planting several dozen small, rural churches. Many, though, were little more than family churches, and few endured very long.
It took until the middle of the 20th century for renewal to come in the South, and this time it came from the Unitarian side with what became known as the Fellowship Movement.
The way it worked is that ads would be placed publicizing Unitarianism and inviting anyone interested to meet a representative of the denomination. At the meeting, the representative would describe the religion and offer support for those who wanted to start a lay-led congregation. That describes the beginning of this congregation and many others. Check a directory of Unitarian Universalist congregations in the South you’ll find few with a founding date before 1940.
As Gordon Gibson points out in his book, Southern Witness, the post-war period of the late 1940s and early 1950s was transforming the entire country, but there was special pressure in the south. Many factors, including the return of soldiers from overseas, a booming manufacturing sector and new accessibility to college through the GI Bill, were stirring up what up to then had been an insular culture.
Lay-led fellowships appealed especially to those recent college graduates and transplants brought in by industry as well as locals who discovered, in the words of the advertisement of the time, they were “Unitarian and didn’t know it.” The early days were heady and liberating time, but some congregations got strong push-back for questioning traditional religious ideas, as well as long-standing social practices, and none of them more incendiary than racial segregation.
Where integration efforts were underway, the fellowships were often involved. These largely white congregations invited African-American speakers for worship and welcomed African-Americans as members. They started integrated daycare centers, joined voting rights campaigns, supported integrated schools and swimming pools.
We here were among them. We helped provide breakfasts and clothing for African-American children and registered blacks to vote. But for many congregations there was a cost: sometimes it was just estrangement from their neighbors, sometimes the cost was greater.
The incident I began with today is an example. The Rev. Don Thompson made a statement about his ministry when he arrived in 1963 as the first minister of the congregation in Jackson, Mississippi by also accepting the position on the Mississippi Human Relations Council created by the assassination of Medgar Evers. During his tenure, Thompson helped coordinate programs during Mississippi’s Freedom Sumer of 1964 and the summer after the Civil Rights marches in Selma in 1965 the congregation opened the first integrated Head Start program in Jackson.
On August 23, 1965 Thompson had just dropped an African American member of the congregation off at his apartment and emerged from his car in a parking lot near his home, when two shots rang out. One bullet missed. The other fractured his left shoulder.
Thompson survived and was determined to stay until FBI agents warned him that there was a credible threat on his life. And so he left. The congregation struggled without a minster for several years, having to sell its building and move to a small house nearby.
It’s a story that Gordon Gibson knows personally because he was the next minister to follow Thompson at that church. He arrived in 1969, staying for several years, as long as the church could pay him, and resigning when they couldn’t.
He spent the next seven years working for the federal Equal Opportunity Commission in Jackson until he returned as the congregation’s part-time minister from 1978 to 1984. You’ll get to hear more from Gordon this summer when he speaks here on August 9.
Few stories of UUs in the South from that time are quite so dramatic, but many aspects of the story in Jackson were mirrored elsewhere in quieter ways. And more often than not it was lay members, rather than ministers, who bore the brunt. Some were doctors who saw their practices dwindle. Others lost jobs or were threatened or abused. Some were involved in making history. We remember, for example, that Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a one-time president of the UU Fellowship of Montgomery, Alabama.
Many were part of the demonstrations in Selma, including several dozen from Birmingham and Huntsville who joined a march on the Dallas County Courthouse demanding voting rights for blacks the day before Bloody Sunday.
Gordon argues that the history of the Civil Rights movement could be written without Unitarian Universalists. Our numbers were small and our influence fairly negligible, though there were places we made notable contributions.
The important lesson, he says, is not how we helped liberate African-Americans, but how being part of the Civil Rights movement helped liberate the European Americans that largely populated our congregations.
Those southern fellowships promoted an approach to religion that was open and accepting but also a crucible for dissenting ideas and religious questioning. They upheld values central to our identity – affirming the worth of each person, freedom, justice, equity, compassion and the interconnection of all things. As congregations they were sometimes quirky, sometimes warm, but the struggles they encountered forced them to test those beliefs over and over again. If the groups could endure – and not all did – their bond and their commitments were deepened.
That pattern is not far from what we saw recently in the struggle for marriage equality. Being tested as we were helped us get clear on just who we were and what we stood for.
It’s an experience that Gordon Gibson argues is not dissimilar to the lessons of liberation theology that emerged not long after this time in Central and South America. People who stayed with our fellowships, he said, were forced to adopt what was essentially a style of praxis: reflecting on their beliefs, articulating them, putting them into practice, and then returning again to reflection and so on, each step leading them deeper into their faith.
“Southern society,” he said, “by opposing many central Unitarian Universalist values forced southern Unitarian Universalists into a deeper understanding, a clearer formulation, a more passionate embrace of those values – often leading to an active practical expression or embodiment of those values.”
So, it’s interesting to reflect on the lessons that our movement’s southern experience has to teach us in our work today. To begin with, we learned that this is religion has staying power, even in the face of steadfast and sometimes violent opposition, and that key to that staying power is being openly engaged in the communities where we live.
We learned that living our faith is the path to strengthening and deepening it. So, we are wise today as a community to create opportunities for and invite each other into work that helps us get there, from the reflection within on our own centers of meaning, to the articulation among us in small groups that help center us and refine our thinking, to practice in the larger world that gives flesh to our convictions.
And we learned that community matters: when we have each others’ backs, when we say “Yes” to helping when we can, when we are ready with care and support for each other during the struggles we endure.
This is the Southern flame that we carry – the flame of refining fire that concentrates and focuses our wisdom, of illumination where there once was confusion, of witness that calls people to action, of compassion and abiding love for all.
This is how, as Rev. Hoover put it, we can learn from and build on the past. We can act, even when we can’t be sure of the results. We can endure pain and tears, frustration and confusion and know that if we stay true they will empower and transform us. Let that be our legacy.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
It was the summer after my first year in seminary, and I was sitting at the bedside of a man roughly my age who had just undergone heart bypass surgery. I had never met this man before. His room was merely on the floor that I had been assigned to as a hospital chaplaincy student. Seminary training generally requires that each student take a unit in what is called “clinical pastoral education” to help them prepare for the visits they’ll be making as ministers later on. This was mine. <i>Click on the title to continue reading and/or to listen…
SERMON
It was the summer after my first year in seminary, and I was sitting at the bedside of a man roughly my age who had just undergone heart bypass surgery. I had never met this man before. His room was merely on the floor that I had been assigned to as a hospital chaplaincy student. Seminary training generally requires that each student take a unit in what is called “clinical pastoral education” to help them prepare for the visits they’ll be making as ministers later on. This was mine.
To say that I was assigned, though, is not to say that I felt in any way prepared. To be honest, what I felt, depending on the day, was somewhere between a novice and a fraud. I had essentially no experience in anything like making a pastoral visit and really no training for it in school.
So, there I was introducing myself to this man only hours after he had emerged from what was likely one of the most traumatic events of his life. No family was present in the room, and I had no indication that any would be coming. What should I say? What does “a minister” say?
I began with pleasantries, acknowledging what a scary experience it must have been. I don’t remember all that I said, but at one point his eyes started to well with tears. I slowed my banter. I held his hand. We sat together in silence. I may have attempted a prayer. Before long I moved along on my appointed rounds. What with the busy schedule of his rehab and my own heavy load of visits and group work with other chaplains I didn’t get to see him again before he was discharged. But somehow we had made a brief connection, and I got a glimpse into this work.
It’s an experience that I’m sure resonates with many of you. None of us enters the work of our lives fully formed. And it doesn’t matter how much classroom or book learning we get. The doing of it requires that at some point we just jump in, no matter how unprepared we may feel. It may seem forced or unreal at first, but we give ourselves to it until we find ourselves in it. You might say we fake it until we make it.
It occurs to me that our religious lives are like that, too. Last week we heard members of our Coming of Age class tell us a little bit about what a year’s worth of studying, reflecting and talking with each other, their teachers and their mentors taught them about what they set their hearts to.
It is the kind of exercise that we think of as distinctive to the path of this Unitarian Universalism. In this month when we are exploring the role of tradition in our religious, it is something that I would call central to our tradition. Because, for us, the religious journey begins, not with learning a doctrine about a text or great teacher, but with our own personal experience. Texts and teachers are worthy contributors to our wonderings, but what’s most important is that we get clear on where our hearts rest.
If there is a doctrine central to our tradition, it is that we are persons of inherent worth and dignity who are capable of building our own faiths, that bedrock that gives us an orientation to lives, from that which calls to our hearts. We trust in that capacity, believing that in time it will open us to lives of compassion, integrity, service and joy.
What makes it challenging is that there is no neat prescription for getting there. We empathize with our 9th graders who told us that being confronted with writing their credos they felt a bit at sea. Who doesn’t? But for them, as for us, the process begins by making a beginning, by planting our flag somewhere and testing what we come up with.
It was Mohandes Gandi who framed the work of his own spiritual development as, in his words, “experiments with truth.” In his autobiography, published some 20 years before his death in 1948, he describes how each formative event in his life – large and small, success and blunder – shaped an evolving and expanding faith that informed a life of principle and practices of nonviolent resistance that have changed the world.
To Gandhi’s eyes, though, his was no hero’s journey. In fact, he writes, “the more I reflect and look back on the past, the more vividly do I feel my limitations.” Instead, he said he saw his own journey simply as a paradigm of the journey we all travel toward whatever we may hope might be true self-realization: harmony, awareness, peace, or, in Gandhi’s words, seeing God face to face, or attaining Moksha, the Hindu state of bliss, release from the cycle of rebirth.
Yet, Gandhi warns against our dwelling on that cosmic sort of end. It can needlessly feed our ego, he says, and distract us from the more pedestrian work of discovering what he calls the “relative truths” that guide our lives. They, he says, “must be my beacon, my shield and buckler.”
The seeker after truth, he adds, “should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”
What Gandhi is raising up here is not an end but a process. Seek the truth in every encounter, he says. Let your life teach you. Take what you learn seriously, but don’t take it as final. Let each experience, each experiment shape your understanding. Key to humility is being wary of presumption. Perhaps it’s better to understand what we bring to an encounter as hypothesis, something we are testing, treating as true – faking it, in a sense – until experience confirms or disconfirms what we have come to believe.
Robert Fulghum’s story that you heard Bob read earlier has a heartbreaking episode at the center of it – the man with terminal cancer who died without telling anyone he was sick. Fulghum links it in a clever way with the children’s game of hide-and-go-seek happening outside his window and the boy who, he says, “hid too well.”
Have you ever known anyone who hid too well? The story couldn’t help bring to mind the man I told you about earlier who I met on the heart surgical floor during my chaplaincy training. I don’t know if he was hiding, but it sure looked to me as if he hadn’t been found. There is, as Fulghum puts it, a grown-up version of hide-and-go-seek that we don’t talk about much. It has to do with wanting to hide, needing to be sought, and being confused about being found.
Like the doctor in Fulghum’s story, we frame it as being considerate, but there’s also a darker side to that: a fear that we will be thought lesser of or we’ll think lesser of ourselves if we reveal ourselves. There is an image – well, let’s be honest, a fiction – that we cultivate to project the appearance that we’re in control, that we have it all together. So, even if we’re not OK, we strive mightily to maintain that image of control. I’m just fine. No problem.
How does this happen? It seems like the game begins in early adulthood when we scatter to the four winds, and work hard to develop that bullet-proof public persona that is so polished that no one will know what’s inside. We don’t actually frame it quite so grimly, but that’s its net effect.
Of course, the truth is that’s not what we want, not by a long shot. What we want is to be known, what we want is love and connection of all kinds. But we fear that who we are, who we really are might not be acceptable to those people who we want to connect with. So, we hide in plain sight and hope that maybe they’ll seek us, or at least they’ll let us hang out with them. If we’re lucky we do get found – really found – by people who not only accept but cherish us. But others of us are burrowed deep in the leaf pile, secure that our true self is safe: safe from disapproval, safe from abuse, safe from shame.
I get it. I understand why we go there. But, oh my, at such a cost. Maybe there’s another way. Maybe there’s a way that opens the door a crack and admits the possibility of opening further.
And it brings us back to our topic today: a way of getting found. It begins, once again, with giving ourselves to something until we find ourselves in it. In order to make a change we need to put ourselves into a place where change can happen.
It’s something like Robert Fulghum’s game of sardines. Instead of scattering, waiting to be found, we align with the ones we seek. Even when it’s uncomfortable at first, we err on the side of building relationship. We may not be sure at first if this connection is going to work, but we stick with it. We fake it in the hope that in time we will make it, that we will create lasting connections that offer a way for us to enter fully into the picture.
There’s no guarantee that any particular connection will work, or will fulfill our initial hopes for it. But at a minimum it gives us practice and at best we create a new node in the web of relationships that supports us.
This applies not only to new people we meet, but even to those who are closest to us. We all experience frustrations with parents, children, partners, siblings and friends, and sometimes we find ourselves in destructive patterns that tear at those vital links in our life.
The same strategy applies. We stay connected, stay in the game. Even if in the moment it feels inauthentic, we affirm how we care. Yeah, OK, we fake it a bit until we have reconnected with the authentic feeling within us.
This is part of what we here can give each other: permission to shift the game from hide-and-go-seek to sardines, to acknowledge that in one way or another we are all at sea struggling to come to terms with that on which we set our hearts.
So, friends, olly-olly-oxen free! Let go of the fears that have kept you hidden away. Come in from wherever you are. It’s a new game and you’re part of it. Get found. Lay claim to your truth. Plant your flag. And share your vision, your wisdom with us that we may each be enriched.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
When times are hard, the first response that many of us make is to withdraw or close down, to find a way to remove ourselves from the conflict or difficulty. But often the healthiest thing we can do is to do our best to stay open and available, to accept the pain that we’re feeling and let it guide us to deeper way of being.
Reading: “The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water” by Mary Oliver
The call came from a friend who I hadn’t heard from in a while. She had had her eye on a job that made her a little nervous but that nonetheless she was excited about. We had talked about this before. She wasn’t sure at first whether she wanted to move, but as time went on she felt the urgency for a change increase to the point where I knew she had a lot of emotional energy invested in it.
The news was disappointing. She hadn’t gotten the job, and even worse wasn’t even sure it was for the right reasons. From the feedback she received she felt they had read things into her background and discerned things about her that weren’t true. So, not only had she lost the opportunity she sought, but the whole process had unsettled her and shaken her confidence. She wondered about how she presented herself and even whether the whole trajectory of her career had jeopardized her options for the future. It was a rough place to be in.
Listening to her, I felt badly, but I was also aware that her tale triggered something a little like panic deep inside me. In a sense it unearthed my own experiences of failure and rejection and all the terrible feelings around them, and I was aware of a small, frightened voice inside me telling me to flee.
But I kept my head. I didn’t find some convenient reason to end the call or jump into “fix-it” mode – offering all sorts of prescriptions for what went wrong and what she should do about it. When a pause came in the conversation, I simply took a breath and invited her to go on.
Frustration and disappointment are part of the warp and weft of our lives, but none of us wants to spend any time with them. They bring us real pain, and we’d just as soon avoid them. Yet, that impulse to flee also serves to isolate us, to disrupt or break the very connections that feed us most deeply. And what is more it disconnects us from ourselves.
So, how do we find the strength not to flee, to remain present, to stay open even when the going gets tough?
Today I want to organize my answer to that question around my understanding of a Buddhist practice that continues to fascinate me the more I explore it. It’s called “Tonglen,” and it translates literally as taking in and sending out. It’s a practice centered in meditation, but the course it follows is different from the way we often understand meditation to work.
Meditation is centered in the breath, and usually in meditation we imagine breathing in energy and vitality and breathing out bad feelings or anything we want to get rid of. In tonglen it is just the opposite: we imagine someone who we know who is suffering and with the inward breath imagine taking their suffering in. Then, with the outward breath we send that person peace and good feelings. In other words, we breathe in what we want to avoid and breathe out what we’d like to keep.
Hmm, you think. Now, how is that a good thing? Why would I want to take that ugly stuff in? Some Buddhist practices even invite the practitioner to imagine it as dark smoke.
Well, to begin with another person’s suffering is not our own. There is no way we can feel it as intensely as she or he does. But taking that suffering in is the beginning of compassion, literally feeling with another. When we sit with another person’s suffering, we don’t belittle or dismiss it. We honor it and affirm the person who is enduring it. It’s not nothing. It’s real. And it matters. That moment of communion alone can make a huge difference in how that person experiences his or her suffering.
Also, because this suffering is not ours we have a perspective on it that it can be hard for the person experiencing it to have. For them, it can seem all-encompassing. It fills the screen, so to speak. But we see the suffering in the much larger context of what you might call the “spaciousness” of this person’s life. We know the inherent goodness of this person, her gifts, his capacities, the larger story. And so we can send him or her the good wishes we truly feel – happiness, joy, peace.
And, of course, this process need not be confined simply to our interactions with others. We can apply it to ourselves as well, though that holds challenges of its own.
Buddhists diagnose the fact of suffering as the chief ill that besets us, and they note that, rather than confront it, many of us devote a great deal of energy to escaping or avoiding it. Our goal is to protect ourselves from unpleasantness. So, we become well practiced at denial and escape.
The problem is that neither strategy is especially effective, and each has the effect of removing us from the world around us, from people we love and even from our true selves. The fact is that there is a crack in everything. The world will go its own way regardless of our wishes, and every one of us is fragile and flawed. So, rather than run from our pain, why not accept it – or, who knows, even embrace it?
That sounds good. Very compassionate, to be sure, and yet, let’s face it, a little scary. None of us really wants to spend much time with that which brings us pain. We want to be happy, happy, and we fear that dwelling on the hard stuff may just bring us down, possibly even to a place from which we can’t get up. And then there’s the shame that we sometimes attach to what brought us pain. Who needs to go there?
Yet, here’s the amazing thing. Sometimes when we own our pain, when we sit with it without judgment, without beating up on ourselves, we find that our capacity to endure it, to walk, as it were, next to it, is greater than we thought. We can even learn to extend some compassion to ourselves, not in a self-pitying way but in a way that acknowledges the pain as what it is, that acknowledges the wound it has given us, but still appreciates that the pain does not define us.
And just as that is true of us, it is true of others, too. It can help if we remember that there is nothing unique about the suffering we endure. The circumstances are ours, but pain is a universal experience. And this can be a point that opens our hearts. We soften our judgment against ourselves and others once we dismantle the shields we created to protect ourselves from our pain and instead accept it.
What’s more this acceptance makes us more available to be of comfort and support to others. Acceptance of our pain gives us a strength of sorts grounded in the realization that we need not be defined by our wounds. Instead, we are defined by our goodness, and that goodness that opens a broad spaciousness in our being, spaciousness that can hold and release the pain of others and respond to them with loving kindness.
Mary Oliver makes this point in the poem we heard earlier comparing our sorrows to water lilies with their roots sunk in the pond bottom, in her wonderful image, “the mud-hive, gas sponge, reeking leaf yard, swirling broth of life” that send skyward on tall wands fists with beaks of lace that tear the surface of the water and break open over the dark water.
Our wounds, in other words, can be our gift. They can be the agent that opens us to deeper living and to deeper compassion with others, that help us break through habits that paralyze our lives.
So, in tonglen meditation we take in the suffering we experience or that others experience and hold it, not belittling it or dismissing it, but honoring it, acknowledging it, not as the whole story, only part of the story we are living.
And then, with an eye to the wider truth of our lives, the deeper beauty within us, we send a wish of peace, that we, that whoever we are with or whoever we are holding in our hearts will take in and experience a sense of the beautiful spaciousness of our, of their lives.
This is framed in Buddhist practice, but it also resonates deeply with my understanding of our tradition as we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. When we suffer, we have a sense of ourselves diminished, as a little less worthy than we had thought we were before. The gift we can give to ourselves is to help each other see the beauty, the wholeness that remains within us despite the circumstances.
We don’t distract ourselves with imagined ways of evading or escaping the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but we help ourselves understand how they are nested in a larger truth of our lives. What had seemed so scary or shameful was not as big, as overwhelming as it had seemed, and from that perspective we find that a way forward presents itself that is true to our heart.
Part of what we can do as a community is to help each other see that way forward through our compassion. We accept that pain is a part of life, something that we will each encounter, but that it does not define us. So, we can be available to each other, accepting without judgment, making room, offering space, until we are able to tear through the surface of our sorrow and break open.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Want to grow? You’ll need to get your hands dirty. At this multigenerational service we explore some of the lessons that the soil teaches us about supporting and sustaining life.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
My wife, Debbie, has begun a new practice when we go out on our walks. Periodically, she’ll just stop and jump. She’s not jumping over or onto anything in particular – just jumping, for the sake of jumping. She started this after reading that she might be able to reduce the gradual loss of bone mass in her hips and legs by mildly stressing them in this way. Just jumping something like 20 times a day, it seems, can halt the loss of bone density – something that is a particular concern for women – and in some cases even improve it.
My wife, Debbie, has begun a new practice when we go out on our walks. Periodically, she’ll just stop and jump. She’s not jumping over or onto anything in particular – just jumping, for the sake of jumping. She started this after reading that she might be able to reduce the gradual loss of bone mass in her hips and legs by mildly stressing them in this way. Just jumping something like 20 times a day, it seems, can halt the loss of bone density – something that is a particular concern for women – and in some cases even improve it.
Now, of course, I need to caution that I’m not prescribing this technique for you. You need to decide for yourself what physical exercise makes sense for your situation. But, when Wes introduced the topic for the sermon he hoped I’d write, it occurred to me that Debbie’s jumping had already anticipated it. It’s an interesting idea that I find challenges some of the ways we think about how we organize our lives. So, I welcome you to open your minds, and as you consider it reflect with me on what implications it might have for our religious lives as well.
The notion we’ll be working with today is something called “Antifragility,” and it was invented by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a one-time financial trader who now teaches in a field called “risk engineering.”
Taleb begins with the premise that the way we thrive in a world full of uncertainties is not to flee from risk but to work with it. As I said, it’s counterintuitive to the way most of us tend to think. We work to make our lives predictable and so protect ourselves against risk. But Taleb argues that risk is not only unavoidable, it can actually be a spur to growth and make us stronger.
So, what is this “Antifragility”? Well, we begin with the idea of fragility. Things that are fragile break easily. So, that would seem to imply that the opposite of fragility is robustness, resilience, the quality of resisting being broken. But Taleb sees it another way. Things that are antifragile, he says, don’t resist forces that threaten to break them, they gain from them.
Debbie’s jumping is a good example. Our bones are strong, but they are also at risk of breaking, a risk that increases as we get older: our bones get more brittle to the point where any fall might result in a serious break. We can do things to reduce the risk of breakage. We can keep ourselves fit, make ourselves more robust, and limit our activities to avoid circumstances that put us at risk of falling.
But, as some of you have discovered, surprisingly serious falls can happen just about anywhere. And even if we eat well and stay healthy, our bones still lose density over time. Apparently, though, one way to slow and even reverse that process is to give our bones a little stress. Small jumps now can reduce the impact of big falls later.
This is true of other systems in our body as well. We know, for example, that exercise that works our cardiovascular system strengthens it. Taleb goes so far as to say that stress is how our bodies learn about their environments, and when we deprive ourselves of stress – the right kind of stress, something we’re more likely to call stimulation – we increase our own fragility and imperil our health.
He pushes this to our inner lives as well: all of us, he says, need some stressors that make us wonder and think, some push-back against our pat certainties, ways to engage our hearts. “If you are alive,” he says, “something deep in your soul likes a certain measure or randomness and disorder.”
Indeed, antifragility, he claims, “looks like the secret of life,” or how it is that living things have endured across the millennia, despite the assaults of one extinction event after another. The trick, of course, is that while life may be antifragile, individuals aren’t. The dinosaurs couldn’t endure the circumstances of their extinction, but life did.
The perspective that Taleb seems to want to urge on us is to see randomness and uncertainty as inherent to anything we do. So, as I’ve framed it today, we should count on finding chaos everywhere. Again, this is contrary to the way we like to organize our lives. We like to create islands of stability in our lives where things are predictable. We look for things we can count on and organize what we do around them.
But Taleb insists this grasping for predictable outcomes is an illusion. The parable of the Chinese farmer that Pat read earlier is an example of this. When the farmer’s horse runs away, the villagers console him. What a terrible thing! But the farmer is not so quick to make a judgment, and sure enough the next day his horse returns with a herd of others. But this blessing turns out to be mixed when his son breaks his leg trying to train a horse. Ach, bad luck! But maybe not, since it leaves his son out of the fighting that suddenly erupts.
The parable teaches that we need to be cautious about how we assess the implications of events in our lives. That means steering away from “catastrophizing” – oh no, we’re doomed! – or smugly congratulating ourselves – well, we’re in clover now.
Another way of looking at the story is that we need to be careful what we assume is predictable. For example, none of the incidents in the parable were things that the Chinese farmer was likely to predict. They are what Taleb calls “black swans” – events that are surprising and rare, that could not have been easily predicted from prior circumstances. When such things happen, we’re inclined to discount them as flukes that we needn’t attend to, while paying attention to what appear to be predictable patterns in our experience. Yet, we know from experience that many of the most important events in our lives – from who we meet to how we make our way in the world – are inherently unpredictable.
But we tell ourselves otherwise, going about planning our lives as if we could control them. All of this worries Taleb, who argues that acting this way blinds us to variability in the world and when adopted, which he insists that it is, by many of our major institutions in the economy, political life, education and more can get us into difficulty.
We look for strategies to reduce risk, to make our lives more predictable. This may be possible within limits, he says, but in the end there is no escaping randomness and volatility. By seeking to remove the uncertainties, the stressors that impinge on us we, in his words, “fragilize” our lives: we increase the chances that a “black swan” event will do real damage.
So, how does Taleb suggest we respond? Do we simply leave ourselves to the whims of fate? Here’s where he introduces another term that came from his work in the financial markets, which he calls “optionality.”
Essentially, as I understand it, this means seeking out circumstances where there is a good chance that good things can happen and taking advantage of them when they do.
For example, we can’t map out the circumstances for when we will meet the person that will be our life’s partner, but we can place ourselves in situations where we are likely to meet people who share our interests. If you like hiking, join a hiking club; if you like music, go to a blues club or the symphony. You can’t be assured that it will work out, but you improve your chances of a good outcome by your choices.
It’s a strategy that rather than fighting the randomness of events, seeks to take advantage of it. We put ourselves in a situation with a number of positive options without betting on one in particular, hoping that in the end we will get something close to what we think we want.
The trick is that to use this strategy, we also have to be comfortable making mistakes – say, a string loser dates until we find the right person. What’s important in this scenario is that the mistakes are small ones – bad dates, say, rather than a bad marriage – so that we have an opportunity to adjust our strategy. That club was a little sleazy. Let’s try a different one.
It’s the tinkerer’s approach to making our way in the world, rather than that of the master planner. And, whether it appeals to us or not, Taleb insists, it is the way of things. We stumble around in a world we don’t really understand and through experience put together ideas of how things work that we continually tweak and test. It is a viewpoint that sees mistakes or bad outcomes simply as information, bumps we find a way to overcome. But, in the end each one makes us more adept at navigating the world around us.
This is all fine as long as we’re aware of our mistakes and upfront with others about them. But, what if we are insulated from our mistakes or able to keep them quiet? The negative effect of our decisions doesn’t go away. It just gets passed on to someone else.
An example of this that Taleb cites is the 2008 financial crisis. It was an episode brought on largely by a limited number of people who made risky deals that brought them great gain and little personal risk. When they collapsed, they passed the pain on to others and it endangered the entire financial system.
So, in any endeavor Taleb warns against working with anyone who isn’t invested in the result, who doesn’t have what he calls “skin in the game.” If I put myself at risk to some degree, I’m more likely to work for a positive outcome, and in doing so I reduce the fragility, the overall riskiness of the endeavor because I’m helping to share the load. Indeed, in some cases I may go even farther and sacrifice something of myself or my situation because it will help the larger good. That itself would be an antifragile act since it would transmute the pain of an individual to a strengthening of the whole.
So, what does all of this have to do with the religious life? Well, in keeping with our monthly worship theme of Revelation our dance with antifragility does offer up some truths that open new ways of thinking about what we hope to accomplish as a congregation.
First, it seems to me that religion itself can be an intensely antifragile enterprise. That’s because through activities that take us out of our comfort zone it helps us grow. We come here and find a diverse community of people with different backgrounds, different beliefs. We are challenged in worship, in classes, in small group ministry, in justice work that takes us into the community to think about things that otherwise wouldn’t have crossed our minds, to reflect on them and consider new ways of looking at ourselves, each other and the world. That is to say, when religion is doing its job, it is changing us and inviting us deeper into lives of compassion, integrity, service and joy.
It’s also antifragile in that we share the risk we encounter. We care for and support each other. We collaborate in the work of raising each other’s children. We attend to each other when we are ill or in crisis. We celebrate each other’s successes, and we mourn each other’s deaths. We affirm it in the covenant that joins us and reminds us of the part we each play in this enterprise. And, like exercise, the more deeply we are committed to it, the more we involve ourselves in it, the greater benefit it gives us.
Also, our Unitarian Universalism has some particularly unique antifragile qualities. Our community is centered not in a fragile, monolithic faith statement to which we are directed to adhere but in a path intended to guide us toward spiritual maturity. We are invited to reflect on and develop practices that help us know and name our core values and sense of purpose.
It is work that we begin by going deep inside ourselves but that we complete in our interactions with others who join with us in a similar spirit of exploration and in our service to the larger world. We do it in different venues that suit our own particular needs, but each grounded in a larger purpose.
To say that we might count on chaos, on volatility and uncertainty is merely to say that we needn’t fear it. As beings of inherent worth and dignity – resourceful, antifragile creatures – we have evolved to cope with a changing world: in fact, not only cope with it but employ it to our advantage.
It gives us enough confidence that we, like the figure on the cover of your order of service, might look into the abyss of uncertainty and offer each other a few notes.
The pink cherry tree outside the window of my home office is done blooming, its delicate petals blasted away by spring’s bluster, replaced by clusters of tiny green leaves poking out of the ends of branches in origami-like folds that seem to open as I watch.
Each year this tree serves as my living reminder of Easter: a non-descript presence through the winter, its spare, dark limbs calling no attention to themselves until suddenly one day in early spring the tree explodes into brilliant beauty.
Each year, even though I know it’s coming, it takes my breath away. Especially on bright spring mornings when the sun lights up the flowers, it’s hard to get any work done. I can’t take myself away from the window as I stare in dumb awe.
Whatever our theology, this is the impulse that this season stirs in us: the capacity to be struck dumb by the beauty of resurgent life. Even though we know it’s coming, there is something astonishing about how the world around us awakens, and it puts us in the mood to wonder what else is possible. What other great, though improbable, things might the world be capable of, or might we be capable of?
The Christian story of Jesus’ death and resurrection embodies that kind of wondering. How might it be that what follows from death is not an ending, but a beginning? And what might it take for us to live as if that were so?
For what is interesting about the Easter story is not really its supernatural details around the empty grave but what it suggests about what ultimately endures among us. It’s not individual persons or their accomplishments, no matter how grand and glorious they may be. It’s something about how we are changed and can become ourselves agents of transformation.
I’ve brought the Flower Ceremony into this service today because I think we can find a similar message within it. But before we go on, it’s worth lingering a moment to introduce it and Norbert Capek, the Unitarian minister who was responsible not only for the Flower Ceremony but arguably for the existence of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia.
Capek was born 1870 in an area of Europe known at the time as Bohemia. He was raised a Roman Catholic, but later joined a Baptist youth group and headed off to seminary, where he was inspired by the emergent Social Gospel movement. A tireless, writer, speaker, preacher, Capek became head of Baptist churches in Bohemia, but soon realized his own liberal leanings were carrying him elsewhere.
With the coming of World War I, Capek fled to the United States, after being warned that he was seen as a threat by authorities. On arriving in the U.S., he found a settlement with a large Slovak Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, but in time he found that the theological gulf between him and the Baptist church had grown too wide for him to continue.
Capek quit the position and he and his wife, Maya, began visiting different churches. They recount that it was their children’s enthusiasm for the Unitarian Church in Orange, New Jersey that persuaded them to attend there. Never underestimate the power of religious education!
With the war’s end the Capeks returned to Prague and with some support from American Unitarian leaders set about building a Unitarian presence there. They opened what they called the Religious Liberal Fellowship in 1922 and drew standing-room crowds. In addition to sermons, Capek composed hymns, led adult classes, and created a counseling center. Within a decade the congregation grew to 3,200 – at the time the largest Unitarian congregation in the world – and about a half dozen other congregations had been started around the country.
The Flower Ceremony was an innovation that the Capeks introduced in June 1923 toward the end of their first year in Prague. At first the services were quite stark, comprising a sermon and a couple of pieces of music. In time Capek added hymns he had written, but he felt they also needed a more spiritual component.
He was treading on tricky ground, though. His congregation was a mix of former Catholics, one-time orthodox Protestants and former liberal Jews, all of whom were wary of ritual. What gesture might help bind these people more closely as a community but not alienate them?
He decided to try an experiment. Each person was asked to bring to the service a flower of his or her choice from their garden or the roadside – even just a twig. Each flower would signify that person’s decision of their own free will to join the others, and the bouquet created would be a symbol of the gathered community. Once the bouquet was complete it would be brought forward and blessed with a prayer from Capek, then returned to the rear of the assembly. At the end of the service, those in attendance would be invited to take a different flower from the one they had brought and leave with it.
That gesture, he said, would symbolize that those who participated accepted one another and agreed to share in both the “beauties and responsibilities” of life in community: Recognizing, in other words, that a spiritually centered life requires that we not only give, but also receive.
Capek’s ceremony was informed by his sunny theology that, as he put it, there is “a hidden cry for harmony with the Infinite” in every person and that the goal of religion is to open the way to each person discovering that connection.
The ceremony was a hit from the beginning and spread widely, and with Capek’s urging the Unitarian movement grew as well. But the rise of Nazi Germany put a chill on liberal religion, and Capek was one of the more noted voices urging his countrymen to hold out against them.
Shortly after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Gestapo broke into Capek’s apartment, confiscated his books and sermons and shortly afterward arrested him and his daughter for treason. He wrote the poem you heard our Speaking Choir read while he was in prison in Dresden. Even there, he insisted, he found a source of strength and connection to the eternal. Prisoners who were with him testified after the war that his quiet conviction fortified them in that grim time.
A German appeals court in April 1942 concluded that Capek was innocent of treason, but the Gestapo ignored the decision and sent him and his daughter to the Dachau concentration camp. Records of invalid transports indicate that he was gassed to death in October 1942.
Capek’s wife, Maya, survived the war, though she didn’t learn of her husband’s death until it was over. She brought the flower ceremony to the U.S. in the 1940s, was herself ordained a minister and briefly served a congregation in Massachusetts.
Nearly 50 years after her death, the ceremony is not as widely practiced as it once was. And here I must admit I may be part of the problem. In my 11 years as your minister, this is, I believe, the second time I have brought it into our worship. Some of you have asked about it, and I’ve tended to nod, “Uh-huh,” and move on. So, here on Easter Sunday might be a good time to make a confession: It’s not that I don’t like the Flower Ceremony – what’s not to like about passing around bunches of beautiful flowers on a sunny spring morning?
It’s just that in my experience, as religious ritual it tends to be, well, pretty light if not downright . . . um . . . empty!
I know, I know. No offense, Norbert and Maya! But really as far as I can see, this is not your fault; it’s ours. Not infrequently in UU congregations the flower ceremony tends to be an occasion to wax poetically about the beauty of flowers, about how they’re all individual, just like we’re all individual and beautiful in our own way. Yay, us!
OK, fine, but, really? Is that all we’ve got to say? There must be a reason why this ceremony captured the imaginations of hundreds of liberally minded people in one of Europe’s most sophisticated cities in the 1930s, a time of intense turmoil, and it wasn’t so that they could smile at each other and say, “Aren’t we special?”
So, in returning to this ceremony, I was determined to look for the energy, the deeper connection that made this ceremony such a transformative moment in that emergent religious community, and what it still might hold for us today.
I think we begin by understanding that the point of this thing was not the flower. It was illuminating to read again that Capek asked his congregants to bring flowers from their homes or roadsides, even just a twig! He wasn’t looking for hothouse wonders from the florist shops. He was asking members of his congregation to share of themselves. The only way that this diverse group would come together was if they were each fully present and fully accepted as they were.
Also, the point of this ritual was not to celebrate each participant as an individual. It was to introduce his congregation to the hard work of building community with the lovely metaphor of creating a bouquet. Capek’s theology spoke to this yearning within each of us to make deeper connections, those sometimes electric, sometimes quietly profound experiences when the world somehow knits itself together and something awakens in us that wasn’t there before.
And he recognized that the experience of community is what triggers those connections in what we free ourselves to give to each other, and what allow ourselves to receive.
We are reminded of where the flower comes from: a plant rooted in the soil – perhaps cozied and fertilized in a garden, perhaps punching up through the leaf mold of the forest floor. It comes with a context that we must get to know and take account of. And that context is what makes it possible for it to bloom.
It’s telling that the Flower Ceremony remained a touchstone for Unitarian communities in Czechoslovakia, even as increasing political pressures made liberal religion a dangerous place to affiliate. The ceremony was an opportunity to renew the heart connection of that community, and the center of value from which it arose: that fundamental assertion of the essential worth of each person and the bond that knit them together.
It didn’t depend on Capek specifically; it depended on the good will and unbroken commitment of each participant. And this brings us back to the Easter story. The true miracle I find at Easter is not the rolling away of the stone. It is the endurance of a community centered in the spirit of love, despite the death of its proclaimer.
How might it be that what follows from death is not an ending, but a beginning? And what might it take for us to live as if that were so? The short answer is that somehow we are changed, and we make ourselves agents of change.
Robert Frost’s poem that we heard earlier points to the brief, elusive pleasures of spring – the bees, the birds, the stray blossoms dancing in the breeze – a moment to savor ahead of the uncertain harvest that awaits us all.
And this, he says, is love, and nothing else is love, that evanescent, soul-stirring experience that wells up within us or that suddenly explodes into our awareness after a dark winter of the soul. Imponderable, really: something before which we simply stand in dumb awe.
But that’s OK. As Frost says, what’s demanded is not that we understand it, but that we learn to fulfill it. Each of us goes about our lives planted in our own soil, yearning for something that we can’t quite name. As Capek wrote in prison with the gas ovens of Dachau waiting, there is a source of strength within us, that if cultivated may give rise to something beautiful.
It is the message that Capek’s flower ceremony still communicates today, inviting us for the sake of our own awakening to build the disciplines of giving and receiving so that we might be agents of each other’s and the world’s blossoming.
So, as you leave today do take a flower with you – even if you didn’t bring one. We’ve got extras. And as you do, reflect on how we build the bonds here that help realize our hope in the world, how you might offer yourself more fully into this community and how we might invite you to receive. As we make space for our mutual blooming, we can ponder what improbable things we might do to bring more beauty, more integrity, more light into the world.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
We are now only a few weeks past the latest round of national elections. And amid the tally of winners and losers is the ongoing rumination over the direction of our political life. I’ll admit to being among those feeling discouraged by the results this year, though I try to find comfort in the observation that American politics tends to follow the path of a pendulum, swinging one way before inexorably turning the other. I’m hoping for a turn. You may feel the other way. That’s the kind of dynamic tension we live in, something that’s been true since our nation’s founding. And still, despite all of that, there is something holds us together.
READINGS
From The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In an ear of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
From Across That Bridge by John Lewis
“All our work, all our struggle, all our days ad up to one purpose: to reconcile ourselves t the truth, and finally accept once and for all that we are one people, one family, the human family . . . . Our struggle to affirm the light despite oppression, depression, conflict, poverty, hunger, disease, violence, and brutality is a loving gift we give to ourselves ad our another to help humanity move toward the day wen we can readily separate the light from the darkness and the equal incandescent beauty of the light that is in us all.”
SERMON
There was a festival feeling in the air as we marched west along Selma Avenue last Sunday. A brilliant sun was in our eyes, and people were gathered along the street, smiling with something between amusement and amazement in their eyes as this flood of humanity passed before them.
The tenor and pace of the march changed, though, as we approached Broad Street. It was here that we began to get a sense of the true scope of this gathering. Turning left to face the Alabama River, we saw for the first time some five blocks in the distance that iconic marker of the Civil Rights movement with the heavy block letters spread across its central girder: Edmund Pettus Bridge.
More remarkable, though, was the amazing crowd of people spread before us. You get a sense of it from the photo I took that appears on the cover of your order of service. The crowd covered every bit of the bridge and the street leading up to it. Organizers had also put up a massive screen that you see to the left where images of and video interviews with major figures in the 1965 Voting Rights campaign in Selma were projected. I happened to catch the moment when an image of the Rev. James Reeb, the Unitarian Universalist minister who was murdered in Selma, was displayed.
What this picture doesn’t show is the many others who spilled over into side streets leading up to the bridge and were lined up for several city blocks behind us. Once we turned onto Broad Street it was no longer possible to march: We inched ahead step by step as we could. It must have taken 20 minutes to walk the few blocks to the bridge. I’ve found myself in crowded settings like these before, but I can’t remember ever having been in one that was as diverse. Even more, I can’t remember having been a part of a diverse gathering where the racial animus or just discomfort that seems so often to lie just below the surface when white and black gather in this country was so low.
As we moved forward, it seemed to me that the festival feeling that we had felt earlier shifted into something deeper. Part of it, I’m sure, was the weighty sense of moment. Here we were – black and white – celebrating with our presence our joined affirmation of the principle won by the struggle of Civil Rights leaders 50 years before – that all people have the right to a role in deciding their own destinies, and that that right is embodied in unhindered access to the vote. Ultimately winning that right was an extraordinary victory that ended a pattern of oppression that had been in place for centuries. And here in Selma in 1965 was the tipping point, hard won through injury and death but won all the same.
But beside that sense of occasion, there was something else in the air. It felt to me like an easiness, communicated in smiles and casual banter. Pressed together as we were, there was no pushing or impatience. We took our time, and it was OK. Looking from the crest of the bridge on that picturesque bend in the Alabama River, listening to children laughing and clusters of people singing freedom songs, it was easy get lulled into a kind of happy “Kumbaya” moment.
But on the bus ride back I remembered remarks from the Rev. Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at a service only three days before at the Baptist church where the Selma campaign had its origin to remember the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. As good as it may feel to celebrate, she said, our nation is at “a critical moment” when, “we must shift our mentality and our behavior and our practices. We must do something radically different if we are going to be able to continue move forward as a nation and a world.”
And it’s true: 50 years after the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, our nation is challenged with a different image: blood on the pavement in Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; Cleveland, Ohio, and elsewhere, and ugly truths about persistent disparities in the lives of black and white Americans.
How far we have to go can be measured by the fact that as we celebrate the Civil Rights victories of the 60s the most powerful slogan of our time is that “black lives matter.”
Yes, we have both elected and reelected the first black American president. Yes, African-Americans are media, entertainment and sports superstars and head major corporations. All that is true, and still racism remains imbedded in the fabric of American life.
The difference from the 60s is that the way it makes itself known is less obvious . . . at least to those of us who are white. We haven’t been followed around in stores by suspicious retail clerks. We haven’t had jobs or mortgages denied for vague reasons. We haven’t been pulled over, repeatedly, for no apparent reason and searched spread-eagle outside our cars. All this goes on, and not just out there in the big, wide world, but right here in Asheville.
Even that, though, is just the surface. It gets more frightening as you move down the economic ladder, where opportunity for employment is less and the chance for entanglement in the legal system is greater. It’s a world that few of us here encounter, and yet it is devastating and even destroying the lives of thousands every year. What’s especially frightening now is the escalating level of violence that has resulted in the needless shooting deaths of black men and now the tragic deaths of police officers.
So, what now? Last December our Associate Minister Lisa Bovee-Kemper challenged you to consider how we as a congregation might respond. She presented you quotes from a couple of our colleagues: One was from The Rev. Tom Schade, who said that “We who believe in people must join in the movement that demands that black lives matter. It is the cutting edge of the assertion that all human beings have inherent worth and dignity.”
The other was from the Rev. Victoria Safford, who observed that: “Our longest march may be the one that takes us down from the dais of competitive debate and rational inquiry into the common ground of listening, witnessing, mourning and embracing.”
Lisa closed announcing, “I stand before you this morning with no easy answers, no clear call to action. I stand before you brokenhearted and tired, feeling as if the darkness has come too close, and I can’t see the way forward. But I have faith in the power of goodwill to act. I believe we can turn that anxiety into anger and the anger into action. I have faith that we will find a way forward, together.”
So, we announced our way forward by posting “Black Lives Matter” on our sign and convened a meeting. Those of us at the meeting resolved that before we decide what to do, we need to know what we’re talking about. People were encouraged to attend the upcoming Building Bridges anti-racism training or make contacts with community groups like the NAACP. And we announced that everyone in the congregation would be invited to read Michelle Alexander’s path-breaking book, The New Jim Crow, and that we would organize groups to discuss it.
I hope that many of you had a chance to at least look through Alexander’s book. It can be dense in places, but she makes a devastating case for how many African-Americans are being denied essential rights of citizenship.
The irony, she writes, is that just as Civil Rights laws were taking effect, tearing down century-old Jim Crow laws intended to intimidate and exclude African-Americans from civil life, a new raft of laws and practices were being adopted that accomplished the same purpose. They weren’t billed that way. Instead, they were offered as tools to protect public safety. But, how they were enforced assured that a generation of young African-American men would be swept away and stigmatized, ripping apart families and neighborhoods across the country.
The numbers alone tell a shocking story. Since 1972, the number of people held in prisons or jails has risen from 350,000 to more than 2 million and a disproportionate share of them are African-American. The number grows even larger when you add those on probation or parole. In fact, there are cities in the U.S. today where more than half of all young adult black men are under correctional control.
The main driver of this increase, Alexander shows, is a program that once was highly praised: the War on Drugs. You recall the grim stories of crack houses and drug gangs turning urban centers into war zones. Politicians promised to “come down hard” on the perpetrators with laws that vastly increased prison sentences for even the smallest drug offenses.
Set aside for a moment the fact that the War on Drugs was declared at a time when drug use was actually on the decline and that treatment is a far more effective preventive for drug use than prison. What devastated the African-American community was that police targeted their neighborhoods for enforcement, even though studies showed that whites used drugs at equal rates. That meant that in the highly publicized perp walks of drug dealers the face in the news almost always was African-American. That, in turn, fed racist assumptions that intensified the drive to push even harder.
Meanwhile, African-American men were being warehoused for years, and when finally released discovered that they were tainted for life by laws that forbid those convicted of crimes from participating in civil society. They were unable to vote, to obtain licenses for most professions, to obtain housing or food assistance. Even when not forbidden to hold a job, their conviction was a stain that often shut them out. The American script that anyone with gumption can make it in life was unavailable to them.
The net effect of all of this, Michelle Alexander argues, has been to create a racialized caste system that devastates lives and threatens to defeat any effort of social reform. So, what to do? Well, here’s where it gets hard because this state of affairs forces us all, white and black, to examine ways of thinking that unknowingly perpetuate it.
Alexander says that what distinguishes the “New Jim Crow” from the old is that it is driven not by racial hostility but by racial indifference. We begin with the simple notion that those caught up in the criminal justice system got there by their own choice. Nobody made you buy that cocaine – right? Commit the crime, do the time!
Except, of course, we know that’s not the way the world works. I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I invite you to reflect on what laws you have violated in your life. Ever smoked or dealt marijuana, or maybe even taken cocaine? Or, maybe your brother, sister, friend? Many people make foolish choices. Even Barak Obama admitted to “doing some blow” when he was young.
But he, and most of us, grew up in families or communities where police were not vigilantly watching for drug use, and even if caught, sympathetic police or judges often could be persuaded to give us a break. As a rule, young African-American men don’t get that break.
So, we fool ourselves if we pretend that race is not a factor in how laws are enforced. This is what drives the fury of African-Americans in places like Ferguson and even here in Asheville. And it helps explain how African-Americans see racial animus in police officers even if the officers don’t feel it.
The truth is that race does make a difference and has made a difference ever since our nation’s founding, and to pretend that it doesn’t is to perpetuate an injustice. In the end, we are left to declare that it is unacceptable, it is morally wrong to write off a generation of young men because they got themselves entangled with the law, to demonize them as evil-doers who “had it coming” and never need concern us again.
Preparing for this service, I visited the discussion groups who were working through Michelle Alexander’s book and found that many of us followed a similar arc in our responses. First: anger over the injustice she so persuasively describes, but then something like deep sadness and remorse for the terrible toll all this has taken, for how our own racism that has blinded and distracted us.
My own moment came in the last chapter of Alexander’s book when she sums up her case and makes the argument that for those who want to make a difference, the chief work before is not tinkering rules and legislation – as badly as the laws need to be changed – but the building of a movement and with it a sense of personal investment.
Ultimately, she writes: “It is the failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed in the United States.”
And that’s it, isn’t it? That simple. Reading that forced me to confront, once again, the excuses and evasions I use to avoid letting my heart be touched by the wanton cruelty of racism that unfolds before me every day that I open the newspaper.
To say that “Black Lives Matter” is to declare that we do care, that we are ready to open ourselves to the truth of the travesty that racism makes of our community and our nation and the way it inevitably poisons us all.
Back in Selma at a Living Legacy conference preceding the bridge crossing, I heard the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed discuss what led the pioneers of our movement to heed the call from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma. We assume, he said, that people were drawn by “the righteousness of the cause and the magnitude of the injustice.” That was there, yes. But to a one, he discovered, it was relationship that compelled them to go: relationships to people and communities, especially African-American people and communities, that got them on those planes, cars and buses regardless of the clear risk of that choice.
So he posed the question for those of us who are mapping how we as individuals, as congregations, as a religious movement might respond to the strife we’re living amid now: with whom are you in relationship?
It’s a question I pose to you, too. Because, if we are going to engage in this work, it needs to be on the basis of more than high-minded principle. We need to have skin in the game. We need to care, and that begins with relationship. As Mark Morrison-Reed put it: when your brother, your sister, your friend, your grandson calls and says they need you to come, you are compelled to go. It doesn’t matter if you have all the answers or can solve all the problems. What matters is that you are there.
The fantasy I hold to is that that glimpse of peace that I experienced on the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just a fleeting moment but a foretaste of the future, a future that we here might be agents in bringing about, where all people learn to be easy with one another, where caring, respect, and love flow freely among us.
I’m not sure of the best way forward. I just know that we have to move. I’m encouraged to hear how many of you have been prompted by this initiative to find your own way. I look forward to us sharing our learnings and inspirations. I’m willing to accept that we’ll make mistakes along the way because I know that the focus of our work will not be getting it right with the proper wording and the proper gestures, but the building of connections – sometimes messy, sometimes wonderful, but sure to change our lives.
In all of this, I am comforted by the words of John Lewis, grievously wounded at the foot of the Pettus bridge, a foot soldier for voting rights who went on to become one of our shining leaders.
All of our work, he said, points to a simple truth: that we are one human family, one people, and that the struggle we endure to overcome the many ills that persist among us – brutality, poverty, oppression – is a loving gift we make to each other that we might finally see the incandescent beauty within us all.
Photo taken by Rev. Mark Ward at the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. (March 2015)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Fires set by mobs rousted Joseph Priestley from his home and laboratory, but weren’t enough stop him from sailing for America and spreading views dissenting from the state church that gave birth to one of the early threads of Unitarianism here.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Along with many UUs, for years I struggled over how and even whether to use the word “faith” to describe my religious orientation. And then I had my own awakening concerning just what I think that word points to.
Faith. For most of my life it wasn’t anything that I thought much about. Yes, from an early age I was a pretty regular church attender. I’ve told you about growing up in the Unitarian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, a booming, young church in the 1950s and 60s. I felt safe and welcome there, and even more, young as I was, I felt like I mattered. But, faith wasn’t really a word that was used to describe what bound us together. We might have used words like “share values” or “a sense of community.”
In fact, I think that if you had asked them, many of the people attending that congregation would have told you that “faith” was something that they had come to that church to get away from.
“Faith,” in their eyes, was something that they associated with the churches of their childhoods where catechisms and Bible stories laid out a belief structure that pretty much was beyond question. Good doubters that they were, though, they did ask questions and probed seeming contradictions and at some point by some person were admonished that they simply need to “have faith.” That reply, they would have told you, prompted a cascade of thoughts and feelings, but the net effect was that in time they drifted away from that community, and often from religion entirely.
Still, something tugged at them. Perhaps it came with the birth of children, or a restlessness sitting with the Sunday paper, or the query of a friend, or a particular book, or movie. Somehow the “big” questions of life started pestering them or perhaps that dark night of the soul arrived, and they thought, “Well, maybe there’s something else out there.” And so they made the rounds and ended up eventually at a Unitarian congregation: nice people, interesting services, and no talk about “having faith.”
Perhaps this story is something like your own. If so, you may be feeling a little nervous now: “Oh, no, what are we doing talking about faith?” So, let’s begin by clearing the decks here. In my understanding of faith, I am informed by one of the great liberal theologians of the 20th century: Paul Tillich. In a book published in the 1950s he lamented how use of the word “faith” had been misconstrued.
“Almost all the struggles between faith and knowledge,” he said, “are rooted in the wrong understanding of faith as a type of knowledge which has a low degree of evidence but is supported by religious authority.” We are left with the idea that faith is something that we get from someone else and that we adopt by a kind of act of will. If you don’t have it, you haven’t tried hard enough.
This sets up the traditional conflict of faith and reason. In fact, Tillich said, there is no contradiction between reason and faith, as it rightly understood. Faith, he said, is not about what we know, but how we feel about what we know: not about how our mind engages with the world, but how our heart does.
It is highly personal, something that arises in each individual in response to her or his own experience. It is that felt sense that connects us to the world around us in the deepest way. In Tillich’s words, it is the state of being ultimately concerned.
“Ultimately concerned.” That’s a pretty abstract idea, but it points to an intimate experience. Essentially, faith is what underlies our sense of wellbeing. It is what we hold to because we cannot possibly not hold to it. It is what gets us out of bed in the morning and lets us settle into sleep at night. It is what centers us when our lives have been knocked off kilter.
All of us have our moments of feeling alienated or disconnected. It is the kind of existential despair that makes our lives seem absent of meaning. It does no good at those times to say, “Buddy, you’ve just got to have faith.” What we need instead is a way of connecting with that original sense of wholeness that we were born with. Ultimacy, to my way of thinking, is that intimation, that felt sense that we are bound up in it all – the vast, mysterious beauty of all things – that we are now and ever will be home.
I remember an incident many years ago when I was a senior in high school. I had applied to five liberal arts colleges, all of them competitive, but within my grasp, I was assured. Then the day came when five thin envelopes arrived in the mail, and I learned that I had been rejected by all five.
Neither of my parents was home. All I could think of to do was to launch out to a tree nursery across the street and walk and walk, brooding. For some time in recalling that episode, I told myself that with that walk in the woods I was just getting some air to take my mind off that crushing news. Yes, it did help in that way, and of course I did find a way to college and all the rest. But I realize now that something else was going on out there on those paths of the nursery. I was, in fact, getting in touch with the ground of my faith.
I found something that day that I have come back to time and time again. Amid my despair something in the world called me back to wholeness. It is said that in the fraction of a second before we process our perceptions into discrete elements – sights, sounds, and so on – we are first flooded with an ineffable sense of being alive in the world.
It isn’t something we articulate; it’s pre-verbal. And yet it gives us a grounding, a place to begin. Amid raging emotions and conflicting thoughts, it is a place of peace, a floor from which to build the foundations of a living faith.
I find it at the center of our first principle, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We are, each of us, enough, and we have the capacity to discover how to realize our best selves and live into the promise that we are.
Sharon Salzberg in her book Faith comes to a similar conclusion. Faith, she says, “is not a commodity we either have or don’t have – it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.”
The passage you heard from Annie Dillard comes after she describes watching a full solar eclipse. She writes that she was surprised by how disturbing she found the experience, as if the sun itself were being obliterated. And yet, beneath her fear what she calls the substrate, the matrix that buoys the rest, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.
Some decades ago, James Fowler made a study of what he called “the stages of faith,” that is how faith is born within us and how it grows over the course of our lives. He noted that people commonly identify faith with a code of beliefs, say the credo of the Latin mass or the creeds of Protestant reformers. But, he says, that’s an error. Belief may be a way that faith expresses itself, but a person does not have faith in a proposition or concept.
Instead, he said, “faith involves an alignment of the heart.” Curiously, this notion stretches across cultures. In Hindu, the term is Sraddha, which translates as “to set one’s heart on.” The religious life, they say, begins with finding in one’s life something to which one gives one’s heart.
Credo from Latin has a similar root, a compound from the word for heart and the world for place or put. So, its most accurate translation is not, “I believe,” an intellectual affirmation, but “I set my heart on,” or “I give my heart to.”
The writer Diana Butler Bass argues that people often misunderstand some of the most famous words attributed to Jesus: “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.”
With those words he was not speaking of a philosophical idea or a set of doctrines. The truth, she said, “was that the disposition of the heart was the ground of truth. Spiritual freedom results from a rightly directed heart. The self as it moves away from fear, hatred, isolation, and greed toward love.”
Buddhism offers a similar view. As Sharon Salzberg puts it, “faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there the underlying thread connection the moment’s experience to the fabric of all life.”
Giving one’s heart, of course, can be a risky proposition. Our hearts are tender and easily broken. And so we have good reason to be wary. At the same time, of course, being made of muscle, they also get stronger the more they are used.
And so here is the conundrum of faith. It is possible to drift through life taking the safe route, trusting in few things, exposing little of ourselves. It offers no assurance of safe passage, but at least we reduce the risk of injury. And yet, what a pallid existence, what a dull life.
The life of faith, though, offers a different path: risky, to be sure, because we can’t know if what we put our trust in will merit that gift. Likely, we’ll overextend ourselves at some point and need to regroup, perhaps nurse our wounds. But we learn, and our heart grows stronger, wiser. And moments will come when our risk pays off with the most glorious awakening, the most amazing meeting of kindred souls, and we are filled as we never thought possible.
Yesterday in our Connection Points class we invited people who are thinking about joining this congregation to reflect in small groups on our worship theme this month: what does it mean to be a person of faith. Some said there was something a little scary in that task. Shaming scripts from their past emerged in their minds, and they weren’t really sure how to reply.
Others helped open the conversation, though, sharing their own experiences and their own sense of deep convictions that kept them centered and grounded. It was a microcosm of one of the key things this congregation exists to do: to listen each other into spiritual growth, to give each other courage to open and explore.
We all know the experience of having been smacked down emotionally, having our hearts wounded and feeling that we need protect ourselves. We shelter ourselves, but, sadly, in sheltering ourselves we turn from our hearts, become stoic, impassive. It’s a place we can live for a surprisingly long time, but not happily.
A way I have seen this present itself in our churches is that we process the work of religion as the wrangling of words. Words are good, but without bringing our hearts into the equation they can be empty. Sometimes you can see the heart pushing to make itself known in the heat of the conversation. How would it be if we let the words be for a moment, and paid attention to the heat? What is that? Can you name it? Can you own it?
May Sarton’s poem that I read for our meditation has been a favorite of mine for some time precisely because it speaks to me of that moment in our lives when the heart makes itself known. It is the moment when we fully know ourselves, when all, as she says, “fuses, falls into place: from wish to action, from word to silence.
“My work, my love, my time, my face gathered into on intense gesture of growing like a plant.”
What does that look like for you, and how might we invite you to explore it? For, there is the vitality of your life. There is where, as Sarton says, all we can give grows in us to become song, made so and rooted so by love.
Let us here affirm, as Sharon Salzberg puts it, that “We all have [the] absolute right to reach out, without holding back, toward what we care about more than anything. Whether we describe the recipient as God, or a profound sense of indestructible love, or the dream of a kinder world, it is in the act of offering our hearts in faith” that something changes within us, something that gives us the courage to act from the center of our lives and fully live our truth.
It is the journey of faith, a journey whose destination is an ever deepening awareness of how entangled we and all things are and how dear we are to each other.
Three weeks in India brought encounters with people whose lived faiths I’ve never experienced before. How does a Unitarian Universalist respond?
Readings “Varanasi,” by Mary Oliver
“I Said to the Wanting-Creature Inside Me,” by Kabir (click here to read the poem)
Sermon
The poet’s eye focuses on the telling detail, elements of a scene that illustrate the larger truth that she finds in the moment. But to get the full picture, here’s what you need to add to Mary Oliver’s description of the scene of the shore of the holy Ganges at the ancient city of Varanasi, India:
First, you need to get down to the river, and that is no mean accomplishment. In this city of 3.5 million the clogged streets and winding alleys are dense with life. Bicycle rickshaws, squat, three-wheel tuk-tuks, motorcycles, subcompact cars, oxcarts, and delivery trucks nudge and beep at pedestrians, cows, and dogs packed together in a kind of lazy river of their own wending down to the water.
Women in bright saris walk purposively with eyes straight ahead, young men in western clothes gossip with the owners of vegetable stalls, older men in dusty kurtas sit along curbs, commenting on the scene. Women sit along the street median with complaining children holding out their hands for alms and teenage boys dog westerners, pleading that they buy their plastic keepsakes. Watch your feet, or your next step may find you in the middle of a cow pie or someone’s half-finished lunch.
Along the riverfront, the ghats, a series of concrete stairways, extend for several miles along the riverfront, often cracked, or broken and uplifted at crazy angles. Sitting under wicker umbrellas, Hindu priests chant an ongoing stream of blessings, tossing herbs into small fires in front of them, as people of mixed ages drop coins in their baskets. Boys sell small, banana-leaf cups, each filled with a votive candle and marigold blossoms, many of which are already burning along the riverfront.
At the water, dozens of people are in various states of undress. Young men stripped down to shorts jump in noisily and splash each other, while women edge into the water up to their waists in their saris. Some hold hands, shyly encouraging each other, while others stand quietly with eyes closed or softly unfocused before they dunk themselves again and again into the cool, grey water.
The scene is empty of organized ceremony. There appears to be no right way to approach the water. And no great fuss is made of this moment of communion. When finished, the bathers simply make their way gingerly back up the steps to a towel or some covering, carrying a small jug of river water, or smiling and chatting with friends or family.
It is, as Mary Oliver suggests, an affecting moment, and yet at the same time about a half-mile upstream a very different scene is taking place. Scattered across the steps are dozens of funeral pyres, each attended by silent mourners dressed in white looking on as tall fires crackled and blazed.
We had visited the spot the evening before, watching silently as every 10 minutes or so a priest would guide mourners carrying their dead wrapped in sheets on a bamboo bier to the river, where they dunked them before hoisting them to huge wooden pyres and lit the flame. When the fire was done, the chief mourner, head shaved and in bare feet, would tote the largest remaining bone on the end of a heavy stick and hurl it into the water.
What does it mean to be a person of faith? It’s a question that we’ll wrestle with this month, and it’s something that I found myself bumping up against time and again these last few weeks in a trip along the great river Ganges in India. It is a place where faith is interwoven into so much in ways that are often paradoxical and confusing. Three weeks of travel is hardly enough time to grab more than a passing impression, but I wanted to share with you a bit of the journey that Debbie and I experienced and some of the threads that surprisingly lead me back to our work here.
Hindus say the Ganges is no ordinary river: it is the embodiment of the goddess Ganga, Ganga-ji, dear Ganga, who once descended to Earth to purify the souls of humankind. On the shores of Varanasi, humans have worshipped Ganga the purifier for nearly 3,000 years, archaeological records go back many thousands more. So, is it any wonder that Hindus regard it as the holiest place on Earth, where special blessings are conferred on those who greet the day here, and where death along its banks is thought to bring moksha, freedom from the cycle of birth and death, union with the infinite being of God?
The faith that people bring to Ganga’s banks has its roots in sources that precede historical records, to the earliest days of the Hindu pantheon. This is, as Mary Oliver says, Shiva’s city, evidenced by the three horizontal stripes of pigment that you find on the foreheads of his followers, or the marigold leis placed at the altars of his shrines. But others are here, too: worshippers of Vishnu with the single, vertical red stripe on their foreheads, elephant-headed Ganeshas stuck on the dashboards of delivery truckers, or “Jai Maa Kali,” hail mother Kali, across the tops of the windshields of tuk-tuks.
In short, everywhere you look, from the roadside shrines to the bulls, those sacred reminders of Krishna, avatars of Shiva’s great mount Nandi, who lope lazily into traffic, you are reminded in one way or another of a spiritual dimension to our lives that our busy striving distracts us from seeing.
And that, Hindus will tell you, is what our Western senses miss when we remark on the chaos and sensory overload of India’s busy streets. It is the seemingly contradictory way of looking at the world holding that the possibility of our own awakening, our own happiness is in our hands, and yet warns against celebrating the ego.
It is not personal salvation that is our goal, they say, but union with all things – not raising up, but erasing the ego. And so each shrine, each image becomes a reminder of the work before each person to shed distractions and better our lives. And every being, every major event in our lives is a teacher for us all. What this means is that the Hindu pantheon, now thousands strong, is not just a historical legacy; it is alive and growing even today.
Our guide on this trip told us the story of one that emerged in his home town. It seems that years ago a young man had lusted over a particular motorcycle. He worked for years to get the money to buy it and finally did. But he had not been driving it for more than a week or two when he crashed into a tree and died. It was terribly sad, but afterward nobody in the family or anyone else in town had the heart to remove the crumpled machine under the tree. In time, people began bringing candles and chains of flowers, first to remember the boy and then as a way of sending blessings or hold loved ones from harm.
What will become of this shrine remains to be seen, but it illustrates a pattern that has been repeated time and again, how Hinduism over time has absorbed and reshaped many of the influences that have touched it.
This is true of religious movements that moved through and even the sub-continent’s conquerors. Buddhism, for example, was born in India in the 6th century BCE, though today less than 10% of Indians call themselves Buddhist. But honoring the fact Gautama Siddhartha likely walked Varanasi’s streets in his wandering, Hindus claim him as the 9th avatar of the god Vishnu. Today most of the foundational sites of Buddhism have been restored. And perhaps none is more notable than Bodh Gaya, where a massive successor of the bodhi tree where Buddha attained enlightenment grows near of the massive Mahabodhi temple. Visitors of all races stream through the grounds while pilgrims in saffron or scarlet robes singly or in groups do prostrations, chant pali scriptures, spin prayer wheels or simply meditate. Nearly every space is occupied by a worshipper of some kind.
We had perhaps our most amusing experience of Hindu repurposing at the famous Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. The hall is a massive marble structure with architecture mirroring the Taj Mahal, even using the same marble. It’s known as the “Raj Taj.”
Outside stands an enormous sculpture of a seated Queen Victoria, soberly surveying the scene. We happened to arrive the weekend of Indian Independence Day and discovered that on that weekend the park’s grand walkways and lawns become a kind of teenage meet market. It was, we were told, a place where Indian taboos on the public display of affection were relaxed and girls in their best saris and boys in their cleanest shirts walked hand in hand, taking photos of each other in alluring poses. Prim Queen Victoria as the latest goddess of love? Well, who knows?
These temples serve as place to keep stories alive that resonate with the people. Temples of a sort include the home in Delhi where Mohandes Gandhi was assassinated. The room where he lived remains preserved with his simple possessions, and footprints imbedded in concrete mark the path to where he was shot. The location of the shooting itself is roofed and adorned with flowers.
But not infrequently we experienced the most incongruous juxtapositions of faith. In Kolkata, for example, we arrived the day of a special celebration of Saraswati, goddess of wisdom and the arts. Several blocks in town were dedicated to shops that made unfired clay sculptures of Saraswati ranging in size from a foot or so to seven feet.
Each was brightly painted with a sweet face, dyed hemp for hair and elaborate paper clothing. On the festival day, we watched neighborhood groups who ordered the sculptures carry them down to the Hooghly River, the name the Ganges takes near the Bay of Bengal. Then, circling seven times and chanting together they immersed the glorious sculpture in the river, where it melted into the fast flowing stream.
And then on a visit downstream we saw a temple dedicated to Ramakrishna, the Hindu leader whose lectures about the unity of all religion at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions introduced the West to Hinduism. Headquarters of the Vedanta movement, it is a monument to the elevated notion of the spiritual unity of all faiths, and still there at its center, was a ghat on the riverbank where worshippers bathed as Saraswati’s remains drifted by.
What this landscape dotted with temples served to remind me was that the spiritual dimension of life, that which guides us to see ineffable beauty wherever we look and challenges us find inherent value in all beings, in all things, remains close at hand.
One of the centers of Hindu theology is what is called sanatana dharma: the notion that there is an eternal path that connects all things, that holds all things in harmony. It affirms no creed, but instead stands for a code of conduct that we might simply call right living. It is centered in spiritual freedom, arguing that any pathway or religious teaching that has spiritual freedom at its center is part of it. Indeed, for some Hindus it is the essence of Hinduism, an ever-evolving way without beginning, without foundational prophets or teachers that is inherent in all things and inclusive of all things.
It’s here that I began to find some connections to our own very different community and to the notion of faith. Faith in our way of thinking is not so far removed from the sanatana dharma. We affirm that our lives are grounded in a center of meaning that is larger than us yet within us. We affirm that our faith is realized in how we engage the word, in an ethic of action, and we insist on spiritual freedom, providing room for us each to find our own path to an awakened state of spiritual maturity, trying in our own ways to make sense of the elephant of our heart’s calling.
Of course, from the Hindu perspective, the world today is far from an awakened state. Indeed, they say we are living in the age of Kali, the goddess of destruction. In the Kali Age, the last of four great ages, strife, corruption, darkness and disintegration prevail in the world.
Traveling across India, it’s not hard find confirmation of that assessment. Amid astonishing beauty and stunning human cultural achievement, there is also terrible pollution and deep deprivation. The crowded cities find a way to function but so much is crumbling or broken or mired in filth as to make one discouraged about their prospects.
The holy city of Varanasi is a good example. Home of one of the premier universities in the country and a center of the silk weaving trade, its sacred riverfront is much the worse for wear. And the human ashes that drift in upstream from where worshippers bathe are hardly the worst assault the Ganges receives. More troubling are the pipes that regularly direct untreated human sewage into the river. And yet, like the woman in Mary Oliver’s poem, they are still determined to find the holy in it.
Our guide told us that Hindus have some thoughts about enduring and even growing spiritually in the age of Kali. In this time, he said, people learn to live closer to the earth, to cultivate a sense of inner light in themselves and among others amid the darkness.
Using Kabir’s imagery, what are doing looking for another river to cross? Do we really believe there is some other place that will make the soul less thirsty? No. Let us give up such imaginary meanderings, accept ourselves and stand firm in that which we are.
And even in this place, wherever our wandering hearts take us, we may yet find the bliss of certainty and a life lived in accordance with that certainty.
Our Director of Administration, Linda Topp, is… known for being blunt. So, I was a bit taken aback when earlier this week, she called me into her office, with a sort of sheepish look on her face and said, “Can we change the wording in your sermon blurb before it goes out in the enews? I mean, I know your sermon will not actually be a snoozer, but the words ‘congregational polity?’ those are a snoozer.”
Wait, what??! Whooya callin’ a snoozer, Linda?! I mean, I know I’m a geek about this stuff, but c’mon! It’s one of those buzzwords that doesn’t inspire confidence. Honestly, I’m not sure why it comes off as such a bore, especially since it is so fundamental to who we are! Congregational, of course, refers to the gathered community within a church or other religious body. Polity means governance structure.
Let me pause for a quick point of order – a few years ago, you voted to change the name of this community from the UU Church of Asheville to the UU Congregation of Asheville. This was done this largely because the word congregation is more inclusive to people who do not identify as Christian, and it is important to us to have an inclusive and welcoming name. For the purposes of this sermon, and because it relies on the historical record, I will use the words church and congregation interchangeably.
So, congregational polity is central to our faith – it’s our religious DNA – core to our identity as Unitarian Universalists. It matters, because it impacts who we are today and how we organize and create community.
Congregational polity means that the people are the ultimate authority in Unitarian Universalism. It is why there were congregational meetings in 2004 and 2014 when you voted to call both of your ministers. As a governance structure, its origins are rooted in both the history of Reformed Christianity and the birth of America.
In 1637, a group of people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in what is now Dedham, decided to gather and create what they called the Free Church. They began holding cottage meetings, not to discuss and decide on what they believed, but how they would gather.
These meetings had a few simple rules, which I share as paraphrased by Alice Blair Wesley, “Rule 1: They would decide before leaving each meeting what question to discuss next week… Rule 2: Each week the host of the house would begin, speaking to the agreed-upon question. Then everyone else could speak by turns… Rule 3 was: Here we speak our own understandings our doubts. No arguing.” (ABW, p19)
The Dedham rules are surprisingly similar to the guidelines we use for small group ministry today. In any case, they spent over a year asking questions of one another and having these discussions before the congregation was founded in 1638. They understood that a healthy church would mirror a healthy society in which “concerns for justice, peace and reasonable laws can be freely and effectively voiced, without suppression.” (ABW, p.20) So the free church was established with an explicit responsibility to both its own members and the larger society.
They created a “…radically lay-led church gathered by mutual consent rather than by mutual belief.” (ABW) At that time, their beliefs actually were very similar. They could easily have organized as a creedal church, but chose not to. They were, of course, reacting against the prescriptive and limiting reality of the English church – it was the 17th century, after all, and these were colonists.
This doctrine, this way of organizing, comes out of an historical context. It is steeped in the outcomes of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, impacted by British political and church politics, and intertwined with the American Revolution. The ideas and governance structure created by the folks in Dedham was described in and codified as the Cambridge Platform, which remains the highest authority on the origin of congregational polity as practiced by a number of denominations, including the United Church of Christ, the Baptists, and most Anabaptist and non-denominational congregations.
All week, a phrase kept popping into my head – an earworm, if you will, with no music. You may recall it. “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” It’s the final line of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence came out of the same political and social stew as the Cambridge Platform. Over a century after the Dedham church was founded in the Massachusetts Colony, the country itself was founded. These new Englanders believed that the strongest, clearest, most authentic voice in their whole society would come from the Free Church once it was established. (ABW, p20)
When you are living in Massachusetts, or even greater New England, you are surrounded by the origins of both Unitarian Universalism and the country, and you can see their interconnectedness everywhere. You can visit Walden Pond, and many of the pivotal moments in the revolution are intertwined with churches that are now part of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Names of the founding fathers are sprinkled throughout the cemeteries and named rooms or buildings of numerous local churches. Similar to living in Asheville, where everywhere you turn you can see views of mountains surrounding us – this history is simply part of the scenery.
Interestingly, the values that caused the folks in Dedham call a series of cottage meetings and set their intentions down on paper were the same values that caused the revolution and the birth of the United States. They had been persecuted in England, moved to the colonies seeking freedom, and worked diligently to lay out a societal structure that would guard against the kind of limits on free expression they had fled.
It’s a question of authority, and of integrity.
Who has the authority? The people. The congregation has the power – through freedom of the pew – the right to discuss, decide and express the vision and mission of the congregation. So too is there a provision for freedom of the pulpit. In fact, the boilerplate contractual language for most ministers (including Mark and myself) calls the pulpit “…free and untrammeled.” It goes on to say that “The Minister is expected to express his/her values, views and commitments without fear or favor.”
And the freedom of the pew is defined by your shared covenant – the bonds of affection you create with one another, and the relationship between the congregation and its minister.
As John implied in his opening words, the congregational idea of freedom is complicated. It’s not that we can do, say, or believe whatever we feel like. It is that we choose to be in community, and we are free to explore and understand our own mind, our own heart, our own truth. And we do it together.
It is a beautiful thing. We are gathered together, here in Asheville, North Carolina, far from the places this faith began – far from Geneva, where Michael Servetus was executed, far from Hungary and the Edict of Torda, far from Boston – and yet we are connected to this tradition. We, too, have the opportunity to pledge to one another our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Our bonds of affection are stronger because we choose them.
And that is the power of the Free Church: The power of choice. I once heard an “elevator speech,” that ubiquitous attempt to explain Unitarian Universalism in the time it takes for an elevator to go from floor to floor, that centered around the origin of the word “heretic,” which is the Greek for “one who chooses.” Our lives as religious liberals are full of choices. But fundamental to them all is the one We choose to be together, not because we share belief or creed, but because we share a commitment to the good of all.
I began this morning with the words of the Griswold Covenant. It is the most famous of the covenants that is used by UU congregations today – having been adapted time and time again. The members of the Dedham congregation followed a more explicitly Christian covenant, but they created a covenantal organization that lifted love as the highest value, and we have followed in their footsteps.
Covenant is about relationality. If we have no creed – we must nonetheless have something to bind us together. And so we make these relational promises to one another in this community. Our cultural fabric is full of promises – from the Hippocratic oath under which a doctor operates, to the promise to serve and protect as a law enforcement officer. Most of these promises, however, are enacted in relationships between individuals or small groups. Our covenant begins with one on one or small group relationships, but it expands further to connect and include people we may never meet. Our integrity as a community relies on our shared commitment to this covenant.
Can we identify our commonly shared loyalties? What is most important to us? If love is the spirit of this church, what is it that we, as a congregation, most love? Where are we putting our energy? Our lives are intertwined by the covenant we share.
John shared a version of our liberal covenant earlier in the service – and what a lovely, lofty goal those words are: With incomplete knowledge, partial truth and uneven love, we nonetheless believe that the bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom. She acknowledges that there is always more to learn, but that fulfillment is possible for us and for our children – and that, like the settlers in Dedham did, we have a responsibility to the world outside this gathered community. Though our 17th century forbears did not have golden shirts with catchy logos on them, they were committed to the ideal of an active, engaged love.
Keeping covenant is a challenge. I recently spent some time reflecting on the fact that I am in covenant with somewhere around 1500 people – other UU ministers – most of whom I have never met. It’s a strange and challenging reality. You, too, have this challenge. We have close to 600 Members, somewhere over 100 Friends. And more people who have not signed the membership book but affiliate with this congregation. You, too, are in covenant with people you don’t know.
And so, how do we do that? How do we love one another when we may not know one another? It is in some ways like any relationship. When I write vows with couples preparing for their wedding, I always encourage them to include a formal vow – whether the words are traditional or not – so that they will be promising the same things to each other. My own wedding vows were like this: we repeated the same vows to each other, and we return to those vows regularly, to see how we are doing, to revisit, to re-promise. A covenant is an active and relational promise, and requires presence and attention to sustain itself. Cindy and I each have three stones in our wedding rings – which remind me that there are three parts to my marriage: myself, my wife, and the two of us together.
We begin with a lofty promise, and then we live our lives in the day to day. And so it is for congregational life.
Sometimes living in covenant feels like striving toward an impossible ideal. It’s often messy. We fall down, we hurt each other’s feelings, we make mistakes. And yet, we continue to return to that highest ideal, we continue to strive.
We choose to be faithful, to be loyal, and to remain in relationship, even when it feels impossible, even when we are uncertain, hurt, or lonely.
We choose to remain in relationship because life’s venture is important, and we understand that we are that venture.
The legacy of the Cambridge Platform is the practice of lifting relationship above creed – covenant above doctrine – so much so that love becomes the doctrine. Our own congregational covenant, which I will explore in more depth in the second installment of this sermon series on January 25th, ends with the line, “Our life together declares that the future of each depends on the good of all and the future of all depends on the good of each.” And so we, here in Asheville, have taken up the charge laid out by the settlers in Dedham over three centuries ago.
May we reach toward the ideal of our own covenant
May our history inform our future together
And may active, engaged love remain our highest ideal
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
What is enough? It’s one of the more subtle and challenging spiritual questions. As we start the new year, we’ll reflect on some of the ways that we might sort through all the tugs on our life and find peace.
It may just be a time-of-life kind of thing, but I’ve been feeling an impulse to shed in recent years. Things I’ve been carrying around for years I take a second look at and think to myself, “Do I really need to keep that?” And more often than not, when I’m really being honest with myself, the answer is, “No.” And so, out it goes.
The turning of the New Year is a great time to do this. Clothes, gadgets, even books: toss, toss, toss. It becomes a spiritual exercise of sorts. I make peace with bits and pieces of my past that I no longer need to hold onto so tightly: fascinations, avocations that seemed so interesting for a time that I realize no longer hold my interest. And that’s OK.
By paring down my possessions I remove distractions and make it easier to focus on what matters in my life. What was it that Henry David Thoreau said was the key to a more peaceful, centered way of living? Simplify, simplify, simplify!
In one way or another, the question that we are asking in the midst of such sorting is, What is enough? It’s a question with deep roots. For it touches existential aspects of our identity. For example, I own a good number of books. And while some mean a great deal to me, many I hold onto because they have utility. In my line of work I am dipping into many sources, and it’s helpful to have them ready to hand. Indeed, part of the professional expenses that you provide me goes toward adding to that collection.
Some of these are valued resources that I’ll keep, but others I’m ready to pass on once I’ve read and made use of them. It’s a discipline for me to think carefully about what I want from each book and why. Am I holding onto that book because I foresee using it, or because somehow I feel it’s the sort of book that “someone like me” should own? Is it some kind of badge of my identity?
It’s easy to get tangled into this kind of knot, and we can do it with all kinds of things, not just books. How often do we look to physical objects as proxies of our identities? Clothes, cars, homes, technologies? There’s a dance we do with the things we own, and for the sake of our own peace of mind we want to be sure that we, not they, are calling the tune.
Because, otherwise there is something unhealthy driving our lives. Rather than true needs, these things feed our appetites – appetites for approval, for status, for pleasure. When pleasure’s in the driver’s seat, singing its siren song, it skews how we relate to the rest of the world, and it makes it hard for us to talk about “enough.”
You recall those experiments from the 1950s when scientists implanted electrodes in the brains of rats that enabled them to stimulate their pleasure centers. The rats would ignore food and keeping pressing the lever to the point of exhaustion. After a holiday season when you may have found yourself pressing that pleasure lever a few more times than was good for you, I thought it might be helpful for us to reflect on some useful ways of thinking about enough.
Now, I’m betting that at this point as you reflect on whatever your own holiday excesses may have been you’ve already been through the drill that anyone raised in this culture learns at an early age: You have spent some time beating yourself up.
“Oh, no! I did it again.” “I was bad; I need to be good.”
The great American guilt trip. We’ve all been there, and we all know a bit about how ineffective it tends to be. So, in the hope of finding a better strategy to grapple with all this, let me invite you to consider a different way of reflecting on this notion of “enough.”
I begin with a big word that you may not have heard before: sophrosyne. How about that? It’s spelled “s-o-p-h,” as in sophomore, “r-o-s-y-n-e.” SoPHROsyne. It is one of the Greek virtues and is a word without a precise translation into English. Essentially, it implies what is called a “healthy-minded” approach to life: balance, moderation.
It is centered on the idea that we can find joy in discovering what is good for ourselves. Pleasure, of course, is part of it, but only part. We can get pleasure, for example, from eating a delicious meal, but part of our enjoyment of that meal comes with ending it when our bodies tell us we are full. The pleasure we get from eating is diminished when we eat to excess. The indigestion, increased weight and all the rest bring our bodies distress.
It’s not a matter of self-denial. We don’t deny ourselves when we end the meal. Rather, we reach a balanced, harmonious place where we feel that we have consumed “enough.” To find that place, though, takes some attention. So, instead of roaring through the meal as fast as we can, when we take our time we recognize the feeling of satisfaction without excess.
From this perspective, there’s nothing especially satisfying about overindulging. There comes a point, for example, as we tuck into that second pint of ice cream that we are no longer feeding our physical need. We are, instead, feeding unhealthy hungers – say, an desiure to draw attention to ourselves, to impress others, to seek their acceptance, or to pacify our own unhappiness or disappointment.
An important dimension of sophrosyne is that it is not a practice of enforced discipline against our wishes. It begins with the assumption that harmonious living is a natural state, what is best for our minds and bodies, how we are naturally inclined.
But it’s not always easy to learn and it can take time. And so the ancient Greeks argued that people adopt an attitude of humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness in going about their lives. We are better able to appreciate others since we are living from a joyful appreciation of who we are. And in time we come to know ourselves as well as those around us more fully.
Our joy, in the end, is bound up with the joy of others and the joy of the community as a whole. Somehow, though, we seem to have the notion marbled into our culture that another person’s joy comes at our expense. We organize our lives to protect our own prerogatives and hold others at bay so we can get while the getting is good.
Wendell Berry’s “Vision” that you heard James read earlier emerged from his experience of many years as a farmer in Kentucky. Berry has long been an advocate for what he calls the “localist” point of view. It comes from the perspective of a farmer who measures the state of the world by the state of the earth. And what troubles Berry is how so much of our current economy has lost touch with the Earth. The kind of factory-level farming that predominates in America, he says, degrades the soil, poisons waterways, endangers wildlife, and promotes patterns of development that are unsustainable. Yet, it is outside the purview of most people, for whom food appears at the table from sources they know nothing about.
This disconnect, he argues, endangers the health of our communities and serves to drive us apart from one another. The corrective he recommends is that we all learn to live, as he puts it, “closer to the ground.” This means not only that we get in closer touch with how and where our food is grown and produced, but that we also get into closer touch with each other.
It is, of course, a challenge in our busy lives, but it is also true that our busyness is part of the problem. We take on work or activities in excess of what we can reasonably achieve and maintain our health and balance.
We organize our lives for efficiency, what the writer Gerald May calls, “the ‘how’ of life,” how we get things done and survive from day to day. But we fail to make room for what May calls the “why” of life. And that, he says, is love, or as he puts it “why we are functioning at all, what we want to be efficient for.”
If it’s true, as Thoreau says, that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them,” it is likely because they have lost track of their “why.” We need to get back to the ground, to be grounded in who we are and the joy of knowing that.
So, when we turn to Wendell Berry’s poem we can see that it is – in essence – a hymn to sophrosyne, to the joy of finding balance and in it a recipe for enough.
The image that he paints of our lives enriching the Earth, rather than depleting it is not, as he says, “a paradisal dream.” It is instead a vision of us living in balance and harmony that is natural to the Earth – to the fields, the rivers, the forests, the mountains. It is a way for us to find closer harmony among ourselves as creatures of this planet in tune with the music that rises from it, which brings with it abundant health and wisdom. So, that we might come to see ourselves in this sleepy backwater of the universe as guests at the district fireman’s ball, dancing to the beat of the local oompah band.
Some years ago there was a poem bouncing around the Internet that made Berry’s point in a different way. It was called, “A Lost Generation,” written by Jonathan Reed. In a YouTube version, a young woman’s voice read:
I am part of a lost generation And I refuse to believe I can change the world. I realize this may be a chock bu “Happiness comes from within” Is a lie, and “Money will make me happy” So in 30 years I will tell my children They are not the most important thing in my life. My employer will know that I have my priorities straight because Work is more important than family I tell you this Once upon a time Families stayed together But this will not be true in my era This is a quick fix society Experts tell me 30 years from now I will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of my divorce I do not concede that I will live in the country of my own making In the future Environmental destruction will be the norm. No longer can it be said that My peers and I care about this earth. It will be evident that My generation is apathetic and lethargic It is foolish to presume that There is hope And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it.
There is hope It is foolish to presume that My generation is apathetic and lethargic It will be evident that My pooers and I care about this earth. No longer can it be said that Environmental destruction will be the norm. In the future I will live in the country of my own making I do not concede that 30 years from now I will be celebration the 10th anniversary of my divorce Experts tell me This is a quick fix society But this will not be true in my era Families stayed together once upon a time I tell you this Work is more important than family I have my priorities straight because My employer will know that They are not the most important thing in my life So, in 30 years I will tell my children “Money will make my happy:” Is a lie, and “Happiness comes from within” I realize this may be a shock but I can change the world And I refuse to believe I am part of a lost generation.
And neither are any of us.
Friends I wish you well in your New Year’s shedding. Along with the clutter, why not toss out a few other outmoded things that may be lying around, like disillusionment, cynicism, pointless guilt, or despair.
Instead, find joy coming to know the good, coming to know your community, coming to know yourself.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Testimony from the trenches: “It was a beautiful, moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere. And 7 or 8 in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches, and there were these lights – I don’t know what they were. And they started signing…”
Photo credit: Diego Sideburns / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND
(Testimony from the trenches, 1914 – 1
Private Albert Moran of the Second Queens Regiment
“It was a beautiful, moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere. And 7 or 8 in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches, and there were these lights – I don’t know what they were. And they started signing.”
Rifleman Graham Williams of the First London Rifle Brigade:
“We could see makeshift Christmas trees adorned with lighted candles that burnt steadily in the still, frosty air. First, the Germans would sing one of their carols, and we’d sing one of our, until we all started up “O Come All Ye Faithful” in the Latin, so we could sing together. It was the most extraordinary thing – two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.”)
SERMON – 1
Christmas 1914 arrived only about six months after the start of the first World War. Having repelled the first attacks by German forces in several major battles over the summer, as the fall started the allies – Britain, France and Belgium – formed a western front to push the Germans back. To stop the allied advance and protect their gains, the Germans began building trenches, which protected their soldiers from machine gun and artillery fire. The trenches succeeded in holding off the allies, so the British and French began building trenches of their own, sometimes only dozens of yards from the German trenches. The trench system expanded as each side attempted to flank the other, stretching eventually from the North Sea to Switzerland.
The two sides jockeyed back and forth, but by November 1914 they had settled into a stalemate of sorts, faced off against each other in their trenches across a “no man’s land” of a hundred yards or less. The trench system had the advantage of slowing the loss of life, which had been catastrophic in the early days of war – hundreds of thousands dead – with more precise artillery and automatic weapons multiplying the rate of mortality.
But conditions inside the trenches were abysmal. Soldiers were continually mired in sticky mud and due to heavy autumn rains there was standing water, sometimes up to several feet, in the most of trenches. Even worse, amid the foul conditions – latrines were a luxury few had access to – the trenches attracted rats and lice and diseases of all sorts.
Soldiers on both sides had enlisted in the war as an adventure that their leaders confidently predicted would be over in a month or so. As winter set in, soldiers began coming to terms with the notion that this war would drag on for some time. Under lowering skies in early December, a British commander was reported to have been concerned that a “live-and-let-live theory of life” was spreading among the troops on both sides. Neither side was firing at the other during meal times, he said, and on occasion there was friendly banter across the lines. The initiative usually came from the Germans, a number of whom had worked at British seaside resorts before the war and so knew English.
To counteract this creeping fraternizing, British commanders mounted several attacks to prompt an aggressive response from the Germans, but it had little effect, and in one case it worsened things, when, due to poor aim, some artillery barrages struck British positions.
The approach of Christmas had soldiers on both sides feeling blue. Governments responded with gifts to keep them happy. German businesses sent packages with sausages, chocolates, cigars and cigarettes, not to speak of hundreds of evergreens so that the soldiers could have their tannenbaums. Some two million British soldiers received brass “tins” embossed with the image of Princess Mary that contained cigarettes or a few sweets and a note from the Princess, and British businesses also provided chocolates and plum puddings.
Christmas Eve settled in cold and quiet along the trenches. A dusting of snow covered the ugliness of the battered landscape, and guns along the front were quiet.
No one knows where it started, though the best guess is somewhere near Ypres, Belgium. British soldiers saw one, then another, then rows of sparkling evergreen trees appearing at the edge of some of the forward German trenches. British high command had issued a warning to be wary, that the Germans might take advantage of a lull at Christmas to attack. So, the allied soldiers watched warily, but before long the lilt of Christmas carols began floating out of the German trenches.
One hundred years later, all we have is brief snatches from the letters of soldiers at the time like Private Albert Moran and Rifleman Graham Williams, but somehow all along the western front something like peace spontaneously broke out. Some British, French or Belgian soldiers replied in song of their own, or waved white flags to exchange cigarettes, or simply rose from their trenches calling out, “we no shoot; you no shoot.”
Hands were shaken, food was exchanged and the stillness of the night and the silence of the artillery on this singular night was how the angels sang.
HYMN 253: Adeste Fideles, first verse
(Testimony from the trenches – 2
Captain Josef Sewald of the 17th Bavarian Regiment
“I shouted to our enemies that we didn’t wish to shoot and that we make a Christmas truce. I said I would come from my side and we could speak with each other. First there was silence, then I shouted once more, invited them, and the Britain shouted, ‘No shooting!” Then a man came out of the trenches and I on my side did the same, and so we came together and we shook hands – a bit cautiously.
Lieutenant Kurt Zemisch of the 134th Saxons Infantry:
“Eventually the English brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”)
SERMON – 2
After all the singing of Christmas Eve, the light of Christmas Day brought another prospect. The bleak expanse of no-man’s land was dotted with corpses of men from both sides who had died in one foray or another. Some had lain there for weeks, since venturing out to retrieve their dead comrades put soldiers at risk of joining them. With hostilities suspended – no one really believed that they were ended – soldiers at different locations approached the other side and suggested they take the opportunity to bury the dead. And so they set to it, collaborating in digging the graves of each other’s dead with crosses made from British biscuit boxes marking the graves. At some locations, chaplains from the two sides led prayers, alternating between English and German.
With the ceremonies done, soldiers from the two sides began talking. They shared stories of home and family as well as newspapers and cigarettes. At some locations German soldiers rolled over barrels of beer and the English responded by handing over plum puddings. At other places the French responded with cigars. Elsewhere, liquor and chocolates were passed around
Amid the conversations soldiers from the two sides began trading souvenirs – buttons, belt buckles, badges and such. And then here and there, from one side or another, a soccer ball or some approximation of it – a sand bag or a food tin – was rolled out and the soldiers organized informal football matches, often across the pock-marked expanse of no-man’s land.
Those who were slowest to join in the festivities tended to be the officers, who had their eyes out for treachery from the other side amid the good feelings. But in time many did come forward to shake the hands of their counterparts and marvel at the sight of their troops toasting each other and trading chocolates.
Of course, not everyone was taking part in the soccer games and singing. Both sides took advantage of the truce to move supplies forward, fortify their trenches and improve their dug-outs. And some soldiers on both sides who had recently lost friends to the fighting hung back resentfully and never took part.
Altogether, some kind of Christmas truce was observed along around two-thirds of the trenches. But as remarkable as the sight was of combatants dropping their rifles and laughing together like old friends, what may have been most distinctive about it was that in a war driven by geopolitical strategy and the ambitions of kings and princes, it was one event that was the initiative of the ordinary soldier. In a conflict that for the first time introduced killing on an industrial scale, a moment arrived when the soldier’s humanity took hold.
Christmas gave them that opening – a holiday dear to the hearts of both sides, full of warmth and cheer that touched a faith they held in common, a faith honoring love and forbearance and light amid the darkness.
Song – “Good King Wenceslas,” first verse
(Testimony from the trenches – 3
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the British II Corps:
I have issued the strictest orders that on no account is intercourse to be allowed between the opposition troops. To finish the war quickly, we must keep up the fighting spirit and do all we can to discourage friendly intercourse.
Captain Charles Stockwell of the Second Royal Welch Fusiliers:
At 8:30 I fired three shots into the air and put up a flag with “Merry Christmas on it. A German put up a sheet with “Thank You” on it and the German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots into the air, and the war was on again.)
SERMON – 3
How quickly the war got back underway varied from place to place along the front, but it was months before the attacks resumed their former level of ferocity. And in many places it took the substitution of fresh troops who hadn’t taken part in the truce for both armies to get back at it with a will.
It took a week for news of the truce to find its way into the media, and official reports from the front and later histories downplayed the significance of the Christmas truce. It was an aberration that the command staff was determined the troops would put behind them, else, as General Smith-Dorrien put it, it might sap their “fighting spirit.”
But not all observers saw it that way. A 1915 New Year’s editorial in Britain’s Daily Mirror reflecting on the Christmas truce observed that wartime hostility was to be found “mainly at home.”
“The soldier’s heart rarely has any hatred in it,” the editorial argued. “He goes out to fight because that is his job. What came before – the causes of war and why and wherefore – bother him little. He fights for his country and against his country’s enemies. Individually, he knows, they’re not bad sorts. He has other things to think about. He has to work and win.”
We could say that many circumstances conspired to make the Christmas truce of World War One a singular event. After all, it took place at a pivotal moment in history between combatants that, despite efforts by each side to paint the other as monsters or barbarians, held much in common culturally, ethnically, religiously that came together in the celebration of Christmas.
Also, the truce came early in a war that would change the nature of warfare, before soldiers became inured to the notion of total war, before the introduction of such atrocities as chemical warfare. As the poet Phillip Larkin remarked in 1964 at the 50th anniversary of the war’s beginning in 1914, the soldiers of World War One brought with them a kind of innocence that we were not to see again in the 20th century.
All that is true. And yet we are left to wonder whether the Christmas truce was not so much as an aberration as a high-water mark, one of those shining moments when our common humanity shone clear and our fears subsided, at least for a bit. It wasn’t the first or the last time that people saw past the causes that divided them to a greater unity that gathers us all, but that we still recall such events with surprise, as novelties amid so much carnage in human history, is a good reason to raise it up as a gesture we are each capable of making.
There is hardly a more important message for us to attend to today. We live in a time when so much divides us – race, class, religion, national origin – and those divisions make it hard to see the truth of our common humanity unites us and is the source of our greatest hope.
We may not be soldiers under fire in trenches, but we struggle all the same, fearful for our safety, for our economic well-being, for our children’s, our grandchildren’s future. We hunker down with those we know, fearful and wary of the motives of others.
Might this Christmas be a moment to break out of that pattern, to take the risk of extending ourselves beyond our familiar boundaries, into a no-man’s land where we are present to others without pretense or guile? At the turning of the year when we take account of what we have made our lives and what is to come, when our hearts are made lighter by the story of an improbable birth of light and love the invitation is plain.
What is left merely is for us to step out of our trenches onto the uncertain ground before us, into a meeting where the promise of possibility opens before us. As we look ahead to the New Year, let us as individuals, as a community commit to making this so.
Song – Silent Night – German, then English
Stille Nacht! Heilge Nacht! Silent Night! Holy Night!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht All is calm, all is bright
Nur das traute hoch heilige Paar. Round yon godly tender pair.
Holder Knab’ im lockigen Haar, Holy infant with curly hair,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh! Sleep in heavenly peace,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh! Sleep in heavenly peace.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
I have a quirky, old VCR tape that’s still a favorite, something I plug into the player – yes, we still have one – about once a year. The film’s called “Defending Your Life.” Anyone else know it?
It appeared back in 1991, written, directed and starred in by a young Albert Brooks, together with Meryl Streep and Rip Torn. It’s one of those existential comedies – full of clever lines while at the same time brooding on the quandaries of existence. OK, yes, just the thing for a minister.
I have a quirky, old VCR tape that’s still a favorite, something I plug into the player – yes, we still have one – about once a year. The film’s called “Defending Your Life.” Anyone else know it?
It appeared back in 1991, written, directed and starred in by a young Albert Brooks, together with Meryl Streep and Rip Torn. It’s one of those existential comedies – full of clever lines while at the same time brooding on the quandaries of existence. OK, yes, just the thing for a minister.
Brooks plays a kind of schlemiel – marginally successful, but divorced from an unhappy marriage and unsure what he wants in life – who, after buying a status symbol of a car – a BMW – runs into a bus. He comes to consciousness of sorts being wheeled with dozens of mostly older others into what appears to be a convention hotel in a place that is announced as “Judgment City.”
The group is told that they have just died and have come to have their lives weighed to determine whether they are ready to “move on.” We’re never told exactly what that is, but it’s clearly a good thing – kind of like moving up an escalator of existence.
The alternative is not a trip to hell – good universalists that they are – but, from the film’s standpoint, perhaps as bad: being sent back to Earth for another try. This doesn’t go on forever, though. Brooks’ character, Daniel, learns that after getting sent back a certain number of times, we may just get thrown away. After all, the universe needs some quality control.
Over several days, Daniel undergoes a trial – complete with judges, prosecutor and defense counsel – where his life is examined. What they attend to is what progress he made in at freeing himself of his fears. Fear, he learns, is the central hazard of our earthly existence, something we must rid ourselves of to “move on.” Of course, there are also fun touches like being able to eat anything he wants and never gain weight, and visiting the “Past Lives” pavilion – hosted by Shirley MacLaine – where Daniel sees himself as an African man being chased by a lion.
It’s clear early on that the odds of Daniel “moving on” are slim, while the chances of Streep’s character, Julia, are a seeming sure thing. Yet, somehow they connect and, even in Judgment City, they fall in love. Is this coupling doomed, or could it be saving for them both? I won’t tip my hand, except to say that the film IS a comedy.
It is just a plot device, but still it’s an interesting notion. If our lives truly were judged, wouldn’t it be on how we responded to our fears? When I think of all that I’ve done or not done that got me into trouble or that I most regret, I have to admit that fear was at the heart of it – something that either kept me from action or propelled me into a foolish response.
Look at the world around us. Isn’t fear what lies at the heart of our greatest ills? War, prejudice, neglect, abuse? Fear locks us up and shuts us down. We become reactive – the old response of fight, flight, or freeze – and niceties like reasoned consideration and compassionate response are thrown out the window.
It’s not that we can avoid fear entirely – there are times when there’s good cause to be wary, and faced with immediate threats we need to act. The problem comes when fear becomes a miasma that colors our living. As Daniel puts it in “Defending Your Life,” it’s like a knot in our stomachs that never goes away.
Today I want to suggest one path that might help release us from our fears, and it ties in with our worship and small group theme this month: Imagination. When we engage our imaginations, we relax our dread fear of the circumstances in which we find ourselves and new possibilities emerge.
We remember, after all, that among religious traditions fear is a great spiritual teacher. For example, in the stories of both Jesus and the Buddha encounter with fear is a pivotal moment in the evolution of their ministries.
In the Bible, the moment comes after Jesus is baptized by John, and – we’re told – is led by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days. There Satan tempts him in several ways to abandon his calling. Each is an encounter where Jesus’ imaginative response turns his tempter aside.
First, after many days of fasting, Satan appears and says. “Why be hungry? If you were the son of God, you could turn this stone into a loaf of bread.” Jesus deflects the question of his theological status and merely replies, “One does not live by bread alone.”
Then, Satan takes him to the top of a temple and demands, “If you are the son of God, you could throw yourself off and not be hurt, for the angels would catch you.” Again, Jesus deflects and says he will not put God to the test.
Finally, Satan takes him to the top of a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and says, “I will make all of this yours if you’ll worship me.” But Jesus won’t be moved: “No. I will serve only God.” Thereafter he begins his teaching in Galilee.
At the time of his enlightenment, Gautama also undergoes a series of tests – three trials – at the hands of Mara, the demon king. His first test is not food but sex. Mara sends his beautiful daughters to seduce Gautama, but he will not be moved from his meditation.
Then, Mara sends an army of horrid demons to attack him with swords, arrows, spears and clubs. But Gautama sees them not as weapons but as flowers, and they fall harmlessly to the ground.
Finally, Mara sends whirlwinds and earthquakes that howl around Gautama and shake the ground beneath him. From the middle of all that Mara calls out: “Prove that you are worthy of enlightenment.” Gautama replies by putting out his hand and touching the earth in front of him. The earth is my witness. And with that he sinks into a meditation of some 40 days from which he emerges as the Buddha, the enlightened one
The parallels in these stories are fascinating in many ways, but for our purposes today I’d like to direct us to a larger message underlying both of them. Before either of these teachers could begin his ministry, he had to confront a few things. They are embodied in fearful demons or accusers, but it’s plain that they reside in themselves, indeed in each of us.
The first is the temptation of sensual pleasure, which in its essence represents the fear of never having enough. It is a craving for sensation that can be addictive. The more we feed it, the more we need, and we are never satisfied.
The second is the fear for our wellbeing. We perceive threats to ourselves that are in fact empty. We give energy to our critics or to those who seek to take from us through passive aggression. Resistance here is simply refusal to engage.
Third, is the fear embodied in the bully’s threat, a puffed up challenge to our ego, the drive to be a player, to impose our will on the world. Remember that high-flying figure from the 1980s – Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe, who the novelist Tom Wolfe lampooned?
Such an inflated image of our own importance is a fanciful delusion that disconnects us from the real world, from who we really are. As in the Buddha’s gesture, we need to be grounded, to embrace with humility our own deepest knowing, something it takes time to find, something we achieve more through listening than speaking, more through compassion than achievement, something to which we might give many names – perhaps one of them, God.
These are the kinds of responses that open to us when we use our imaginations to disconnect from the electric charge that fear sends out. We see that what keeps us from living into who we are is often the fierce clutching of our own hands.
The Quaker writer Parker Palmer takes note of the fact that many spiritual traditions hold out the hope that we can escape the paralysis of fear and come to encounter others and even challenging situations in ways that don’t threaten us but instead serve to enrich our work and our lives.
This hope, he says, is embodied in the phrase “be not afraid.” This phrase is not suggesting that we should not have our fears. Fears are inevitable and even necessary. But, as Palmer puts it, “we do not need to be our fears.”
In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer tells the story of a shop teacher in a group he once worked with. The man was an impressive figure – six-feet-six and 240 pounds with an athletic build and deep voice.
For some years, though, he and the school principal had been caught up in an escalating argument. The principal wanted the teacher to attend a training to modernize the shop, but the teacher insisted that all that stuff was just a fad.
One day, Palmer says, the teacher arrived at the group to say that the cycle had been broken. The principle had made his demands, but this time the shop teacher responded differently. “I still don’t want to go to that institute,” he said, “but now I know why. I’m afraid – afraid I won’t understand it, afraid my field has passed me by, afraid I am a has-been as a teacher.”
There was a silence, and then the principal spoke: “I’m afraid, too. Let’s go to the institute together.” They did, Palmer writes, and the experience reclaimed and deepened their friendship and revitalized the shop teacher.
We inhabit a universe where the smallness of our “I” often makes us feel dwarfed against the vastness of the “not I,” where we can feel like isolated atoms bouncing against unyielding walls or though unending emptiness.
It’s a sobering picture, and maybe with the winter settling in and troubling reports of war and prejudice topping the news it can feel all too real. But it is an illusion. The truth behind our fears is one of deep and abiding connection. We can see it when we look for it, but we’re not always inclined to look. As Parker Palmer puts it, the way we move beyond the fear that destroys our connectedness is to reclaim the connectedness that takes away fear. That may sound circular, he says, but that’s the way the spiritual life is. The initiative lies with us.
(Here I tell extemporaneously the story of Nik Wallenda who on November 4 walked on a steel cable connecting Chicago skyscrapers 600 feet above the Chicago River. The lessons I learned from Nik about dealing with fear here is that he practiced precise conditions of the walk for some months before attempting it, that the cables was carefully prepared the day of his walk and that he prepared for failure, so that if he were to be dislodged from the cable he would grasp the cable and wait to be rescued. He practiced holding onto the cable for 30 to 40 minutes at a time.)
So, it’s true. Our fears do not need to lock us in. Indeed, the most formidable locks that hold us in place are of our own devising. Pema Chodron is another wise person who has written about on this. “Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of the butterfly,” she writes, “we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.”
Ah, ego again: that fearful, fortified place where we hide, a place that we persuade ourselves is safe, yet that shelters us from what we most want and need – connection. This isn’t just some intellectual construct. It’s something we feel in our guts. Our hearts pine for it, even when we fool ourselves with the pretense of indifference.
But this ache, Pema Chodron insists, is not something that should trouble us. It is, in fact, a blessing, for it directs us where we need to go: outside of ourselves, into communion with others, into a place where we come to know the great unity of all things that we inhabit now and ever will.
From time to time you may be inclined to acquaint yourself with the vast plenitude of being in which we find ourselves. You may, say, head out for a nice walk in the woods, where the glory of these mountains is on display before you. As lovely as it is, though, there are those of our fellow beings out there who may not welcome your company, in whose poor eyesight larger creatures like us appear as threats. Given that, when frightened, they, too, may be threats to us, it is wise to keep your distance.
But rather than walk with dread, fearing each turn in the path, why not bring your imagination to bear, so to speak. Why not enter into an imaginative conversation with this fellow being: nothing fancy, since its understanding is limited.
Perhaps we can imagine ourselves reaching across that seemingly unbridgeable distance between species, beginning with simple awareness, a meeting of respect:
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
What is “the wild?” Years ago it was scary space that we humans felt needed to be tamed. Then, it became a source of romantic inspiration. Today, as climate change threatens even the most remote ecosystems, we are being forced to rethink again how we ought to regard the Earth’s “wild places.”
Nigel Pitman, a field biologist who worked for a time in Amazonian Peru, tells the story of once receiving an unusual visitor to his research station. The man was Thomas Struth, a German fine art photographer.
Pittman had been through this drill before with dozens of visitors, from teachers and schoolchildren to philanthropists and filmmakers. Per usual, he showed Struth a map of the area and offered to take him on a tour of some of the most photogenic sites near the camp. Struth thanked him for the offer and said he would like to visit those locations, but wouldn’t bring his camera.
Differences in language made it hard for Pitman to understand Struth’s explanation, but he understood him to say that rather than striking settings in the rain forest he was looking for “complexity.” Hmm. OK, fine.
Pitman said he gave the photographer and his assistants a map and left them to their own devices. It was only later, when Struth volunteered to give a slide show of his work, that Pitman got a sense of what Struth’s work was about. The first images, gritty scenes of German cities, made the audience of scientists bored and restless. But they sat up when Struth moved on to a series on forests around the world that he was calling “Paradise.” But soon they began to slump again in their seat. While some of the scenes were striking in their beauty, others appeared to be mere tangles of vegetation.
They weren’t the kinds of scenes where observers could easily fix a gaze or that one could tell stories about. There was just too much. The lights came on, and the scientists applauded half-heartedly, happy to get back to their work.
Three months later Pitman received a note from Struth in his email inbox, and attached were six images that he had taken at the research station. Struth mentioned that when exhibited these images were enormous – the largest as big as two king-size beds pushed together.
Sometime later Pittman organized a slide show of some of the most interesting photos taken at the station, and he slipped Struth’s images in at the end. The scientists murmured with approval at the scene of a jaguar pacing a riverbank or of a woman giving birth in a canoe.
But when it came to Struth’s images they started muttering again. The most common remark on the photos he heard later was, “Are you kidding me? I could have taken those pictures.” Which was true. And yet, he reflected, of the thousands of people who had passed through the station only one did.
To botanists, after all, the scenes were uninteresting, since the forest they showed had clearly been disturbed by human activity and other disruptions: “trashed,” they might call it, something they’d hike through to get to a more pristine, undisturbed place.
In the months ahead, though, Pitman says he kept returning to the photos. Yes, to some they may look like a tangle of vines, but to him, they were the placed he lived. They were home.
Perhaps you’ve guessed by now that the images that have been cycling behind me are, in fact, from Thomas Struth’s exhibit, “Paradise.” They come from around the world: not just South America, but also China, Japan, Australia, Germany and California. In an interview, Struth said, “one can spend a lot of time in front of these pictures and remain helpless in terms of knowing how to deal with them. They present a kind of empty space: emptied to elicit a moment of stillness and internal dialogue.”
“Nowadays,” he says, “the human being is reduced to a consumer and therefore to an instrument of a global economic mechanism. I, on the other hand, am interested in peculiarity, the individual ways of people and what goes on inside them when their historical bearings are disoriented.”
Growing disorientation is a pretty good word to describe how we think about wildness these days. This fall marks the 50th anniversary of passage of the Wilderness Act, legislation signed by Lyndon Johnson that set aside 9.1 million acres of federal land that was to be “left wild” to allow plant and animals communities to thrive essentially undisturbed. The amount of land set aside for wilderness has since grown to 110 million acres, and as development encroaches on other fragile landscapes advocates are pushing to expand the designation to at least a dozen more locations.
Amid all the anniversary celebrations, though, there is a worrying undercurrent. Agencies that are monitoring lands intended to be preserved pristine for generations are discovering an uncomfortable truth: land that we leave alone doesn’t remain static. It changes.
Debbie and I discovered this last summer on a vacation trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. The scenery is still stunning, but invasive beetles are attacking the native pines, long-time meadows are drying out, threatening elk populations, and the numbers of tiny mouse-like creatures called picas that are prey for any number of animals are falling, and no one knows why.
Pick your favorite national park or wilderness area and you’ll find a similar story. Invasive species and the overall warming of the climate are a couple of the more obvious causes for these changes; in some cases the causes aren’t clear. The National Park Service and Forest Service are scrambling to respond, in some cases going so far as to spray pesticides to kill invasive pests, or considering relocating iconic trees from threatened landscapes.
There is, of course, great irony to all this. Once we start pampering wild places, are they still wild places? The answer is not as simple as that question makes it sound. Scientists in the Northwest, for example, are concerned that drying of climate is threatening giant Sequoia trees. We could just let them go, but isn’t it worth having these trees around, even if it means we have to see that they are watered?
Scientists manage populations of elk, bears and other animals with an eye to maintaining viable ecosystems. Is it worth sustaining those ecosystems? And if we do, does that mean we’ve taken on the role as the Earth’s gardeners? If so, how do we decide what to protect and what to let go?
There are no obvious answers, but one way to address all this is may be to reflect a little more on this notion of wild.
It was disorientation that Henry David Thoreau hoped to address in his essay, “Walking,” which you heard John read from earlier. Really, what he offers is a prescription. Are the obligations of society weighing too heavily? Get on your hiking shoes, and head out the door.
“The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is,” he says. “I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses.” And, to use his language, whither shall we walk? “I believe,” he says, “that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”
And for Thoreau the source of that magnetism was what he called “wildness.” For most of Thoreau’s contemporaries, wildness was not an especially attractive notion. Wildness suggested danger, savagery, something that civilized society existed to protect people from. Thoreau, for his part, argued that civilized society offered its own form of savagery, resulting in people who, he observed, “lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
with the song still in them…
In his essay, he locates the wild in “the West,” what at the time was unsettled land where travelers told of primitive forests and vast mountain ranges.
In a sense, we still do that. Out West is where we find those majestic parks and untamed wilderness. It is true in a sense and yet also a fantasy. In fact, there is very little in this country, no matter how far “out in the middle of nowhere” you go, that humans – including people who occupied the land long before Europeans arrived – did not have some role in altering. To describe a landscape as “pristine” is really to speak of how long it has been since it was last altered.
Thoreau only made one trip “out West” in his lifetime, and yet he found ample sources of “wildness” in the forests around Concord, land that was hardly pristine, having been clear cut only decades before. No, wildness was not a character of landscapes far distant from human cities. It was more like an essence, something that one could almost drink in, he says, like “hemlock-spruce, or arbor-vitae in our tea.”
“How near to good is what is wild,” he says. Why? Because, “life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.” Wildness is that song in all things, that vital essence that makes each thing what it is. Little wonder that, in Thoreau’s words, we plough and sail for it, or seek to import it at any price. We seek to tame our landscapes, to make them less dangerous, more accommodating. But for Thoreau, “hope and future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”
At Thanksgiving a few years ago with our daughters out of town, Debbie and I decided to drive down to Savannah, Georgia for the long weekend. We saw all the standard tourist sites and enjoyed them, but I think that for both of us the most memorable part of our trip was a tour with a young biologist of local salt marshes.
Wearing high boots and coated with bug spray, we trudged through brackish water and watched fiddler crabs skitter about and egrets soar, then stand like statues. It was wonderful! It was wildness on parade, everywhere you looked, even if it was a couple hundred yards from the main highway.
Of course, I don’t need to tell you what that kind of experience is like. We are blessed to live here with such amazing wildness near at hand. And whatever our location this proximity invites us into the kind of relationship that John spoke of. We are invited to locate ourselves within it, to enter it, bringing our curiosity, compassion and wit. In a sense, the wildness of the world calls to the wildness within us and bids us to respond.
This is the place where we experience the power of our seventh Unitarian Universalist principle: respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. It is our way of saying that we are not just observers of the world around us: we belong, intimately in every possible way. We are part of it, and it of us.
It has been our way, we know, to imagine that somehow we humans rise above the great welter of things, that our plots and plans shape the larger scheme of things. We live still with the old biblical myth of dominion ringing in our ears and suppose that we far-seeing beings we can look ahead to some greater destiny.
It’s a habit we find hard to break, and yet the deeper we dive in our understanding of the natural world the clearer it becomes that we must. It is this insight that I think gives us a way to contribute to resolving the disorientation that haunts the debate around making space for the wild. Wild is not just an attribute of distant forests or rocky crags; it is a character of all things, of their deepest essence. As we struggle over preserving our wildest places, the issue is not how to save particular iconic creatures or plants. It is instead that we are called to uphold life where we can, and to do so with humility and with respect to the extraordinary complexity with which life abounds.
This, I believe, is the “complexity” that Thomas Struth told Niles Pitman he was seeking to photograph in the Amazon rainforest. It is a dimension of life that we can’t get at a quick glance, and yet that draws us in all the same. The more we attend to it, the more we see. I wonder if that’s happened to you as you’ve watched these photos cycle past. Is there something here that you find yourself drawn to, where somehow the tangle of leaves and vines in one or the quality of light filtered through branches in another speaks to you?
Perhaps the time will come for us when, like Niles Pitman, we will be able to look at any scene like this in its wildness and luxuriant complexity and see not some random arrangement of vegetation, but home.
Todd & Meg Hoke, Guest Speakers
Each of us struggles with difficult passages in our lives. In more than 25 years working in end-of-life care, Todd and Meg Hoke have worked through a process to help us find the positive even amidst sadness and pian. Meg is Clinical Service Manager for Hospice of the Carolina Foothills and Todd is a nurse at Elizabeth House, a hospice in Hendersonville.
Taryn Strauss, Guest Speaker
Our only Universalist miracle story, that of the Rev. John Murray and the winds of change, begins with the extreme discomfort of a man steeped in doubt and personal loss. In the book of Numbers, Moses faces severe doubt that he can care for his people after bringing them into the Wilderness. Each of us works to find comfort, a sense of safety and protection from danger, but that keeps us out of the wilderness. What can the wilderness teach us?
Photo credit: theglobalpanorama / Foter / CC BY-SA
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
How are you with promises? I mean, not only how are you at keeping your promises, but how are you at making them, too?
I think that generally I’m pretty good at keeping promises. I try to think about the commitments I make and attend to them, though I mess up sometimes. Just this past week an error I made in keeping my calendar resulted in someone cooling her heels in our church office while I scrambled get in.
READING
“You Reading This, Be Ready,” By William Stafford
SERMON
How are you with promises? I mean, not only how are you at keeping your promises, but how are you at making them, too?
I think that generally I’m pretty good at keeping promises. I try to think about the commitments I make and attend to them, though I mess up sometimes. Just this past week an error I made in keeping my calendar resulted in someone cooling her heels in our church office while I scrambled get in.
Well, it happens, right? Sure, but it bothers me. Because I know how I feel when other people fail in their commitments to me, and even worse if they seem to just blow me off and act as if it doesn’t matter. So, when I’m the one at fault, I try to make sure to acknowledge the mistake I’ve made and apologize for it and the wrong that I’ve done them.
It may be just an inconvenience to them, or it may be something deeper: embarrassment, or even deeply hurt feelings. I can’t know, and I can’t change it, but I can at least make some gesture of compassion and respect. Because, promises matter, even the little ones. When we make a promise, we put something of ourselves emotionally into the transaction. And to have that promise broken feels at some level like a violation.
So, I try to be careful about the promises I make, too, though often these days I find I have little choice about them. Just about every commercial transaction we make seems to have some carefully lawyered promise written into it, whether it be the cell phone contract or some credit card payment.
There you are online trying to make some purchase and suddenly up comes this screen full of dense text entitled “terms of agreement”: I agree to . . . yada, yada, yada. And, of course, you read every word, right? No, I don’t either. I look for the box I can check that will let me get on to the next screen and complete the purchase. The box may say, “I agree,” but it doesn’t feel like much of an agreement, except that I accept that I’ll be dunned if there’s some hang-up in my credit card.
This state of affairs may satisfy corporate bookkeepers, but it doesn’t do a lot for the state of promise-making in our culture. Indeed, it serves as a reminder that while our lives are flooded with promises of this sort, there are whole industries of people working to find loopholes in those promises.
There’s a Darwinian kind of feel to all this: the survival, not necessarily of the fittest, but of those who can best game the system. OK, maybe this is how the whole miracle of the marketplace works, but we get into trouble when this sort of sensibility invades our private lives. For, no matter how grizzled or world-weary we may be, there is still something tender inside of every one of us that is looking for the real thing: true communion with another human being.
It could be a partner; it could be a friend; it could be a community of people. It feels like a rare thing these days to be in relationship with people who live inside their promises, not because the terms of a contract loom over them but because of their personal commitment to keeping them.
And so we learn to be wary, reluctant to commit to others and ready to flee when the inevitable lie is uncovered. Well, what did you expect? You expected better. Some of us learn to harden ourselves, or to define the world by our own interests, or just hide away to avoid the harm and deceit we’ve come to expect. We also learn to deny the longing for connection that we feel and the deep grief for it that lives inside us.
The importance of promise-making is very old in our religious tradition, originating among the Puritans who settled New England in the 17th Century. Here’s a statement of this that comes from John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts , who famously told his shipmates aboard the Arabella:
We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must hold familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
The language may be archaic, but the intent is clear: Winthrop was laying out the terms of a promise that he proposed the settlers make to one another.
Heading into an unknown land, seeking a new way in the world, he urged that they support each other, not just in the supply of “necessities,” but also by laboring and suffering together, by making others’ conditions their own, by “delighting in each other” in “meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.”
History shows that these settlers had mixed success in living up to that promise, which was a big part of why our forebears, Unitarians and Universalists, later split away to form their own religions. But the notion that we as religious communities are gathered by promises has endured. We frame it, in this congregation and elsewhere, as a covenant. These are words of our choosing that tell how we intend to hold a space for spiritual exploration that makes room for a diversity of belief.
People new to this community may wonder how a religious community could ever exist among people with differing beliefs. My colleague Meg Riley, minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, says in a recent newsletter column that the way that we create spiritual or theological common ground “is so simple it’s almost embarrassing: We agree to do so.”
No person, no pronouncement compels us. On entering this community, we simply are asked to enter into that agreement. That’s a way of pointing to the fact that for us, our covenant, our promise to respect and care for one another, to stay in conversation even when the going gets tough, is more important to our community than the individual beliefs of its members. Sounds simple, but in practice it’s anything but.
It means that we endeavor to leave ourselves open, not just to hearing what others say to also to being changed by it. There are people from across the theological spectrum – theist, atheist, humanist, Christian, Buddhist, mystic and more – who can’t imagine being in community with people with different beliefs.
It’s what makes us distinctive and puts the lie to the criticism that, as Rebecca Parker, former president of Starr King School for the Ministry, puts it, UUs are some kind of “empty cipher.” We are open to many things, but there are ways of thinking that have no place here.
* “You can hold a view that there is no God or that God exists,” Parker says, “but you cannot hold the view that God is the all-powerful determiner of everything that happens, that there is no human freedom. We hold that freedom is a real and essential characteristic of life.
“You can define salvation, healing and wholeness in many ways, but you cannot hold to the view that there will be an ultimate separation of the saved from the damned. . . . UUs are clear that all souls are of worth.
“You can be devoted to a specific religious practice – Christian prayer, Buddhist meditation, or pagan ritual (to name a few), but you cannot hold the view that one (perspective) encompasses the exclusive, final truth for all times and places.
“Finally, you can see this world as tragically flawed, wondrously gifted, or both. But you cannot hold the view that salvation is to be found solely beyond this world. UUism is clear that the ultimate is present here and now, and can be grasped and experienced, even if only partially, within the frame of our mortal existence.”
And there’s more. The reason this business of covenant making is so important to us is not just because we want to be nice, although we do try to treat people with compassion. And it’s not just that we think it’s important to leave room for people to make up their own minds about what they believe, though we do strongly hold that position.
It’s centered in the understanding that the covenant we make extends beyond ourselves. It is a way of helping us to see that we live and have our being in relationship. The covenant we make with each other helps us better understand the larger unspoken covenants into which each of us was born.
“We are not our own,” writes Brian Wren in one of our hymns. “Earth forms us. Human leaves on nature’s growing vine.” And not just Earth: generation on generation we form each other in ways great and small, ways that may even be invisible to us, yet are undeniable all the same.
Beyond the beliefs that arise among us out of the circumstances of our lives, there is a greater unity that we are a part of, a unity we hope to model in our lives together and bring into being in whatever ways we can. The unity of all things is not something we are observers to: we are in the messy middle of it, bound up by our spirits’ longing, by our very DNA. The covenant we make acknowledges that and invites us into deeper relationship.
This being in relationship is one of the inescapable truths of our lives. A couple of weeks ago when Asheville Playback Theatre led our worship service we invited you to reflect on two questions: who are you, and whose are you? We paired those questions because they are inevitably interwoven. Who we are is defined at least in part by those with whom we are in relationship. And our relationships are shaped by the particularities of our individual identities.
We are not always so good, though, in acknowledging the covenant that is embodied in those relationships. We take things, we take each other for granted, even assume we are entitled to the bounty that is ours.
Is it any wonder, then, that we are so often divided from one another, that we have such a hard time, as John Winthrop put it three and a half centuries ago, “making others’ conditions our own, rejoicing together, laboring and suffering together, delighting in each other . . . abridging ourselves of our superfluities, holding familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality”?
In our disappointment and grief, we forget that we have at our disposal the power of promise. It is a power that I want to argue that we in this community are gathered to employ.
We gather to promise each other a crucible where we may bring our full selves to the life-long journey of spiritual exploration, free of judgment but not of challenge, free of compulsion but not of invitation and inquiry. We gather to promise to be present to each other in each stage of our lives to our wonder and our befuddlement, to growth and decline, to joy and grief. We gather to promise to call ourselves and each other to account to live what we proclaim, to be guided by our hearts as well as our minds, and to put our muscle and our money where our mouths are.
It is good to begin this worship year with a reminder of the promise that underlies our commitment to this community and all the opportunities we have to put it into action.
I’m grateful that our Board of Trustees is beginning this year with a process designed to elicit from the congregation where we want this promise to carry us as a community. Last week they began by inviting about 10 members of the congregation to talk with them about what nurtures them about this place, what motivates then to take part, and also what hinders their involvement and they might add or change to improve their experience.
We learned from these folks that they have a fairly positive experience of Sunday worship and religious education as well as social activities like Restaurantours and family potlucks, as well as social justice work like Room in the Inn and our sharing our offering plate with the community each week.
We also heard disappointment at the lack of diversity in our congregation, difficulties that some newcomers have finding a way in, and intolerance that flares from time to time.
The process will continue the rest of this fall at the board, and in other venues, too, throughout the year. Please look for opportunities to join in as you can. The Puritans aren’t the only people who ever struggled with holding to their covenants. We, too, need occasions to remind ourselves of and renew the promises that gather us and to challenge ourselves to live fully into them. One thing that 35 years of marriage have taught me is that promises are not static. They require continuing attention, investment and care. So it is with us as a covenanted congregation, too.
To create what we hope to see – a place where our tender hearts lead us into deeper connection with our best selves, our dearest values, beloved community – will take a combination of both dedicated commitment & work, and making room for the gentle grace that is forbearance and love.
Out of great need, the Persian poet Hafiz put up, climbing in dangerous terrain, we are holding hands, friends. Holding back, playing the observer, kibitzing from the sidelines – all ways of what Hafiz calls “not loving” – are not neutral acts. They are ways of letting go.
Won’t you stay with us in the game? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
* From “Quest,” newsletter of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Vol. LXIX, No.8
