Another View of Hope (text & audio)
Rev. Mark Ward
We have spent some time in worship and our small group reflection this month playing with this interesting notion introduced by the novelist David Foster Wallace. Speaking to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005, he argued that there are “default settings” that operate in our thinking. He described them as the kind of ideas about which we are absolutely certain, but that, all the same, are, in his words, “totally wrong and deluded.” And chief among these, he said, is the deep belief that “I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” Of course, he said, we rarely think such things because, in his words, “it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.”
We have spent some time in worship and our small group reflection this month playing with this interesting notion introduced by the novelist David Foster Wallace. Speaking to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005, he argued that there are “default settings” that operate in our thinking. He described them as the kind of ideas about which we are absolutely certain, but that, all the same, are, in his words, “totally wrong and deluded.” And chief among these, he said, is the deep belief that “I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” Of course, he said, we rarely think such things because, in his words, “it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.”
Wallace’s words echoed in my mind earlier this year as I read news reports about the South African leader Nelson Mandela lingering near death, as he still does. Now, two decades since his release after 27 years in prison, Mandela has been lionized on the world stage. He has been celebrated in films like “Invictus” and widely praised by world leaders, including our own President Obama.
It’s worth remembering, though, that at the time of his release there was much uncertainty about what Mandela’s new freedom would bring. The collapse of Apartheid in South Africa, the 40-year-old system that had codified racial oppression in every way that country’s white leadership could conceive, left a vacuum that no one knew what would fill. Mandela himself was in his 70s and long absent from the politics.
And so it was all the more amazing that from the moment he emerged Mandela took his place not only as a vigorous leader of an anxious and expectant nation but also as one of the world’s preeminent advocates for racial reconciliation. Despite a lifetime under the heel of virulent racist oppression, Mandela opened a path for healing and renewal for all people, one that adroitly took account of just the sort of default settings that Wallace pointed to.
We Unitarian Universalists have made a practice at this time of year at around when the United Nations was founded of widening our vision a bit and considering what the larger world has to teach us about the possibilities for peace and freedom. So, today, as we near the 68th anniversary of the UN’s founding, we turn to the story of Nelson Mandela and the hope his life offers humankind in its long walk to freedom.
Mandela writes in his autobiography that he began his life feeling that he was free, or at least, in his words, “free in every way that I could know.” He grew up in villages in the Transkei, a South African province bordering the Indian Ocean, many miles from the major cities of Pretoria, Cape Town, or Johannesburg, and was raised in relative privilege. His father was a local chief and advisor to the king of the Thembu tribe.
Seen as a boy with promise, he was sent to a Methodist boarding school, where he was given the name, Nelson. But shortly afterward, when he was 9, his father died, and he was sent to live with a family friend who was the area regent. He attended classes at a British boarding school – which helped make him a lifelong Anglophile – but he counted some of his most important education as witnessing the regent, his protector, as the leader of area assemblies.
These were occasions of great ceremony at which any man, rich or poor, was given the opportunity to speak – sad to say, woman weren’t given this privilege. Issues were discussed, and when a consensus was reached, the regent would sum up the results, a poet would deliver a song full of both praise and satire, and the evening would end with the regent leading the crowd in a roar of laughter.
Mandela headed off to college at 19, seeing a future for himself in the government’s Native Affairs office, and got involved in student government. On returning home, though, he found his protector had arranged a marriage for him to a woman who he knew was in love with a friend of his. He fled to Johannesburg, but later reconciled with his protector, completed college by correspondence course, apprenticed himself to a law office and later entered law school.
Friends counseled him against getting involved in politics, but he was drawn in all the same. As he wrote later, “it was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion . . . that I began to hunger for it.”
The African National Congress had been organized in 1912, and as early as 1918, the year of Mandela’s birth, at the Versailles peace conference, it had voiced the grievances of African people. By the 1940s, when Europeans adopted an Atlantic Charter asserting the dignity of each person and arguing for democratic reform, the ANC responded with a similar charter calling for full citizenship of all Africans, the right to buy land, and the repeal of discriminatory legislation.
In 1944, Mandela and his allies, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, helped organize a Youth League of the ANC, to advance its goals. But in 1948 Afrikaner Nationalists came to power and brought with them the policy of Apartheid. Blacks in South Africa were already essentially non-citizens in their own country, without the right to vote or hold property. But Apartheid codified that oppression as never before. It regulated who could live where and forced blacks to move from some areas. It restricted who could hold what jobs and who would receive what education and instituted a policy of police terror and political persecutions for those who opposed it.
Mandela and Tambo worked as lawyers to help people navigate the system and helped organize the ANC response – a Defiance Campaign that broadly challenged the Apartheid system. The results were thousands of arrests and ultimately an epic trial for treason against Mandela and 29 others that lasted from 1955 to 1960 that resulted in their acquittal. Later that year, though, police in Sharpeville fired on a massive protest demonstration, killing 69 and wounding at least 180 others.
Shortly afterward, to avoid being arrested, Mandela went underground. During that time he even went on an international tour as an ANC leader and was chosen to head an offshoot group called the Spear of the Nation. That group led a shift in the ANC’s tactics, for the first time organizing acts of sabotage in the hope of weakening the state’s resolve. After two years in hiding, Mandela was captured and put on trial for crimes against the state. In 1963 he was sentenced to life in prison. He was 45 years old.
Social scientists argue over the origin of racism, but I think a credible claim can be made that it originates in something like the default setting that David Foster Wallace identified: “I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” Carried further, it’s easy to see how this way of thinking morphs into an attitude that sees my interest as trumping all others. So, I need not concern myself with others’ welfare, even their humanity.
It’s not something we’re likely to confess, as it is, as Wallace observed “so socially repulsive.” Ugh! I hate to confess it, but I think Wallace is right. It’s an impulse that each of us struggled with. I can certainly find it in myself. And Nelson Mandela could see it, too, not just in his oppressors but also in himself.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey after his release, he said that it was certainly a tragedy that he spent most of his adulthood in prison. But, in his words, “if I had not been to prison, I would not have been able to achieve the most difficult task in life, and that is changing yourself.”
Yes, sitting in a narrow cell or breaking up stones in the prison yard on Robben Island, he thought deeply about the future of his nation and how he would like to change it. But he also gave attention to what he considered the flaws in himself: his impulsiveness and pride, the hunger for vengeance. To help temper that, as the grind of prison life went on, he began to get to know his jailers and study the Afrikans language and history as well as that of his own people. He came to appreciate the fear that underlay that racist state that oppressed him, and to see something else: another and very different default setting within us.
“I always knew,” Mandela wrote, “that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. (Human) goodness is a flame that can be hidden, but never extinguished.”
Two decades after its demise, it’s hard to fathom how oppressive the Apartheid state was, how hard it worked to demean, even to deny the humanity of every non-white resident, but mostly blacks. Leaders who emerged were intimidated or assassinated, and reform groups, both black and white, were infiltrated with spies and troublemakers who worked actively to undermine them.
And still by the late 1980s the state itself, one of the most poisonous purveyors of racist oppression ever to have arisen, recognized that its days were numbered. So, in a remarkable turn of events it turned to the man it had demonized as the chief agent of its woes to negotiate a way forward. And he, despite enduring a prison term that snatched away a third of his life, agreed.
The iconic event of Mandela’s release in February 1990 was just a start. It took another four years to negotiate a new constitution and arrange new elections, which resulted in Mandela’s election as president. Soon afterward Mandela appointed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to investigate many decades of human rights abuses. The years since have seen the disbanding of the National Party, which had created Apartheid, and the continued success of the ANC, but political turmoil, grinding poverty, corruption, and the country’s many intransigent divisions make South Africa still a work in progress.
As Mandela put it in his autobiography, “when I walked out of prison, my mission was to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case.
“The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficulty road. For, to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
It may have been because Mandela’s words were ringing in my ears, but I thought I heard them again just this past week in a very different context. The occasion was the Campaign for Southern Equality’s latest action at the Buncombe County Register of Deeds to end the state’s discrimination against same-sex couples seeking to be married. It was shortly before 10 same-sex couples accompanied by about 80 of us supporters were to walk over to request a license to be married and, for the first time ever, not be denied.
Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the campaign’s executive director, was talking to the group gathered in the sanctuary of First Congregational United Church of Christ. “I look around this room,” she said, “and I see people who are willing to go a step farther, to say this law is wrong and I know it, and I’m willing to believe that something I do in my life can help change it.
“I see people who believe that if we stand up against these laws again and again and again and return to the counter again and again and again to say I am equal, I am human, this is who I am, this is who I love, that it will change things.”
“We dare to believe what we know in our hearts, that those truths are more powerful and transcend the brokenness of laws that treat any people as inferior to other people.”
The circumstances may be different, but the end is not. It is simply the language of liberation that calls to us across cultures, across decades, across the world, language echoed in religious teachings from the parables of Jesus to the dharma talks of the Buddha.
We cannot be free, we cannot be whole if we would countenance the oppression of others. It may be, as Nelson Mandela observed on his inauguration as president that, “there is no easy road to freedom,” but in the end it is also the only path to peace. Nelson Mandela’s life and work embodied that, the combination of steely resolve and undying hope in what is possible among us, hope that the fear within us can be quelled and the love within us can be stoked: that the world’s liberation can be our own.
Entering Another Story – Native American People’s Day (text & audio)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
So, today we return to this month’s worship theme of “default settings,” an opportunity for us to examine some of those untested assumptions and routine ways of thinking in our religious lives that get in the way living fully with integrity and peace.
In that context, many of us grew up learning a narrative of history that told of plucky European explorers who came to this continent in the 15th and 16th centuries on voyages of discovery, finding a new world, which they then settled and civilized. Of these figures, Christopher Columbus was singled out for special status as early as 1792, the 300th anniversary of his arrival. Columbus was not the first European to arrive, but his travels established the first lasting European contact with North America. Celebrations of his arrival culminated with President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision in 1937 to grant the request of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal group, to create a federal holiday in his name on the second Monday of October, tomorrow.
Left out of that narrative, of course, were the stories of the peoples who occupied the land that the Europeans claimed to have “discovered,” people who lived in rich and complex cultures that were thousands of years older than those of the European settlers. Also left out of the lesson plans was the depravity of those early settlers, men like Columbus who murdered, raped and enslaved native peoples for the sake, not of discovery, but of enriching themselves.
In recent decades as the stories of indigenous people have finally begun to surface in our Western culture and the true history of those early days is being told, a window has opened on a different way of marking those days. It began with events in October 1992 – the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival – that was celebrated in some places as Indigenous or Native American People’s Day, and has been honored since. Today, we ally ourselves with that movement, recognizing the old Columbus Day narrative as a default setting in our culture that we need to abandon for the sake of our own ethical integrity.
As a religious movement with its roots in Europe, we recognize that we are part of the culture that has benefited from this narrative at the expense of others. So, we have some catching up to do. We need to learn the larger history that embraces the full story of those indigenous peoples as well as our European ancestors. But to make ourselves available for that story we also have to open ourselves to different ways of seeing and being.
The deeper default settings that challenge us here are bits of the cultural patrimony that we carry unknowingly, settings that, for example, depict humankind as the crown of creation, given the natural world to exploit as we choose, or as rootless creatures whose destiny is not of this Earth.
Today to assist in that opening we will center our service on some of the stories of our neighbors, the Cherokee, people who have occupied these hills longer than white people have occupied Europe.
We’ll invite you to enter those stories, not as quaint myths of another time but as living testimony to a way of being present to the world while remaining in relationship with it, with a sense of place and deep time that our hyperactive culture works against. There are surely lessons in that testimony for people like us who seek to live fully and responsibly, who hope to know this world we occupy as sacred and our lives together as blessed.
PRESENTATION: ENTERING ANOTHER STORY
THE ORIGIN OF LEGENDS
Long, long ago people lived in the world with animals. They could talk to one another and everybody got along. But one day, as people will do, they started to fight. One thing led to another, and this person wasn’t talking to that person. Somebody wasn’t very nice to someone else, or stole from someone else.
They got so angry that the Creator was afraid they were going to kill one another. So, he divided them up into four groups and sent then off in different directions – the north, the south, the east, the west – to the four corners of the world. When they got there they were confused because they didn’t know how to live there. They didn’t know the plants, didn’t know where the water was and didn’t know what the seasons would be like.
The Creator felt sorry for them, so he sent them dreams that told them about each of the animals, what to eat, what to do, what the plants were for, and so on. They began to learn and grow, and then he sent them another gift so they wouldn’t forget. He sent them legends about all these plants and animals, and the world, so that each time they told the legends they would know how to be with the plants and the animals, and how to be with each other.
ENTERING THE STORIES
It’s hard for us to know what to make of Cherokee stories. To our ears they have the sound of children’s fables, and yet they are likely older than our European fairy tales, with roots perhaps older, even, than Genesis.
Last week I joined our adult education class on “Discovering a Sense of Place” on a trip to Cherokee, where we were hosted in a visit to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian by its education director, Barbara Duncan. In seeking to learn more about the Cherokee, she told us, it is good to begin with stories, since historically among the Cherokee stories served as both school and religion.
Stories held lessons for how people got along with each other and the larger world. So, the message behind them often boiled down to simple advice like don’t be greedy, don’t steal, don’t brag: lessons for getting along.
Years ago Joseph Campbell argued that the motif for legends in the west was the hero’s journey, the individual prevailing over daunting odds. For the Cherokee, the motif is different. As Barbara Duncan put it, the typical end of a Cherokee story is not the triumph of an individual, but an achievement for the community. Individuals may be sacrificed along the way, but the community prevails.
Stories also communicated a world view. There is no corresponding Cherokee word to the western word “wild,” referring to things outside of our control, in a natural state. Instead, the Cherokee see themselves as part of the world’s natural state, living in community with plants and animals, and responsible to them.
Nor is there any a separation between the sacred and the profane. Some places are considered especially holy, such as village mounds or places where community fires are kept, because of how they are used or what legend or history says has happened there, but every part of land is to be cared for.
In foraging, for example, when looking for a particular kind of plant, one would pick only every fourth one, assuring that more remained for future foragers. A river was called a “long man,” with his head in the mountains and his feet in the sea; people were prohibited from soiling them, assuring that the water would be clean.
The ethos underlying Cherokee stories is finding balance, implied in the Cherokee word Duyukta translated roughly as “the right path.” But the feeling in the community was that no instruction, no preaching was needed to learn this. It was something that everyone knew if he or she just paid attention.
HOW THE WORLD WAS MADE
The earth was a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault. All of the animals were in the sky place, Galunlati, but it was very crowded, and they needed more room. They wondered if there might be something on or under the water. So, the Beaver’s grandchild, Dayunisi, the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see what it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then, it dived into the water, swimming down and down and down, until it came to the bottom and found some soft mud, which it brought to the surface. Immediately, the mud began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth.
This earth was still fastened to the sky with four cords in the cardinal directions. At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The animals were anxious to come down, but they didn’t want to sink in the mud. They sent out different birds to see if it was dry, but they found no place to land and came back again to Galunlati. Then the buzzard had an idea. He flew down close to the land and flapped his great wings, which started to dry out the mud. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and flew still lower. His wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day.
ORIGINS
The Cherokee origin story is set here in the mountains because as far as they are concerned they have always been here. Kanati and Selu, first man and first woman, were said to have made their home in the Shining Rock Wilderness near where we gather blueberries these days, as the Cherokee did before us, at Graveyard Fields along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Archaeological records date human occupation in this area back at least 10- to 12,000 years ago. When Cherokees emerged as a separate tribal identity is unclear, but the Cherokee language appears to have appeared distinct from other tribes around 3,500 years ago and permanent, well-built villages date back at least 1,000 years or so.
Historical records say that the Cherokee nation once encompassed a population of some 36,000 over more than 140,000 square miles – covering much of what today is Kentucky and Tennessee as well as western Virginia and North Carolina and northern South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. This nation, though, had no central government, but instead consisted of a federation of towns.
One of the nation’s “mother towns” was at Kituhwa, near present day Bryson City, the site of a prominent mound. Unlike in the burial mounds of some cultures, there are no bodies buried in these places. Instead, they are said to be places where members of the community brought soil in baskets or even turtle shells to a common location in the center of a village as a symbol of their coming together, and because of that they are held to be holy. The mound was also the site of a sacred fire that was always kept burning, symbolizing the presence of the Creator among them.
Another important location was what the Cherokee called Kuwahi, or Mulberry Place, which we call Clingman’s Dome, the highest peak in the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. As John mentioned earlier, this was also the location of the Gall Place, the magic lake that to human eyes looked merely like clouds filling a valley, but was where sick and wounded bears, and other animals, could go for healing.
During the forced removal of Cherokees in the mid 19th Century, it was also said to be a place where people hid away from the soldiers, seeking healing of a different kind.
ON THE ORIGIN OF STRAWBERRIES
At the dawn of time, the first man and the first woman set up their home together by the side of a great broad river. They had everything they needed for a blissful life: fruit, meat and fish, plenty of wood and fresh water, and, of course, each other. They lived as happily as any man and woman have ever lived together, until they began to quarrel. First it was the small things, like “Why didn’t you cook this?” and “Why didn’t you tidy that?” But then the insults, and a few wooden plates and bowls, began to fly.
The first woman was so upset that she decided to leave the first man. At the break of day, while he was still asleep, she set off down the valley, heading towards the rising sun. She walked and walked, always looking straight ahead of her, and not once turning back. When the first man woke up and saw that she was gone, he waited for her to come back. She did not come back. He found her tracks along the valley, but she had a long head-start on him, and she did not stop or look round.
The sun was now high in the great blue sky. It looked down upon the first man, as he followed after the first woman, and it saw that there was sadness on the face of the world. The sun asked the man what had happened, and when the man told him, the sun asked if he would like to have her back. He said that he would. So, the sun took pity on the first man and decided to help him. His gentle rays touched the ground along the woman’s path, and a huckleberry bush sprang up. Its fruit was shiny and enticing, but as she passed her eyes remained fixed on the distance, and she did not see the berries.
And so the sun shone again on the ground up ahead of the woman. And he caused a clump of blackberries to grow up beside her path. She refused to even glance at them.
And then the sun thought that he must create something entirely new: something so vivid, fragrant, and delicious, that even the first woman would not fail to take notice of them in her resolute and unhappy mood. And so he shone his rays, and the first patch of strawberries spread over the ground.
Their sweet scent filled the woman’s senses, and her mood became lighter. She began to look around her, and she saw the bright red fruit hiding beneath he leaves. She picked one and ate it, and as she tasted the strawberry on her tongue, she began to remember the happiness she knew when she first set up home with her husband. She found she no longer felt the pressing desire to leave him. She sat down on the ground and wondered what she must do. At last she gathered a bunchy of the finest berries and started back along the path to give them to him. He met her kindly, and they went home together.
WOMEN’S WORK
It is said that one of the greatest shocks that westerners faced when they came to negotiate treaties with the Cherokee was that women would be among the leaders of the negotiating parties. From the Cherokee perspective, though, this would be expected. In the matrilineal culture of the Cherokee, women had control of the houses and fields. Men traditionally were away hunting and fishing, which left the women to tend the gardens and run the family. They were the ones who passed their clan affiliation to their children. Unlike the nuclear families of the Europeans, Cherokee families were often large, embracing many layers of relations.
This shifted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when, after recovering from their defeat at the hands of Europeans, they set about to make themselves a “civilized tribe” of farmers and businessmen. With European “civilization” came a patriarchal social structure of disparate households with male breadwinners and women tending the home fires.
With all those transitions, though, what didn’t change was the Cherokee sense of connection to the land. Having been rooted here so long, one Cherokee is said to observed, “even the dust of this place is from our ancestors.”
THE COMING OF THE GENTLE PEOPLE
They say that if you go out in the woods and hear some music or some people talking but don’t see anyone around you might have caught a glimpse of the gentle people, the Nunnehi. One time the Nunnehi came to the Cherokee people and told them, “you’re going to have to come with us now. All of you pack up your belongings, and in seven days you will have to come and live with us.”
“But why?” the people asked. “Where are we going? Why do we have to go?”
“Because,” they said, “Something terrible is going to happen: worse than any flood, or any famine that you have ever known before. You have to leave to save yourselves.”
So, they packed up their belongings and followed Nunnehi for miles until they came to a big stone way deep in the mountains. As they watched, the stone rolled away, and they rushed to see what was inside. It was such a beautiful place. The air seemed to dance with joy.
So without even thinking, many families rushed in. As the turned to close the door forever, they saw a group standing away in the back. The chief asked them, “Why aren’t you coming in? We’re ready to close the door.”
But the people said, “We were born here, and no matter what happens we want to stay.” The chief was torn. He wanted to go in, but he also wanted to be with his people. He decided he needed to stay and help lead his people.
The stone rolled back, and the people who stayed were the descendants of today’s tribe. Those other people have never been heard from again, though they say if you’re out in the woods, you might hear some music or some people talking. It’s the Nunnehi, and they’re reminding us that they’re always with us.
INTERCHANGE
The greatest irony in Europeans celebrating Columbus Day is that for the native peoples of North America the colonization of their land was a catastrophe. This is so not merely because within the space of three and a half centuries Indians were tortured and abased, militarily defeated and driven off their home lands, but also because the diseases the Europeans brought with them cut like a scythe through their numbers. By one estimate, 95 percent of Native Americans were killed by disease epidemics like small pox within a little more than a century after the arrival of Columbus.
The first contact the Cherokee had with these people was an expedition by Herman DeSoto in 1540 in search of gold and slaves. But full blown trade with Europeans didn’t start until the beginning of the 18th Century. There were benefits to the Cherokee from this trade – introduction to new crops like apples and sweet potatoes as well as livestock, and goods like pots, weapons, plows and cloth. But by the end of that century, the Indians also experienced several killing epidemics, warfare with European settlers that included multiple atrocities on each side and in the end wiped out dozens of villages. The Cherokee also saw the loss of 75% of their former territories through treaties with their conquerors.
It was George Washington and his secretary of war, John Knox, who in 1789 proposed a solution to the continuing tit for tat of warfare between Indians and settlers, a policy of what he called “civilization.” Indians would be taught to live like white people, even encouraged to intermarry with them. The Cherokee ultimately agreed and succeeded grandly, developing schools, churches, and businesses, creating a written language, a constitution and a representative assembly.
But the settlers weren’t satisfied. They wanted the Cherokee land and pushed to remove them. The now “civilized” Cherokees responded with the tools they’d learned. They lobbied, petitioned and even filed a lawsuit that eventually won them a Supreme Court ruling allowing them to stay.
It didn’t matter. President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling and called out federal soldiers and state militias in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina to drive the Cherokee out. Troops rousted people from their homes, gathered them in rough stockades and drove them west to Oklahoma on what has become known as the “trail of tears.” Some 15,000 Cherokees were driven from their land; between 4,000 and 8,000 died on the journey.
Here in the mountains of North Carolina, though, a small group living along the Oconaluftee River maintained a toehold on their land by persuading state legislators to accept their petition to stay. In time the federal government recognized them as the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. Another several hundred hid out in the mountains and eventually joined them.
Having the right to stay, though, didn’t prevent rapacious logging in the next 60 years or so that clear cut their land twice and left a nucleus of about 1,500 people living in poverty. The 20th Century also saw the arrival of federally-funded boarding schools that punished children for speaking the Cherokee language. In time, the schools closed and the tribe began its own schools that teach Cherokee language and culture.
A shift in the Cherokee’s fortunes came with the Indian Gaming Act in 1988. It gave the Cherokee a source of income, first with bingo and in 1997 with casino gambling, as well as jobs from the attendant tourist industry that has raised the standard of living of tribe members and funded health, education and other support services.
Meanwhile, the stories are still being told. Barbara Duncan from the museum has collected many of them from current day story tellers, people who learned them from relatives and tell them to school and civic groups.
She quotes a story that one those tellers, Freeman Owle, told to a group surrounding the trail of tears. Owle notes that, despite all the brutality the Cherokee experienced, the survival of the Eastern Band was due at least in part to the kindness and support of some of their white neighbors.
He concludes by saying, “You know, I came here tonight to tell you that the Cherokee people don’t really hold any hatred or animosity in their hearts for the things that happened in our past. We can take our hats off to the past, but as one great gentleman said, ‘We should take our shirts off to the future.’ The reason the Cherokee people survived is because they loved their neighbors and were good neighbors.”
It is a remarkable conclusion, an act of grace, really, that offers us an opportunity to enter these stories, to see in them links to our common humanity, a glimmer of hope for us all. Even today, the Cherokee are composing stories that end with something good for the people, for all people. And it is cause for us to be grateful.
Two important sources for this presentation were:
Living Stories of the Cherokee, collected and edited by Barbara R. Duncan, University of North Carolina Press, 1998
Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook, Barbara R. Duncan & Brett H. Riggs, North Carolina Folklife Institute, 2003
Photo credit: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p15012coll5/id/1160
We Don’t Stand; We Move – Association Sunday (text & audio)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
On a bright fall morning more than a decade ago, Sam Zurich began the day as he usually does with his radio tuned to NPR. As he was getting breakfast together, his ears pricked up to an item on the news: a couple of jetliners that had left Boston’s airport for the west coast were unaccounted for, and authorities were puzzled as to where they could be. Only minutes later, he heard that apparently one of those planes had smashed into the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center, and within 15 minutes the other plane had plowed into the south tower.
Sam knew the World Trade Center. For some 30 years, before he and his wife, Elaine, had moved to Asheville, he had commuted from his home in Westport, Connecticut, to a radio announcing job in Rockefeller Center in the middle of Manhattan. The twin towers were unmistakable landmarks, looming in the distance. He and Elaine had celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary only a few years after the towers had opened with lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the north tower.
As he listened to the rest of that day’s horrifying events unfold – the collapse of the towers, the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, the fourth augering into a Pennsylvania forest – one of his first calls was to the church. Sam had been helping out on the worship team, and he asked what the church would do and volunteered to help in any way he could.
Before long he got a call from the minister, Maureen Killoran, to say that there would be a service that evening and asked him to call local radio and TV stations to let them know. A large poster was prepared announcing the service and propped on an easel in our front yard with the words prominently displayed – “Everyone is invited!”
Sam says he recalls the service that night that packed this sanctuary as the moment he was proudest to be a part of this congregation. And the responsive reading that he led in that service tells why: “We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted,” it began. “We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.”
Seven years later on a late summer Sunday, Chris Buice, minister of the Tennessee Valley UU Church in Knoxville, and his daughter were having breakfast with Debbie and me, getting ready for a day at Bele Chere, when Chris’ cell phone rang. The signal was spotty, but he could make out enough to hear: “shooting at church.”
He dashed off not knowing what he would find, and we jumped on the Internet. Before long we learned about the man who had entered the sanctuary that morning with a shotgun hidden in a guitar case, pulled it out and began shooting while children of the church were putting on a production of “Annie, Jr.” Two people were killed; several were injured.
A little later I got a call from Taryn Strauss, our religious education director, who had grown up in that congregation while her mom, Lynn, was minister. She came over, and as we commiserated in shock we resolved that we needed to hold a service in solidarity with the Knoxville church. The service was set for Monday, a time when Womansong usually rehearses in our space, and they not only gave up the rehearsal space but performed in the service. Taryn told a story; we sang “Spirit of Life” and “One More Step.”
I began my remarks by quoting remarks that Forrest Church, minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, gave in their service after the events of 9/11. “I am so grateful to see you, each and every one. How profoundly we need one another, especially now, but more than just now. We are not human beings because we think. We are human beings because we care. All true meaning is shared meaning. The only thing that can never be taken from us is the love we give away.”
So, what is religion about? Many tend to associate religion with edifices of various sorts: edifices like this one of stone, wood, and glass, some grand and some simple. But we also associate religion with edifices of another kind: structures of words that organize the world in certain ways, that separate the world into the sacred and the profane, that outline a prescribed path to peace, to salvation, that state of final happiness that we humans imagine in so many ways.
It is in these sorts of words that most faith traditions locate their identities, words intended to inspire, to frame a sometimes hostile word in understandable terms, to offer comfort and serve as bulwarks in times of doubt and need. And yet, as Monika illustrated in her exercise to begin our service, edifices of any kind resist the natural motion of things. Those that endure must find some way to adapt to that motion.
Nearly a century ago, Lewis Fisher, dean of the Ryder Divinity School in Chicago, a Universalist seminary, was struggling with this issue. The denomination had recently celebrated the 150th anniversary of the arrival of one of its founders, John Murray, in America, and launched a campaign to double its membership. In truth, though, the denomination was in decline, split between conservative rural churches and progressive-minded urban ones.
In his book Which Way? Fisher argued that every religious tradition evolves. Words take on new meaning in the light of new circumstances, and denominations must learn to move with them. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move.”
This famous quote has a new currency among us Unitarian Universalists with the announcement that our denomination’s iconic headquarters building at 25 Beacon Street, off the Boston Public Garden and right next to the Massachusetts State House, and several other buildings nearby have been put up for sale. Headquarters will be moving to an up-and-coming but less prestigious neighborhood at 24 Farnsworth Street.
There is much to recommend the move. The old buildings are hopelessly out of date, and it would cost enormous sums – more than we can afford right now – to retrofit them. The sale of these buildings during a booming real estate market in Boston is likely to net the UUA a handsome profit to help pay off debts and put us on a strong footing for the years ahead.
And yet . . . it causes some pain to lose that prominent and historic address that has been home to the Unitarian side of our tradition for nearly 90 years. And there are those who see in this move signs of trouble for our movement at a time when we, like other progressive-minded religious, are, again, struggling. But here I want to affirm the UUA’s use of Lewis Fisher’s words, written for a different time but applying to a surprisingly similar circumstance.
It is not a prominent edifice that defines us as a religious body; it is the way we are in the world that opens the path to life-giving hope, that raises us above our self-concern and helps us see the possibility of a greater life, that creates connections among people centered in an affirmation of each person’s inherent worth and dignity and our kinship with all things.
It matters that we are joined, not by unalterable words, but by a covenant of principles and ways to be together that we learn by living. It matters that the sources of our tradition, some of which you heard the choir recite this morning, are a gift to draw on, not iron strictures. It matters that we have room to move, because it gives us space to breathe, to grow. So, it is a good day to join with other UU congregations across the country to mark Association Sunday as we celebrate the future that awaits us.
This month in worship I am inviting you to examine the “default settings” that you find governing your religious life – untested assumptions, routine ways of thinking that get in the way living fully with integrity and peace. And today I want to suggest that attachment to these kinds of edifices I’ve been talking about is one of them.
Oh, we certainly need them. This lovely edifice that we occupy makes possible the gathering of this community in light-filled, aesthetically pleasing space. But we have also seen it evolve and know it will continue to evolve as this congregation and its needs evolve. We also have our own edifice of words – our mission statement, covenant, by-laws, governing document, as well as the wise words of celebrated women and men. All that gives needed structure to our life together, and it, too, continues to evolve over time.
The life of a congregation, though, is something more. It is embodied, not in its edifices, but in its people and how being part of a gathered community has changed them and changed the world: in short, not so much what we stand for, but how we move.
I began today with two stories of such change, of how our way of being in the world opened doors, opened hearts and made possible something life-giving and good. Sam recalled how the 9/11 service made us both a force and a voice for a community coming together. Our service after the Knoxville shootings not only served to offer comfort in the face of meaningless violence, but made room for an interfaith conversation that we hosted on how faith communities respond to violence.
And there are many more stories to tell. So, to make a start at this I invited people who have been a part of this congregation for 10 years or more to share some of their stories. Sam’s was one; here are some more.
Arthur Poultney recalled the camaraderie of growing up in the 1950s when barely more than a couple of dozen people met at the old YMCA and then a large home on Vermont Avenue. An oasis of liberal religion provided a welcome respite for progressive-minded people, and their gathering sparked community involvement, such as recruiting Eleanor Roosevelt to speak to a U.N. Day gathering here, such as serving breakfasts to African-American kids and registering their parents to vote at a time when the schools here were still segregated.
Bob MacPherson recalled his wife, Ann, bumping into UUA President Robert West in a trip to Germany and recruiting him to speak at a banquet before the dedication of this building. Among the 250 or so present at that dedication on October 15, 1972 were Paula Sandburg, whose gift help make the building possible, and Reuben Robertson, who donated the land where it was located, both of whom died within the year. Those present dedicated this building where we sit to “the life universal, that it may bring blessings to many people: guidance to the young, consolation to the troubled, encouragement to all.”
Nels Arnold remembered an all-church project in the 1990s to support the Helpmate domestic violence center, with congregation members taking part in everything from fund-raising, to child care, and building playground equipment.
And in perhaps no other way we have brought about the change we seek than through religious education that, in William Ellery Channing’s words, aims “not to stamp our minds on the young but to stir up their own.” I couldn’t begin to weigh the impact that dozens of volunteers have had on the hundreds of children who have taken part in our classes, yet I see it resounding in the joy of those who have been touched by it. Anna Olsen says she has taught religious education here for 24 years because she gets so much out of it.
“My theology is open to self examination,” she says. “My patience is increased, my appreciation of wonder at the small details of life and relationships are experienced. I become more of the best part of me because that is (what is) expected. I feel accountable for who I am.”
It is a measure of what a crucial role we play that so many of you have supported this community over the years to preserve a liberal voice in religion in this part of the world. Michael Lord will be returning to his native England within the year, but before going he has contributed $25,000 to our endowment in a bid to help assure that this congregation not only survives but prospers.
Take a look over the fireplace in Sandburg Hall before you leave today to see who else has given or plans to give from the abundance of their lives to sustain the promise we hold for the world. When that list is next updated, you will see my name and Debbie’s there as well. Won’t you join us?
This is important, but in the end we will be measured as a religious community by how we realize our hope for all humankind. It is why our members were key organizers of Building Bridges, a community anti-racism training, and why we are life members of the NAACP. It is why we hosted overnight undocumented workers campaigning for immigration reform, and why we have had teams of visitors, donated books and served as reading tutors to prisoners at the county jail.
It is why our building has been a host of advocacy groups for transgendered people, and gay, lesbian and bisexual teens; for guardians ad litem, and Alcoholics Anonymous.
Cathy Agrella recalls one evening more than a decade ago when she was in the foyer outside the church office and heard a group in the RE common area downstairs singing traditional Christian hymns. She says, “I thought, ‘What in the world?’ These songs, filled with references to Jesus and salvation, were certainly not being practiced by our own choir. And yet, the sound was so beautiful, and so heartfelt, that my eyes filled with tears. When a staff member came by, I asked about the music, and was told that members of the Metropolitan Community Church were having services.
“At that time, when it was still rare for gay people to be welcomed in Protestant churches, where else but in our building could these singers have felt so free? We had offered them a safe and open haven for a spiritual gathering. I was never so proud to be a member of our congregation as at that moment.”
And, of course, the welcome that we provide for others makes that much sweeter the welcome we can offer to each other. I offer you these words of our member Carol Taylor:
“This Christmas, Betty and I are flying to Portland, Maine, to get married—because we can. After 40 years together, we figure it’s going to last. Betty says it will turn us from an old couple into an old married couple.
“Maine in December isn’t exactly what I want. I want to be married here, in this sanctuary, where, for 13 years, I have been moved to laughter, tears, and action. I want to be married by Mark Ward. I want a reception in Sandburg Hall, with champagne and a big cake, surrounded by family and friends, including many in this congregation. I don’t think this will happen soon. When you’re both in your 70s, you can’t afford to wait around.
“When Mark asked everyone who’s been here 10 years what impact UUCA has had on their lives, I had lots of answers. Most of them were about community. This community clarifies my thinking, nudges me outside my comfort zone, draws me out of my shell, brings me friends, and makes me happy. But the clearest and most dramatic impact has to do with who I love.
“When the state of Washington voted to legalize same-sex marriage, a lesbian friend who lives in Seattle said she was surprised by the effect on her, since she had no plans to marry. It changed everything. As she rode the bus, dined in restaurants, shopped in bookstores, she looked around and thought, ‘These people voted me into existence. I’m a citizen of this state. I’m real. I belong.’
“I know how she feels, because I’m a member of this congregation. Oh, this is how it feels to be accepted as just another person. Accepted casually, as a matter of course (“say hello to Betty”). This is what it feels like not to be a category. It’s wonderful to know that if you dislike me, I have earned it. I was rude, or insensitive, or unkind, or stupid, or you haven’t gotten over the checkout lines at last year’s auction.
“When you live in a culture that despises you, it’s impossible not to take that inside. When you belong to a community that affirms you, that brings you in, that accepts you with no particular interest in who you love, you take that inside, too. The hard-edged defenses dissolve, and you can move on.
“In a diverse congregation of 600, there have got to be people who oppose same-sex marriage, and who think that the least I can do is shut up about it. I suspect they don’t talk about it much, because it’s so clearly contrary to the ethos of this congregation. Bless their hearts. In their own way, they’re in the closet. They belong here, too. Community matters. It is comforting. It is transformative. It is life-giving.”
My friends, never doubt the power of religious community, of this religious community. Never doubt that in how we move we are changing the world, even if one silly brick at a time, even if it takes far longer than it should.
But we can trust in the process, in the hope that, as the crusading Unitarian minister Theodore Parker put it, “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” because we can see it at work, slowly moving in the world at large, and moving in ourselves as well.
Moving, with all that has ever lived or will live in infinite space and infinite time, letting go of false assurance and giving ourselves over to possibility: emergent, vital and alive, arising in us now.
Let it Be a Dance (text & audio)
REFLECTION 1: “I’m dancing with myself”
Okay. Full disclosure: I can’t dance. At least not the way they were dancing during the prelude. Give me a driving rock & roll drum beat and I’m all over the place. But I love this other music; this music that begs for a partner. My feet start tapping and I want to dance, but my body just doesn’t know how to move like Lauren & Able. Why is that?
When I was a teenager and living in southern California, I was part of an awesome United Methodist youth group. Throughout the year, each church in our district would put on a dance and all the youth (and our friends) would flock to them. It was the 80s and dancing was something anyone could do. You didn’t have to know any special steps or how to be coordinated with a partner. You just got in a circle or a clump and moved to the music. If you were like our friend Mike, you’d just stand in one place and bob your head, or if the music got thrashy, just jump up and down. Safety Dance! Or like our friends Rob or Tami, you’d flow your arms and head like this. Or, if you were me, you’d travel around and avoid all eye contact.
It was great! Moving with the music, being with people, but then not really being with them because
I was wrapped up in my own space. I remember one dance when Billy Idol was playing and I was out there “dancing with myself oh oh oh oh” and this poor boy had the gall to come up to me and… ask me to dance! “I don’t like to dance,” I said— as I kept on dancing. I could have said, “I’m already dancing, dope! Why don’t you dance!?” or something nicer….But I was embarrassed and then the poor kid was embarrassed.
But most of the time you could avoid that kind of thing which was great as a teenager and young adult because you didn’t have to have a partner or know any special steps or be especially coordinated. Until, of course, there was a slow song….bleh! Time for everyone to leave the dance floor…. except the couples who basically just entwined themselves in a full body hug while swaying a little to the music.
But luckily the slow songs were few and far between so we mostly “rocked the house!” And no matter what group you were in —geeks or freaks or mods or the popular crowd —everyone was equal on the dance floor. Even in Pretty in Pink, outsider Ducky owned the dance floor.
What’s so great about dancing? In some ways, I suppose it’s like any kind of physical movement. My dad always use to talk about the euphoria he got when he hit that point in his running or biking when he pushed past the point when he didn’t think he could go any farther and there was this release of endorphins. That’s definitely part of it. The physicality. But dancing is different. In large part because it’s combined with music. With that beat that beckons us to get to our feet. It’s ironic that many world religions involve movement or dance as a spiritual practice while many others see dance as evil. The real irony is that I think it’s for the same reason. Dance makes sense as a spiritual practice because you can lose yourself in it—in the music and the movement—such that you forget about your conscious thought and go to a different place. That losing of conscious thought, of letting go, can seem scary. In some ways it’s a lot like sexual desire, giving over to the feelings of your body. Again, probably why the various fundamentalists aren’t so up on the dancing thing.
I’m not sure all the reasons why, but for me and the people I grew up with, and danced with, there was something suspect about traditional partner dancing—in whatever form it came in. We associated it with conformity and patriarchy, with putting the woman in a subservient position, draped on her partner like a supermodel on a sports car.
Though in schools there was still the formalism of the prom and all the crazy trappings that came with it, you could still go “stag” or with a group of friends. But my friends just wanted to get together and dance and wear whatever we wanted, not have to have a partner, but just hang out with each other while grooving to the music we really liked.
I remember my parents talking about the dances they went to when they were young—of the elaborate clothes they had to wear, the anxiety over getting a date, or being a wallflower waiting for someone to ask you to dance. Because you couldn’t dance if you didn’t have a partner. And I think that’s what we refused to accept. And so we had to push everything away that hinted at that kind of structure.
But is it really so freaky to dance with others? It’s good to be independent and to dance to your own drummer, but we have to find a way for it to not cost us our connectedness to others, our ties to community. We say we’re more connected than ever via the world wide web… Email, Facebook, Twitter—but aren’t we really just finding more ways to disconnect from others? to be less aware of our bodies and of others? to retreat into ourselves? I think today we’re still struggling with how to balance that.
But you don’t “dance with yourself” by yourself, right? I mean, I can turn on some great music and feel like jumping around to it, but it’s really not the same as if I was in a big group. Just like meditating by myself can be a good spiritual practice, but it can be easy to neglect if I’m doing it alone. We all want to be connected to the larger body. We can’t help but want to go to the dance. We need that pulse that connects our heartbeat to the larger beat. That helps us feel connected.
Why dancing with ourselves is really best done … with others.
Anthem: “For a Dancer” by Jackson Browne; David Ray, vocal and guitar
REFLECTION 2: “Two Left Feet”
Early on in our marriage, Rik and I went to a dance at our church in Brooklyn. We had not read the flyer very well, but just heard “dance” & our 80s brains said “whoohoo! Rock Lobster, let’s go.” We got there and found out they were doing some kind of swing dancing thing; there was a caller and one person had to lead and the other follow…we tried but….. It was… horrible. We ended up grousing at each other and getting in a fight. We stomped upstairs to the sanctuary and sat down and talked about it and ended up laughing. We realized we both had two left feet so we guessed that meant we had 4 between us which was just far too many. We vowed never to try dancing like that again.
Rik and I may suck at dancing, but we’re pretty fabulous partners. It hasn’t been easy. No long-term relationship is. It takes patience and honesty and willingness to make mistakes and forgive them. We both suffer from personal tendencies toward depression … And different things set off our tempers but usually they’re related to each of our sense of inadequacy about something in ourselves. Sound familiar? But most of the time, we can dance the relationship dance— when one of us is down, the other one compensates and takes up the slack; when one of us is agitated, the other one works to diffuse. When one of us is sulky or closed off, the other one works to pull the other one out of their shell.
Of course there are times when our rhythm is off. When family or work stress is high and we falter; when we’re both too tired to pay attention to the cues of the other. This is of course when a blow up occurs. We bump into each other; step on each other’s feet. There were more of these earlier on in our marriage than now, but they still occur from time to time. Mostly we’ve become aware of what triggers the other and keep ourselves from pushing each other’s buttons. We may not be able to figure out whose hands or feet go where when it comes to dancing on a dance floor, but when it comes to the relationship dance, we can waltz like the best of them.
What if we thought of all of our relationships as a dance? From our family members to our longtime partners to the stranger we run into in the hallway or street and every time we each take a step we get in the way of each other… We can get frustrated and just push past them. Or, we can laugh it off and weave back and forth before dancing on our way. It can be so easy to fall into our default setting of forward thrust, of ticking off our list, and going about our business. But if we remember that in the dance, we step forward while the other steps back, and then they step forward and we have to step back. Sometimes we lead and they follow. Sometimes we have to let go and be the follower.
Back and forth, around and around. Listening to each other’s cues. Remembering we’re in this together; we’ve all got our own form of left feetedness…
When we choose to let our interactions with others be a dance, instead of a duel, something changes.
And it’s a whole new dance floor full of possibilities.
REFLECTION 3: “Dance this dance with me.”
With busy lives, it can seem hard to just “let it be a dance.” Just finding time to dance can be impossible. Inspite of our two left feet, Rik and I still yearn to dance. Not with each other, we’ve got our own private moves for that. But to dance in community. Why?
I think it’s because as geeky introverts, we secretly desire more meaningful ways to connect with others. Ever since we moved to Asheville, and even before, back in Brooklyn, we kept hearing about Contra dancing. From old people to teens and everyone in between. This seemed like something really different. But could we do it?
Finally we decided to break our old pact and check it out. We went to the YMCA downtown that had a Family Friendly contra dance, taking our 10 year old son with us. It really was a lot of fun, until they got into some more complicated dances where it was really important that there be a “leader” and a “follower.” It was fine as long as we were all dancing with other people who knew what the heck they were doing, but trying to dance with each other we had the same problem—we couldn’t keep track of who was trying to lead and where our hands and feet were supposed to go. All those crazy left feet!
Still, we went back several times since most of the dancing was pretty simple and involved lots of people who didn’t know what the heck they were doing either, including lots of rowdy kids. So we didn’t stand out like sore thumbs, or 6 left feet.
I think one reason Rik and I struggle with traditional partner or group dancing like Contra is the use of gendered language. So when we hear “men on the left” and “women on the right,” we start getting twitchy, which doesn’t help us pay attention to all our left feet very well. This is the one flaw of the Contra Dance movement. I know the dances go back to the 1700s, but this is the 21st century! The dances are great mixers and people of any gender are welcome to take either dance part, so just lose the gender binary language already and just line us up as “leaders” and “followers” and let each individual decide.
But we so want to find a way to join this dancing community. We know enough now to understand the draw— You can’t do it by yourself. You can’t do it virtually. You need other people… in the same place…. together. You have to touch each other. And you have to have live music. And a caller. So it’s okay if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do; someone will tell you; and if you don’t get it right, you’ll have another chance because all the moves get repeated multiple times.
And if you and your partner both have left feet, that doesn’t matter either because you switch partners throughout the dance. It’s really a completely different thing than the dancing I grew up with. There’s a social contract involved. You can’t just focus on your own enjoyment. You have to get people where they’re going—across the circle or down the line; you have to pay attention to each other; be aware of your surroundings.
Some people have described contra dancing as a “kaleidoscope, a weaving, a quilting with humans.” I like that.
And guess what? The people look at each other…. while they’re dancing. They make eye contact. For me, that’s the hardest…and yet, the most wonderful. Because isn’t that what we all want the most? Someone to see us so we can truly see?
Let it be a Dance.
This is the last song sung at final worship service of SUUSI. SUUSI is the Southeastern Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute, a yearly UU summer camp our family goes to. And no matter what the theme or the particular experiences of that year—Ric Masten’s “Let it Be a Dance” is always the right song to be sung. Because it exactly expresses why we come. Why we gather together year after year—and perhaps why we come here—to this place—to gather around this chalice fire, for the first time, and then again and again—week after week—to dance this dance; to feel the rhythm, feel the need, fill the need.
We need to be, to know and be reminded, like repetitive dance steps, that we can teach each other—that no matter who we are or where we come from, whom we love or how we dance, we are welcome around this flame; we are welcome to dance this dance; to let it be a dance; with ourselves, with our partners….with a circle of others, but always embodied—our full selves—mind, body, and spirit—always in community; this seeking of hands, of rhythm, of need and heartbeat. So that we know—we do not dance alone.
We never have to dance alone.
So come, sing a song with me and dance this dance with me.
No Hell, No Way (text & audio)
READING
From “A Treatise on Atonement” by Hosea Ballou
“There is nothing in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, that can do away with sin, but love; and we have reason to be eternally thankful, that love is stronger than death, that many waters cannot quench it, nor the floods drown it; that it hath power to remove the moral maladies of humankind . . . . O love, thou great physician of souls, what work hast thou undertaken!”
SERMON
My colleague the Rev. Jake Morrill, minister of the UU church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, recalls that the other day he was stopped at a traffic light when he noticed that the car he was facing going the other direction had a front license plate with a cartoon of a Confederate soldier holding a rebel flag.
Beside the cartoon he read the words “Forget Hell!” At that, Jake says, his Universalist heart swelled, and he thought to himself, “That’s right. Even you, Johnny Reb, who fought to sustain the fathomless misery of countless enslaved people, even you see that you can’t escape the all-conquering power of love. Forget hell is right!”
It was then, he says, that he saw the comma. Forget, Hell!
You don’t hear an awful lot about hell these days, but that’s not to say that it’s been forgotten about. Gallup polls show that about three-quarters of Americans believe there is a heaven, and slightly less, about 70%, think there is a hell. What’s interesting, though not especially surprising, is that most people figure that when they die they’re going to the first place, and not the second: 64% feel they’re going to heaven, while ½ of 1% think there’s any chance they’re going to hell.
I must say that it’s an interesting commentary that one is willing to posit ever-lasting torment for some other guy, but, heavens, not for me!
We’ll get back to that, but first I want to tell you a little bit about some folks in North Carolina who sowed the seeds for a Universalist faith that forgot hell and whose lives stitched together a community and even helped make possible an unexpected gift to this congregation.
American Universalism arose in New England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was founded fundamentally on a simple premise: a loving God would not consign those he created to eternal torment. Sure, he may get mad at them now and then, but it would be not through punishment, but through the force of his loving nature that he would draw us back to the good. If God truly is love, they argued, there cannot be any such thing as hell.
In the face of the prevailing faith, a grim Calvinism that preached that each person was born depraved and likely destined for the fires, this Universalism found a ready audience and spread quickly, if haphazardly: Most of the early preachers who set out on the road had little education, but great enthusiasm, and congregations gathered fitfully. By the 1830s enough churches had been formed in North Carolina to start a state convention, and around that time Universalism seems to have moved into these mountains.
It’s hard to be precise about these things because there were strains of Universalist belief among many of the early immigrants who were making their homes here. One especially strong influence was a tradition of German Baptists who had popularly become known as Dunkers.
What we know is that the first Universalist presence in these mountains seems to have begun next door to us in Haywood County, begun by a man by the name of Jonathan Plott. Plott had come here to serve as the first teacher at Bethel Community School. He was of German heritage and may have grown up a Dunker, but he claims to have been converted to Universalism by one of those saddle-bag preachers.
Plott was a community leader of sorts and drew people to him. One of those people was a young man by the name of James Anderson Inman, who at 17 moved in with Plott as a hired man of sorts. While there, Inman met and fell in love with Plott’s adopted daughter, Mary, and the two were married.
James and Mary also were drawn to the Universalism that Plott had adopted. It wasn’t an easy choice in a community where fire-and-brimstone preaching was the norm. For preachers who saw the threat of hell as the only check against sinful living, Universalism was a path to perdition.
There’s a story that Hosea Ballou, who we heard from earlier, was out riding one day with a Baptist preacher, and the two were arguing theology. At one point the Baptist minister said, “Brother Ballou, if I were a Universalist, and feared not the fires of Hell, I’d hit you over the head and steal your horse and saddle.”
Ballou then looked over at him and replied, “My brother, if you were a Universalist, the idea would never occur to you.”
And so Inman believed, too. He was reading deeply in the Bible and found the Universalist message affirmed wherever he looked. The heart of the gospel as far as he was concerned was that love overcomes all. It’s said that the Bible he carried throughout his live opened to one of those passages, these words from Isaiah: “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
A group of people in the area began meeting regularly as a kind of Sunday school, and by 1859 they had recognized Inman as a Universalist preacher at the age of 33. The gathering Civil War, though, disrupted all that, and Inman and his four younger brothers enlisted in the Confederate Army.
By what was probably a happy accident, given the terrible carnage of war that killed three of his brothers, Inman was captured and spent most of the final years of the Civil War in an Illinois prison camp.
Now, here’s where the story of this tiny Universalist church in the mountains intersects with our modern day. If you read the book or saw the film “Cold Mountain,” you may recall the figure of Monroe, the father of the female lead character, Ada. The author, Charles Frazier, describes him as preacher who scandalized the mountain folks by preaching that in the end they could forward to being “immersed in an ocean of love,” and who was shunned for his “failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy.” Frazier has since acknowledged that the figure of Monroe was modeled on James Inman, who was his great-great grandfather.
Shortly after Inman returned from the war, in 1868, the Universalist Church of Haywood County was organized. The church had no home, though. Inman’s services were held in the homes of members, under a hospitable tree, or occasionally public gathering spots, and his wife, Mary, served as midwife and healer. It took another 30 years for its members to raise the funds and find the land for a church, which was completed in 1901. Inman, though, only lived to serve the church for another decade, before he died in 1913.
The church foundered for a while before the Universalist Women’s Missionary Association adopted it as a project. In 1921 they recruited Hannah Powell, the first woman minister most of those people had seen, to serve the church.
Some leaders of the church, not to mention its neighbors, were skeptical of seeing a woman in the pulpit, even though Powell was 55 years old with a divinity degree and had already served several churches in Maine. But she had grown up in a logging family and knew what those communities were like. As it happened, by the time she arrived, many of the loggers in western North Carolina had already cleared the best stands and were moving out, leaving the people behind impoverished. Powell moved quickly to raise funds from the Missionary Society for construction of a home, built in 1924, next door to what was now know as Inman Chapel. Dubbed “Friendly House,” it served as a kind of community center, with day school for kids and night school for adults, health clinic, emergency shelter, and library created by a gift of 1,000 books donated by the city library of Newark, New Jersey.
All this made for a vibrant community, but it couldn’t have survived without Hannah Powell’s fund-raising appeals. When Powell finally retired in 1943, the contributions began to falter, and, though a couple of other preachers were called there, none worked out, and the community dwindled in the 1950s, around the same time this congregation got going.
In 1957, Friendly House was sold and Inman Chapel was closed by the state Universalist convention. The chapel would have been sold too, but for the fact that Inman himself had deeded it to family trustees. Since then, the family has maintained the building, and a few years ago completed a major renovation. The chapel now holds photos and exhibits from its early days. In a couple of weeks, Elly Wells, a UUCA member with family ties to Inman Chapel, and I will lead a tour of the chapel that was offered as an item in our annual auction.
Several years ago, Phyllis Inman Barnett, a great granddaughter of James Inman who moved back to the Pigeon Valley with her husband in retirement, collected much of the history around these early Universalists in a book called “At the Foot of Cold Mountain.” I used it as a source for this sermon, and you can find it in our library.
She reports that while many of James and Mary Inman’s descendents still live in the area near Inman Chapel, interest in Universalism has pretty much died out. It’s also true that in the final years that Inman Chapel was a Universalist meeting house, folks in the larger movement lost interest in it. By 1961, when the Universalist and Unitarian churches joined, there was little interest in tiny, moldering backwoods churches.
So, all these years later it’s worth asking what we today might claim from the story of Inman Chapel. We should begin by acknowledging that culturally and theologically there is a big distance between us. It’s hard for any of us to fathom that early pioneer life, not to speak of the rough times of the lumber camps. And, though the faith of the Inmans differed radically from that of their neighbors, they all agreed on one central point: religion was strictly centered on the Bible.
We Unitarian Universalists today honor the Bible as one source of religious wisdom among many, but not the one and only guide to a religious life, nor is the notion of a personal God necessarily a part of our own sense of faith. Still, it seems to me that at the heart of that old Universalist faith is the possibility of common ground and perhaps a source of inspiration for us.
And that carries us back to Jake’s license plate. What does it mean to “forget hell”? Well, I think it suggests more than just that we disagree with the proposition that there exists some place of eternal fire that awaits all who commit unredeemed evil. I think it implies a stance that says “forget heaven,” too.
Forget this image of the cosmic court that weighs us one way or the other and the bifurcated path to judgment that it offers up to us, that we ourselves slip into so easily and that makes us such high and mighty judges on behalf of some vision of the Good.
Here, I know, I’m crossing a boundary that I expect our forebears at Inman Chapel could not abide, but it seems to me unavoidable. Hell is merely the fury of our unrequited fear and shame given form, and heaven but the vision of our yearning aspirations.
We are, all of us, lacking any definitive knowledge of what follows our deaths, but those ancient tropes, in truth, do us no good. Trusting in the great by and by or depending on the devil to do our dirty work merely keeps us from the work of living fully while we can.
And this applies to any of us however we may understand our ends when we self-righteously presume to impose judgment, when we dismiss the humanity of another, or demand another’s suffering as recompense for our pain.
Hosea Ballou was right when he said that the greatest hell that any of us need fear is that of our own making, the torment we create by our heedless actions. And the path to redemption, whatever our offense, is always the same. It is centered in love: love that, in Ballou’s quote from the Song of Solomon, will not be quenched, will not be drowned, that has the power to remove the moral maladies of humankind: Love that is stronger than death.
Yes, death stills our beating hearts, but it will not stop what love has started, what love ignites, what love gives energy to. It is the story of life and of all that is good in our lives, the source of hope for each of us: that our lives will not have been in vain because of what we gave out of love.
This is what I take from our Universalist forebears in Haywood County, people who, in Charles Frazier’s words, imagined their hopeful end as being “immersed in an ocean of love.” What we know about our forebears at Inman Chapel settled at the foot of Cold Mountain is that they did their best to help make that happen, as loving, faithful people who served their community and each other.
And here’s how this story touches us. You’ll recall what I said about Hannah Powell, that she was a dynamo who developed strong connections across the community. Apparently, among her acquaintances was Reuben Robertson, owner of Champion Paper and Fibre Co., a major land-owner in the area.
I’m not clear on exactly how it happened – though I can’t help believe that the memory of Hannah’s good works played a role – but in the late 1960s when this congregation was looking for a location after it had outgrown its home in a large West Asheville home, it was Reuben’s son, Logan Robertson, and his wife – who were members of the congregation – who showed the way by offering to give the congregation this property where we are now located.
At the time it consisted of a vacant lot, on the corner, and three homes. Architect Bill Moore, who is still a member of this congregation, designed the building where we sit, and in 1974 it was dedicated. It had been nearly 20 years since Inman Chapel had closed as a Universalist meeting house, but it’s hard not to believe that in some way the good will that those people worked helped make possible our own rebirth.
Perhaps, in the end, it’s true, as the Sufi story I mentioned a couple of weeks ago says, that what water is to fish, love is to humans – that by which we live and breathe. So then, ought we not to give our time, our energy to finding ways to bring it to our awareness and into our actions, that we might find wholeness and peace?
In that case, forget about giving any energy to that terrible gyre of fear, shame and doubt that arises at times in our fragile, fallible selves; forget about the tantalizing tug of prejudice and easy judgment; the tooth-grinding demand for vengeance.
No hell! No way! Let love have its way!
This is Water – Ingathering Sunday (text & audio)
READING
A Thirsty Fish
by Rumi
I don’t get tired of you. Don’t grow weary
of being compassionate toward me!
All this thirst equipment
must surely be tired of me,
the water jar, the water carrier.
I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it’s thirsty for!
Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.
All this fantasy
and grief.
Let my house be drowned in the wave
that rose last night out of the courtyard
hidden in the center of my chest.
I don’t want learning, or dignity,
or respectability.
I want this music and this dawn
and the warmth of your cheek against mine.
The grief-armies assemble,
but I’m not going with them.
SERMON
It arrived, as it seems such things do these days, as a posting from someone I distantly know on Facebook: a video that was recommended as intriguing. I clicked, and the video began with some jaunty music and a disembodied voice over an image of two goldfish swimming in a bowl:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet on older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
“And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What’s water?”
Yeah, cute, I thought. I’ve heard the story before: one of those old Sufi teaching tales that I’ve always liked. The speaker goes on, and I realize that he’s talking to an audience – turns out to be a college graduation address from some eight years ago, and the speaker is the one-time literary phenom David Foster Wallace.
What is arresting is what he does with the story, and what the video does with his words. Wallace acknowledges the obvious – using his word – “platitude” that the story offers up: that, as he says, “the most important realities are often the ones that it’s hardest to see and talk about.”
But he cautions that these so-called platitudes can actually be significant. They can even have a life-or-death importance for us, and to demonstrate he invites the graduates into a kind of eerie flash forward to a less than glamorous moment of the lives that await them.
“Let’s say,” he begins, “it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or 10 hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple hours and then hit the bed early, because you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
“But then you remember there’s no food at home – you haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job – and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because, of course, it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping.
“You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people. And when you get your stuff it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open, even though it’s the end-of-the day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long.”
Our response, says Wallace, is to find all this “stupid and infuriating.” But, of course, it does no good to take our fury out on the people in line or the harried checkout lady. So, we pack the flimsy plastic bags of groceries in our cart, with – he adds with a sly touch – the one wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, through the crowded, pot-holed, littery parking lot, and head home through slow, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic.
Something like a modern version of one of Dante’s circles of hell, no? But, in a sense that’s the least of it, Wallace says, when you consider that in our lives this scene will be repeated, day after week after month after year. And of course, it may not be this moment that gets our goat, but another one of the many infuriating, routine tasks that swallow up the precious minutes of our lives.
So, what to do? One option, of course, is to follow what Wallace calls our natural “default settings”: to pop off at the next guy, give the check-out person a hard time, or just bury ourselves in numbness. Another, though, is to entertain the possibility of seeing these moments as an opportunity for choosing.
I came upon Wallace’s talk at about the time I was mulling over what might be themes for worship this coming year. It was also a time of a new crop of commentaries predicting the downfall of religion. You’ve seen some of these, I expect. Churches across the spectrum are emptying, denominational numbers are down, and the numbers of those who affirm no religious affiliation are rising. Some of these people express no interest in religion, although as a percentage of people surveyed this group hasn’t grown particularly in recent years.
What has grown, and significantly, is the number of people who affirm an interest in religion but are unaffiliated with any particular religious tradition, or who identify themselves as spiritual, but not religious. We Unitarian Universalists have tended to look at those trends and crow that these are folks are ripe to join our churches, people like many of us who abandoned the religious homes of our childhoods for this one.
This may be true for some, but we would be wise to note that when these people say “not religious” they tend to have places like us in mind, as well, and this may be problem that we have contributed to creating.
Diana Butler Bass is a long-time observer of religion who has spent a good deal of time looking at this boundary between the religious and non-religious. She notes that in the West, at least, the path to faith across traditions has taken a particular shape with three stages, which she identifies as: believe, behave, belong.
That is to say, the threshold question to be answered when one enters a church usually is, what do you believe? This comes after many centuries of schisms and conflicts over theological doctrine, resulting in religions defining themselves in terms of where they stand on certain religious propositions. This tends to be true even for us, a non-creedal religion. Though we have no uniform doctrine, we tend to raise questions of religious belief early in our orientation process.
In the traditional model, once you orient yourself to a particular belief structure, you reshape your practices in certain ways: attend worship, enroll in religious education, take part in social justice work, and so on. Finally, then, you decide to become a member.
But Bass says that there’s something odd about this arrangement. It isn’t really the way the rest of the world works. For example, she said, if you decide you want to join a knitting group, you don’t spend a lot of time reading up on knitting doctrinal statements or knitting history. You just dive in. You find someone who can teach you the basics, go to the yarn shop, and find a knitting class. In time, if it appeals to you, you get to know the others there, and you find that the group makes you feel better about yourself, gives you a sense of service, and maybe a deeper sense of meaning.
In her words: “relationship leads to craft, which leads to experimental belief.” So, how would it be if churches followed a similar path: Moving not from belief to behaving to belonging, but from belonging to behaving to belief?
Belonging to a community starts with a flash of recognition – “I fit with these people; this feels good.” We make friends and find that being a part of that community makes our hearts lighter and the world more interesting. After hanging around a while, we see how they do things, how they act with each other, what they do in the world, and we find that it resonates with a deep place in ourselves. Then, engaging the questions raised in that community and the wisdom it holds dear, we come to a more settled sense of our place in the world and our responsibilities to it, a faith of sorts that shifts and grows amid the trajectory of our lives.
And here is where I connect again with David Foster Wallace, but with a twist. So, remember? There we are in that slow-moving check-out line, where, say, one person in front of us is talking loudly on a cell phone, another is a frazzled mother with a shrieking child, another has this deadened, cow-like expression and this guy in front of us has a Confederate flag stitched to his jacket.
I can dwell on all the reasons this scene upsets or frustrates me, or, Wallace says, “or I can choose to consider the likelihood that everyone else in this line is just as bored and frustrated as I am. . . .
“If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice,” he says, “you can choose to look differently at this fat, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid. Maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights with her husband, who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.”
It may even be in your power, he says, “to experience this crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things.”
And how do we put ourselves into a posture where we’re willing to consider such possibilities? Well, Wallace, in this college graduation address, argues that it is a benefit that education gives us: we are taught, in his words, “how to think,” to appreciate what he calls “the capital T truth” that you get to decide for yourself how you will see the world and how you will orient your life toward it.
Now, being a college graduate who gained much from that experience, I wouldn’t deny that much of the wisdom that can turn us in that way is certainly present there. But in truth, I think, whether or not you are a college graduate or have any other kind of fancy education is not enough. We need something more: we need community.
We need a community that will provide a crucible to help us figure out where we fit and how the world works while we struggle to make our way. We need a community that will hold us when things fall apart and those brilliant ideas sound so hollow. We need a community that will celebrate and help make connections for our kids and our partners, that will invite us to consider new ways of opening ourselves and introduce us to amazing people who share our hopes for the world.
That is what we are building here. It’s a community that offers no litmus test of belief but invites you to bring your our own journey of religious discovery and join us in the work of building freedom, justice and love. And central to that, I believe, is the work that Wallace points us to – developing disciplines and looking beyond distractions in order to see the truth and beauty around us. Challenging work, but critical to the peace and spiritual centeredness that I think we all seek.
So, this year in worship I plan to use many of the elements that Wallace introduced in his provocative speech as themes that will help us do that. We’ll touch on these in worship, but I also invite you to join us in one of our Theme groups or Covenant groups that are forming right now to carry the conversation further. Or, bring it into other settings in this community, or just dip into the Worship Theme resources you’ll find on our Web site.
Finally, let’s return to Wallace’s little fish story. Another version of the story imagines one of the fish returning to his mother at the end of the day, confused and frightened about what the older fish had said.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “What is this water? Is it dangerous? Is it going to hurt me?”
“Oh, sweetie,” his mother said. “Don’t worry. Water is everywhere we go. It’s all around us and inside us. It’s what we live in.”
As his mother spoke and stroked his head, the little fish began to calm down, and, as he did, at his mother’s side, he began to feel a little current of water in his gills, and on his scales. He really had never noticed it before.
For the Sufis, the story points to a deeper wisdom. What water is to fish, they say, love is to the human being. It is all around us, inside us, and everywhere we go: available to us if we can allow ourselves to experience it.
In gathering resources for you to reflect on our themes, I invited a number of you to act as curators to provide books, poems, quotes, videos as well as personal reflections. You can find many of them on our Web site. One reflection on our first theme, awareness, came from Sharon Van Dyke. She gave me permission to share it with you.
Sharon wrote that she was 34 when she and her husband, Chris, lost their first pregnancy. “I had been a really tough time,” she wrote. “I spent months trying to hold back a lot of negative feelings about losing the baby, primarily because I wanted to be able to move on, so we could try again. But it was exactly that – the holding back of feelings – that made it harder to move through it.”
Coaching in a meditation practice, she wrote, helped her wake up to her feelings and even embrace them. Things turned out OK in the end. They now have three rambunctious boys. But Sharon still reflects on what a struggle it was to make room for that deep discomfort within her, to see that attention needed to be paid to it.
“To me it’s about the bigness and smallness of life, which coexist at the same time,” she wrote. Of course, those feelings “mean a great deal to you. But while you’re there can you also see the smallness of it? Can you see how you are surrounded by others, 7 billion others, people just like you, in their own moments?”
As Rumi said, we truly are all thirsty fish, struggling to find enough of what we’re thirsty for. All this fantasy and grief around us: Which way to the ocean?
Well, let the armies of those wrapped up in their grief be on their way. I’m not going with them.
No, as David Foster Wallace puts it I want to open myself to what’s present before me, to bring my awareness “to what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over.
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
Resources: This Is Water by David Foster Wallace, Little, Brown & Co., 2009; and Christianity after Religion by Diana Butler Bass, Harper Collins, 2012.
Finding Common Ground (text & audio)
Debbie and I arrived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1984. I had taken a reporting job at The Milwaukee Journal, an afternoon paper, which, in that blue collar town, made it the leading paper in town. It was an unrepentant liberal daily that Time magazine only a year or two before had identified as one of the 10 best papers in the country.
At the time, Milwaukee was still known as the machine shop to the world, a place where vast acres of the city were covered with big-bay manufacturers that heated, pressed, bent and shaped metal into countless shapes for industries of all sorts. It was a place of many tidy neighborhoods of cheerful bungalows or well-built duplexes packed into tight blocks with barely enough room for a driveway to separate them.
Milwaukee at the time had a reputation as a comfortable, middle-class city. For many years, factory jobs were plentiful and pretty much handed down from father to son. There wasn’t a lot of wealth, but most people – as long as you were of European, white heritage – could be assured of getting work, and, at least for a time, minorities did well, too.
Milwaukee, after all, had once been the site of what was called the Bay View massacre. This was an incident where in 1886 seven people died when National Guard troops fired on some 14,000 workers at a steel rolling mill who were marching for an eight-hour day. It took another 50 years until New Deal legislation actually gave workers the right to an 8-hour day, but the shooting sparked a movement in Milwaukee of what became known as the “sewer socialists.”
This Socialist Party was made up not of fire-breathing revolutionaries but of labor-friendly progressives who emphasized honesty in government, public works, and coalitions with others working to build the middle-class. These Socialists held the mayor’s office from 1910 to 1960.
Even the paper where I worked exemplified this spirit. It was employee-owned, and for a couple of generations its privately-held stock enriched not just top management, but all employees. While I was there, many a pressmen retired with a million bucks and bought a retirement cottage on some northern lake.
By 1984, though, the bloom was coming off the rose. Many of Milwaukee’s high-income jobs were being shipped overseas, and the big-bay manufacturers were shutting down, emptying many inner city neighborhoods of those reliable wage earners. The lay-offs hit minorities first, who moved into lower-cost homes abandoned in the inner city, setting off a blizzard of white flight and establishing a pattern of hyper-segregation that continues to this day.
My reporting, first at City Hall, then at the courts, kept this story in front of me. Politicians were sure the city could come back. They recruited developers to turn empty factory buildings into malls and kept streets even in some of the most desperate inner city neighborhoods well paved. But real estate sharks were moving in, buying dozens of once well-tended homes, squeezing out what they could and putting nothing back in.
Like a bicycle tire with a leak, energy slowly drained from the city. The business district and stunning lakefront – one of the chief gifts of the sewer socialists – received attention, but its center was hollowing out. The newspaper, too, suffered with declining circulation and loss of advertising. Eventually, it went public, but the disappointing performance of its stock left most employees with little to show.
Debbie and I left in 2004 to come here, wondering what would become of it all. I got a chance to see recently in a PBS special by Bill Moyers. He followed two Milwaukee families – one white, and one black – over the last 20 years. The picture was familiar: In 1991, when the story began, the husband in the white family and both husband and wife in the black family had recently lost their jobs at Milwaukee manufacturers. Both families were homeowners with several small children.
Each hoped to find other work and managed to secure what they were sure would be “temporary” employment at a fraction of their former wages. But, of course, “temporary” turned into the way it would be, and in the end wasn’t enough to sustain the lives they had created for themselves. They endured visits to a food pantry and days without electricity when they couldn’t pay utility bills. Bouts of illness became big financial setbacks, and worries over money tore at the fabric of relations between husband and wife, parent and child. But eventually both managed to accommodate themselves to a new reality, even if their incomes never approached what they were making 20 years before.
Remembering much of what I saw as a reporter over the years covered by the Moyers program I have to say that in many respects these two families were lucky. As the show ended, both were still intact and the kids were mostly OK, though struggling. For many others during that time, the story was much grimmer.
Whatever your vantage, this one-time prosperous city slowly but surely was being depleted and hollowed out. And Milwaukee was not alone. Other great old manufacturing centers also suffered, and in the days since, their grief has been shared by many in the suburbs, the South, Silicon Valley: all of the supposed hot new centers of economic activity. Wealth was being created, money was being made, but fewer and fewer people benefited from it. Stocks have soared in recent years, but employment has barely moved all.
The result has been a historic shift in this country that has seen the wealth created in our economy, once spread widely, accrue to a tiny fraction of the richest people. Here are a few numbers: From 1947 to 1979 wages of all workers at all salary levels grew roughly the same percentage, but between 1979 and 2007 63% of total income growth went to the top 10% of households. Wealth became even more concentrated, to the point where today the top 1% owns 40% of the nation’s wealth and the bottom 80% owns just 7%.
With wages essentially frozen the only way to make headway economically today is by owning non-cash assets – stocks and bonds, and so on. But, of course, most people own few such assets and have little prospect of acquiring them, and even for those who do, the real money is made in executive suites and corporate board rooms.
The author George Packer describes this period we’re going through as an “unwinding,” a time when cultural moorings are being loosed and long-standing assumptions are turned on their heads. In the past, he says, these periods have brought great disruption but also an uneasy kind of freedom. “Each decline,” he observes, “brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion.”
If it is an unwinding we are experiencing, one notion that seems to be in play is that there is some fundamental value to human beings and their labor. Human labor is diminished when it is accorded so little value in the marketplace. A good example is Asheville where most new jobs these days are paid at less than a living wage. And human beings themselves are devalued as we watch measures once created to support a decent life – support for housing, medical care, education – stripped away.
We can ask for no better indicator of our low estimation than to see abstract corporate entities given the status of persons. In such a world, human persons are finding themselves at a disadvantage to compete.
And yet, amid all this it’s not unreasonable to seek out the possible seeds for what George Packard calls a “new cohesion,” and to identify a role for ourselves, as Unitarian Universalists, in its creation. History, after all, teaches that the road we are on – one that blocks avenues of social mobility and impoverishes a vast share of the populace – is a recipe for self-destruction and decline. So, what might that “new cohesion” look like?
Walt Whitman wrote the poem you heard Bob read from earlier at a time of tremendous economic expansion, when America’s industrial might was coming into its own. So, it is no surprise to read him celebrating, in his words, house builder, ship joiner, pile driver, coal miner, iron worker, coach maker, leather-dresser, sail-maker, fire stoker – digger.
And in all of these lines of work, he declared, we find “realities for you and me, in them poems for you and me,” in all of it “the eternal meanings” of our lives. This spirit also infused the organized labor movement at the time in places like Milwaukee, a spirit that saw work as a source of meaning in our lives, not a form of servitude, where labor brought us the bread to sustain our lives, and the roses that make life worthwhile.
Whitman captured the heart of this ethos in his words: “We thought our Union grand, and our Constitution grand . . . We consider bibles and religions divine – I do not say they are not (grand or) divine, I say that they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still. It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.”
And it is here that I think we enter as Unitarian Universalists. We tend to catch grief in the larger world for the pluralism of our movement. We draw from the Jewish and Christian roots that are our heritage, but also dip deeply into Buddhism, the 20th century humanist movement, and various pagan and mystic traditions, not to speak of science, psychology, and so on.
But in this big tent we are quite clear about a few things, and chief among them is the conviction that each person is inherently worthy and deserving of dignity, respect and love. From a history dating back some five centuries informed by thinkers and scholars, activists and visionaries, wise women and men we have distilled this fundamental truth that we are precious from the moment we enter this world and that we realize our own hopes and best natures when we attend to and act on that underlying unity in a way that connects us with each other and all things.
All that is good and holy is not visited on us from some external source; it rises from within us and the world around us. The wisdom we need to guide us, in Whitman’s words, “has grown out of us, and may grow out of us still.”
This year in worship I am inviting us to reflect in different ways on the wonder and beauty and the many sources of hope that lie before us that we struggle to see. Our themes for worship will offer different tools to help us focus on those things and invite us to wrestle with integrating them into our lives.
We begin this month of September with the discipline of awareness, and our topic today is only too good a place to start. There is hardly a one of us who is not aware of, if not themselves damaged or weighed down by this “unwinding” that we appear to be in the midst of. And the squeeze we feel can shut us down, making us wary, depressed or dismissive. And so we isolate ourselves and retreat into numbness.
Part of why we gather as a community here is to invite each other out of isolation, to cultivate the awareness that we are not alone but deeply connected, and to provide the space for learning, insight, and action that will set us on the road to renewal and wholeness.
If we are to be part of a “new cohesion,” it will be as agents of renewal and advocates of wholeness working in common cause with others to affirm human dignity.
It may be that I am still caught up in the moment, but when I stood with many of you at the Mountain Moral Monday rally at Pack Square just a month ago, I felt something knitting together, some rough skein of hope that I hadn’t sensed before.
I have no millennial predictions to offer around this. It feels as if we’re still in for some rough patches. But it was an opening, and it fed my faith that our generous and hopeful natures will win out. As Dr. William Barber, the NAACP state president, told us that day, “You don’t judge your progress or success by immediacy. You know that if you stand long enough, love and justice eventually win.” And so must we stand. And so must we love, and hold the demands of justice in our field of view.
We need not seek afar off, for the solution to this state of affairs lies with us: In things we know best, where we find the best; in folks nearest to us, where we find the sweetest, strongest, lovingest; happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour, but this hour; we workwomen and workmen with our own divine and strong life.
Our Water, Our Home (audio only)
The Great Human-Earth Reunion (audio only)
The Story of the Jumping Mouse
This service was a skit, therefore no audio or text is available.
Poetry Sunday: Search for Meaning (text only)
Blue Ridge Identity
by Donna Lisle Burton
The minute I turn on to the exit
and curve up toward it
I am someone else.
This is another country.
And while I am a foreigner in it
It is really
My country and
I am who I knew
I was.
I am
A tunnel lover
A motorcyclist
A hiker
A wild flower taster
An October sky
with all fiery leaves.
A lover of blue berries
Shrouding and sudden fogs
Scary drop offs that
keep your eyes on the road
And vista as grandiose as
The Grand Canyon.
Another country,
Right in my own back yard.
Twenty minutes from home
I am someone else here;
My true self.
Summer Day
by Norris Orbach
When the wheel of seasons turns to sun
And day is long and slow in passing
Bugs murmur in flowering meadows
While families spread their lunches
On speckled blankets.
Tiny wisps of cloud and larger shapes
Pass overhead, while a disjoint chorus
Of children’s voices celebrate the temperature.
We talk softly about the news, about
Our upcoming vacation, about our friends.
The spaniel barks at a squirrel,
And eventually the sun glows red and sets.
TIDE-INGS
by Frankie Schelly
The Moon lady
Beams luney tunes.
The Voice of Self
Animated
Back lit, under lit,
exposing secrets.
’Tis not muscle in the moon!
Nor gender genes,
But tides that gently push
Common human themes,
Harmony that scrubs and shines each Soul
Into One family.
The Last Fall
by Frankie Schelly
Death is vibrant in the fall
Swuuushing, whirling, plummeting
In full color and regalia,
Like some chanting primitive
In plumage, thumping the earth
In mask and ash-bottomed feet,
On stage dancing the dance of life,
In defiance before the moon!
(Soon enough we’ll know Who’s boss!)
A parliament of owls
by A. D. Reed
What do we see when we SEE what we see?
A shrewdness of apes and a whoop of gorillas
Are kinships we’re proud of, ’til, deep in the mists
of our past—or our mirrors—
Some of those cousins that everyone has
Appear—to remind us that pride is a sin:
Then we have to acknowledge our bloodlines include
A chattering of monkeys, and a congress of baboons.
What of our friends, our canine companions?
Do we name what we see, or imagine, or fear?
A kennel of dogs, and a litter of pups
A stable of hounds, but a cowardice of curs.
Pekinese are a pomp, wild foxes, a skulk.
Wolves come in a pack, and coyotes a rout.
Now the big and small cats—felidae—have two classes:
The felines—the cute ones—like house cats and lynxes,
Are kindles, as kittens, and clowders as cats.
Their more dangerous cousins, the pantherinae—
the lions and leopards and tigers, oh my!—
Form a pride, leap, or ambush, depending on species
And certain behavioral characteristics.
Plain old herds can be horses, or llamas, or moose;
Herds of ibexes, wildebeests, elands and yak!
Harts and hartebeests are herds, and chamois and cattle;
elephants, too, (though they’re also parades)
But Wombats and Wallabies always form mobs.
We refer to rhinoceroses as a clash;
To skunks as a surfeit, and elks as a gang.
A business of ferrets, a mischief of mice,
An army of frogs and a poor knot of toads.
Jellyfish are a smuck, and, well, goats—are a drip.
So what’s in a name? How human it is
To see characteristics resembling our own
Among all the animals, two- and four-legged, with
Fur, scales, or hide.
We attribute them attributes we humans abide.
But when we give titles to wild beasts that fly
Imagination, like them, soars higher than high.
The poor flock of turkeys is a dull name,
But descriptives can sometimes create gilded frames:
An unkindness of ravens, a gaggle of geese;
A stand of flamingos, a bevy of quail
An aerie of eagles, exaltation of larks
Tanks of swans, scolds of jays,
Herds of wrens, broods of hens,
peeps of chicks, clouds of bats…
Flights of butterflies truly depict what appears.
Does a squabble of seagulls sound right to your ears?
Goldfinches tremble, hummingbirds charm
While ostrich, like lions, gather in prides.
A chattering of starlings, a pitying of doves
A mutation of thrushes, a murder of crows—
Let’s ponder which group we prefer ’mongst the fowls:
A congregation of magpies, or a parliament of owls?
Searching for Facts
by Ruth Beard
Question others, ask yourself, then compare
Whether a statement is partly true or not.
Is it meant as an opinion or is it a fact?
Is it only partly true or an individual’s act?
Religious leaders claim to know what’s true
As do most friends and politicians too.
When scientists prove that such is untrue.
Will your opinion change if given proof?
Holy Doggerel
by Paul Fleisig
This hallowed ground
Our Lord profound,
Bequeathed.
By decree divine,
This land is mine.
With force of might,
Our tribal right
Is guarded.
Just keep away,
Only we can stay!
So said the wolf
Vehemently,
Pissing with glee
From tree to tree,
Ever so
Territorially.
Jihad
by Paul Fleisig
Mushroom Clouds
You must agree,
Bring
Jubilation,
Amid debris.
Clasped tight
Our hands will be,
Believers
Risen,
Corpus free!
The Rapture!
Wails the banshee,
As we join
Our Lord,
With ecstasy.
The Others?
Earned their agony.
Rejoice!
We’ve killed
Their heresy.
Search for Meaning
by Anita Fletcher
We sail the seas,
fly the skies,
sense in ancient places
man’s elusive
struggle for meaning,
in edifice, altar, art.
The feather on our doorstep,
a flower heroically springing
up through concrete,
sun and moon
dependably on the job.
Instructive, yes,
but how to capture it,
make sense of it all?
The heart sees a weaving,
not a potluck,
not a blended smoothie,
but distinctly separate threads
that have interlaced,
allowing respect for each strand,
yet woven together
to form the unique tapestry
that is ours alone,
as we journey toward our own
search for meaning.
In the Dark
by Joan Weiner
The stars are lit
again by the night,
reliable candles against the dark,
arranged as bears and dippers,
hunters and twins
across the sky
and back into the infinitude
of time too vast for my small mind
to grasp.
The panoply of lights
rekindles the old desires —
to fathom the source of this splendor,
to guess the reason for it,
to know the place for my miniature self
in this astronomy of life.
If I have urged a single flower
from the earth, shielded and nourished it,
is that enough to justify
the time and space I occupy?
I wonder if the stars sing
or maybe hum across the eons.
Do they sigh or wish to talk
to one another as we do,
long to be loved, to end the aloneness,
to gather, to shelter together
from the relentless cold?
I think they simply are.
But I am not a star.
Chimera
by Michael Vavrek
I’ve spent a lifetime looking for meaning
Serious seminars, good-time gurus…disagreeing.
Hoping to win. Open to every swing.
Trying to be free and responsible again and again.
I was looking in all the wrong places.
Looking to prophetic people’s best-cases.
Searching their words and deeds, looking for traces
Of what I was dreaming of.
Hoping to find a way to be better-off.
Bless the day I discovered
Another looking for the unheard-of.
When I was with others, no meaning in sight
I did what I could given my plight.
Didn’t know where it started or if an end was in sight?
Trying to be free and responsible again and again.
I was looking in all the wrong places.
Looking to prophetic people’s best-cases.
Searching their words and deeds, looking for traces
Of what I was dreaming of.
Hoping to find a way to be better-off.
Bless the day I discovered
Another looking for the unheard-of.
Came a knock on my mind’s door.
It was what I’d been looking for.
No more looking in all the wrong places
Looking for meaning in too many bookcases
Searching words, looking for traces
Of what I was dreaming of.
Now that I’ve found what I’m sure of
Bless the day I discovered
My heart.
To my mind and heart I’ve taken a vow.
Their separation I disavow.
I am free and responsible now
Balanced by my heart.
The Smoke Filled Side
by Peter Olevnik
I entered the gingerbread-gabled depot
through a dark oak side door,
clutching my ticket
as if it might fly away.
My mother told me, this time,
I must take the train, alone,
to grandmother’s funeral.
(In May, nearly seventy years ago)
Handing it to the agent who,
sitting at an ancient desk behind
a brass-grilled window, stamped it
saying “she’d be running late today,
catching up on the way.”
I found a seat amidst two rows
of church-stiff benches. In the midday
depot silence, I waited.
Like a flock of grazing sheep,
stirred before a quake, the depot
must have felt the shake as the train
had just passed Clinton Street.
The depot master knew, sending us
to the platform there to see approaching
the massive iron, one-eyed face of
a steaming locomotive coming to rest.
Climbing the passenger car steps,
I heard the conductor say,
“Chicago to your left.” I quickly found a seat,
would soon discover my view hampered,
as I had picked the engine’s smoke filled side.
Just passed Plymouth, suddenly,
the speeding train came to an unexpected stop.
Sitting the longest while, explanation not forthcoming,
I got off, walking to the front and saw
wrapped around the steaming engine face,
like an insect on a windshield splayed,
a car, two riders, surely dead.
I saw their startled, disbelieving faces,
then was told to get back on the train.
Stunned, I sat, my mind struggling
to find a place within its darkest chambers
for the tragedy to reside and routes
within to comprehend.
Hours later the tragic train
begun again its final destination
and I, forlorn, arrived at the station.
With relief I saw my mother who earlier left
to be at her dying mother’s side.
In the funeral home amidst muted conversations
and sentinelly placed bouquets, grandmother lay,
dressed in a pearl colored gown unlike
the faded housedress she had often worn.
When we children, in secret, gathered
in grandmother’s basement walk-in closet,
before, sharing our deepest secrets,
talk of death had meant the screams we heard
on Sunday night radio mystery shows,
where people died we would never know.
How short our span of time to understand.
How the “I’s” and the “C’s” Help Us See Our Vulnerability (text & audio)
Joy Christi Przestwor
Part 1 of Sermon
WOW…that was amazing! We’re filled with energy, laughter, smiles. Oh yes and since we’re diverse probably a little “this is over the top” critique going on too! Oh my gosh, we may even have forgotten about ourselves for awhile in the enjoyment of the process blending these service elements.
But what happens to each one of us when we put our intellect in front of our heart; when we place our rational, thought-through ideas in front of our spontaneous intuitive feelings? Is life a happy song each day? Do I REALLY depend on you or you or you (go from person to person in the congregation) to rely on “being by my side”? How does compassion and caring propel me through my self-created maze of independence, interdependence and introspection?
You know, Bill, I’ve had many an occasion over this past year to think about those questions—to ask myself why do I continue to extend myself, to volunteer, to “lean-in” to life’s moments rather than allow my introverted self to just sit in the mountains or even run away from any engagement. How do I live into Pastoral Care in this community or receive Pastoral Care for myself? How do I develop an alive, collaborative dependence with you and other members of this congregation rather than the uncomfortable dependence on my fellow community travelers?
I just returned from a week on the Atlantic Ocean—one of those serene, very positive, deepening places on mother earth for my soul. I sat intentionally one evening, as the sun went down, along the lapping water’s edge and breathed in the lovely salt air AND jotted in my journal a list of all the major events that I moved through in 2012. (you know me a little—lists are part of me, no matter where I find myself!)
So Bill here’s the items that I wrote on my list: The first two months of 2012 I celebrated my 65 birthday, taught my last classes of my 40-year teaching career, and was honored at a retirement party on the final day of February. That was then followed by a 6-month intensive study in mystical, esoteric, theology—dotted with my mother-in-law’s death in CA in April, my niece’s wedding in May, and Justice General Assembly in Phoenix and culminating in my ordination as a Liberal Catholic priest at the end of July. I returned to my mountain home the first day of August and promptly was immersed in a half month travel trip each and every month from August through December supporting my mom and my dog Angel as each moved toward their respective deaths; Angel on the anniversary of Carla, my partner’s death and my Mom on Christmas Day. I closed 2012 with the actual closure of my mother’s internment box where my family celebrated her 90 years with song and awe. I was tired and emotionally drained when my pen left the 2012 listing page. My annual lists ALWAYS jar me as I deliberately embrace and take-in what appears in front of me. But my mind continued to race noting that the first six months of 2013 have begun with vigor and deep moments as well.
What was clear as I re-read that list, spattered with tears and supported with quiet nods and smiles as my eyes scanned over the page, is that every person in this congregation sitting right here in front of you and me, at this moment could also make such a list; a list of HIGHS and LOWS; a list that mimics the lapping of the waves on the shore where I sat. These moments TRULY are part of the ebb and flow of our human experience. They challenge us to redefine in day-to-day, nitty-gritty ways what we consider the concepts of independence, interdependence, and introspection to mean as we carry ourselves through the “front lines” of this exquisite journey of living. As we say in our Congregational mission: we journey “to nurture our individual search for meaning and work in community for freedom, justice and love.”
My work as part of our Pastoral Care team has taught me to appreciate that Pastoral Care is NOT confined to only moments of despair, or on-coming death or hospitalization. It’s about being present at ALL moments where need is expressed or abides; moments of enormous joy, gratitude, and delight or moments of uncertainty, confusion, and difficult decisions.
As Brene’ Brown noted and Nancy read so well…these moments ENGAGE us—they cause us to either sink into a place where “having the world in the palm of your hand” isn’t even imaginable or reaching out that palm and choosing to dare greatly helps keep our hearts AND hands open.
The image of hands remaining open is a wonderful metaphor for our need for each other. It’s sometimes easier to keep our hands in our pockets or to clasp them together behind our backs or to ball them up into a fist; all ways of partially disengaging—NOT RISKING any moments of sweaty palms or trembling fingers or awkward thumbs. Perhaps the intertwining of my hand with yours calls me to be more compassionate with myself, more caring in my outreach both to you as well as myself.
Perhaps being vulnerable with you, letting you in and “being all in” myself to all the moments we share opens me to that mysterious miracle we strive to achieve that Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community. Eleanor Roosevelt put it another way, “Yesterday is History, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift”.
Just perhaps being vulnerable calls me and you into daring to touch one another in the deepest recesses of our spiritual presence with and for each other…perhaps we CAN be vulnerable and see more completely who we can become through facing our challenges of independence, interdependence, and introspection.
Bill Williamson Sermon
Part 1 July 14, 2013
When Joy Christi and I began to talk about vulnerability what jumped to mind were my high school years. In 2007, two people very close to me were very sick. My father had bile duct cancer that would end up killing him in 2008. Simultaneously my best friend, William, who had been a healthy state-ranked wrestling champion, had contracted Crohn’s disease had progressed to the point that he was living with a feeding tube for nutrition.
Luckily after a year with his life in the balance, William was returned to full health, playing rugby with gusto at Chapel Hill and once again able to whoop me at wrestling. But during a time when most kids were focusing on getting cars and dates and then getting those dates into cars, I watched two of the most important people in my life literally waste away.
I also saw the Is and Cs that Joy Christi began sharing with us this morning. I became much more introspective. When faced with the specter of the grim reaper as a young high schooler I spent a lot of time thinking about the big questions. Not surprisingly I had many conversations about these big questions with both my friend William and my dad. These conversations deepened my relationships with both people in immeasurable ways. When I reflected on how my dad and William handled their illnesses and how those around them responded, I realized the type of man that I wanted to be.
To borrow Joy Christi’s imagery I wanted to be a man with open hands. I wanted to risk engagement and be deepened by it. I clearly remember debating whether or not to go visit my friend one day when he was sick. He was frightening, creepy-looking, and foreign. His skin was wrinkled and crinkled from extreme weight loss and had a pale blue/green tint. This was not the person I had been on sports teams with, had played in band with, had camped with on Boy Scout trips. Watching his decline was scary. By seeing his vulnerability… while living daily with my dad’s situation of declining health, I was doubly reminded of my own fragility. However, I went for a visit and I think that visit was far more important for me than for him. When I arrived we played chess, and laughed, and we made fun of each other. And the most meaningful thing for me was that my frightening and foreign looking friend, skin and bones, pale as paper, with a plastic tube coming from his nose, asked how I was dealing with my dad. My friend who looked like death warmed over wanted to make sure I was ok. It was then that I realized that my “I’s” were out of balance. And that, although independence is wonderful and self-sufficiency is a virtue I prize highly, I was not giving interdependence the respect it deserved. I thought that I was going to play chess to cheer my friend up but he helped me far more than I helped him.
Another person who inspired me during this time was my neighbor, Mark Gauger. When my dad got sick, lots of people offered condolences and in true southern fashion, food; lots and lots of food. Many also offered to help in any way they could. However, this man, unlike the others who said “anyway they could” as a polite, rather than a true action-oriented statement, meant it. He described what he meant; he said to call him to help when dad became bed ridden, to call him at 1 am, to call him to help clean up bodily messes, or to lift Dad when he fell or basically, to call him for any reason.
The overriding lesson I learned from this time was that in the moments of great vulnerability, you will receive community care. However after my dad died and William got better, I realized that like Joy Christi said– community care has a place not just in moments of great vulnerability but also in moments of enormous joy, gratitude, or moments of uncertainty and confusion. In that spirit I have tried to be there for my friends and members of my community during daily life just as my community was there during my life changing events.
Bill Williamson Sermon
Part 2 July 14, 2013
All faith communities have an obligation to cultivate community bonds but as UUs this obligation is even stronger for each of us. We do not offer our members eternal salvation, we do not offer rituals like ‘priestly confessionals’ that will mitigate transgressions, and we most certainly do not offer certain answers. What we do offer is covenantal community. We offer a welcoming space shaped by our principles in which a community of questioners can grow and learn from each other.
To quote James Luther Adams, a former professor at Harvard Divinity and an UU theologian, “A free church brings the individual…into a caring, trusting fellowship that protects and nourishes his or her integrity and spiritual freedom”. If we agree with this, and I think I can say we do, since this statement so closely mirrors our fourth principle guaranteeing a free search for truth and meaning, we need to nurture this search. To do this we need to open ourselves up. We need to expose our own vulnerabilities to invite others to expose theirs. Once we do this we can engage more fully with members of our communities.
One of the biggest challenges to opening up is today’s ever-present electronically-driven universe, full of IPads, IPods, IPhones, and Facebook Friends. It’s too easy to flee from the intimate settings where people can form truly close friendships. When everyone has a device on their hip, it is hard to fully engage with one person at a time because we are trying to constantly engage with everyone all the time. We spread ourselves too thin and end up not fully engaging with anyone.
My high school Latin is pretty rusty but I know the word commune and the word communicate are related in some etymological way. The Webster online dictionary describes commune as ‘bonding or intimately relating’ with someone. It also describes it as a transitive verb that is obsolete.
This past winter my girlfriend broke her phone and it was one of the best things that has happened to me. Without a means of instant communication we had to face the horror of making plans in person and then sticking to them. This meant that more often than not one of us would show up at a place we were supposed to meet slightly before the other and shoot the breeze with whomever we would run into. I loved it! Without a constant technological connection I was able to make personal connections. To remain open to being vulnerable in our day-to-day life, connection is required.
Rebecca Adams, a professor at UNCG says that sociologists consider three conditions crucial to making close friends, proximity, repeated, unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down. That last one is important for our service today. In order to make close friends you need be where you and others and can open up. To truly build intimacy, a crucial part of community, you must be vulnerable and allow others to be vulnerable as well.
Our congregation is the perfect place for these three conditions to occur, two of them are guaranteed: we have proximity and repeated interactions. The only condition we need to work on is having people let their guard down. We need to not only open our doors when we welcome people but open ourselves in all that we do.
We might get hurt and we may get burned and certainly will uncover uncomfortable differences, but by engaging and connecting with others at a deeper level we will be rewarded. I recommend always being willing to take off your electronic and emotional armor and be willing to make connections wherever you find yourself.
Joy Christi Przestwor
Part 2 of Sermon
You are truly amazing Bill…you certainly help me realize, just by being with you, that opportunities seem to abound when we stretch out our hands and hearts.
One of the memorable moments that transpired in the first six months of 2013 has been a RE Adult Ed class called Healthy Living. Nancy Bragg, who shared one of the readings today, was one of its facilitators. (A commercial side bar, if any of you see this class advertised as happening here or at Reuters’ Center take advantage of a spectacular opportunity to grow) During that class we made lists, lots of them, they covered every wall space we had in our meeting room. The lists weren’t the critical element but they aided our process of remaining vulnerable with each other. They provided the backdrop for explaining how we were working to remain open, discovering OUR healthy ways of being, and growing individually and collectively. At the final class we went back to the first list we wrote of WHY we had come to this class and what our hopes were for our participation; we discovered, in laughter and tears, that a transformation in each person in that classroom had taken place by supporting each other in achieving what we wanted to gain from our time together. As Bill so wonderfully noted, we found out that when we engage and connect with one another amazing things can and do happen; changes and insights happened that we couldn’t even imagine!
Today everyone here has taken four minutes out of this new day (that’s 2 hundredths of a percent of a full 24 hour day for those mathematically interested) to share a hope and a promise with one other member of this, OUR beloved community. I ask you then during the rest of this day and in the weeks ahead to intentionally focus on that sharing. To engage in this congregation, to be all you can become by remaining open to the moments of vulnerability that are here…moments found in an RE classrooms, moments in Sandburg Hall, moments as you find familiar or unexpected opportunities to share at Moral Monday bus stops or Equality Now rallies or SUUSI or as you sit in your favorite spot at home or go to our congregational retreat in November or attend District workshops. I ask you to cherish each moment for those moments propel us deeper, provide us with better visions, and offer us the incredibly, wondrous delights of living wide open.
I ask you, as we walk among and along side one another, that we share these deepening moments of growth, that we stretch forth our entire being not knowing what we may touch but truly knowing we can grow from just the process of stretching out an open palm, opening wide a loving heart, and attuning closely a listening ear. I can guarantee, from my personal lived experience in this community of cherished friends, that if each of us lives with this level of intentional vulnerability in all our daily moments, living will be mystical and magical. Living this way will allow our sight to become clearer and our light to shine brightly for all to see! And so I ask that together and intentionally we may make it so!
UU Mysticism Then and Now (text & audio)
Some months ago our lead minister, Mark Ward, and the worship associates started scheduling the summer services. I agreed to lead a service on the topic of mysticism. I came to this tradition and congregation just about four years ago; so I am not as knowledgeable about the history of Unitarian Universalism as many of you are. So when I talked to Mark again two months ago about this service, I expressed my desire to relate today’s sermon to how mysticism has been expressed over time in the UU tradition. He directed me to the book by Leigh Eric Schmidt titled Restless Souls, The Making of American Spirituality. It is a very well written book on the history of the liberal, religious tradition in America, of which we are an integral part. Although I have not finished reading it yet, I highly recommend the book.
I have walked the path of a mystic almost my entire adult life. In the summer of 2007, I read a book by Brother Wayne Teasdale, which brought into clear focus my understanding of mysticism. That book is The Mystic Heart, Discovering A Universal Spirituality In The World’s Religions. Teasdale coined a new term of Interspirituality as the concept that there is a common, mystical core across all the religious traditions. Also, Elizabeth Lesser in her book, The Seeker’s Guide, Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure, describes a highly individualist choosing of one’s beliefs from multiple traditions, a pluralistic framework, as a recent development. But after reading Schmidt’s book, I realize that Interspirituality is very close to the vision of the Transcendentalist movement that started in the early part of the nineteenth century. I have to guess that if such people as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, Henry David Thoreau, and Sarah Farmer were alive today, they would probably be viewed as being SBNR (spiritual, but not religious).
There is something else that I need to mention; back in April when we had a service with the topic of Reimagining Jesus, I stated that from my perspective we are a congregation of shared values rather than shared beliefs. At the General Assembly in the exhibition hall, there were a variety of booths set up; some of which strongly enforced that opinion. There were tables for Humanists, Buddhists, Christians, Pagans, Jewish Awareness and Mystics in Community. I doubt if you would ever find such a varied collection of traditions at one location, unless it was at an interfaith event. I spent several hours helping out at the table for mystics. What I learned during that time is that there is a great deal of variance in our understanding of mysticism as well.
I call this sermon UU Mysticism Then and Now in my desire to explore how the mysticism of the nineteen and early twentieth century would relate to us who are at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These are my own personal opinions, so you should perhaps regard this talk as an extended version of a This I Believe.
I will tackle of one the big questions first. Does one need a belief in God, Source, Divine Mystery or whatever else you could call it, in order to be a mystic? My response would be ‘No’. I believe that a person who calls themselves an atheist or agnostic can be a mystic.
Now, I admit it is the conventional understanding of mysticism to be primarily about one’s relationship with the Divine, but I believe there other avenues, which are equally valid, that a person can follow as a path of a mystic in the post-modern world. I will briefly describe three alternatives later.
Now the Transcendentalists often wrote and spoke of God; although quite often it was not a traditional interpretation, especially for their time period. Whitman in his Song of Myself, the reading this morning, shows that he was very ecumenical in his approach to faith. Emerson described himself as the ‘transparent eye-ball’ looking upon God’s creation. But today, UUs do not often address their founding doctrines of the denial of the Christian Trinity and of universal salvation. It is a daunting task to create a spirituality that leaves up to each individual the answer on the issue of a deity. It is a challenge for both for us as individuals and as a community. As long as we approach each other with open minds and caring hearts, I am positive that we can continue to make this house of worship our collective home.
Chapter two from Restless Souls is titled “Solitude.” Emerson wrote of his solitary walks in the woods, Thoreau spent time in a hermitage beside Walden Pond, and Emily Dickenson was a recluse most of her life. I doubt if it is necessary to go live in a cabin in the wilderness for a couple of years or to restrict our social life to our family and a few close friends, in order for us to become mystics. But taking time for silence and to be alone as Emerson was on his walks in the woods is perhaps a key component of being a mystic in this day and age. It is good to turn off the television and the radio, to walk away from the computer screen, to put down the tablet and e-readers and simply be present to each moment without the distractions of the world. In comparison to the nineteenth century, we are now ever more addicted to doing, getting something accomplished, getting someplace other than where we are. Taking time for us to just be in the world is essential for our wholeness. I feel this is especially true for those of you who are an activist in the world.
I am reminded of a quote by Thomas Merton:
“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and over-work.
The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his/her work for peace.
It destroys the fruitfulness of his/her own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes work fruitful.”
I found it interesting that Schmidt repeatedly mentions the significance of the World’s Parliament of Religions which happened in Chicago in September of 1893. This event was significant because it brought together most of the religious traditions to dialogue with each other.
Brother Teasdale was one of the main conveners of the second Parliament of World Religions, one hundred years later, 1993, again in Chicago. In his book, The Mystic Heart, which was published in 1998, he identifies nine elements that he understood as being found in the mystics across all traditions. It is unfortunate, that Wayne died of cancer in 2004.
But he left a rich legacy that is now carried forward by an organization created in January of 2009 from his vision. It is called the Community of the Mystic Heart. I am one of its charter members. We took those nine elements and rewrote them as vows. I do not feel that there is anything particularly religious about them; I think that many UUs could easily live by most of them. They are:
I vow to actualize and live according to my full moral and ethical capacity.
I vow to live in solidarity with the cosmos and all living beings.
I vow to live in nonviolence.
I vow to live in humility.
I vow to embrace a daily spiritual practice.
I vow to cultivate mature self-knowledge.
I vow to live a life of simplicity.
I vow to live a life of selfless service and compassionate action.
I vow to express the deepest realization of my inner practice through the prophetic call to work for justice, compassion and world transformation.
The three alternative paths to being a mystic in the post-modern world, that I mentioned earlier, are through nature and the cosmos, through service to humanity and the world, and by our exploration of human consciousness through meditation and shadow work.
I feel that the Transcendentalists were quite correct that our connection with our natural world and studies of such sciences as biology and cosmology are a completely valid path of mysticism. It was the case for me that my knowledge of cosmology that first brought me a mystical framework. I also believe that it does not require a belief in a creator; for the universe is mysterious, wondrous, and sacred in and of itself alone. There are many modern authors that write on our profound interconnection with the natural world. Some writers like Father Thomas Berry, do include a creator, and while other authors, such as Bill Plotkin, leave it mostly unanswered.
Being of service to humanity and the world is a noble path. I strongly hold that mysticism is not about sitting on a cushion so that one experiences states of ecstasy and falling deaf to the world’s cries of pain and suffering. I see that it is vital for anyone who would call themselves a mystic to be engaged in the everyday world. For me, the isolation and separation of a monastic life behind a wall belongs to a form of mysticism that is best left in the past. I love the fact that Unitarian Universalism is a champion of social and ecological justice issues. But I also know from my own experiences that one can get more done with the help of a community than one can by oneself and each person needs a set of practices to renew their spirit and give them courage to face their daily challenges.
That brings me to the third alternative path for a twenty-first century mystic. Closely tied to solitude is the need for reflection, contemplation and self-knowledge. I use several different contemplative practices from a variety of traditions in order to fulfill several of the vows that I took as a member of the Community of the Mystic Heart. For the last seven years, I have a counselor who helps me delve into those aspects of myself that otherwise might stay hidden.
As part of the call to form Small Group Ministries, a few of us are now meeting on Monday evenings from 4:30 to 6:30 downstairs in the Religious Education area. We are the UU Contemplatives. We have a silent meditation for forty-five minutes, some personal sharing and time for a reflection on a reading. We each take turns to be responsible for our activities. If anyone here feels an interest in this form of spirituality, you are welcome to join us
I hope that UU Contemplatives will be the first of several Small Group Ministries that will be created here at UUCA so members can find connection with other people within the congregation with whom they share a common set of beliefs. I hold that this will be a powerful way to experience our diversity within our overall knowledge of our community.
Photo credit: ViaMoi / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND
Don’t Dream It; Be It (text & audio)
Let’s do the Time Warp again
This morning I want to time warp back to high school. For me, that’s almost 25 years ago. I was going to Catholic school. Friends of mine were just starting to get boyfriends and girlfriends, heterosexual only, thank you. Sex was scary and sinful and forbidden. But it was also exciting, and the dream of many hormone-flooded nights.
Through most of my school years, I felt like an outsider at best, and a freak when I was being picked on. I didn’t like doing the things most boys seemed to like: sports, roughhousing, posturing. I’d been called “gay” long before I knew anyone who actually was gay. Very few people were out in those days, at least in Dayton, Ohio. It wasn’t until I went to college that I heard of anyone my age who was gay. On a campus of 6,000 students, there were two willing to go public. There were whispers about the sexual revolution, but it didn’t seem to be happening anymore, at least not in the open. It was the Reagan era, “just say no.” Don’t let it all hang out. Keep it in the closet.
Yes, I felt alone and confused and outside the bounds of society just because I like to read and play Dungeons & Dragons, because I questioned the garbage being fed to me by authority figures. How much more depressed and isolated would I have felt if I were gay, if society’s message to me was that I was disgusting, perverted, and dangerous?
The messages coming in were stressful and overwhelming: find someone to love and spend the rest of your life with; you’re not cool unless you’re having sex; sex can kill you, especially the wrong kind of sex; wait till marriage; you’re still a virgin?; don’t even think of telling anyone about that dream you had involving your best friend.
Some people say that everyone feels like a misfit as a teenager. Maybe that’s true. Maybe the guys who picked on me were being picked on by other people up the line. I do know that I felt like everyone expected me to live up to a certain standard of normality that I just couldn’t manage. And that falling short socially felt to me like torture.
I did find some friends. I felt like we were targets together rather than standing alone, but we were still outcasts. Then one sleepover Saturday night, we agreed to meet some older friends at the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it turned out to be a light in the darkness. Those bright places often turn out to be in the most unexpected places.
SONG: “Over at the Frankenstein Place”
For once, my black thrift store trenchcoat was not a signifier of standing out, but of fitting in. I’d learned to embrace the darkness in life, and here were my people. But they weren’t moping about being outcast from society. They were celebrating. They were laughing. We first-timers were brought up front as “virgins,” and auctioned off to whoever could bid the most disgusting phrase. After a few rounds of gross-out one-upmanship, we were no longer virgins (in one sense, anyhow). Then we could settle in for the movie, and the show.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a movie based on a stage musical, a sort of camp sendup of the monster movies and sci-fi of the early 1950s.
Brad and Janet are high school sweethearts who are getting married. They are as normal as it gets, and they seem to have it all: popularity, good grades, true love, innocence, and of course virginity. A flat tire leads them to an isolated castle on a stormy night. They just want to use the phone, but they are quickly dragged into a party of strangely dressed, sexually ambiguous “rich weirdos,” as Brad calls them.
As the action takes place on screen, a cast of costumed fans act out the same scenes at the front of the theater. Meanwhile, cast members and fans in the audience yell out comments and gags at the screen, and bring props to use. For instance, in a wedding scene, the audience throws rice, and when a character on screen says, “I always cry at weddings,” the audience calls out “Do you laugh at funerals?”
It’s a little bit of a bewildering experience for a first timer, and one of the reasons people go back time after time is to pick out what is actually going on, picking out callback lines to shout out the next time, or even come up with something new to yell that will crack everybody up.
For those of you who’ve never been, you can get a sense of how it works from this clip from Fame.
Clip from Fame
Only five years after Rocky Horror was released, Fame was already playing off its cult status. Whether you’re an aspiring actor who worries about performing, a shy teenager who’s self conscious about everything, or someone questioning your sexuality or gender identity, Rocky is a safe place to open up and try on a role that might feel too dangerous in “real life.”
Because in 1980, or 1990, and even today in a lot of places, Rocky Horror feels dangerous. The master of the castle is the iconic character Frank-N-Furter, a mad scientist who is actually an alien.
He calls himself a transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, but that terminology was more designed to roll off the tongue and shock audiences rather that to accurately describe Frank. Just like Fame uses the word “schizophrenia” to mean “playing multiple roles,” Rocky Horror uses “transsexual” to mean something closer to a combination of “genderqueer” and “pansexual.”
Frank wears a corset and garter belt, high heels, makeup, leather jacket, feather boas. He seduces men and women, indulging every sexual whim without thought to consequences. He’s played as both hero and villain, completely free and completely queer, no apologies.
In terms of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, Frank is “all of the above” in everything. What he isn’t is normal, not even a shred. And Tim Curry gives such a performance that you can’t watch Frank and not want to be at least a little like him. I remember how confusing it seemed to me, a sexuality not defined by just this or just that. What was he? And what did it mean to be attracted to him, whether you were Brad, Janet, or just a confused teenager?
As the movie continues, Brad & Janet are exposed, quite literally, to a wilder sort of sexuality, and go from frightened naivete to willing participation. There’s a buildup of bedroom farce and sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that leads to the big “Floor Show,” a musical number that spells out Frank’s philosophy: Don’t dream it; be it.
MEDITATION
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
This is what Frank sings out desperately towards the end of Rocky Horror.
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
I invite you to relax in your seat and take a moment to breathe……. deep…… down.
Think back. Who is the YOU you wanted to be but were afraid to?
Maybe you were a teen or a young adult… or maybe it wasn’t so long ago…
Imagine yourself in that place or time, in that version of you.
What most holds you back? your own fears? your parents? your peers?
your faith community? societal expectations?
What does it feel like to not be the YOU you know yourself to be?
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
Do you remember the first time you went to Rocky Horror?
Or maybe it was some other outlier event or experience….
a place where you could BE whomever you wanted to be
and love whomever you wanted to love?
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
What is it like, as a misfit teenager… or adult…., to go to a place
where you can dress any way you like,
wear makeup and fishnets as a boy, or a tux as a girl,
or anything else outside the boundaries, and be celebrated for it?
A place where everyone is expected to participate, but not graded.
A place where sexuality is open and fluid and unapologetic and experimental.
A place where normals and misfits are equally mocked and equally embraced…
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
Who or what are the sparks of light that lead you out of the darkness?
that lead you back to yourself when you are lost?
enable you to be the YOU you most want to be?
is it a friend? a lover? a group? a calling that you pursue?
a camp? a family member? a faith community?
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
What other places can we come together regularly as an accepting community, participate, laugh, sing along, feel better about ourselves and learn to treat others with more compassion and more respect?
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
We can’t just dream it and expect the world to change, we have to be it.
Live our principles. One moment at a time. Day by day.
So as we breathe into this space and this moment
may we meditate on these words and what they might mean
for each of us and for our UU community…
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
Don’t Dream it. Be it.
Don’t Dream it. Be it……
OFFERTORY
We UUs do a lot of dreaming….envisioning a world of peace, justice, and equality.
I’ve heard some say they feel the 7 principles are too big, too idealistic, too dreamy.
But what if we don’t just dream it. But we Be it.
What would that look like?
What does it LOOK like to BE a true place of RADICAL WELCOME?
A place where whoever you are, whomever you love, you are welcome?
Do we walk that walk everyday?
What of other dreams we have?
personal dreams, dreams for this UU block of Asheville….
how often do we talk about our dreams and forget the small ways we can BE them?
As we come to our time of Offering–
let us hold these thoughts as we hold one another with care and intention.
Let us think and act on what we can each give to this faith community,
this spark of light in the darkness
as those who wish come and silently light candles from our chalice fire.
Now I don’t want to spoil the whole movie for you. It plays once a month at Cinebarre, and they put on a great show if you ever want to check it out. But just as any transformative experience ends with the struggle of coming back to everyday life, Rocky Horror ends with the whole castle lifting off back to the planet of Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, leaving Brad & Janet behind. They are bewildered as to what comes next, how they can rebuild their lives, how they can integrate this experience into themselves.
Likewise, the audience goes back to their own lives. To me, back in those high school days, it was as radical as if the priest had given the benediction at the end of church:
If you have lustful thoughts, maybe that’s not such a sin
And if you feel a little bit gay, maybe that’s not so abnormal
And maybe you can show off a little bit, even if you’re not that confident
Maybe you can accept yourself, even if you don’t fit into what they tell you is “normal”
Maybe you can be it instead of just dreaming it.
One of the many reasons I love being a UU is that that sort of benediction would be nothing to comment on here, except you might have to explain the word “sin” to the kids who’ve never heard it before. One of my fellow OWL teachers told me her YRUU group took the 9th graders to Rocky Horror. Only UUs would do that as an officially sanctioned church event. Although Frank is not a good role model and the story is a traumatic one for the characters, it’s mostly played for laughs, and the audience participation makes it all about the fun for anyone who goes.
Elizabeth and I went to see the movie a couple of months ago to help prepare for this service, and I was afraid it would seem like a quaint relic from a bygone age. And it does, in some ways. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that because this room in this town is safe, that we’ve made enough progress. I saw a lot of high school students streaming out of the Biltmore Mall theater who could’ve been me all those years ago. For so many, the closet still seems like the safest place. For many, gender as a binary concept seems as inevitable as gravity. For so many, the loneliness can be soul crushing.
My dream is that our congregation can be as attractive to young people with questions and fears as a 40-year-old midnight movie. My dream is that our services and activities are fun and uplifting and joyful and a little bit crazy. My dream is that we’re radically inclusive and welcoming and a little bit dangerous.
Don’t Dream It; Be It
The Time Warp
*Note that Asheville’s Rocky Horror is hosted by the “Unexpected Pleasures” cast at 10:30 PM on the second Saturday of every month at Cinebarre, Biltmore Square Mall.
That Left Turn at Albuquerque (text & audio)
How many of you remember Loony Tunes? When I was a child, Saturday morning cartoons were not complete without my weekly dose of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and Wyle E. Coyote being outsmarted by his arch-nemesis, the Roadrunner. I loved the silliness and slapstick humor then, and I as I grew up, I realized how subtle and subversive some of the shorts really were. Loony Tunes introduced me to new musical styles as Bugs and Elmer presented The Barber of Seville and a condensed version of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” operas…”kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit”. I also got to witness transgenderism without prejudice since the male characters often donned dresses as a disguise which allowed for the shifting of gender roles, as well.
All of these were my favorite at one time or another. Yet I often am reminded of another batch of shorts that began with a mole-like tunnel raised up and moving as Bugs burrowed his way along, finally popping up with the expectation of being in a certain place. To his surprise and frustration, he often found that he wasn’t where he thought he’d be. “Hey, wait a minute. This doesn’t look like Los Angle – eez or Pismo Beach or Coney Island.” He’d pull out a map and check it and then declare, “I knew it;(say it with me) I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
Now I admit that when I stumbled on this idea for a sermon, my goal was (and is) to talk about those times in our lives when we get derailed from our original plans. I wanted to talk about learning to stop second guessing ourselves and be with what is in the present moment. I thought I’d be able to offer something of value in sharing how I have come to cope with the need to check my internal GPS and recalculate my journey. And I will do those things. But first, I really want to tell you that I have spent several joy-filled hours in YouTube research viewing old Loony Tunes clips.
I have giggled at the antics of these characters, and I have recalled the tension I used to feel as a child when I knew something was going to go “wrong” for Bugs or Daffy. It has helped me to know that I still enjoy the silliness along with the social commentary. I may not have ended up where I thought I was going to go (Me? A minister? Really?)…and I still have lots of road left ahead of me…but Bugs Bunny was a great mentor in not only accepting where he ended up, but also in diving right in and embracing the adventure at hand rather than wallowing in the “should have/could have” swamp of regret.
That famous Robert Frost poem that James read illustrates this idea of choosing a path without looking back in regret. The traveller is faced with two paths. Each of them holds beauty, the promise of adventure and mystery. Frost describes the beauty of the fall day with the phrase “yellow wood”…can’t you just imagine yourself there? The paths were similar in wear, one fading into undergrowth, the other a bit grassy, and both were covered “in leaves no step had trodden black”. The traveller chooses one path knowing that even though he may at times wish for the ability to go back and choose the other one, that probably won’t happen.
Why? Why can’t we go back and choose again? Because life happens while we’re walking along. Each decision leads to another choice. Each path leads us onward and the terrain changes moment by moment. In Frost’s words, “way leads on to way”. In order to go back there are many choices that would need to be revised, and that’s not usually possible.
What do you do when you find yourself in a place you didn’t expect? Well, Bugs’ system was to check his map. He looked at it to discern where he’d gone astray from his original plan. Again, that left turn at Albuquerque was usually his biggest divergence. So when you or I are in a place of wondering “where am I and how did I get here?”, the first step might be to figure out where you meant to be based on your map.
And here we come to the next point. Who made the map? Is this my map? Did I agree to this route or even the destination that was supposed to be waiting for me? Maybe; maybe not.
Sometimes we come to a point in our lives and realize that the reason we are confused or displeased with the outcome is because we’ve been following someone else’s map. As a parent, I know how tempting it is to dream up lives for my children that would allow them to find happiness as I define it. Many of our parents did the same thing and many of them also felt it was best if they gave us that map to their happiness. Some of us followed that particular route and it may have led to some happiness and maybe a great deal of it, but for others of us, that map that was given didn’t meet our needs and when we got to the supposed destination we found that rather than the fun and excitement of Coney Island we ended up at the South Pole, frozen, barren and isolated.
Bugs Bunny’s next step after consulting his map was to notice what was around him. He’d take in his surroundings so he could be in the now. He’d sometimes try to find someone to ask for directions. Do you remember the one where he was trying to find the Coachella Valley Carrot Festival and ended up in a bullring in Spain? That’s a pretty big detour. So he asked for help. Unfortunately, the toreador was too busy running away from el toro to give any answer. In order to find his way, Bugs had to be present with his surroundings and then figure things out from there.
Often in mentally retracing our steps to find where we veered from the path we expected, we notice new and interesting things in our immediate environment that may not have been present in the intended destination. What’s new in your world? What can be learned from the detour you took? Is it necessary or helpful to go back and try to correct the “mistake” and attempt to bring that into the now, or is it no longer relevant based on your current paradigm.
We are different at each point in life. What may have seemed like a good idea at 25 may not work at 35 or 52 or 78. Each day we are given the opportunity to recalculate our internal GPS based on new coordinates and new insights. We can learn to let go of others’ expectations. We cannot live for our parents, our friends, our partners, or our children. Happiness and contentment are inside jobs.
There are many stories of people who have been living with a diagnosis of a disease such as cancer or HIV, who say that the illness has been “the best thing that happened to me”. How on earth can that be? How could something that seems so devastating turn into something described as “the best”? Perhaps you can remember an event in your life that at the time seemed horrible, but as you lived with it and moved through the subsequent days and months, you found that there were blessings present, hidden gems, that you would not have found without the initial shock. In times like these, the internal GPS is recalculating a new roadmap based on a new reality, just like when you are driving your car and encounter a roadblock or a sign reading “bridge out”. We can help this recalculation by sitting with what is, activating the internal observer, and refusing to mindlessly follow some preconceived notion of what we should do or should feel.
Yet there are always those “what if’s” that come up from time to time. Some of those are recurring questions: What if I made the wrong career decision? What if I had gone to the private college rather than the big state university? What if I hadn’t broken off that relationship? What would my life be like now? And really the underlying thought about those kind of questions is: Would I be happier in that life scenario than I am right here and now?
Most of the questions I just asked can keep us firmly focused on the past, ensconced in regret, and living only half a life when we wake up every morning. What is the reward for this? Because there has to be a reward or you wouldn’t do it, right? Perhaps the reward is escaping from a currently difficult and stressful situation. Perhaps the reward is keeping a fantasy alive of who you once were. Bruce Springsteen wrote a whole song about that one: Glory Days.
Sure, life as we know it is sometimes chock full of difficulty, pain, frustrations, and imperfections. But change doesn’t happen in trying to relive the past. Changing your now can only happen by moving forward into the future that you create based on the choices you make today. Bugs Bunny never did go back and take that left turn at Albuquerque. What he did is what we can do, too. Take stock of your situation, look for guides and allies – even those who may seem like enemies can act as guides along the way– and, always be willing to embrace where you are and be open to whatever the adventure offers. This is the key to recalculating the internal GPS and setting our sights on the road ahead.
Unto the Seventh Generation (text & audio)
Our story begins some 500 years ago at a time of terrible feuds among people who have come to be known as the Iroquois in the region we now call upper New York state. The feuds had their origin in a long-standing practice call “mourning wars” that had entered a particularly bitter and bloody phase.
The practice was grounded in a belief about how the world worked. The people felt that there was a spiritual power that animated all things and that any time someone died the collective power of his or her family or clan was diminished. So, afterward the family or tribe would hold a ceremony in which social role and duties would be transferred to someone else.
Of course, sometimes there was no one else to take that role, and there was much grieving. In time, however, if the grief did not abate, women of the household could demand that a war party be assembled to raid a neighboring tribe and seek captives to make up for the loss. In some cases, those captives would be integrated or even enslaved by the clan, but in others, if the grief were particularly severe, they could be ritually killed and cannibalized. During this particular period, this exchange of mourning wars was incessant with clans raiding each other, tit for tat, while the killing just went on and on.
Among these folks, was one man, Hiawatha – not Longfellow’s noble savage but a very different figure – who had lost several daughters to this carnage and was driven mad by anger and depression.
In despair, he wandered off into the forest where he is said to have encountered what is described as a spiritual being who called himself Deganawidah, or the Peacemaker. The Peacemaker gave Hiawatha strings of shell beads and spoke words of Condolence that dried his eyes, that opened his ears, that unstopped his throat and so on until his grief was removed and his reason was restored. Those acts were woven into a ritual that became the center of a new teaching that, the Peacemaker assured Hiawatha, would make wars of mourning unnecessary.
Hiawatha and the Peacemaker then traveled to surrounding tribes and in time persuaded them to join what was then called the Great League of Peace and Power. It was to be an alliance that would marshal the spiritual energy of every family group.
The five and later six Indian nations joined in this league became known as the Haudenosaunee, or people of the long house. The title refers to the large dwellings where the people lived, housing as many as 20 families, as well as the ethic they lived by, one that envisioned all members gathered around a common fire, respecting each other, involved in each other.
To secure and maintain the peace they declared, the League created a Grand Council made up of 50 leaders, or sachems, whose sole purpose was to prevent what was called “the disuniting of minds.” As one observer put it, their notion of peace “did not imply a negotiated agreement backed by sanctions of international law and mutual interest, It was a matter of ‘good thoughts’ between nations, a feeling as much as a reality.”
The council’s purpose, then, was not to adopt laws – in fact, it had little power over individual tribes – but to cultivate and deepen relationship. The League ended the mourning wars, but honored the spirit behind them by granting the leading women of each tribe the right to select each sachem.
It was among the sachems or chiefs in these councils that the notion that one should act with an eye to the welfare of the seventh generation ahead was articulated. In a forum focused on relationship, not only with each other but also with the land on which they depended, full of ceremonies of thanksgiving and honor for each other, such a declaration was a natural outcome.
Today, it is curious now to see what a popular meme that phrase has become in our culture. Run “Seventh Generation” through Google and your first hit is a company that has trademarked it for their line of home cleaning products, followed soon after by another selling disposable diapers.
And why not? You could argue that the popularity of the phrase among marketers is a testament to how powerful the idea behind it is, even if we seem to miss the irony of finding that label on a package of paper towels. But before I get too high and mighty, let me make a confession – I have bought those paper towels; I have bought those diapers. Because, even if, OK, there are hardly more conspicuous examples of products that contradict the ethic of environmental sustainability, that contribute to this nation’s ballooning waste stream and the depredation of its forests and water courses.
Even though I know that: I mean, well, there are times when paper towels come in handy – not often, of course, I usually use cloth – and, well, are cloth diapers really so much better than disposable? And, gosh, looking at the labels of these products they seem more “environmentally-friendly” – boy, talk about a loaded term – than others. I mean, don’t they say they’re made from more recycled or recyclable materials?
And . . . and . . . and . . . Well, you get the picture. This is where we live, isn’t it? There’s hardly a soul today who doesn’t at least give a nod to the environment in how she or he goes about their lives and hardly a soul who feels that he or she is doing enough.
And yet, however we feel, the fact remains that the world is changing before our eyes. We see it in birds or perennials appearing earlier in spring, in pests once killed by winter freezes sticking around, in colossal storms spawning killer tornados and hurricanes. Our climate is clearly in play, but we have no way of knowing how it will play out.
Just a month ago, scientists reported that the average level of carbon dioxide in the air has reached 400 parts per million, the highest it’s been for 3 million years, a time before humans had evolved as a species. What does it mean? Well, because carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape into space, it likely will lead to overall warming of the Earth.
But of course our climate is complex, the result of the interplay of many forces that we are only beginning to understand. So, the effects vary from place to place, and sometimes in unexpected ways: in one place a killing drought, in another, monsoon-like storms; in some places spring-like winters, in others increased snowfall. But the overall trend has been warmer. Overall global temperatures are higher than at any time in the past 4,000 years; last year, 2012, was the hottest on record in the U.S. And the effects are obvious: mountain glaciers and polar icecaps are shrinking; sea levels are rising. And around the world these rising temperatures are either stressing or killing forests and coral reefs, and changing the habitats for creatures ranging from insects to antelope, extinguishing some and threatening others.
The fossil record says that the last time the concentration of carbon dioxide was 400 parts per million, average temperatures were 4 to 7 degrees warmer and sea levels were much higher. We can’t be sure of how things will go now, though, since it takes time for the effects of warming to ripple through the Earth’s systems.
And, of course, we have every reason to believe that carbon dioxide levels will continue to rise. That’s because we have a pretty good idea as to why they’re rising. We’ve endured the debates as to the causes over the last half century, and at this point it’s all over but the shouting. We humans are the drivers on this bus. Some two centuries of industrial development have disrupted this planet so profoundly that we have put our own survival and that of many of our fellow creatures in peril.
It’s astonishing to think that we comparatively tiny beings, so easily tossed by storm and tide, could make such an impact on this vast globe. Yet, it turns out that the conditions that sustain beings like us are fairly narrow, and it doesn’t take all that much to knock them off kilter. We need only look at the record of history to find civilizations that have disappeared due to fairly minor shifts in weather. What can we look forward to in a world warmer than humankind has ever known?
It’s a scary prospect, so it’s little wonder that so many of us choose simply to avert our eyes, or satisfy ourselves as doing our part by buying “green” and recycling our trash. Part of what makes this so hard is that the problem is woven into the details of our lives as we now live them. Every time we drive our cars, or ride in a plane, every light or appliance we switch on, plug in, or boot up adds carbon dioxide to the air.
It makes me understand a dimension of Hiawatha’s grief of half a millennium ago. Here we sit in the 21st century with that which sustains life on this planet under assault from the very patterns and practices of our living, and not just any practices, but those that we have come to equate with “the good life,” the life we aspire to.
What a disconnect! What an impossible irony! But it’s not lost, I believe, on our psyches. It may offer one explanation for the dystopic images scattered across our films and video games of a ravaged world with Hiawatha-like figures wandering the landscape in frustration and despair.
But the story of the Iroquois offers us more the just an image of despair. It also offers a frame for hope. The figure who appears to Hiawatha, linked closely in the story to one of the creator figures in that people’s mythology, finds a way to release him from his grief: in the story, to dry his weeping eyes, to open his ears, to unstop his throat so that his sorrow may be relieved and his reason restored.
Climate changed has been framed as a technical problem in need of technical fixes, and yet, to be honest, like the grieving Hiawatha, I’m not sure we are yet in the place where we are ready to sort this out in a rational way. About a decade ago, an engineering professor, Robert Socolow, detailed more than a dozen strategies, stabilizing wedges he called them, that he argued could slow and even halt the warming of the atmosphere.
They were things like dramatically expanding the use of photovoltaic cells to generate electricity, adding more nuclear power plants, even capturing and storing carbon. The problem was that every wedge required a monumental effort. In the case of photovoltaics, for example, to make any significant difference we would need arrays covering a surface of five million acres – about the size of Connecticut.
The question is not what we can do to solve this problem; it’s what we are prepared to do. In an interview at the time, Scolow said the task before us is on the scale of abolishing slavery. “It’s the kind of issue,” he said, “where something looked extremely difficult, and not worth it, and then people changed their minds.”
Years ago as a science writer I got to cover the spring “booming” or mating rituals of prairie chickens in central Wisconsin. These endangered creatures surely would have been erased from that landscape long before I arrived but for the work of the naturalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold was most famous for arguing for the awakening of what he called “a land ethic”: a way of looking at the world that, in his words, “enlarges the boundaries of community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or, collectively, the land.”
These words echo those of the Peacemaker in the Iroquois story who invites Hiawatha to understand his identity more broadly and to see the larger spiritual unity of all things. When we in this religious tradition agree among ourselves to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, we make a similar connection.
Taking our lead from what the Iroquois discovered in their Grand Councils, while scientists strategize possible solutions to our approaching peril, the rest of us must be about the work of building of relationship. Remember that the Iroquois commitment to the “seventh generation” was rooted in their love for the people and the land of their present day.
And so it will be for us if we are to find a solution to the train wreck that climate change presents us. As Wendell Berry put it, love is not an abstract proposition. It is tied, in his words, to “particular things, places, people and creatures.”
I can profess my love for the world and all things in it, but that alone has little purchase. When I can name what I love and tell how that love has changed my behavior, changed my thinking, changed my life I am getting a little closer to the true thing. Again, from Wendell Berry, “love proposes no abstract vision but the work of settled households and communities,” communities that act, that take stands, that take risks, and still stay in relationship
So, what is our work as a settled community affirming respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part? It is a question I want to invite you to join me in answering. How might we as a people of memory and hope learn to widen our hearts to embrace a world now under assault by the very patterns and practices of our lives?
You have my commitment in the coming year to finding ways for us to engage in that conversation. We have long passed the time when we could delegate this issue to others. It is ours to confront, and it will require educating ourselves and thinking, and adjusting our lives to an emerging reality.
But, as Lew Patrie suggested earlier, it will also require deeper work fitting of a religious community. It will require learning to transcend the fear, despair and forgetfulness that paralyze us, that set us against each other, so that we might awaken to the wonder of our lives and each other, to the gift of a planet that seven times seven generations ahead might yet sustain our own kind and the vast web of life.
Resources for this sermon include:
The Ordeal of the Longhouse by Daniel K. Richter
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert
Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, eds. Kathleen Dean Moore & Michael P. Nelson
Love God, Heal Earth, ed. Rev. Canon Sally G. Bingham
A Simple Thank You (text & audio)
Because I didn’t grow up going to church, I didn’t really learn about “saying grace” until later in my life. Once we started going to the UU congregation, we had a few different things we would do to take a moment of gratitude before eating. Sometimes we used the short poem my sister had learned in nursery school: For song of birds, for hum of bees, for all things fair, we hear and see, we thank you! Sometimes we had a moment of silence. After a while, we got a chime that we rang at the beginning of dinner, waiting to start eating until the ringing died away entirely. As an adult, I confess, I am often in a hurry or eating alone, and I don’t take the time unless it is a major holiday!
But I have one friend with whom I always say grace. It started when I first met her. Her son was seven, and they were practicing things like praying, and waiting for a few moments before you eat. So when I ate with them, which was not infrequently, I joined in. And it became our habit, no matter where we were. Expressing something religious in public was not something that came easily to me (I’ve gotten over that!), but the first time I went out to eat with my friend and her son, it was just the most natural thing. After the server set our plates down, we held hands, bowed our heads and took a moment to be grateful – for the food, for the people and the plants and the animals that made it possible, and for the gift of the time together.
How often would you imagine that you say the phrase “thank you” in a day? I would guess fairly frequently. Perhaps when someone holds the door for you. When you are handed your coffee or your receipt. When someone pays you a compliment or passes the butter upon request. Hopefully it’s a reflex. If it’s not, there’s a great place to start with a practice of gratitude. The practice of being conscious of saying thank you to those around you is a first step to being aware of your gratitude on a deeper level.
“There was once a billionaire who was asked, “What’s the secret to wealth?” He said, “Gratitude. If you don’t have gratitude then no matter how much you have you’re poor, because you are always looking at what you don’t have. If you have gratitude then you are never not wealthy.”” [1]
I saw this first hand when I was in Mexico a few months ago – I believe that the profound sense of hope expressed by the deported migrants we met grew directly out of their focus on gratitude, even when they had only a few possessions to their name, and had lost touch with their families. Finding hope is how we human beings survive.
Like any spiritual practice, cultivating gratitude requires both intention and preparation. Our lives move quickly, and it is easy to get swept away by the larger culture, into the world of constantly assessing and judging and wanting more. In our day to day lives, gratitude helps us to stay in the present moment, appreciating what we have. And practicing when we are not in crisis helps us to prepare for the times that are more difficult.
[1] website no longer active
To be sure, when you are going through a struggle, cultivating gratitude can be one of the hardest things to do. Sometimes we don’t see the gifts in an experience until we can look back on them. And I do not suggest that you ought to be thankful that you have a bad illness or are being bullied at school. Sometimes we can get to that place of being grateful in the moment that we are suffering, but no judgment if we can’t!
What I am suggesting is that in the midst of experiences that are heartbreaking and painful and difficult, taking a moment to make an “I’m thankful for…” list can help us to reframe, refocus and re-energize. The important thing is to keep your perspective. We don’t have to be thankful for bad things – though sometimes in hindsight we become thankful for the experience they brought us – but cultivating an attitude of gratitude can change our perspective and help us to approach our lives in a different way, no matter what is happening.
When things are really bad, my gratitude lists are pretty convoluted. Like the only thing I can come up with for my list is that it was raining outside and my shoes did not get wet. Or you could be grateful that one of the ER nurses made a fresh pot of coffee so you didn’t have to drink the burnt sludge coffee that had been there since mid-afternoon. But I find that just spending a few moments to make a gratitude list is a wonderful way to refocus. It doesn’t negate the difficulty, but it can shift your perspective.
The most important thing about gratitude, perhaps, is that it is a choice. A choice of emphasis, a choice of outlook… “Whatever one can muster at these points as a prayer of gratitude—okay, I’m still breathing, or I have friends who care about me—tips the experience from being immersed unmindfully in one’s suffering to moving into the present moment with a more holistic perspective. We see that there is suffering, but there is also this gratitude, and we can hold them together.” [2]
“It’s like the Zen story of the hermit monk living in the mountains. While he’s out gathering wood and roots a robber comes and strips his cabin, “everything” is gone. As night deepens he sits at the window and looks out at the evening moon, thinking to himself, “If only I could have given the robber this perfect, white moon.” He’s still wealthy.” [3]
There is a growing body of research that suggests that people who make gratitude a daily practice have a higher quality of life, even in the midst of great stress and suffering. “When you practice gratitude, you become more optimistic. That, in turn, makes you healthier and happier, boosting your personal and professional life. Gratitude… makes you feel even more connected, resulting in clearer thinking and more decisive action.” [4]
And saying thank you to the people around you helps to shift the larger consciousness, too. How does it feel to be looked in the eye and thanked? How does it feel to find a small hand-addressed card in among the stack of bills? “Thank you” is so simple, but can be profoundly impactful in our rough and tumble world. It’s an acknowledgement of another person’s action or sacrifice, and a simple way to connect.
[2] http://www.beliefnet.com/Wellness/Gratitude/The-Transformative-Power-Of-Gratitude.aspx?p=2
[3] website no longer active
[4] http://www.wellnesstoday.com/lifestyle/consistent-gratitude-practice-makes-you-happier-and-healthier
And so, today, we offer our love and gratitude to three of our staff who are leaving their positions with us: Asher, Melissa and Linda. I understand that none of them will be going too far, but their roles in this community will be changing, and so it is important that we acknowledge their service and their hard work among us…
I have made each one of you a special box. And all of you will find paper hearts in your pews/bulletins. We invite you to write a few words or a message to each of these folks expressing your gratitude to them. What did they bring to their work that you will miss when they are gone? What do you wish for their future? During the musical reflection, you will have an opportunity to write your messages, and you can leave them in the baskets on your way out – or if you have someone sitting near you who might be ready to get up for a moment, you could have that person bring the hearts to the basket up here. Please be sure to write the person’s name on the heart so we can sort them and distribute them properly!
Musical Reflection “The Lullaby” (I’m Thankful)
(distribute boxes)
Asher, for your positive attitude, compassionate spirit and musical spunk, we are grateful!
Melissa, for your patience and perseverance, your gentle care for our children, and your sweet smile, we are grateful!
Linda, for your exuberant welcome, your tireless service and your gift of seeing others’ talents, we are grateful!
With Hearts On Fire (text & audio)
“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting… Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”
This is crazy stuff. Even the people who were there “were amazed and perplexed!” They experienced something unbelievable, and wondered what it meant. I’m sure that even as it happened, there were some in the room who did not believe their eyes – or their experience.
You know by now that I was raised in a fairly skeptical family – the idea of God, even in the untraditional sense was something I didn’t learn about until much later in life.
And even once I had learned that the word “God” meant so much more than the dude with the big pointy finger painted in the Sistine Chapel, it took me a long time to reconcile the idea of a constantly moving and changing Spirit which infuses all living things with what I had been taught in my early life. But most importantly, I had to accept that experience is not always rational or logical.
Let me give you an example. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe that the spirit within us lurks nearby once our body has died. As far as I’m concerned, ghosts don’t exist. Except I saw one once. Back when I still worked in the theater, I attended a tribute concert for a much-loved gentleman who had run the box office for decades. I was sitting in the back of the theater with my friend who had worked with Charlie for many, many years, and gradually I became aware of a presence behind me. I turned around to look, and there he was. Sitting in the seat directly behind my friend, with a cigarette in his hand and his beloved dog Ginger, a golden retriever who had also died a few months before, at his feet.
It is a great mystery to me what that was all about – because like I said, I don’t believe in ghosts. But as sure as I am standing here before you today, I saw one once.
The story of Pentecost is one of the great mysteries found in the world’s scriptures—and like my experience, is open to reflection and interpretation. I learned about Pentecost in my very first class in my very first year of seminary, when I had to run to the bookstore and purchase the last copy of the Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms so that I could look it up! It was a class on the History of Ancient Christianity, and the professor had breezed by a reference to Pentecost, assuming that we all would understand. But though I had heard the word before, I didn’t understand what it meant.
“Pentecost” was one of those words. The words I thought I knew were part of a special story, one from which I was omitted at best, and more likely, actively excluded. Upon further study, however, I discovered that one of the most important parts of the Pentecost story is that it was the first time that the Spirit had been revealed to more than just a select few.
According to the story, Jesus gave the Spirit to the twelve disciples on the evening before he died. But on Pentecost, “The Spirit, once the exotic possession of a prophetic few, is now offered to all.” For me, this biblical story about one aspect of God seemed almost Universalist in nature.
We can use this story as a metaphor—calling on the idea of the power of fire to connect us to the power of the Spirit to transform. It is no coincidence that the Holy Spirit comes down as tongues of fire. “Spirit of Life, come unto me…”
According to theologian Peter Hodgson, “Biblical and classical metaphors of spirit represent it as a fluid, pervasive, intangible energy whose fundamental quality is vitality and freedom and whose fundamental purpose is to create, shape and enliven.”
For Unitarian Universalists, the flame symbolizes the light of truth, the warmth of community and the fire of commitment… it symbolizes the refiner’s fire, the flame that transforms us, the flame that keeps us warm, the fire that lights our way and draws us home.
In astrology, fire signs are mutable—they are changeable. And just as fire is always changing—just as fire is a dancing light throwing shadows on the wall, the flame that exists at the center of our shared symbol is always changing. It reminds us of our history, illuminates our present, and prepares us for our future.
As Unitarian Universalists, we are constantly evolving, and so are our congregations. UU history is a dance of change and continuity, not a static, fixed doctrinal deposit that must be preserved and passed on unchanged.
My friend Alison puts it this way, “Today, as a minister, I use the flaming chalice to symbolize many things on different occasions. Sometimes it is truth, or love, or hope; sometimes the energy of a life, of one of us, that is gone but not forgotten’ sometimes I simply hold the flame up as a reminder of our good intentions…
Some days it is the chalice part we hold up, sometimes it is the flame. But for me, I will always think of the flaming chalice as a vessel of sorts, one that can receive but also one that can share and give of itself. One that contains the past but is open to the future. Most importantly, my chalice is a vessel that holds something significant and powerful to which it is worth paying attention.”
Today we are holding up the flame—that dancing, burning heat of the refiner’s fire—the flame that tempers steel, making it stronger and more flexible. And that image of the flame is significant and powerful. It is worth paying attention to!
The flame we lift up today reminds us where we came from—it calls to mind people like Thomas Potter, committed to his vision, and John Murray, willing to embrace a miracle.
I particularly think of Michael Servetus, our anti-Trinitarian forbear who was burned at the stake in Geneva, all but three copies of his major written work destroyed.
This is the fire of commitment.
We must also remember the cost of commitment to the light of truth—and be willing to risk our comfort and our assumptions in order to realize our greatest dreams. Hopefully you and I will never find ourselves making such a drastic choice as Servetus did, but nonetheless, I ask, what are we willing to sacrifice for our faith? It is possible to allow this life-changing faith of ours to enter into our hearts and souls. It is possible that in the mystery, we might find a common understanding.
The flame also reminds us of the work it takes to create and sustain a fire: to build a strong foundation, we must begin with lots of kindling, shelter the young flames and then tend the embers. This is the warmth of community: it is work to nurture and tend our families, our communities of faith. And yet, this work does not have to be drudgery—it can be joyous and enlivening, as dancing flames in a warming fire.
It is no coincidence, I would argue, that the first major appearance of the Holy Spirit moving on earth was first revealed in the sounds of wind and the appearance of fire. This is the unpredictable non-rational, mysterious, playful part of the trinity.
My own experience of the divine is exactly that sort of astonishing, pervasive power that lives and moves anywhere and everywhere, most especially where I least expect it. Like the ghost I can’t explain, but know that I saw, God is inexplicable and surprising, and over the years I have learned to let my rational mind have a little break and not work too hard to understand.
And that is why I love Pentecost. Pentecost is real, it is immediate and it is miraculous. The inbreaking of the Spirit is troubling, unsettling, even scary, but it is where we find the greatest gifts, if only we allow ourselves to let go of our worries and fears long enough to give it space to move.
When the tongues of fire descended, the writer of Acts reports that the people “…were so on fire with new hope that outsiders who watched them concluded they must have been drunk on new wine…” UU minister John Nichols continues, “So much about the spiritual life is difficult to describe in conventional language. We owe it to our friends and ourselves to pay attention to a vision, dream or a thought that comes to us in a very compelling way. Of course, it could be a delusion, but it could be a much more powerful message.”
And we are a spiritual community. We are a Unitarian Universalist spiritual community, steeped in the historically beloved and effective trifecta of freedom, reason and tolerance. These essential historical concepts are deeply important to who we are as a faith community, but I do believe that we sometimes rely on them to our detriment.
According to a sermon by Rev. Bruce Clear, “To be rational does not mean to believe only those things which are proven to be logically true.” In order to fully live our faith, we must be open to the unexpected, the non-rational, the unproven. We must look for the mystery. We must make room for Spirit.
Fire is part of many religious traditions: the hearth of Brigid, the angel of the Lord appearing to Moses—it is also an integral part of most any shamanic initiation. Pentecost was an initiation of sorts, but a communal ecstatic initiation experience rather than an individual one.
How do you feel when you think about this? Is it scary? Threatening? Perhaps you are a bit frightened. Perhaps you fear that letting go and embracing the mystery might cause things to spin out of control? Can we trust in the power of the Spirit of Life to light our way as we walk forward into the mystery, out onto the edges of our known world and step into what the future promises to bring?
At Pentecost, it was through the mystery that the people found a common understanding. They were lost and afraid, missing the man who had inspired and led them, worried for the future of this tiny movement that would become Christianity. And yet, they experienced the mystery of the tongues of fire, and they were able to understand one another and move forward.
As Unitarian Universalists, we do not always understand each other’s language – we have different theologies, different life experiences. But we are in covenant together, which means that we are committed to walk forward into an unknown future together with compatriots whose language we cannot always understand.
Embracing the mystery, as at Pentecost, changes us. We are not changed so as to be unrecognizable, but transformed, transmuted, through the fire of Spirit and the light of truth into something more. As the small gathering of disciples was transformed into something more. Not changed into something different so much as propelled into a new stage in their development, with new energy, vision and purpose.
We have a powerful image here in the chalice, and the story of Pentecost is a powerful reminder of the importance of paying attention to the things we do not understand.
May we find our way to welcoming the unknown.
May we embrace the mystery together.
May our shared history and our commitment to the light of truth and the fire of commitment bring us to new and unimagined places.
May it be so.
What Needs Saying (text & audio)
In February I told you about Randy Pausch, the computer scientist who became an Internet sensation and best-selling author for his “last lecture,” a talk he gave at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught, while he was dying of pancreatic cancer. You remember he talked about how important it is for us to find the passions in our lives that bring out the best in us. None of us knows how long we have. Indeed, Randy ended up living only into his 40s. But he was happy with a life in which he gave himself to those he loved and the work that filled him.
It’s an inspirational story, but you know the world may never have even learned about Randy’s story but for the work of someone else, the writer Jeffrey Zaslow. So, today I’d like to begin today by telling you a little bit about Jeff.
Jeff was a reporter living in Detroit working for the Wall Street Journal and writing about, what he calls, “life transitions” when his editor passed along a release from Carnegie Mellon announcing Pausch’s lecture. He thought it might make for a nice story.
Jeff checked on last-minute flights from Detroit to Pittsburgh and found out it would cost him $300, more than the Journal was willing to spring for. His editor suggested that Jeff stay home and interview Pausch by phone the day after the lecture. But Jeff thought that wasn’t good enough. He wanted to meet Randy and get a sense of the scene. So, he decided to drive the 300 miles from Detroit to Pittsburg and the next day was in the second row when Randy delivered his talk.
Like everyone else in the room, he was touched by Randy’s presentation of what essentially was a love letter to his colleagues and family. When Jeff’s story about it ran in the Wall Street Journal online, it included a link to a video of Randy’s lecture, which had been recorded by Carnegie Mellon, and it quickly went viral on the Internet.
Given that reception, Randy’s friends and colleagues urged him to expand the lecture into a book. Randy initially wasn’t keen on the idea, figuring that writing a book would take away precious time that he wanted to devote to his family. But then the idea arose of contacting Jeff and seeing if he might put the book together based on the lecture and interviews with Randy. And that’s what they did.
Jeff said that Randy, the engineer, was, in his words, “a time management freak.” Determined to stay as fit as he could, he went on a daily hour-long bike ride, so the two worked out a routine in which Randy would wear a cell phone head set on his bike rides, and Jeff would interview him. And so it went: an hour a day for 53 days.
The book came out in April 2008 with a press run of 400,000 that sold out in two days; the publisher went back to print five million more. “The Last Lecture” remains hugely popular both as a book and a You Tube video.
Jeff said that he thought what made Randy’s lecture, in fact his whole story, so popular was that it was clearly authentic. In a time where the air waves and Internet are full of “reality” shows that are little more than set-ups for people to strut in front of a camera, this was the real deal: a brilliant but quirky fellow who sought not to bring attention to himself but to urge us all to give our time, our love to what matters most.
Jeff said he was delighted to be able to place a copy of the completed book in Randy’s hands three months before he died. Although, he said that when he would call Randy to tell him all the places where the book was appearing or another language it was being translated into, Randy would bring him up short: “Stop Googling my name, Jeff, and go home and hug your kids,” he would say.
For you see Jeff had shared his own story with Randy in their conversations. Married and the father of three daughters – a situation I can relate to – Jeff would say, “I’m quite comfortable being outnumbered by women.”
Before moving to the Wall Street Journal he worked at another newspaper as an advice columnist, and he often found himself in the position of giving advice to clueless men about dealing with women. He tells of one column he wrote after a boy stood his daughter up who he asked to the prom. The night before, he called and said that he and his friends thought the prom was stupid and they were going to spend the evening in a friend’s basement. She was welcome to come.
Not only was Jeff uninterested in having his daughter spend the evening in that basement, he was outraged that the boy had backed out at the last minute, after she had brought her dress and everything. So he used the power he had at his disposal: he wrote about it in the newspaper, telling his readers. “The lesson of the story – and of that night – is to teach your sons to be chivalrous, and your daughters not to take it.”
Another male reader wrote to ask how he could persuade his girlfriend to have breast augmentation surgery. He responded that the woman “deserves someone who loves her for who she is, not how she looks in a sweater. If you can’t do that for her, she won’t need implants anyway because she will already have a big boob in her life. You.”
As you can tell, Jeff had a talent for zingers. But he said that the most important lesson his reporting had taught him was how fragile life is and how important it is not to leave words we want to share with our loved ones unsaid.
In one column he wrote around Valentine’s Day one year he told the story of a judge who often told his children that he loved them. One day as his 18-year-old daughter was leaving the house, he called out to her, “Kristin, remember I love you.”
“I love you, too, dad,” she replied. That day she died in a car wreck. It was a story that Jeff took to heart and led him to make a practice of saying “I love you” to his wife and daughters before saying good-bye or hanging up the phone.
This story comes to mind when we come to occasions like today that are transitions in our lives. We pray that the youths of this congregation that we send out to the world will be back many times to tell of their adventures and to share how they make their way in the world.
But we also acknowledge that this is a time of passage: there are things that these young women and men are leaving behind and new things they are taking up. So, it is a good moment to say some of those things that we want them to know: how proud we are of the people they have become, how impressed we are with their maturity, and how grateful we are to have known them and have been a part of their growing in this brief space of time they have been with us.
Too often, pride or shyness keep us from speaking our heart’s truth, or for that matter from taking the time to hear it from another. So, we make do with substitutes such as greeting cards or gifts, all appropriate in their own way, of course, but not what we really need to say and hear.
What we need to say and hear is the truth. It doesn’t have to be flowery words or orations. It simply should come from and be received by the heart.
My wife, Debbie, is a hospice nurse, and she tells the story of one day doing some work on a computer at another person’s cubicle at her office, when she saw a small piece of paper with a list of words posted on a bulletin board at work.
“I love you . . . Please forgive me . . . I forgive you . . . Thank you . . . Good-bye”
She wondered what it was about, and so she asked one of the chaplains. She was told that they feel that these words summarize what chaplains believe we all need to hear and to say before we die.
“I love you . . . Please forgive me . . . I forgive you . . . Thank you . . . Good-bye”
The end of life, after all, is a stressful time. We each approach it as innocents: we have no experience at it. And so it’s not unusual for us to be consumed with all the medical details of the dying process, treatments considered or refused, all the ways that the body slowly shuts down. Add to that the emotion burden everyone brings – regret, anger, shock, grief – and it’s no wonder that it often is a traumatizing experience.
Amid all of this, though, there needs to be time given to the truth of relationships, finding time amid all the turmoil to tell each other how much we care, how grateful we are for each other’s company, and how we hope to be reconciled at last. And finally, acknowledging the truth of parting and making our peace.
We may not fully achieve it. Life is not always tidy, and there are wounds we carry that can make it hard to find reconciliation. But it’s worth giving it a shot.
In a subsequent book after The Last Lecture, Jeff Zastrow told the story of Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely landed a crippled airline in the Hudson River in 2009. He recalled how a Holocaust survivor living along the river in New York City observed the whole scene and wrote to Sullenberger, applauding him for keeping a cool head and doing what he could to help the passengers survive. Jeff said the man told Sullenberger that we never know if one person someday may make the difference that will save the world. Who knows if someone on that plane might have been that person, he wrote? “So, thank you, for saving the world.”
Zastrow said in a TED talk on the Internet that the lesson he learned from Sullenberger’s feat was that we can’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever life gives us, “We’ve got to be honorable, be moral; we’ve got to work our hardest.”
And here’s the coda that adds another twist to this story. A little over a year ago, not long after his TED talk, Jeff Zastrow was on his way home from a book signing in northern Michigan when he died, much too young, in a car accident on icy roads.
None of us can know what life will give us, but we have the choice of deciding what we bring to life. We owe it to those we love to let them know that, and often. We owe it to ourselves and others not to duck our responsibilities, but to step up to them. If we at this congregation have done our job, we have given you who leave the world of high school and our Religious Education program a sense of what some of your duties are: to treat each person you meet as someone with inherent worth and dignity, to see yourselves as agents of justice, equity and compassion, to be accepting of others while holding to your own conscience.
I hope we have helped you understand your community as extending far beyond here to people of all places and in the end encompassing all life on Earth, the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
You go with our blessings and our hopes, but we will always welcome you back with joy. And as you make your way in the world, if you find a Unitarian Universalist congregation in the community where you settle, you might want to check it out, and help us keep this great faith tradition vital and alive.
Let what you have found here in this community be a spark to your imagination that you, too, might find your place in the family of things.
Finding Family (text & audio)
Pattiann Rogers’ poem that I read earlier came to mind a little over a week ago when I got some good one-on-one time with Lucille, newly born daughter of our daughter and son-in-law, Anna and Langdon, and our second grandchild. Langdon was off to work, and Anna was getting ready to drive their older daughter, Eliza, to day care. So, I stopped by as one of a rotating corps of volunteers to watch the baby for about a half hour so that Anna could take Eliza without having to pack up the baby for the trip.
As a father of three and grandfather, now, of two, I’ve come to take real delight in having some time with an infant, but it had been a while, and there was much that I had forgotten. I had forgotten how at first when you hold them they’re inclined to hunch their backs and pull their knees up close to their bodies – still not quite fully unfolded from the womb, how much of their time in those early days is spent in a sort of semi-consciousness between sleep and waking with the first hints of a smile playing across their lips.
But most of all, I had forgotten the almost visceral way that they seem to drink you in. As she cuddled against me, I felt her reaching, trying me out in some elemental way, before sound or speech or visual perception, a kind of bodily communication that I seemed to have forgotten I was capable of, but that I suddenly found myself slipping into.
Her: I’m here. Who are you? Me: I’m here. I love you.
One of those old, enduring connections found in all flesh, the finding of family. None of us can know for sure how, where or from whom we will get it – life is complicated out there – but we can’t do without it. Family: something deeper than the channeling wires and threads, the veins, ligaments, filaments and fibers that are our biological heritage to each other.
Rabindranath Tagore captured it with the verse in his poem that we sang earlier. Looking out on “insects, birds, and beasts and common weeds, the grass and clouds have fullest wealth of awe,” but it is family that “gives meaning to the stars.” It is establishes our roots; it centers our identity. It is what makes possible what Pattiann Rogers calls “the grip of voice on presence, the grasp of self on place.”
And so we were introduced to each other, Lucille and I, the first of our interactions and one of many connections she will be making in the world. But, of course, we all know that it’s not long before the reality of family changes and becomes more like the picture my sister, Lisa, paints: scrambling to keep get going in the morning, beating ourselves up for the chaos we find in our lives and hardly present to each other at all, scattered to our various obligations – school, work, and so on – and reconnecting only in passing.
It’s part of a natural drift that seems to have become the norm in the frenetic pace of this busy world. “Things to do, places to be” usually translates as anything but family. At its best family seems to act as a kind of charging station that we return to after our energy winds down, a place of shelter and renewal.
But too often it is the place where we play out the frustrations and unhappiness that build up over the course of our daily lives, a place quickly taken for granted or resented, whose its imperfect denizens, we feel, never quite appreciate what it is that WE need. And for some it can be a depository for shame or a sense of inadequacy, leaving us feeling harried and alone.
But, as my wise sister, Lisa, remarked in her Mother’s Day sermon of several years ago, it doesn’t have to be that way. “We can honor our responsibilities, nurture others and include ourselves in the midst of it,” she said.
For her, the key was offered by a couple of encounters she had with spiritual advisors she had sought out over the course of a year or so. She was looking for help in reflecting on how in her busy life where at times she felt whipsawed by the responsibilities of parenting she might cultivate a deeper sense of spirituality. Unbeknownst to what the other had said, each offered similar advice: your children are your practice.
What she heard them to say was that attention to the daily rituals of family life was a discipline in itself. In raising her children she was not simply providing care that they needed, she was, in her words, “dwelling deep in interdependence.” She was learning what a spiritual practice gives you, which is to see from a larger perspective, to find in the giving to another an avenue to maintaining a centered sense of self.
This doesn’t mean somehow using own children for our own ends. It means seeing in that role a path for growth for parent and child. The discipline entails accepting the role of parent without judgment and acknowledging its power and the duties it entails as lessons for one’s life.
As Lisa observed, “the chaos that children bring invites us to steady our sense of self and find our footing. We are echoed, challenged, mimicked, defied, sought after and sent packing. We are put on pedestals and used as furniture, we are intensely visible and not even there. This is all the stuff we need to practice acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, creativity and trust. This is all the stuff we need to enter life fully.”
And it occurs to me that the same observation applies to our larger family roles, too, though with a little less intensity. Grandfather, sister, nephew, aunt: we are given these roles, and most of us are not really sure what to do with them. For some, they are mantles we don grudgingly at dreaded family gatherings, but it need not be that way.
These relationships, too, can and do have power in our lives and consequences for each of us. In that way they are also reminders of a deeper way of living available to us. They are reminders that the life of wholeness and integrity that we each seek doesn’t just happen. It is built brick by brick by each encounter we have, and we don’t get it right from the get-go. We are awkward and uncertain at first, and so it takes rehearsing. It takes practice.
And, it’s important to remember that the fact of family is not limited to those of blood relations, nor does blood relationship necessarily result in these kinds of family ties. Again, life is complicated and circumstances can set people against and apart from each other. Some rifts can be repaired, but others yawn too wide to be bridged. And so we are left sometimes to find family where we can.
I know of people in this congregation who have set about creating family ties with others where no blood relation exists but where they have found or made a connection of caring. In the end, we find family where we make family, where we can give ourselves to others with love and intention and are received with reciprocal care.
This Mother’s Day brings to mind how such a connection happened a generation earlier in my family. My mother, Cynthia, a member of this congregation living in Brooks Howell Home, was only four years old when her mother, Alice, died.
It was, you can imagine, a hard time, and the family struggled for some years – my grandfather a newspaper editor trying to raise three girls on his own with the help of some family. Then, came the day several years later when a new woman entered his life, a phys ed teacher with an unquenchable spirit whose name happened to be Lucille. When she and my grandfather married, the kids weren’t sure what to make of her, but she swept into their lives in those Depression Era days and made a home for them.
Truth be told, when I was growing up Lucille was probably my favorite grandparent. She was a “pahk the cah in the Hahvad Yahd” Yankee who saw to it on our trips to visit her that we saw all the sights of her home town of Boston. I remember that she always took intent interest in us and sent faithful birthday cards with cheery notes.
Unlike Billy Collins, I can’t remember having sent her anything even as unimpressive as a lanyard as a gift, but I will always remember her as a loving soul who helped weave strength into our family. As I take my place in the grandparent generation I would say it is Lucille’s example, Lucille’s practice that stands before me. For she was one who chose to give her heart to those she chose to name as family: something I never had cause to doubt as long as I knew her.
Family, after all, is made in many ways: whether the result of blood ties or circumstances, its central components are the same: love and intention – love, that elemental gift of our very essence, the hope that we live when we are guided by the best that is in us; and intention, the practice of directing our thoughts, our actions, our will to something or someone that we deem worthy.
It isn’t easy work. As Pattiann Rogers notes, there is “seminal to all kin” the open mouth seeking to take and take – You mothers know, right? – and the “pervasive clasping common to the clan” clinging tight like limpets, like the hard nails of lichen, fingers around fingers and the grasp of self on place, and then the snorts, the whinnies, the shimmers of self declaration.
Oh, we weavers, reachers, winders and connivers, pumpers, runners, air and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave gliders, wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators –
Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, uncles and nieces and third cousins twice removed, stepmoms and foster dads, peace parents and godparents and every stripe of relation there is or can be.
All part of the crazy jumble that is family, blessed family, the great, old, enduring connections that are ours to find and ours to make, a practice that warms us and fills us and that in time and with intention might overflow to a hurting world.
Rites of Passage
The 9th grade youth presented their credos or belief statements on life’s big questions: thoughts on God, existence, why bad things happen, ethics, death, after-life and possibly more. Learning with their mentors and teachers, supported by their parents, and spending time alone in the woods has led them to this place, on this day, to share their journey with us.
Reimagining Jesus (text & audio)
INTRODUCTION
Over the last couple of months about 20 of us here have been making our way through the gospels of the New Testament with the Rev. John Buehrens, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and a biblical scholar, as our guide. His book, Understanding the Bible, is premised on the notion that too often we liberal religious folk abandon the Bible to conservative voices who insist on reading it with a narrow, literalist bent. In recent decades, he notes, there has been fine scholarship by progressive voices who offer a more nuanced reading of the Bible, taking into account cultural and historical context, that has opened that text as a source of meaning for people of many theological perspectives.
So, his invitation to us is that we open the Bible with curious and critical minds, letting go of baggage that we may carry from our childhoods, turning aside from pinched or oppressive readings that others may offer, and engage it for what it is – rich, complex and sometimes contradictory testimony of how we humans might understand the source of meaning in our lives and our duties to one another.
Since our focus in this class was the New Testament, our conversation inevitably centered on the figure of Jesus. As the cover of your order of service suggests, the images of Jesus these days run the gamut: The shepherd, the avenging hunk, the Jedi warrior, the Semitic trickster and wisdom figure, and more. In some respects, each person reading the Bible creates her or his own image of who Jesus was and what his life and teachings mean to them.
As we read and reflect, listen and share, dig into the latest scholarship and get in touch with where our own hearts are leaning those images evolve. The roots of Unitarian Universalism lie in the Christian tradition, but we no longer insist that Jesus is central to our faith, and we have no received understanding of who Jesus was. Still, he remains a challenging, provocative, and for many inspirational figure.
So, as we were working through this material I invited members of our class to reflect on the shifting image of Jesus over time and consider for themselves how they might reimagine the figure of Jesus for themselves. Who was or is he for them? Here are some of their thoughts.
VOICES
Beth Gage:
My intent from the study group was to learn biblical history about Jesus’ time in the world– and that I have done. The vision of him specifically is still growing in me
My image of Jesus is:
- in part, the gentle Jesus of my childhood who walked by the Sea of Gallilee and loved little children
- then, a teacher I vaguely dismissed to the ranks of many religious seers
- now evolving into an historical and inspirational picture of an activist and teacher protesting pomp and injustice, preaching goodwill to all people—and who did not intend to start a cult!
Mona Ellum:
I was raised in a Lutheran church in Connecticut. I don’t remember anything particularly significant from Sunday School; I went because my parents drove me, dropped me off and then picked me up again an hour or so later. Beyond the required church attendance, I don’t recall having a lot of deep theological thoughts while growing up or even in early adulthood. Honestly, I never really put all that much thought into my belief system until I moved to the south and realized my children would be going to school with a lot of evangelical Christians and I wanted to have a response to questions that might come up.
So what began as an exercise to ward off the Pentecostal church members down the road from our house has become a quest of sorts to try to understand what the idea of Jesus means to me and how I’d like to present him to my children.
I hesitate to identify myself as a Christian because I don’t want to be associated with the typical or stereotypical Christian we often think of when we hear that word. But, I’m also not willing to let those quote unquote Christians be the ones who define Jesus because I think their interpretation is often wrong. So when asked I do identify myself as a Christian and if a conversation follows I expand on my beliefs. Some of my beliefs, as I stand here today, are as follows:
I believe in God, as defined by the major monotheistic religions. I believe that a man named Jesus lived about 2000 years ago and I believe he had a good and powerful message to share. From the class we just had, I discovered that the writings spoken words attributable to Jesus were written decades after he died but that the words apparently have multiple independent sources. That doesn’t necessarily convince me Jesus was the Son of God or that he rose from the dead but it does convince me that people who knew him when he lived believed that he was special enough to continue to preach his gospel long after he died. And while I think powerful men used and still use his teachings to control people, for me this doesn’t take away from the power of his message or mean that he should be blamed or dismissed for the mis-use of his words.
The Jesus of my understanding was a teacher of peace, a protector of the lesser (the poor, women, the sick) who, if he were alive today would not be happy with some of the things said and done in his name. I don’t believe that Jesus is the Jesus of the Westboro Baptist Church or Jerry Falwell or any number of other, less known quote unquote Christians who quietly preach hate and intolerance. I also don’t believe that Jesus is a war-mongering bigot who only loves Americans.
I don’t believe that Jesus is egotistical and that the only way to a salvation of any sort is through a belief in him. I believe that Jesus was a Universalist in that everyone will be saved and no will be eternally condemned by God.
As I did some research in preparing this, I came across the words of a 19th century Unitarian, Rev. William Channing. He said that the words of Jesus are good and true. But that these words are not good and true because Jesus said them but instead, that Jesus said them because they are good and true. He also preached about one loving God who made humans in his own image of goodness and how the man Jesus, in his wisdom and compassion, was the best example to us of how a person should live.
That strikes me as a pretty good summary of my take on him. Thank you.
INVITATION–Elizabeth Schell
I grew up a social gospel United Methodist. God was love. God was acceptance. And Jesus, being the human representative, did the walkin’ and talkin’ of that message. It was the 70s and both my minister and my Sunday School teacher favored guitars and autoharps as their preaching media. So my introduction to Jesus was through music:
- Jesus loves me this I know…
- What a friend we have in Jesus…
- And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own…
Sweet. Comforting. Somewhat Innocuous. Though the love part was definitely a good message, the “Invisible Man Friend” seemed a bit of a contradiction to the “don’t talk to strangers” warning.
- Jesus Christ, Superstar, who are you, what have you sacrificed?
- When wilt thou save the people, O god of mercy, when?
In high School, the first play I ever directed was Godspell. Its music, and that of Jesus Christ Superstar, both helped me see Jesus in a different way. His message was still about love, but it wasn’t a sweet, Mr. Rogers kind of love. It was a powerful, radical love that questioned authority and literally turned the tables on the status quo. Of course, the teenager in me loved this Jesus.
When I was a teen, we made mixtapes. You’d pick a bunch of different songs and shape them into an arc that got across a message or juxtaposed one song against another. Of course it would take you a gazillion hours to record a mixtape. Now, with iTunes and ipods the process has been greatly simplified. Of course the challenge is all gone, too. Perhaps that’s why the “mashup” has become the craze. From real DJs sampling tunes live …to anyone with garageband overlaying, cutting and pasting tunes on the computer. Now you can blend songs literally one on top of the other. Really mashups aren’t anything new. It’s just the newest way to describe how humans like to retell, recycle and recreate with the existing thoughts and inspirations around us. Which brings me back to Jesus.
In seminary I learned a lot more about Jesus. Or really more about his followers, about politics, about who Jesus was not, about Christology (that’s theology about Jesus) including Black, Feminist, Eco, and Liberation christologies. And I learned some new songs.
- We’re gonna sit at the Welcome Table…
- We are a gentle angry people…
- And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on, (2x)
While in seminary, I found myself writing plays about Jesus. Retelling the crucifixion story in light of 9-11 and Guantanamo Bay and finally the growing anti-gay practices of the United Methodist church I had been planning to serve as a minister. This faith that taught of Jesus as Emmanuel/God With Us. Except if you’re gay. The had taken over my social gospel church. That’s when I walked away from Jesus. I saw my friends and congregants and fellow seminarians—all being abused, rejected, and judged by this so-called Christian faith which seemed to have completely forgotten all that Jesus preached about.
When at last all those who suffer find their comfort, [hymn: “Cuando el Pobre/
when they hope though even hope seems hopelessness, When the Poor Ones”]
when we love though hate at times seems all around us,
Then we know that God still goes that road with us,
Then we know that God still goes that road with us.
So what’s a former United Methodist, now Unitarian Universalist, believe about Jesus? I could just outright reject Jesus; erase him from my memory. But his story is a big part of my story; he’s part of my life soundtrack. If I never heard his story and wrestled with its meaning, I’m not sure I would be the person I am today. Does that mean I think everyone needs to tango with Jesus? No, definitely not. There are other teachers of love and tolerance out there; there are other stories of redemption…. but there is something pretty provocative about Jesus. And I think it’s because he’s the ultimate mashup.
He’s this real, imperfect, human visionary who lived thousands of years ago; who challenged assumptions, gathered followers, hung out with slaves and prostitutes, preached in riddles, confused a lot of people, but also empowered a lot of people – a guy who questioned his religion and its dependence on rules instead of love.
Then he was executed by the state. He was a troublemaker. That’s when the true resurrection happened: not a man rising from the dead, but people taking the story of the execution of this powerless Jewish guy who lived under Roman occupation and spreading this story, tweaking it, enhancing it —as we humans are wont to do with stories… And this rabbi who spoke of peace in the midst of Roman authority and how the poor would inherit the earth in the midst of huge wealth disparity (all sounding a bit familiar?)…. well, this guy becomes a bit of a savior – a symbol to anyone on the bottom. Of course, like Moses before him, and every other cultural superhero before and hence, his story becomes so amplified and mutated, it’s hard to find the true message under all the layers of crap. And yes, I say crap, because so much was heaped upon this guy — far more than the weight of a wooden crossbeam. Salvation of the world. Deliverer of the masses. Judge of the living and the dead.
This is the traditional Christian mashup: Jesus the teacher, Christ the Savior. Through the years these two themes—Jesus Christ—have sometimes brought comfort and liberation to the oppressed, and sometimes, too many times, have brought persecution, terror, and abuse.
O for a world where goods are shared [tune: O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing]
And misery relieved, [lyrics by Miriam Therese Winter]
Where truth is spoken, children spared,
Equality achieved.
I felt my Lord’s Atoning Blood, [tune: O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing]
Close to my soul applied; [lyrics by Charles Wesley]
Me, me He loved, the Son of God,
For me, for me He died!…..
What a horrible remix this is! Far too many layers. The bass is overpowering. The harmonic message lost in the cacophony. What can we salvage from the remnant mashup that remains from this man’s life? from this faith which has repeatedly liberated while simultaneously enslaving?
In our bible class, the question was asked, “Why are we studying about Jesus in this way, if this is not the Jesus that the religion is based on?” Well it is the Jesus; the guy lost under the religious rhetorical rubble. But we don’t really know who he was. We don’t know what he would think of Christianity, the faith formed out of his story. All we can do is follow our 4th principle: search for truth and meaning. Meaning is still to be found in Jesus’ teachings–about love, justice, compassion—these still resonate today; these still challenge us to be our best selves. And these teachings resound in our UU principles. Jesus is one of our Sources.
And as UUs, we possess a great privilege: we get to be the Deejays. We get to do what a really successful mashup does—take the best parts and fit them together in a way that improves each and sets them in conversation with each other. Teaching this class reminded me that I can, if I want, still include Jesus in my spiritual journey and in my beliefs. But I will have to become a new storyteller and I’ll definitely have to create a seriously improved mashup.
INVITATION – Mark Ward
Early in our Bible class we had an exercise where we invited members to tell of their history with the Bible and to name any baggage they might be carrying about Jesus. Like Elizabeth, many had childhood experience in a Christian church and some were carrying heavy stuff – disappointments from childhood churches, arguments with ministers, difficult interactions with family members.
For me, though, there wasn’t much to tell. I grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church where I remember learning vivid creation stories from the Bushmen and acting out Greek myths, but I don’t remember much about Jesus. I’m sure I had contact with Bible stories at some point, but they didn’t much of an impression.
As an adult my spirituality has long been centered in a kind of Emersonian wonder in nature and a humanistic ethics. There was much to fill my reflections, and I didn’t see what the Bible would add to it.
So, it wasn’t until my first year of seminary that I dove into it in any serious way. Scholarly study of the Bible was really quite fascinating. I especially enjoyed learning about the historical context of Jesus’ life and the early church, how the different gospels emerged from different factions within the church, the apocryphal gospels that didn’t make the cut and the tumultuous times in which Jesus’ life played out.
The journalist in me was and remains fascinated with efforts to nail down, as it were, the historical figure of Jesus, clearing away the accretions of church teachings and the projections of preachers across the ages and cobbling together as realistic picture as we can of who this figure was and what he truly said and did.
What I found I had no taste for was high Christology that argues that Jesus died to save me from sin, or that he sits on the right hand of God where he mediates my salvation. Still, I definitely came away with renewed respect for the rabble-rousing, wisdom-speaking, boundary-crossing teacher in more ways than I never had before.
Unlike my friend and colleague Michael Carter, who you heard from a couple of months ago, I did not come away from my study of the Bible a follower of Jesus. I respect those within our Unitarian Universalist orbit who have, and I know that includes some of you here. Indeed, it is my hope that one outcome emerging from this class will be the creation of a study and reflection group to examine what it means to identify as Christian in a UU context. If this interests you, please let us know.
In a congregation as diverse as ours it’s important that we provide opportunities for each of us to explore paths that deepen our faith. Similar groups have met or are currently organizing around the notion of what it means to be a UU contemplative or a UU humanist.
But whatever our spiritual center, as Elizabeth said, we are joined by our 4th principle, which calls us to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The way forward for many of us is often a process much like Elizabeth describes of mash-ups, where we sort through widely varying material to find a thread of meaning that rings true.
Of course people have been doing this with the Bible for many years. Our spiritual ancestor, Thomas Jefferson, gave us one example when he took a scissors to his Bible. And after all, when you study the Bible with its diversity of sources from conflicting communities, you find that in many ways it’s one of the biggest mash-ups of all.
But to return to Jesus: to say that I don’t consider myself a follower of Jesus is not to say that he doesn’t intrigue and challenge me. The image of Jesus that works on me is the visionary preacher seeking to bring into being what he calls “the Kingdom of God.” It is a phrase scattered across all four gospels and is generally regarded by scholars as one of the most authentic teachings attributed to him.
Over the years, many have read these passages to refer to heaven, some place distant from the here and now, but I think they mistake his meaning. Look closely and the phrase is often couched in a context such as: the Kingdom of God is at hand, or the Kingdom of God is within you.
The image it seems to me he is conjuring using a powerful metaphor of his time is not of a place in this world or any other, but a way of seeing the world around us that regards it as precious and beloved.
It is an image that lies at the heart of our own first principle, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all, and arguably our seventh principle as well, respect for the interdependent Web of existence of which we are all a part. It is a reminder that the source of our own and all worth lies not outside, but within us and all things. It is inherent to them. The trick is learning to see it.
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est: where love and charity abide, there is the center of our hope, the greatest thing. Whatever path we take, we are led, in the end, to love.
It is a radical notion, and it poses a question that resonates deep within me. How would it be to live in such a way that I would see truly no separation between myself and every other person, between myself and every other being? I puzzle and wonder over that. It is something of Jesus that enters my mash-up, where it joins bits and scraps from other sources that make up my own evolving faith.
All this is part of the reimagining of our religious lives that helps us integrate what touches us with what we know. It is the kind of work we exist as a congregation to support each other in doing. And Jesus is part of the mix, as is every other avatar across human history urging us to waken to deeper living, to see a larger duty in our brief lives beyond ourselves, to join in building communities of healing and hope.
Photo Credit: http://media.photobucket.com/
Link by Link – Earth Day (audio only)
What We Do, Who We Are (text & audio)
Reading “Working Together,” by David Whyte
Sermon
I have spoken in the past about the ways we are called to challenge one another to spiritual growth, and this is one marker of our status as a religious community. So, too, it is our work to support one another in times of tribulation and to celebrate with one another in times of joy. This kind of support is particularly useful in a religious context—It makes a difference when we receive support from our faith community.
For example, in the Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss class, we have been able to talk about ways that Unitarian Universalists faced with death might find comfort and meaning that are different from the more traditional religious perspectives. Secular support groups are deeply meaningful and essential for processing grief and finding connection, but they do not provide the opportunity for this kind of faith-focused support and reflection.
It is our work to support one another. A lovely sentiment, surely, but what does it mean in practice? A few weeks ago at a Pastoral Visitor training session, I overheard a snippet of conversation from one of the role-play groups:
The person playing a sad, upset congregant had been approached by the Pastoral Visitor, and said, “but why did you come up to talk to me?” and the PV said, “because that is what we do here, we care about each other.” Again, I was struck by the simplicity of the sentiment.
Because that is what we do.
This is a great example of the way what we do can become who we are. We’ve all heard the old adage, “actions speak louder than words,” but I tend to prefer the more ancient words of Lao-tze, because they are more nuanced, “Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”
It is much easier to care for one another on a regular run-of-the-mill Sunday morning than it is in a crisis or long-term difficulty. I know that many times we don’t say anything at all to a person we know and love, because we are just not sure what would be the “right thing.” I know I have been guilty of this more than once, and I’m a professional!
I spent the day yesterday at a conference called the Sacred Journey of Dementia, which brought together caregivers, professionals and people with memory-related diagnoses. One of the most poignant sharings I heard was part of the Early Memory Loss Collective’s panel discussion. The person said the most difficult thing is when you see someone quickly turn and cross the street to avoid talking to you. It’s not because they don’t care, it’s because they are afraid to say the wrong thing.
The LA Times recently published a wonderful article called “How Not to Say the Wrong Thing.” It outlines a simple and practical way to think about how we respond to a crisis in our community. They call it “the Ring Theory” and I think of it like the rings on a tree stump – a model of caring based on concentric circles. Imagine that the person with the crisis – whether it is emotional, financial, medical or legal – is in the center, the smallest ring. In the next ring is the person’s spouse, then children, closest friends, and so on, counting as many rings as you need to include everyone affected by the crisis.
After you’ve imagined this diagram, the rule is simple: dump out, comfort in. If you are speaking to anyone who is in a ring smaller than yours, your simple task is to offer support and comfort. If you need to express frustration, anger, sadness, fear or anything other than empathy and support, choose someone who is in a ring larger than yours. Dump out, comfort in. It is easy to get confused and worried, and this model gives us a simple reminder.
When something terrible happens to someone I care about, I feel sad, I feel upset, and I experience grief. But my grief is my own, and it isn’t the responsibility of the person in crisis to manage or alleviate my grief. That’s why I need to take it to some one in a larger circle than mine.
So, that is “how.” But we still haven’t talked about what is the “right” thing to say. I have been at hundreds of bedsides, sat with hundreds of individuals and families in medical crisis or experiencing trauma, and I’m here to tell you that this is one of those good news/bad news situations.
The bad news is that there is NOT a right thing to say when someone you love is in crisis.
But here’s the good news: There is NOT a right thing to say when someone you love is in crisis.
We want to be a comfort. We want to fix it. Ultimately, it is our greatest wish to end the suffering of a person we love. We want to stop the pain, cure the disease or fix the situation that is causing stress and pain. But since this is not possible, we try to say something calming or comforting – usually to make ourselves feel better. And remember, if I am trying to make myself feel better, I need to turn to an outer circle, not an inner one.
In the darkest moments, when people we know face the death of a child or loved one, the end of a relationship or any substantive loss, there is simply not a right thing to say.
When people tell you that your presence is enough, they are not lying or trying to make you feel better. They are telling you the truth. It is the only thing we have to offer. We apply our love to suffering.
Metta, or the application of love to suffering, is the sentiment expressed in the lovingkindness meditation that we sang earlier in the service. It is one of my most favorite things to sing – in fact, it was the closing meditation at the conference yesterday, because it is so simple and beautiful and effective. The words are not complicated, and the tune is easy to pick up. But the real power is in the slight difference between the three verses—we begin with “I,” then sing “you,” and finally “we.” This is a beautiful model to use in our everyday lives, as we internalize the practice of self-love, then love of those to whom we are close, and finally love to all beings.
Metta recognizes that all sentient beings are capable of feeling good or feeling bad, and given the opportunity will choose good. It can be described as caring for others, without judgment, and with no expectation of receiving anything in return. It is similar to the Greek word agape, meaning unconditional, self-sacrificing love.
For me, though, the closest comparison is empathy. Empathy is the ability to recognize emotions in another being—to share an emotional experience. When we practice metta, we are intentionally participating in active love – for self, for other, and for the unknown.
Each time I sing the meditation in a group, I am deeply touched by its simplicity and power – the universality of the language and practice. Beginning with yourself has almost become counter-intuitive in our culture, as we fight against the super-individualist social model that pits the good of the one against the good of many. But metta turns this model on its head and asks us to begin with “me” with the express intention of ending with “all.” I begin the meditation with myself not because I am selfish, but because I am responsible for my own well-being. Then my well-being is able to focus outward and impact the whole. It isn’t me for the sake of me, but me for the sake of us. “We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again.”
(step out of pulpit onto floor)
Blessing of Prayer Shawls
As strands of yarn, we come together from all directions to bless these shawls & lap robes, to expand our circle of caring beyond these walls.
From the East, the quiet breath of habit, sense memory and love
From the South the fire of inspiration, energy and passion
From the West, tears shed together in joy and in sorrow, tea grown cold as fingers flying warm
From the North, Earth nurturing, giving space together and a reason for wooly socks.
Wrap around us the tapestry of this, our beloved community, the variegated strands, the complicated patterns and the carefully knotted fringe… a garment woven, we rest in the circle created by our own hands, nurtured by each other and warming us all… the caring of men and women who know the beauty of the handmade gift, the heartfelt prayer and the gathered circle… as the loops of knit and purl are nothing without each other, two sides of a soft and fuzzy coin, so too, we gather
In this circle we gather.
In this circle we sing.
In this circle we care for one another.
And our caring extends outward to encircle those who cannot be with us in person, the warmth of this community wrapped around shoulders, warming knees grown cold with age or trouble.
We offer our blessings upon these symbols of our circle of caring.
This congregation is a “whole” – a community of memory and hope, pledged to care for and support one another – and we, in turn, impact the world around us. Beginning with the one, the individual who walks through the door, we form radiating circles of love that expand outward.
When we begin with compassion for ourselves, we allow ourselves to be human, which means that we acknowledge that we may not know the “right thing” to say, and that we know that our presence is sufficient. This community, I hope, is a place where we work to trust one another and share on a deeper level, which allows us to stick together when the going gets tough.
This is who we are:
We are a community that cares for one another.
We are a community that throws the door wide to welcome each other – and the stranger.
This is who we are.
This is what we do.
We care for each other.
May it be so.
Photo credit: © Marjanneke | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images
Weaving Ourselves Into the Web, April 7 (text & audio)
So, it’s a spider we’ve come to talk about today, right? Well, yes, and a bit more. It is now a little more than 60 years since Charlotte’s Web was published, but instead of looking ahead to retirement E.B. White’s magnum opus seems to be finding new life with each generation that encounters it.
The book that novelist Eudora Welty described as “just about perfect” finds fans at every age. Indeed I admit to having infected my three daughters with it, having read it to each of them. And Anna has continued the pattern, having read it to Eliza.
There are books we read to children with a sense of obligation: they really ought to be exposed to this, we think. And then there are books like Charlotte’s Web where the treat is ours as much as theirs, where the experience of it is almost a rite of passage, an introduction to a way of seeing the world that fires our imagination and opens our hearts. It’s a case where a work sometimes dismissed as “just a children’s story” can touch us at our core and leave us changed.
While it’s true that Charlotte, a humble grey barn spider, is the central focus of this story, White elects to wait a while before introducing her. Instead, we begin with a dramatic morality tale: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” The questioner is Fern, a pre-teen farm girl, who sees her father headed out to the barn to dispatch the runt of a litter of piglets born in the night. She cannot believe that the world, no less her father, could be so cruel as to snuff out a young life.
“If I had been very small at birth would you have killed me?” she cries, hanging on to his ax, adding that it was “the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.”
Good John Arable gets a funny look on his face, starting to tear up a little himself. All right, he says, you go back to the house. I’ll bring the runt and you can start it on a bottle. You’ll see what trouble a pig can be. Garth Williams’ illustrations give us this beatific pose of Fern nursing that young pig, propped in her cross-legged lap, lovingly naming him Wilbur.
E.B. White later acknowledged in interviews that this scenario reflected his own misgivings. Though he loved farm work and lived on a farm in Maine while writing this book – and once owned a pig named Wilbur – he was haunted by what seemed to him the moral dilemma of feeding and raising livestock with the intention of slaughtering them.
Several years before writing Charlotte’s Web, he told of an episode on his farm when a hog got sick and died. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham, but the loss of a pig,” he said. “He evidently became precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”
So, Fern’s plea succeeds, and the pig is saved, but John Arable doesn’t intend to raise any more pigs, so he must be moved. Fern’s uncle, Homer Zuckerman, is willing to take him in, and so Wilbur finds a home in the manure pile of his barn. The humble barn with its manure, straw, and farm tools, inhabited by creatures of all sorts, domesticated and not, gets an Eden-like sheen from E.B. White’s prose: warm in winter, cool in summer, its mixture of earthy smells expressive of an all-pervasive goodness. It echoes White’s comment elsewhere that, in his words, “all that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say is that I love the world.”
But all is not well in the barn. Poor Wilbur is bored and lonely, and none of the other animals are interested in him. Bemoaning his outcast state, he is surprised to hear a small voice in the darkness: “Do you want a friend? I’ll be your friend, Wilbur. I like you.” Morning brings a cheery greeting of “Salutations” from a gray spider about the size of a gumdrop perched on a web stretched across the barn door. She introduces herself as Charlotte A. Cavatica, a presence who he learns is clever and kind but also fierce, brutal, and scheming. It gives Wilbur a fright: What a gamble friendship is!
This was not the first time that E.B. White had employed insect-like creatures to advance a children’s story. Years before he made Archie the cockroach the subject of several of his stories. But for Charlotte he was determined to get the details right. He had exhaustively researched spidery biology from their markings and colors to behavior and life cycle.
He learned, for example, that spiders stun, rather than kill their prey, then drink their blood – no wonder Wilbur felt squeamish. He discovered that Aranea cavatica – Charlotte A. Cavatica – was the species most likely to inhabit a barn in Maine, that their lifespan was about a year and that their nests had an average of 500 eggs. He even mapped diagrams of how webs were made.
But his research extended beyond books. He kept track of a spider in his barn in Maine. He watched how it trapped and killed flies. Then one day he noticed a gray ball on the web that clearly was not a fly or some prey. He concluded that it must be some sort of egg sac. He got out a ladder and light and examined it. It was a fuzzy pink color, the consistency of cotton candy.
One day he saw the spider spread itself on the top of the sac, presumably laying eggs. The next day it was gone. Curious about what would happen with this egg sac White cut the threads holding it on and carried it inside. He put the sac in an empty candy box and, when he had to leave for New York, carried it to his apartment in Manhattan and put it on his bureau.
Several weeks later he noticed movement around the box. He looked and saw tiny spiderlings crawling out of air holes that he had punched into the box. He let them cavort there for a week or two, inhabiting his hair brush, nail scissors, mirror and comb. He removed the spiders after his maid refused to work around a spider encampment.
Where Charlotte’s Web takes its most inspired turn, though, is with a detail of spider life that White never documented. Happy with his life on the farm and his new friend, Wilbur is distraught to learn of Zuckerman’s plans for him. A sheep breaks it to him: they’re going to kill you and eat you.
Death, again, is looming in Wilbur’s path. Charlotte, though, proves herself to be a creative friend: You shall not die, she says. I will save you. It takes a couple of days, but then it comes to her while watching flies buzz into her web. The way to save Wilbur is to play a trick on Zuckerman. People, she says, are so gullible.
The web she weaves to catch a person takes advantage of a conceit of ours about which White was an expert: our way with words. So, the next morning when the Zuckermans’ hired hand hauls out Wilbur’s slops he chances to look at Charlotte’s web glistening with dew and see something that stops him short: woven into the web are the words “SOME PIG.”
And thus begins a merry romp as one human after another gets caught in Charlotte’s clever subterfuge. For a quarry so wily, though, Charlotte must pay out more line. So in time she adds more words: terrific, radiant, humble.
People travel from miles around to view “the miracle.” Zuckerman is so distracted he drops any plans for butchery and instead carts Wilbur off to the county fair in a cart emblazoned with “Zuckerman’s Famous Pig.” Charlotte’s subterfuge has worked, Wilbur is saved. But White remembered his spider biology. Fall is when they make their egg cases and perish.
Wilbur is impressed with Charlotte’s egg case, but he is inconsolable when he learns he will lose his friend. Great sobs rack his body: “Charlotte! My true friend!” But this time Charlotte will have none of it. “Come now, let’s not make a scene,” she says. She can feel her energy waning. She knows the end is near.
But then Wilbur has his first truly selfless thought. If he can’t bring Charlotte back to the barn, he will bring the egg case. He has to make a deal with the rat, Templeton, to give him first dibs on Wilbur’s slops if he gets the egg case, but Wilbur doesn’t hesitate. Wilbur is carted back home with the egg case, and Charlotte is left at the deserted fairgrounds.
The story ends with the tiny spiderlings hatching and crawling about, like they did on White’s bureau. But then comes another disappointment for Wilbur. He despairs as they weave tiny balloons and float away on the breeze. Three, though, decide to stay, assuring a lineage that will be with Wilbur the rest of his life.
Zuckerman, White tells us, “took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.”
The story has such a satisfying arc that it’s easy to miss some of the sly and bittersweet wisdom that White imparts. He fools us with his dramatic opening, for the travails of Wilbur are really only a plot device to advance a deeper story, and it’s centered in Charlotte. The caginess and compassion of the spider is the through line that holds the story together, through Wilbur’s endearing enthusiasms and despairs, through the miracle hokum of the words on the web that satisfied White’s moral qualms over animal husbandry.
In the book’s penultimate chapter when it is clear that Wilbur will be saved, the pig finally asks the question that has been knocking around ever since Charlotte appeared. “Why did you do all this for me?” he asked the spider. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.”
Charlotte replies simply, “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”
And so in her final speech Charlotte reveals herself as something of a student of Zen. We cling so tightly to this world so much of which ends up bringing us such heartache. I think of a book by a Buddhist teacher that I received recently entitled“Who ordered this truckload of dung?”
We are each confronted with the messes of our own lives. Charlotte’s was trapping and sucking the blood of flies. Yet, we are also presented with the opportunity to, in Charlotte’s words, “lift our lives a trifle.” We are given the opportunity to do things we would have thought impossible to raise others up, to put our shoulders to the wheel of compassion.
We’re born, we live a little while, we die. As Wislawa Symborska put it: performance without rehearsal. We know nothing of our roles, only that they are ours. We improvise, though we hate improvising, and we trip over our own ignorance, our character like a raincoat we button on the run.
We stand on the set and see how strong it is, the props surprisingly precise, and the machine rotating the stage has been around forever. And we stand at the premiere, knowing that whatever we do will become forever what we’ve done.
It want to tell you about a moment I had when I was reading Charlotte’s Web again for this service. It had been a while since I picked the book up so I gathered myself in a chair and plowed through it. It was late at night, and I was getting near the end, when suddenly without really even knowing it at first I found I was crying.
Part of it, I suppose, was thinking back to sitting on my daughters’ beds reading White’s magnificent prose and remembering those moments we shared. But a part of it, too, I think, was sitting in the circle of light from my lamp amid the enveloping darkness around me and reflecting in awe on this “set” before me, the wonder of my life, this world and those in it, and reflecting, with E.B. White, on how much I love it.
E.B. White, who closed his book giving a compliment to Charlotte that his wife once gave him, that she was a true friend and a good writer, finishes his story with a paean to the world. And it’s not a bad model for us either.
“Life in the barn was very good, night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. “It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.”
Life Abundant – Easter, March 31 (text and audio)
Scroll to the bottom of the page to play the audio from this sermon.
Spring seems to be getting off to a slow start this year. Here we are scraping the bottom of the barrel of March, and we’re still seeing snowflakes flying in the air. It feels as if winter won’t give up its grip and spring is not especially anxious to get up out of bed. If Easter is awakening, a glorious rolling away of the stone of the cold clutches of winter both in the world and in our hearts, then it seems to me it sure is taking its time in coming.
It’s not just the cold. So much in the world seems unsettled and uncertain. We have nuclear saber-rattling in the Koreas and a bubbling pot of conflict in Syria ready to boil over and enflame the Middle East. The stock market’s hitting new heights, but most of us still feel poor, and the high unemployment rate is hardly budging.
Even a horrific massacre of elementary school children doesn’t seem to be enough to get our lawmakers off the dime to adopt sensible gun control laws. And while hundreds of thousands across the country rallied last week to end discrimination against same sex couples who seek to have their commitments to each other recognized by law, the justices of the Supreme Court sounded a bit skittish about whether they might actually do something about it.
As I said: wherever you look, spring seems to be slow in coming. Sure, the daffodils and forsythia are providing their annual show, but in the morning as I head out early for the newspaper I’m surprised to see the thermometer in the 20s. Frigid temperatures are slowing the green wave that erupts each year across these mountains. Of course, I remember that the natural world has surprises of all sorts to spring on us, often in the most unlikely ways.
Beekeeper Sue Hubbell recounts her experience with one such surprise. In her book A Country Year, she tells of one spring evening in the Ozarks she was sitting in a brown leather chair in her living room when, in her words, “I became aware that I was no longer alone.”
She looked up and saw that the three floor-to-ceiling glass windows at one end of her living room were covered with frogs. There were hundreds, she says: “inch-long frogs with delicate webbed feet whose fingerlike toes ended in round pads that enabled them to cling to the smooth surface of the glass.”
From their size and toe structure, she supposed them to be spring peepers, those early choristers of life. She went outside to get a closer look and, sure enough, that’s what they were – the species hyla crucifer, pinkish-brownish frogs named for the dark criss-cross pattern on their backs.
“I had to be careful where I put my feet,” she writes, “for the grass in front of the windows was thick with frogs, waiting in patient ranks to move up to the lighted surface of the glass.”
Hubbell says she put down her newspaper and spent the evening watching them. “They did not move much beyond the top of the windows,” she says, “but clung to the glass or the moldings, seemingly unable to decide what to do next.”
The next morning they were gone, never to reappear, that spring or any other. What may have been most extraordinary about this visitation of sorts, Hubbell says, is that the frogs were totally silent. Being so tiny, they’re usually hard to find. We become aware of their presence from their sound – resonant mating calls from male frogs that come from vocal sacs that they fill with air, making a high pitched whistle that when they’re gathered in large groups can sound almost like the tinkling of tiny bells. At some ponds on spring evenings their collective symphony can be almost deafening.
Of all that life offers at this time of year, peepers are the true heralds of spring. For many years at the church I attended in Wisconsin, an artist friend who lived on forty-acres of woods with a pond next to her house would arrive at church some Sunday early in spring with a light in her eyes to tell us, “the peepers are back.” Ever since, each spring I, too, go listening for them, once again remembering our friend’s delight and the renewal that this awakening life brings to me.
Henry David Thoreau observed that, “There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I need only suggest what kinds of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and the mean. The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.”
Some of you may know that currently UUCA member Elizabeth Schell and I are leading a class here on reading the Bible, specifically the New Testament. Our guide on this journey is the Rev. John Buehrens, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and a biblical scholar. His book is entitled “Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers and Religious Liberals,” and his project, he says, is to help progressive people like us claim our own power to understand and to interpret the Bible.
For, he knows that many people come to our tradition after having had a bad experience with the Bible at some time in their lives. And all of us have seen Biblical texts used to oppress and discriminate. Yet, he argues, and I agree, that there is much more to be found in that text than those skewed and narrow readings would have you believe. The Bible is worth reading, not because we privilege it as a unique revelation, but because it is one of the great scriptures of the world that forces us to confront some of the most difficult quandaries that life presents us, and because it offers a rich and complex testimony of human experience that has extraordinary influence in our history and present culture.
As it happens, our reading in that class has just now taken us to the Easter story – it’s our focus this coming week. We’ve just been through the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, or colt, depending on which gospel you’re reading – the story commemorated in the Palm Sunday celebrations at Christian churches last week. Was this intended by Jesus merely as a gesture of humility, or was he getting a dig in at Roman authorities? And we looked at his cleansing the temple, upsetting the tables of money-lenders and those selling animals for ritual sacrifice. Was he really so outraged with this practice, or was this just another example of his turning ritual Jewish practice on its head, along with his meals with prostitutes, or was it guerilla theater, like something out of the Occupy movement?
Now we move into what may be the most fraught part of this story. Without anticipating too much where our class will go next week, let me observe that scholars consider much of the passion story of Jesus’ final days to be more a creation of his followers than a historical record. Among other things, it’s a little too tidy how closely those events echo well-known passages in the prophets and the psalms of the Hebrew scriptures. Yet, scholars also say that of all the stories about Jesus, the one that is most firmly documented is that of his crucifixion on the cross as a punishment for sedition against the Roman state.
And then? The early Christian church was explicit. As Paul put it in his first letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ was has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” Whichever gospel story you read, the Bible insists that Jesus was raised from the dead, and such remains the center of Christian churches today. And it is a central point that separates us from them. While we have our roots in the Christian tradition and regard Jesus as a great teacher and prophetic figure, we hold that he was a man like other men and that he died as all men will.
That, of course, then begs the question: what are we doing celebrating Easter? What, indeed! Here is a response from one of our ministers, the Rev. Earl Holt: “Jesus died. His death meant exactly what every death means: the end of life’s promise, the end of his hopes, the end of his dream, and also the hopes and dreams which others had of him and for him.
But “something happened in the minds and hearts of Jesus’ disciples, for whom everything had been lost. A transformation occurred, a radical shift from absolute despair to renewed hope, from a sense of the utter absence of Jesus to a feeling that in some way he was still with them. His death was not the end; it was the beginning. What had died became again lively in the world.”
What I believe makes the Easter story inspiring is not that it is a magical tale of bodily resurrection, but what it says about the power of Jesus’ radically egalitarian message and how it worked on and transformed those he left behind.
John Dominic Crossan, one of the most prominent scholars on the life of Jesus today, argues that the Easter narrative in the gospels, rather than being an account of three days in the life of Jesus’ followers after his death, is likely instead a distillation of what took place in that community over several years, how those following Jesus evolved, grew as a community and found a way forward.
It’s a complicated story and not every development was a positive one, but it speaks to something that can inspire our own lives – that the hope we live by might survive us. As Crossan puts it, “Easter is not about the start of a new faith but about the continuation of an old one. That is the only miracle and the only mystery, and it is more than enough of both.”
And so as we watch the regreening of our world, the emergence of frogs and the reappearance of songbirds, we reflect that love and hope can endure winters of sorrow, pain, or discontent and reappear in the most astonishing ways. And that can be cause enough for celebration, for dressing up, gathering flowers and decorating eggs – the seeds of new life – and for singing alleluias.
I think Jacob Trapp had it right in our reading earlier when he said of the Easter miracle that it is about celebrating the ecstasy of gratitude I feel for this, my life, and the freshness of awareness that might teach me to be present to it every day. I know that all living things will die, as I will die, and yet those deaths will bring about ongoing renewal of this miraculous world. Those who follow us will be the ones to make the possible, actual.
I love his phrase, “Nothing grows, flowers and bears fruit, save by giving. All that we try to save in ourselves wastes and perishes. Things ripen for the giving’s sake, and in the giving are consummated.”
It is the oldest and hardest story on Earth. In Trapp’s words, “The ploughshare of sorrow, breaking the heart, opens up new sources of life.” Sorrow and loss are woven into the wonder of life on Earth, our life on Earth, but it is only a small part of the story. The greater part is rebirth, the enduring possibility that the goodness of our lives and what we give our lives to will outlive us. We see it all around us in the renewal of life, in the children we welcome and to whose care we dedicate ourselves, in the blessings we bestow on them that make the way easier by surrounding them with love.
So, I guess I may have let my grumpiness get the better of me earlier. For in truth, after writing my complaints about how spring just wouldn’t come, I woke yesterday to find the temperature near 40 and a soft, life-giving rain falling. As I said, you never know how the natural world will surprise you.
Heading out once again to pick up the newspapers, I decided to pause a moment and watch the sky in the east begin to lighten. And while standing there I decided to focus my attention briefly on a little copse across the street where water tends to gather just to see if I might hear anything.
I wasn’t sure at first, but then there it was, like a soft tinkling of bells. It’s true, my friends, the peepers are back.
© Iperl | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images
Acceptance and Judgment, March 17 (audio only)
Youth Sunday
Sermon from March 10: Yes, And… (text & audio)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–
Thin January sunlight filtered through leafless trees as about a half dozen people gathered a little self-consciously along a sidewalk in the hills of Berkeley, California. Facing them, along the doorway of a small, squat building that is Starr King School for the Ministry, were about 30 others, standing in silence. At some unspoken cue that group began singing the words of the Sufi poet Rumi:
Come, come whoever you are
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, yet again, come.
At the song’s conclusion, Rebecca Parker, president of the school, began reciting her poem that you heard earlier:
“We are at the threshold; we are here.”
And then other members of the group took turns reading:
“We who have crossed many thresholds already
to arrive at this space and time” and so on:
Coming out – coming across – coming with – coming to – coming again.
Crossing a threshold, poised for possibility.
Then, the new students standing on the sidewalk were invited to enter and be greeted.
This was the scene I witnessed nearly two months ago when our daughter Erica, one of those people gathering on the sidewalk at the start of the ceremony, formally took her place in that student body, beginning the challenging walk of ministry.
It came to my mind as I reflected on this service today where we welcome newcomers into this community. I don’t presume that joining this congregation is anything like entering seminary. That place, after all, is in many ways a rarified setting, removed from much of the daily flow of life so that students have room for a depth of study and reflection that few of us have time for, and the commitment of leadership it demands is far greater than what we seek as being part of a congregation. But the parallel is not as far off as it might appear.
We hold up this moment of joining this community, we take time for it in our Sunday worship because we believe that this is something that matters – to you who are joining us, and to us who welcome you. As I told our newcomers our Connecting Points class, when you join a congregation like this you are making a statement. You are taking a public stand. In the words of UU minister Roy Phillips, you are making a declaration “about who you are and who you intend to become.”
The culture we live in today atomizes us. It breaks us up into the tiniest possible bits, disconnects us from each other, and then spins us around. We either fly off in random directions or bash into each other. In between the work of getting and spending we look up in despair and wonder what on earth we are running so hard to accomplish.
Meanwhile, there is in us a yearning for integrity in our lives: to make some sense of the world, to raise our children as decent people, to live with character and compassion, to lift our dull gaze from feeding our own hungers so that we might make some difference in the world. But all of this is too big to figure out on our own, and besides we quickly run out of time and energy to accomplish much.
Rebecca Parker tells of a time at the start of her ministry when she was a young pastor at a tiny congregation that was on the verge of closing. Still, she saw hope in the caring of those who remained. So, she began a practice of watching for visitors and calling on them in the following week. Though often surprised, she said, most people were hospitable.
She says that she found that no one ever came to church casually, as if they had nothing better to do that Sunday. Instead, Parker said, most of them came for, in her words, “life-and-death reasons.” One woman who had finally given birth after years of infertility and miscarriages was looking for a way to offer gratitude for life and to find a community to help her raise her child. A man came with his partner after he had lost his job because the school district was firing gay teachers. Angry and heart-broken, they were looking for an expression of kindness that might ease their pain and give them hope. One woman had just been diagnosed with cancer and was feeling scared and overwhelmed. Another had spent years working to defend the Earth and was looking for something deeper than anger to keep her going.
Change some of the details of these stories and add a few more and you would describe many of the people who I have welcomed into membership in this congregation. Our congregations are not just convenient places to spend a pleasant Sunday morning. They are places where people bring some of the deepest struggles of their lives, hoping to find a community that will take them seriously, that will confront head on some of the gnarliest knots that living presents us and will stick with them and stay in conversation when the going gets tough, that will support them in their struggles and the twists and turns of life, and that will celebrate often and with great joy the wonders of this good life and how good it is to be together.
And so I begin each newcomer class with a chalice lighting and reading from our hymnal: “We bid you welcome who come with weary spirit seeking rest, who comes with troubles that are too much with you, who come hurt and afraid. We bid you welcome, who come with hope in your heart, who come with anticipation in your step, who come proud and joyous. We bid you welcome, who are seekers of a new faith, who come to probe and explore, who come to learn. We bid you welcome, who enter this hall as a homecoming, who have found here room for your spirit, who find in this people a family.”
So, welcome! Now what? Some weeks ago I introduced you to comedian Tina Fey’s “Rules for Improvisation.” You may recall that one of her principle tenets was that when you enter a scene you should begin by saying, “Yes.” Rather than question what your partner offers, begin from an open-minded place. In Tina Fey’s words, “Start with a YES and see where that takes you.” But she also said that “Yes” alone is not enough. Your partner depends on you to help keep the action going. She or he expects you not only to play along, but also to add something of your own: not just “Yes,” but “Yes, and . . . .”
As she said, “don’t be afraid to contribute. Your initiations are worthwhile.” And so it is here. Having said “yes” to becoming a part of this community, what might you contribute to helping keep the action going?
Because, you see, I believe that this practice of “yes, and” is not just a good idea; it is integral to who we are as a religious community. To make this case, let me bring in Bernard Loomer, who we heard from earlier. Loomer was a theology professor associated with the University of Chicago, who late in life joined a Unitarian Universalist church, as it happens it was in our daughter Erica’s haunting grounds in Berkeley, California.
For a good part of the 20th century he was an important figure in process theology, a movement that sought to bridge the gap between science and religion, arguing that creativity is woven into all things and that the universe is constantly growing in size and complexity.
Loomer reached the conclusion that this growth occurs in the making of relationships. What matters in the end, he said, are the relationships that this process working in the universe makes, and the making of these relationships is what creates us as individuals and a society.
What determines how effective these relationships are, Loomer said, is their size, their ability to grow and expand, and also to accept tensions and contradictions. At the Berkeley church in conversation with other members, he was said to challenge them to reflect, “What is the size of your soul?” Here’s what he said about that: “By size I mean the capacity of a person’s soul, the range and depth of his love, his capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality.
“I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness.”
As Unitarian Universalists we understand that our relatedness to one another and the Earth is not some random fact of our existence. It is essential to our nature; it defines us. And so, returning to Loomer’s remarks, when we look for the source of love in our lives, we see that there is no external principle of love that determines our interdependence.
“Love,” Loomer said, “is an acknowledgement of our interdependence. We love because we are bound to each other, because we live and are fulfilled in, with, and through each other. We love because a failure to love is a denial of the other, a denial of ourselves, a denial of our relatedness.”
By expanding our souls enough to add the “and” to the “yes,” – “Yes, And . . .” – bringing ourselves, our own creative capacity into play in the communities we join, we affirm what we already know in our hearts: that, while we see ourselves as many, in the end we are one.
So, here we stand at the threshold of this evolving community, a community that changes as we change, as the world changes, yet remains routed in the possibility of relationship that links us with each other and all things, that finds the sacred in this world, in this life, within and among us.
It is space where each of us seeks to grow, and so as those of us who have been here a while welcome newcomers, we also welcome each other in our continuing journeys, some of us also still coming out of identifies that didn’t embrace fully who we were, crossing boundaries that once limited our lives; coming with our loves, our partners, our children, our memories, our wisdom; coming to our senses, our awareness of that which holds hope and possibility; coming again to our commitments, to our deep knowing:
Come, come whoever you are;
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again, come.
Come into this space, into this community that we create together, poised with possibility of thresholds yet to come, joined in the commitment to say, “Yes,” and with that affirmation bring our full selves into relationship with all that is and all that might be with our common endeavor.
Sermon from March 3: The Pebble in My Shoe (text & audio)
Rev. Michael Carter, Guest Minister–
Shortly after the attacks in New York on September 11th, a close friend of my wife Judy and I got together for a drink at our local watering hole. This friend was an educator and a very progressive thinker as well as a lot of fun to be around, and we are very close friends with him and his wife to this day.
As we sat at the bar, I noticed that he was wearing an American Flag pin in the lapel of his suit jacket. Now, unless you were in New York City at the time, you would have witnessed the ground swell of nationalism as if all differences were forgotten and we were all Americans now that we had been attacked (granted this was temporary). This nationalism was at it’s zenith right after the Twin Towers came down.
Because I was very familiar with his political thinking and progressive politics, or so I thought, I asked him about the lapel pin. I had only seen, in my estimation, very politically conservative individuals wearing these pins as an unquestionable display of their patriotism and “America right or wrong” worldview. So, quite naturally, I inquired why he was wearing the flag on his jacket.
He said that he was wearing the flag to let other Americans know that one could be progressive and liberal and still love and care for this nation. I was shocked. I challenged him by asking, “Who is going to know your politics just by wearing the flag? He responded that perhaps a conversation would ensue and a meeting of the minds would follow. I could not see his point, or perhaps I did not want to see his point, but we moved on an enjoyed the rest of the evening. Now, although it is not something I would have done, to wear the flag, I understand what he was saying, if only to himself. There is more than one way to be an American. There is more than one way to think about this nation and its principles.
When I left my job last April, I was not a happy camper about how the event transpired and the way it was handled. I will not get into the details, but suffice it to say that I am extremely happy to have moved on. However, I was angry about the way in which the events took place and the enormous stress I had to endure along with my family.
I have long believed that where you go in time of crisis or need is where one’s home is. When I left the hospital I went to the Bible for my spiritual comfort. Yes, I have studied other spiritual traditions and techniques ranging from Buddhism to New Thought Metaphysics. I have read the great existential books and texts from Camus to our own UU authors and ministers. I have even declared my self an agnostic and atheist at times in my life. If I am not mistaken, I may have mentioned those sentiments from this pulpit and others. The truth is, I am not orthodox or traditional in my Christian beliefs. I am a UU Christian, and more specifically, a Universalist Christian. Ironically, when I first joined this denomination, I self-identified as a UU Christian, and there were some rough times even then. I had known UU ministers who, when candidating for work, would not tell congregations they were Christian for fear of not being hired. They would often self-identify as a Theist. It was a shame. I was a minority within a minority, if you will. The words of T.S. Elliot come to mind about exploration.
We shall never cease from exploration and at the end of exploring we shall arrive at the place we started and know it for the very first time.
And yet those teachings of Rabbi Jesus have always remained the pebble in my shoe. Irritating, even painful at times but always calling me to revisit the teachings and life of this man, this Palestinian man of color from the First century C.E. And yes, you say, the teachings of Jesus and our post-modern Christianity are not the same thing. You are correct.
I asked myself how could these teachings and stories assist me in working through this anger and frustration, this lack of ethics, this racism that I was dealing with at work? How could I keep my humanity and thereby maintain theirs? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus, a Christian in this technological world of ours, when to be a Christian today for many means to be judgmental, small-minded, bigoted, socially and politically conservative, afraid of change, patriarchal, etc? How could I wear a flag in my lapel to start a dialogue or conversation as to what it can mean to be a Christian or follower of the teachings of Jesus today? You have heard me say that the highest evolution for a human being is not from Theism or Christianity to Humanism or Atheism. There are times when it is the other way around.
First of all, I had to revisit those stories from the Bible and about this Jesus and to move from head to heart. I had to put aside the human craving for what is rational and logical and to have the courage to feel as well.
UU Christianity assisted me a great deal with this, as I could focus now on the humanity of Jesus instead of the dogma of orthodox Christianity. You see, all of the work of theologians like Marcus Borg and Jack Spong—Jesus Seminar scholars—among others, is truly wonderful and much needed. But UU Christians were already involved in the “historical Jesus” studies back in the ‘fifties.
Ironically, the same denomination that gave me “permission” to look at Jesus as a human being, was hostile to Christianity because of the wounds its members had suffered in childhood. No problem. We’ve all been there. But I believe that if one is 40 years old and is still angry at one’s parents, one has never really left home.
Malcolm X once said that you can’t hate the roots without hating the tree. Our denominational roots are from the Judaio-Christian background. This is not to say that everyone should be a follower of the teachings of Jesus. No, not at all. But we welcome so many other paths with open arms, but our own roots we shun. There is an old African-American saying that one should never forget the bridge that brought them over. It’s okay to be seekers, but let’s remember that the goal of seeking is to find something.
In our market-driven culture which is so preoccupied with titillation, stimulation, infatuation, and fascination rather than deep spiritual empowerment, I had to decide where these teaching fit in for me. Well, first of all the teachings say that he or she who would be great among you must first be a servant to others.
These teachings have been toned down for many in our generation and culture. The courage, the audacity to be a follower of Jesus is serious business indeed. We are bombarded every day with the notion of conformity and to place a premium on this notion of being well-adjusted and complacent. To just go about one’s own business in an individualistic, isolated, hedonistic way, holding at arm’s length community, public interest, and the common good is the key to success. We are encouraged to nurture life in our own little bubbles and parochial worldviews.
I have rediscovered that being a Christian or follower of Jesus, UU or otherwise, is to move beyond dogma, doctrine, creeds, and guilt. It means having the courage to examine our hidden assumptions about ourselves and each other, the attitudes that cause us to shatter our prejudices, and that cause me to lose sight of the humanity of other people. Being a Christian resonates with the Socratic imperative echoed in line 38 A of Plato’s Apology that states that the unexamined life is not worth living. It’s about making the effort to get to know ourselves, warts and all, with all of our strengths and inadequacies. It’s also about knowing that the unexamined faith is not worth having.
Market-driven culture says be successful, gain status based on financial gain. The message of Jesus says no! Become great, and the greatest among you will be a servant. The greatest among you will keep track of “the least of these.” The greatest among you will know yourselves and learn to love your neighbor as yourself, therefore and thereby in essence loving your God. This wisdom is not only counter- cultural but counter-intuitive to our way of thinking as children of the Enlightenment and the West.
This agape love speaks to the radical Jewishness of Jesus of Nazareth, for he expounded on the prophetic Judaic thought of his time of not only loving your neighbor but also loving your enemies and those who spitefully use you as well. He preaches about the healing power of forgiveness, which makes the wisdom of this world mere folly. Giving and forgiving is the key to humanness and of his teachings.
This does not mean that I am a follower of the teaching of Jesus and everybody else is inferior or somehow less than. This does not mean that I am a UU and everyone else is somehow not as enlightened. T.S. Elliott uses the phrase, Hollow People, when referring to those who suffer from a spiritual malnutrition and/or an existential emptiness or arrogance.
For me, the message of the teachings of Jesus is boiled down to this. There is nothing you or I could ever do or be that would separate us from the love of God. Even if you don’t want the love, it is there for you. We are called to transcend our boundaries, to be the best UU’s we can be, the best Muslims, Christians, Pagans, Atheists, Humanist, Theists, Agnostics, Goddess Worshippers, Earth-Centered Spiritualist, (or however we choose to self- identify), that we can be and to eventually transcend even those labels and boundaries to embrace one another and the world. I’m not interested in converting anyone. I am interested in sharing my “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46) and to hear about yours as well. We share our truths with each other. This is about learning to love. Howard Thurman reminds us that the truth found in any religion is there because it is true. It is not true simply because it is found in a religion. The Gospel news is good news because you can come as you are. All are welcome! Men and women, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, Black, White, Brown, Yellow, Red, Democrats and Republicans, moderate Republicans and Tea Party Republicans, those for and those against new gun legislation, all are welcome!
How is this lived out by Jesus? He was betrayed and he loved them. He was denied and he loved them. He was persecuted and he loved them; he was killed and he loved and forgave them.
It really doesn’t matter whether or not we believe that these events happened literally or historically, although I must admit that I do happen to believe that. What matters to me is that his life was no longer concerned with survival as its highest value! Life is more than mere survival and living lives of quiet desperation. Those who do not know how to live cling to life in desperation born out of fear, but those who posses life are free to lay it down because death no longer has dominion over them. In many ways his story is not about theology for me; it is about experience. Theology explains experience, but experience gives life.
I also happen to believe that if we are to grow and to become more welcoming as a denomination, we will have to be able to accept those who treasure the Jesus story or myth. This is what we say we are about in our principles. Let’s be true to what we say on paper. We treasure King and Thurman. They were Christians folks! In closing, let me just say that for me Yehsua Ben Yoseff is the great example, not the great exception. He lived fully and loved wastefully. His life exhibits what it is to live abundantly, he speaks to what it means to be fully human. He reminds that God is not a person; God is not a being. God is being itself. No one can know God, but perhaps one can experience God, or whatever name suits your taste. Yes, Christianity must change or die, to quote, Bishop Jack Spong. UU Christianity can be the vehicle for this change.
Thomas Sheehan, Professor of Religious Studies, at Stanford University says,
If we perform the radical surgery on Christianity that is required, not only will certain traditional formulations of faith fall to the wayside, but also much of the presumed content of Christianity, and rightly so. Our only consolation is that if we do not intervene radically and soon, the patient will die.
Yeshua, his life, and his teachings have been the pebble in my shoe for all these many years. Universalist Christianity’s path is not the only path to truth, but it is the path for me. In hindsight, it always was, I just did not see it at the time. The Philosopher Kierkegaard reminds us that life is lived forward but only understood backwards. Jesus’s life as a human being bears witness to Dr. Thurman’s statement that the contradictions of life are not final. Indeed there would be no Christianity, UU or otherwise, without this example. And so this morning, with great joy and relief, I can now remove that pebble form my shoe and continue on my journey. Thank you this morning for walking with me.
Amen.