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At Play – Mother’s Day (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward
My own memory goes back some 30 years, but this time the genders in the scene that Sharon Olds holds up in her poem are switched. And it’s me and one or another of my daughters at one or another of the homes we occupied during that time….

 

My own memory goes back some 30 years, but this time the genders in the scene that Sharon Olds holds up in her poem are switched. And it’s me and one or another of my daughters at one or another of the homes we occupied during that time.

Before beginning I set out all the ingredients – soap, shampoo, wash cloth, towel, clean clothes – and then with excruciating care calibrate the temperature of the water that slowly pours into the basin, a la the tree bears – not too hot, not too cold: just right!

And then this carefully choreographed dance that my daughter and I engage in. The hold, just as Sharon describes it, initiated by me, the child gathered in the crook of my arm, as if she always belonged there, and then the slow descent to the dance floor, the welcoming pool of water with satisfying wisps of steam rising off of it.

From the infant at first, a clenching, tensed response to this new environment, eyes wide, apprehensive, focused tightly on my face, but then with a gentle touch, the water’s soothing feel and the soap’s slipperiness, a slow relaxing, a calming of movement, and together we catch the rhythm of this routine.

I remember as a new parent the fear that surrounded me that first time I attempted this feat – visions of all that could go wrong and do damage to the child before me – but, as Sharon Olds says, experience in time teaches us. It teaches us not only how to navigate this task; it teaches that we are good for each other.

This is how we are meant to be: two people linked in love, bonded, but not too tight. And if we are lucky, the formal nature of this interchange – the cleansing of the child – devolves into something deeper, which is play. Whether it’s cooing or splashing or singing or laughing, we connect and find an easiness with each other that opens the way to intimacy.

So, on this Mother’s Day, I’d like to take some time to notice of and celebrate the many ways in the parenting we both give and receive that play opens us to each other and the possibility of deeper connections in our lives.

Now, as we enter this subject I must admit that I am of the generation that was raised under the guidance of Benjamin Spock. Remember him? We baby boomers, now nearing our retirement years, were beneficiaries of the then-scandalous advice of this best-selling pediatrician that parents ignore the rigid rules of child-rearing proclaimed by supposed experts and simply use common sense in rearing their children. Your children want love and affection, he said: give it to them. They want to explore: let them. Talk with them; listen to them; and, yes, play with them.

In his early TV appearances Spock was sure to elicit cries of surprise, and sometimes disapproval, when, presented with a clutch of toddlers, he would fold his six-foot frame and settle on the floor among them. Naysayers fretted: you’re spoiling those kids! And years later, commentators diagnosed the nation’s ills as the result of Spock’s supposed leniency.

Spock himself and anyone who paid attention to what he actually wrote dismissed such rubbish – attending to your child doesn’t mean you don’t also guide and correct her. Your play with him is not the same as what happens in the company of his age mates. It is something else: a unique opportunity to create something that is really more like a moment of communion.

For, as people who study such things tell us, there is something extraordinary that happens when we are at play. Any parent is familiar with the phenomenon when they see their children settle into play, and so are artists or anyone who finds him- or herself deep in a creative endeavor.

There comes a point when we forget about ourselves and whatever our worries may have been and we enter into an expansive state. When we join in play, we enter into that state together – a place where we are fully present as who we are, present to ourselves and each other, and yet not present, so absorbed in the play before us that the world around us vanishes, and there is only the play.

Though we may not frame it this way at the time, it is a place of great spiritual depth – something akin to what the Buddhists call samadhi, a meditative state of selflessness where we feel the borders between us and everything else disappear and experience ourselves connected to a wider world. Our play invites our children into that space, a place without judgment where they and we are worthy and whole, and also bonded with each other.

Of course, as nice as play is, our lives are busy enough that it can be hard to schedule and exhaustion often robs us of the energy to engage. It’s why we need communities like this one where the play of parenting can be shared, and one wonderful avenue is across generations.

It is one of the great joys of grandparenting that it has given me a new outlet for play. From the first peek-a-boos to puzzles or the games of tag in the yard we are weaving webs of intimacy that we each can draw on.

A great Mother’s Day recollection I have is a time when our daughters were growing up, and on my mother’s visits she would put herself at their disposal: “What shall we do?”

The answer was often an elaborate story line with roles assigned based on dress-up clothes they would dig out of a great trunk in our family room. My mother would adopt whatever role she was given and accept the clothes they chose to drape on her together with elaborate hats.

I tap into the same sense of play when my granddaughter touches my arm, shouting, “Tag, you’re it!” and giggles as she dashes away. In that moment, our roles and the generations disappear, and we are in it together. It is more than a lark. It is truly one of those great unitive experiences that reminds me who I am and what I love.

The writer Stephen Nachmanovitch argues that we make a mistake when we downplay the significance of play as something ephemeral or foolish. Creative play, he says, is not the act of manipulating life. It is experiencing life as it is.

This is, after all, how we become: we play – with ideas, with our environment, with each other. We step away for a moment from the world with all its consequences and toy with possibility. And in possibility we find our place.

We reach a place where we are finally determined to take ownership of our lives. “Now I become myself,” says the poet May Sarton, and it often feels that way. Having lived within the tidy or tangled scripts that we cobbled together from our limited experience, we are called to something larger, something greater. Those early scripts, we now see, were inadequate to who we are and what we need, but we had no way of knowing that. And it wasn’t our fault: it was just too big, and there was too much, more than we could possibly fathom at the time.

Somehow, though, within our fearful, clinging selves we can discern something deeper that is both ours and greater than us, a dimension, a capacity that draws us out and links us more widely with others, with all that is.

We find it in the dawning moment, at the edge of perception where an astonishing fullness floods in on us pregnant with possibility.

Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, whose words we sang earlier, evokes a sense of that moment. He places it in a memory of his childhood – sun-kissed mornings when, in his words, “the marvelous” bloomed like flowers within his heart. The tone that runs through the poem I can only call playful, taking in the world around him “with simply joy” where grass and clouds are enough to inspire “fullest wealth of awe.” It is, he says, is not the words his mother speaks: simply her voice that gives “meaning to the stars.”

It reminds me that we mistake sometimes how we touch each other. We wordy, well-reasoned sorts imagine that it is our arguments that carry our weight in the world, when really it is how we make ourselves present and to whom that matters.

Tagore closes this passage, which he wrote toward the end of his life, saying that thoughts of his own approaching death brings him back to that rising bedside curtain, to the new morning, and with it life awakened in fresh surprise of love.

It is in childhood, of course, when we feel that most intensely, before we have constructed our filters and armored ourselves against injury and disappointment. Yet, the fullness of life is no less available, the marvelous is still at hand, and love is every morning a fresh surprise.

And so today we celebrate the mothering that has taught us to care,

to open our sometimes-hesitant hearts to each other,

to make room for the play that welcomes possibility, our own and the world’s,

so that once nurtured in the crook of a loving arm we, too, born from the mystery beyond all knowing might come to move our silky limbs at will and realize the blessing that we were born to be.

Out of the Ordinary – Easter (text & audio)

 

Our “Sense of Place” class had its April field trip last week to the North Carolina Arboretum. It couldn’t have been a prettier day for a tour of the gardens and a walk through the woods. We had an eye out especially for those ephemeral spring flowers, and here and there we found a few – yellows, pinks, whites: tiny flowers that pop briefly out of the leaf litter before dying back without a trace before the tall trees overhead leaf out and blanket them in shadow.

Except for these flowers and a few early shrubs, the forest looks inert at this time of year. Last fall’s leaves are drained of color, and things in general have a beaten-down look from the snows and winds and frigid temperatures of winter.

We know, of course, that outside of our sight there is a lot going on. Sap is running in the trees and tiny tendrils everywhere are reaching out as daytime temperatures rise. That’s the thrill of a walk in the woods in this season: each day something new emerges or unfolds. A seemingly dry and colorless landscape is shot through with the electricity of life; out of the ordinary, the blah, the unexceptional, something exceptional, amazing and fresh is entering the world.

And so, with that image before us once again we enter the Easter story, that great tale of death and resurrection that centers the Christian tradition. It’s a story that lives with us as Unitarian Universalists as well by virtue of our historical roots in that tradition, although our practice is to give that tale a different take than Christian churches do.

As Frederick May Eliot, historic Unitarian leader, put it more than a half century ago, “When I go to church on Easter, I expect to be reminded of the elemental truth that in this universe of ours, with all its hesitancies and timidities and tragedies, the tides of life are flowing fresh, manifold and free.”

What speaks to us isn’t the magical story of bodily resurrection at Easter, which has dominated the Christian narrative for the past millennium or so, as much as the need for rebirth. Just like the forest floor in early spring we find times in our lives when we feel beaten down. Circumstances, some of them of our own making, shut us down or cause us to draw in on ourselves. We get quarrelsome and cynical and just stuck.

Easter serves as a reminder that there are stores within us, within the world around us that can lift us out of our funks and offer a way forward. There are those who will say that this is just those UUs again messing with a well-established religious tradition, picking and choosing the parts they like, but leaving the hard parts behind. Curiously, though, thanks to recent scholarship, we’ve learned that our take on the Easter story connects in interesting ways with the perspective of early Christian communities.

Several years ago, Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry, one of our seminaries, and a colleague, Rita Nakashima Brock, wrote that in studying early churches they found that for hundreds of years the image of Jesus was very different from what appears in many churches today.

Instead of the crucified Christ whose death was recompense for humanity’s sins, they discovered a figure with welcoming arms inviting followers into a luminous scene that was strongly reminiscent of the Mediterranean landscape where they were situated. Parker and Brock realized they were looking at a vision of paradise, not as a distant heaven, but as the world of those people’s experience that was infused with a brilliant energy.

Paradise, in other words, was not another world; it was a way of looking at this world that had been lost to its people. The purpose of worship and other dimensions of community life, then, was to restore this lost connection to a sense of that sacredness, and it was communities that sought to live by Jesus’ teachings of justice and compassion, rather than dwell on his death, that were offering that path.

Parker and Brock argued that there was a strong parallel to our work as religious communities today, communities that celebrate the beauty and wonder of this world while seeking to cultivate practices of what they call “ethical grace.” They describe this as living in a way that is “attuned to what is beautiful and good, and responsive to legacies of injustice and currents of harm.”

With this view in mind, Easter could offer us the opportunity to praise that which upholds life and to call forth that in us that awakens hope and courage to act in such a way that we might bring such a world into being and learn to live rightly with the Earth and each other.

OK, OK, sure: Sounds great, but often a whole lot easier to say than to do. Again, back to that funk: “praise life, awaken hope, live rightly with the Earth and each other” is just a lot of words unless something connects with us directly. So, here’s where this business of blessing comes in.

As John said earlier, the traditional meaning of blessing is an act of or in the name of God. I’m wary, though, of anyone who presumes to speak or act on behalf of God or any other image of divine authority. For we fragile, fallible sorts, the source of our authority is our own authenticity. We speak for ourselves, and only ourselves. Yet, if we are fully present and true to the best within us, we are capable of conferring on each other gifts that might waken us to the wonders of the world around us, to life abundant, to the ethical grace of our lives together

The author Barbara Brown Taylor, who is also an Episcopal priest and professor of religion, writes that for many people the prospect of conferring a blessing is daunting. Who am I to do such a thing? So, she invites them to begin with something simple – say, a stick lying on the ground.

The first thing to do, she says, is to pay attention. “Did you make the stick?” she asks. “No, you did not. The stick has its own story. If you have the time to figure out what kind of tree it came from, that would be a start to showing the stick some respect. It is only a ‘stick’ in the same way that you are only a ‘human,’ after all. There is more to both of you than that. Is it on the ground because it is old or because if suffered a mishap? Has it been lying there for a long time, or did it just land? Is it fat enough for you to see its growth rings?”

This stick has a history you cannot know. Did a bird once make a nest on it? What was it like to be part of the deep mystery of drawing water up from the ground against the pull of gravity? How was it to launch green leaves from its buds in spring and only to have them drop off and float to the ground in the fall? It has arteries not so very unlike yours and tissues that as you stand there are breaking down, returning to the soil from which it sprang.

What might you say?

“Bless you, stick for being you?”

“Bless you for turning soil and water and sun into wood?”

We only need remember, as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, that “the key to blessing things is that they beat you to it.”

Blessing is ultimately an act of deep appreciation and once you are in the posture of doing it, the act redounds to you. The respect, the care that comes from a blessing speaks to an unplumbed depth within you. It is the place from which the “path to plenitude” that John Donohue spoke of in our reading opens for us.

This also connects us to another way of looking at the Easter story. The scholar John Dominic Crossan has examined much of the historical record around the stories of the Bible, and he notes that as lyrical as the death and resurrection narrative is, there is nothing historical in the finding of the empty tomb.

The most that we know from the record, he said, is this: there was a movement of people organized around a man named Jesus; he was executed by the authorities; but the movement continued and spread. The final point, Crossan argues, is the key one, and how it did so is the subject of one of the final episodes in the Gospel of Luke in the story of the walk to Emmaus.

In it, two disciples are on a road leaving Jerusalem shortly after Jesus death, talking about all that happened. At some point, they are joined by a figure they don’t seem to know, but later identify as Jesus, who tells them to continue his teachings.

Crossan argues that the story is intended not to be historical, but apocryphal: in his words “a metaphoric condensation of the first few years of Christian thought and practice in one parabolic afternoon.”

In essence, he says, Jesus opened a “path of plenitude” for his followers, a blessing that helped them see the world in a new way. This lives on in the gift that Easter gives us, the reminder that death is never the final answer. There are, as Frederick May Eliot put it, “tides of life flowing, fresh, manifold and free” – just look at the green points poking through the soil in your garden – ready to be employed if we can imagine ourselves as agents in bringing the future about.

And for many of us this is perhaps the greatest reach of all. Who am I? Pretty small, let’s face it. Life abundant, living with ethical grace. Wow, yeah! But . . . well, we each have our own reasons for why we think that path is a bigger lift than we’re capable of, but more or less they all fit under that classic Facebook post: “It’s complicated.”

But think about this. Today, you scribbled a few words on a slip of paper, crammed it in a plastic egg and dropped the egg in a basket intending it for one of our children to find and read: a blessing! What was that like? How was it to imagine your words being read, or perhaps read to someone?

How will that child receive it? I don’t know, but I call tell from what I have been told in past years that our children are kind of amazed by this gesture. They may not understand all the words, but they get the gesture.

It is a step or two above blessing of a stick. It is a moment of meeting that communicates abiding care, care that every one of us is in the position to offer each other in many ways. You may not be able to move mountains, but you can communicate abiding care.

And, hey, remember there’s another one of those blessings waiting for you in a colorful plastic egg that our children have secreted somewhere in Sandburg Hall. How will you read that blessing? What will you do with it? How will you let it touch you?

Annie Dillard paints it in stark terms: there’s nobody here but us chickens, nobody else to do all that heroic work that needs doing.

Remember the image from Wendell Berry’s poem that I offered as a meditation: amid our fears and tormented dreams there is within us the capacity to see beyond our outcast state, to make ourselves available to that well of abiding care within us that connects us with each other, a source that, if we will let it, can bathe us like a quiet, summer rain.

It is a weakening and discoloring idea, Annie Dillard says, that “rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us.”

No: The absolute, the ineffable, however we might understand that unfolding possibility that moves like electricity in us and all things, is available to everyone in every age. And we who go about our busy lives – knowledgeable and important, fearful and self-aware – we well-meaning folks, who nonetheless sometimes cut corners, who promote and scheme and deceive, we who long to flee misery and escape death – we are all that we have to bring it into being.

Our destination is not clear, but as John Donohue puts it, we can trust the promise of this opening and unfurl ourselves into the grace of beginning.

Pull a Thistle, Plant a Flower (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
How do we learn what it is we must do with our lives? For the figure at the center of our service today it came to him while he was harvesting wheat on his family’s farm one bright autumn day. Only just returned from service in the Civil War as an artilleryman with the Sixth Wisconsin Battery, Jenkin Lloyd Jones didn’t see much future for himself in farming. As he joined his brothers in the field, his head was full of all that he had seen in the war – the folly and the bravery, the terror and the tedium – and he marveled over how, as he was to put it later, the war seemed, “such a wrong way to do the right thing.”

 

How do we learn what it is we must do with our lives? For the figure at the center of our service today it came to him while he was harvesting wheat on his family’s farm one bright autumn day. Only just returned from service in the Civil War as an artilleryman with the Sixth Wisconsin Battery, Jenkin Lloyd Jones didn’t see much future for himself in farming. As he joined his brothers in the field, his head was full of all that he had seen in the war – the folly and the bravery, the terror and the tedium – and he marveled over how, as he was to put it later, the war seemed, “such a wrong way to do the right thing.”

Then, suddenly, it occurred to him what his path was: he was to be a Unitarian minister. It’s not the kind of epiphany that occurs to most people, but then the members of the Jones family were not most people. They had immigrated to Wisconsin only a couple of decades before, when Jenks, as he was known, was just an infant. Their home had been in Cardiganshire, Wales, which at the time hosted a dozen Welsh Unitarian churches. Nine of Jenks’ uncles were Unitarian ministers, including another Jenkin who had preceded Jenks’ family to Wisconsin, and who, barely a year after they arrived, died of smallpox.

So, the family was not especially surprised by Jenkin’s announcement, even if up to that point Jenkin had never actually attended a Unitarian church.

Oh, it’s true, the family read from the old Welsh Bible, and in this literate household Jenkin had read whatever he could get his hands on. He had also experienced his father at times offer up sermons at nearby churches – not often, since their liberal theology always seemed to get them in trouble, earning them the nickname, “the God-Almighty Joneses.” It would be a decade or more before Unitarian congregations formed there. But the family affirmed the gift they saw in Jenkin and sent him off to seminary without so much as a day of formal education.

Arriving at Meadville Theological School, Jones was the proverbial farm boy: lacking social graces and struggling with the demands of school but earnest, bright, and persevering.

It may have been his unusual origins or his family’s proud heretical heritage – Jones always said that for his family “freedom was a word to conjure by” – but from early on he had a different vision of religion than most seminarians. His idea, as he put it later, was the church would be “a free congress of independent souls,” a place of, in his words, “universal brotherhood” that would “lead in the campaign for more truth rather than to indolently stand guard over some petty fragment of acquired truth.”

It was an attitude that ended up putting this Welsh Wisconsin farm boy at the forefront of what was to become an emerging movement for expansion to the west in a denomination that at the time mostly saw its proper role as offering Biblical instruction from the high pulpits of Boston.

So, no sooner had he graduated from seminary than Jenkin Lloyd Jones enlisted in the role for what was described as Wisconsin missionary. Really, it was a role that Jones created for himself: there had never before been such a position in the Unitarian church and never would be again. But it turned out to be a winner for all involved. For Jones, the position got him back to familiar territory near his family, and for the newly emerging Western Conference of Unitarian churches it got an energetic organizer in the field to drum up interest in fast-growing pioneer towns.

Jones and his new wife, Susan, landed in a vacant parsonage attached to a struggling congregation in Janesville, Wisconsin, where between visits to emergent groups in growing towns he worked to give form to an evolving vision of what the church might become.

For Jones, the church was first off a center of community. So, to bring people together, among his first creations was an adult Sunday school held on Sunday evenings. Unlike the old catechism classes, the lessons were set up to explore topics ranging from the Beatitudes to the natural sciences to great religious teachers, ranging from Socrates to Buddha, Zoroaster, Muhammad and Confucius.

The classes gained a strong following in Janesville, reviving that congregation. So, Jones and his wife managed to package the lessons and send them off to others. Within six months he had a subscription list of 700.

After a few years, Jones’ success led to his being named missionary to the entire Western Conference, which at the time was vaguely defined as stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific coast. His activities, though, were mostly focused in the Midwest and Plains states, reaching from Ohio through Iowa and up north to Minnesota.

It was challenging work that he once described as like that of the woman in a Medieval story who appeared in the marketplace with a can of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, declaring it was her purpose to put out the fires of hell with the water and set fire to paradise with the torch, so that men and women might serve the right regardless of their own selfish interests, whether it be hope for future reward or dread of future punishment.

The schedule that his expanded duties demanded of him was insane. His first year he logged nearly 10,000 miles by train or ox cart, often sleeping in train stations and boarding coaches without enough money for the trip home, hoping for freewill offerings that would give him return fare. He mostly visited distressed or dormant churches, or isolated groups of religious liberals who sought to start churches. But it paid off with him helping to establish many new congregations.

His encouragement and support went a long way to holding struggling congregations together. And nowhere was that support more crucial than in Iowa, where women were emerging as leaders in some small congregations.

Denomination leaders in Boston had no interest in encouraging women to take on the role of clergy, but Jones had been promoting equal rights for women since he first arrived in Janesville. He was delighted to find women eager to step into the pulpit, especially since few male clergy would travel to serve those prairie towns. After arranging for the Western Conference to ordain one of those women – Mary Safford – Jones trumpeted the achievement to the wider conference, and invited other women to join her. At Jones’ urging, Meadville, his alma mater, began admitting women, and soon about half a dozen women joined Safford to minister to those country towns in what became known as the Iowa Sisterhood.

In his travels, Jones gathered allies in his work, a group who together created a magazine to communicate their views that they dubbed, “Unity.” The text Bob that read earlier by William Channing Gannett, probably Jones’ closest colleague, opened the inaugural issue of that magazine. Its forward-looking vision speaks very much to the ethos of that time, naming what he called three essentials of religion:

Freedom, which they said implies respect for the past, but reverence for the future, for the continuing unfolding of truth,

Fellowship, opposing exclusivity in religion, and seeing unities of human experience across traditions,

and Character, the view that morality, how we are to treat one another, is the focus of the religious life.

As a statement, it was none too popular with these men’s colleagues back East, since it lacked any specific reference to Christian teachings. Jones insisted there was no need, since the principles they endorsed embraced the heart of the Christian message. That argument, unfortunately, got him exactly nowhere with his opponents, and in time he found himself increasingly marginalized.

When headquarters in Boston finally got around to starting new churches, they invested their money in buildings in university towns where they could send preachers who were schooled to address this educated clientele. Jones regarded this as elitist nonsense that ignored his own efforts that in the course of a decade had helped found 40 congregations across the Midwest and Plains states.

The downside of Jones strategy, though, was that many of the congregations he helped get started were desperately poor, and lack of support for Jones from headquarters made their continued existence that much more precarious.

In time, increasing conflicts with conference leaders and Jones’ own weariness with travel led him to refocus his work. Now located in Chicago, he turned his gaze to a struggling congregation in town, Fourth Unitarian Church. He gathered the dozen remaining members and it grew rapidly, changing its name to All Souls Church. Again, he was a dynamo in the community: sponsoring weekday lecture series, helping to found the Chicago Peace Society and starting the first Post Office Mission, similar to our Church of the Larger Fellowship today, that mailed sermons and tracts to people in distant places.

Arguably, Jones’ most spectacular success was as general secretary of the group the planned the 1893 World Parliament of Religions. Other more prominent religious leaders captured the headlines in the event that provided the first exposure that many Americans ever had to Asian religions. But it likely could not have come about without Jones as the sparkplug to make all the logistics work.

The glow of the parliament left Jones less inclined than ever to compromise with what seemed to him a hide-bound bureaucracy in Boston and soon after he withdrew All Souls from the American Unitarian Association. He tried building another alliance of liberal religions, but it crashed.

Instead, he turned his attention to creating the Abraham Lincoln Center, a settlement house modelled after Jane Addams’ Hull House. Designed by his nephew, Frank Lloyd Wright, it included apartments for Jones and several teachers, a 900-seat hall, classrooms, a library, gymnasium, art rooms and space for all sorts of gatherings. It proved to be an important gathering center on Chicago’s South Side, where it continues to operate today, one of Jones’ most enduring legacies.

With war on its way, Jones – the avowed pacifist – found himself marginalized even more. He was among the few clergy in America who publicly and urgently opposed it, reminding his hearers of the horrors he himself had experienced a half century before. Many ministers who shared his views, including Unitarians, lost their pulpits, but Jones remained at All Souls.

In 1918, shortly after the U.S entered the war, Jones died, cared for near Madison, just down the road from a chapel his family had built at a summer camp he had created at the site of an old Civil War tower used to make shot for rifles. It is now a state park. The epitaph on his grave at the family cemetery was from a quote of Abraham Lincoln’s, a favorite of Jones’: “He sought to pull up a thistle and plant a flower wherever a flower could grow.”

I guess you can tell that I have some affection for old Jenkin Lloyd Jones – untiring activist, Welsh farm boy, visionary leader. Back when I was a student intern at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin I impersonated Jones as my closing sermon for that congregation – complete with bushy, white beard and 19th century frock coat.

It seemed a good choice, both because of Jones’ connections to Wisconsin and because the Madison church was another of those building’s was designed by his nephew, Frank. And the connection is not a bad one to raise here too, since our member Bill Moore was deeply influenced by Wright in his design of this building.

As at the Madison church, the natural materials in this structure – wood and stone – give you a sense of place, an organic connection that links us and all things in one world, and the windows from many angles that bring the outside in, that let in the light, uncolored, unaltered that reminds us how widely truth is to be found.

I also I turn to Jenkin Lloyd Jones as I wonder what our future as a congregation might be. News reports are full of speculation about the decline of religion in this country. Churches are closing, denominations are scaling back, polls show fewer and fewer identify with institutionalized religion in any form. Like every religious body, we, too, must make our case – what are we here for: what are we here to be, what are we here to do?

These are questions that your Board of Trustees and I will invite you to be asking and answering this coming year – not because we fear for the future but because we want to be clear, and we want for that clarity to drive our work together. There will be different venues to do this, but when the time comes I hope you will all be part of the conversation.

One of the abiding charms of Jenkin Lloyd Jones was his unstinting hope and optimism, derived simply from a faith in what we humans are capable of achieving, the conviction, in his words that, “salvation lies in the unmarked possibilities of the soul.”

Part of what we exist as a congregation to do is to persuade each other, and sometimes ourselves, of this truth. As Wislawa Szymborska puts it, we are each “coincidence(s) no less unthinkable than any other,” each with our own gifts and our own quirks, and all of them added together have created this incredible confluence of events that is our life. What an astonishing thing, this life, hurtling along on the knife-blade of time. How shall we use it?

Well, here again, Jenkin Lloyd Jones offers some instruction. “Nothing in this world,” he wrote, “stands alone.” Rather, all of us are measured by our expanding sympathies. And so it is by the gesture of opening, of inviting, of embracing that our measure is made, that our hopes are made real, that our destiny is realized, so that at our life’s close we might be left with that one gift that is ours alone, that realizes us better than any other: our amazement.

The Allure of the Golden Calf (text & audio)

 

Where were you when you first felt it, that plaintive tug of alluring, almost painful pleasure? Something that grabbed you like nothing had grabbed you before, that filled you with longing and got your heart pumping like crazy.

Debussy’s “Syrinx,” it seems to me, captures that feeling about as well as any piece of music does – thank you, Bradford. That haunting series of chromatic cascades that begins it invites us out of the conventional world where we live into a seductive place of mystery and possibility.

The piece evokes the Greek myth of the satyr Pan who was smitten by the wood nymph Syrinx and pursued her into the woods. The story goes that Syrinx, wanted nothing to do with Pan’s advances and fled. Eventually, though, she was trapped at the edge of a river and implored her sister wood nymphs to help her escape. They obliged by turning Syrinx into a reed – a waterside plant – so that when Pan reached out to grab her he found himself hugging an armful of rushes.

Defeated, Pan gave such a deep sigh that it resonated through the reeds and created a melody. Pan was intrigued by this sound and so cut some reeds and made the first set of pan pipes. He played them wherever he went and their haunting sound was said to have delighted the gods. Debussy’s piece, which he wrote in 1912, became famous as the first piece for solo flute by a European composer in about 300 years.

Beyond its cleverness as a kind of “just so” story, this myth also offers some illumination for our topic today – an old word we don’t bandy about much these days – idolatry.

Pan is hardly the first to have had a monomania around an alluring figure he chased through the woods. I’d venture that most of us have had the experience at some time in our lives of falling hard for some unobtainable person somewhere. The “chasing” we do may involve direct contact with that person, but more often I think it’s likely to be something like watching his TV show or buying her album.

It’s fun, but in time most of us recognize it as the pleasant little diversion that it was. We move on. Reality sets in. We get our priorities straight, get a life and make a way in the world. For those who can’t let go, they, like Pan, eventually discover an armful of rushes where they had thought to find the object of their affection.

That image on your order of service harkens back to one of the great moments of crisis for the early Hebrews described in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. The story is that while the people are camped at Mt. Sinai, after Moses has delivered the 10 Commandments, God calls Moses back up the mountain for another 40 days to give him further instructions.

After he is gone for some time, the Israelites get nervous and urge Moses’ brother, Aaron, the high priest, “Come, make Gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

So, Aaron directs the people to take off all their gold rings and bring them to him, and from them he crafts the image of a calf. The people declare, “These are your gods,” and Aaron calls for a festival to be held.

Meanwhile, up on the mountain God is enraged. He urges Moses to return to his people, and vows to destroy them all. Moses dissuades God from doing that, but on returning to the camp he angrily smashes tablets he brought down, onto which God had written his covenant with the Israelites, and destroys the golden calf. He rallies supporters to his side who move through the camp killing several thousand people who had reveled before the golden calf.

A grim episode, right? And it’s one regarded among Jewish scholars as the greatest scandal during the Israelites’ passage through the wilderness. There are debates over what the calf really represented, whether this text represents some kind of internecine conflict in later times. And the fact that it is not Aaron, but the people who demanded the calf who suffer, tends to support that take.

Still, it is fascinating to find this event appearing in the text where it does, just a short time after God was said to have pronounced the 10 commandments, an event accompanied, so we are told, with thunder and lightning. Pretty impressive!

And yet, no sooner is Moses out of sight than the people are ready toss these commandments aside, beginning with the first: “you shall have no other gods before me.”

It’s telling that this prohibition against false images for the divine runs across religious traditions. In Islam it is one of the greatest sins a person can perform. This explains why Muslim art permits no images of any living thing, lest believers mistakenly worship it as an image of Allah. And in Buddhism, a famous Zen story warns against mistaking a finger point at the moon for the moon.

A caution against idolatry also led our Puritan forebears to build plain meetinghouses without images, icons, even stained glass. Nothing, they felt, should distract the worshipper from the contemplation of God. And, of course, that takes us to the heart of the question, a puzzle that resides with every religious tradition. How does one come to know the holy?

Texts are written, disciplines are taught, teachers are recognized, prophets are honored. But in the end, religion, if it is to mean anything, must connect with us, must touch some place deep inside. It must evoke from us an affirmation that is life-giving, that lifts us out of our personal worries and awakens us to how deeply we are connected to each other and all life, how blessed we are simply to be.

But, as we’ve already established, there are so many things that can get our blood racing, that can give us, at least for a time, a sensation of fulfillment. How, then, are we to distinguish this feeling of deep connection from other feelings that can lead us to paths that are unfulfilling, even destructive?

One way we can read J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of Middle Earth is as an extended reflection on idolatry. The ring of power that Bilbo chances on in Gollum’s cave, in the passage Bob read earlier, is at the center of the tale, a character in itself really. Created, so the story goes, by a powerful figure in a craven attempt to dominate the world, it seeks to enthrall anyone it comes into contact with to the same vain end. So, in a kind of reversal of the holy grail myth, the point of the journey that the Lord of the Rings books tell is not to find an icon that will bring great spiritual power, but to destroy an evil idol and so release all beings from its curse.

For two decades Chris Hedges, author of our first reading, was a distinguished foreign correspondent for the New York Times, covering wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia. He writes, though, that when he returned to New York City at the end of his tours he was exhausted and unsure of where he was headed. The experience of war in all its confusion and depravity had wrung him dry.

Before entering newspaper work Hedges had studied in seminary but in the end concluded that the work wasn’t for him. Returning to the states, though, he found himself revisiting the themes of his religious studies that now put his experience in sharp relief.

And so in one of his books in the years following he used the prism of the 10 commandments, words he first learned growing up the son of a Presbyterian minister, to put his experience into focus and also help find a measure of peace.

I say that Hedges explored all 10 of the commandments, but throughout his book, Losing Moses on the Highway, it is really the first that seems to weigh most heavily on his mind. And I think that’s because, as he sees it, our human inclination at times to hitch our wagons to unworthy stars can loosen whatever other mores may guide us and open the door to some of the worst mischief of which humankind is capable.

Still, this is tricky. Remember that the error, the problem at the heart of idolatry is confusing something of small value with something of large value. This sounds like it ought to be easy to spot, but it isn’t necessarily.

How does one come to know the holy? As Chris Hedges points out, in traditional religious terms the holy is ineffable, hidden. Its mystery, he says, “frustrates and defies us.” We are left with no certainty or security. What do we do?

Well, we seek out comfort, but we find treacherous ground. There is an allure to a way of living that assures us of convenience and ease, complete with pre-packaged judgments and confident trajectories. There are, of course, compromises we make to get there, but we accept them for the security they seem to bring.

It is only when we chafe against them, or find ourselves pricked by their consequences that we learn their limits and the hollowness of the conformity that they demand. In that light, we can see them as the idols they are – images, ideas that we adopted or affirmed to protect and calm ourselves.

As Chris Hedges points out, the fundamental flaw with idols is that they “are always about self-worship.” We’re taking care of number one here, and if the messy world can’t see fit to make that happen, well, I’m going to organize my life to make sure it does.

Really?

Hedges says that one of the chief lessons he learned on his tours through war-torn countries was that the idols we humans create have no mercy. They may, for a time, bring us pleasure; they may bring us consolation, but in the end they simply consume us.

So, how to escape? We begin, he suggests, by exiting the bubble of self-affirmation and self-approval that we live in. We begin listening to the prickling of our conscience, the voice of a deeper wisdom in our hearts, and begin paying attention to and extending ourselves to others with humility and compassion.

There is no point in grandiose gestures, Hedges says. “Only the small, mundane acts of life save us,” he said. “They hold at bay the crippling power of death and despair. They allow us to live, allow us to be human, allow us to affirm others and ourselves.”

How does one come to know the holy? In such acts: in acts of compassion and sacrifice that reach beyond our narrow circle, in acts that affirm the abundance of this world, this life, and don’t feed on the fear of scarcity.

We come to know the holy through love, and love, as Chris Hedges points out, “means living for others.” Many parents, he says, “know this sacrifice, not the temporary sacrifice made to assist another, but the daily sacrifice to create life at the expense of our pleasure, career and dreams.”

“There is drudgery and difficulty in this self-denial,” he says, and yet it is in this self-giving that we create and preserve life: Life on life and ever greater life, and in this life we find a peace that goes with us even as we move through darkness and confront our greatest fears.

You may recall that last fall I introduced you to a chant by Rabbi Shefa Gold that was centered on the Hebrew phrase in a verse from the 23rd Psalm that expresses this sense of abundance, of life on life and ever greater life. The passage usually translated as “my cup runneth over” or “my cup overflows.” This image invites us to imagine the blessings of our lives as an unending flood pouring over us, so great they exceed even our boundless need.

I’d like to invite you to sing it with me again, and in your singing, as you can, unburden yourself of the fears that clutch at you, that might incline you to build idols in your heart. You yourself are enough, and the beauty, the wonder, the joy of this life is so great, and the love you hold is so powerful as to overflow all bounds.

The phrase is, “Kosi r’vaya.”

Photo credit: the Providence Lithograph Company / Foter / Public domain

A Faith for the Few? (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward
I am learning that I need to be careful of the topics I choose for worship, lest I be given lessons I’d just as soon not have. This week is a good example. As I began mulling over how I would address the topic of class this Sunday, I promptly lost my wallet. Actually, it turned out it wasn’t lost – thanks to a reminder from my wife, Debbie, I discovered it eventually in a coat pocket. But for a good hour or so Monday morning I was tearing around frantically, convinced that it was gone. What would I do now?

 

I am learning that I need to be careful of the topics I choose for worship, lest I be given lessons I’d just as soon not have. This week is a good example.

As I began mulling over how I would address the topic of class this Sunday, I promptly lost my wallet. Actually, it turned out it wasn’t lost – thanks to a reminder from my wife, Debbie, I discovered it eventually in a coat pocket. But for a good hour or so Monday morning I was tearing around frantically, convinced that it was gone. What would I do now?

It took a while to calm down after I found it, but when I did, I reflected on the experience and how I had reacted to it. Why was this such a big deal to me? I don’t carry much cash in my wallet, so I wouldn’t have lost much money, and just about everything in it of any importance can be replaced, even if it is a pain to do so. No, there was something more than that, and the more I thought about it, I realized that it has something to do with class.

Open my wallet and you can learn a good bit about my class status. Prominently displayed is a driver’s license: no big deal, right? A matter of course for most of us here, but a credential that already puts me in an echelon above many other people in Asheville, and as accepted identification gives me access to everything from an airline seat to a bottle of wine.

Then, you’ll find a credit card and debit card, evidence that I have sufficient income and assets to persuade at least a couple of banks to take a chance on giving me credit. Again, not especially uncommon, but a credential that puts me in even more exclusive company.

And then, ah, a health insurance card, evidence that either I or my spouse are employed – probably full-time or nearly – at a company large and bountiful enough to provide this coverage.

And then you’ll find a random collection of cards that round out the picture – from a library card, not especially exclusive, to a triple A membership, a little less common – and then cards for things like Ingles, the Biltmore, the North Carolina Arboretum, 12 Bones, Ultimate Ice Cream, and more.

OK, all this may be interesting at some level. But it doesn’t really address what had been the source of my distress. When I thought about it, I realized that all those things in my wallet speak not only to whatever my class status may be; they also remind me of my privilege. They give me access and entrée that make my way in the world easier, more enjoyable and less stressful. And they command some level of respect among other people.

What’s tricky, of course, is that the respect is tied to the credential, not to me. Without the credential, where would I be, who would I be? If I couldn’t get someone to vouch for me, if I didn’t have some record that I was who I said I was and was deserving of that privilege, what would I do? That’s part of what I found myself thinking about as I mulled over having to replace the contents of my wallet.

These were not the sorts of things I spent must time thinking about when I was growing up. I was raised the oldest son of a psychiatrist, lived in a nice house, took vacations, had my way paid to college, and lived with the expectation that my adult life would follow suit.

And, why not? That was the script that my social circle followed, and an important part of that circle was the Unitarian Universalist church my family attended. This was Princeton, New Jersey, in the 1960s and early ‘70s and the baby boom was booming. The church was growing quickly with many families like ours – young professionals or people associated with the university. It appealed to people looking for alternatives to their childhood churches, and the UU dedication to freedom of belief and religion responsive to reason felt right to them.

This trend was repeated across the association. Indeed, it was the heart of its growth strategy. As early the 1950s Unitarians had made a point of targeting growing suburbs near universities as the most promising sites for new congregations. Princeton was one of a number of the places where that strategy proved right.

Yet as Mark Harris, one of our eminent historians and minister of the UU congregation in Watertown, Massachusetts, points out, as suburban churches grew, urban and rural churches declined and with them the hope of cultivating the kind of diversity in our movement that we said we sought. Congregations still insisted they wanted to appeal to people of all races, classes and ethnicities, but as a rule it was white, middle- to upper-middle-class whites who found a home there.

In his book, Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, Mark notes that the two strains of our movement followed different paths to this place. Our Unitarian forebears succeeded in the theological debates in early 19th century Boston, and for years they occupied many of the high pulpits there that drew the elite. While there were reformers among them, as a rule, Mark says, “Unitarians tended to sacrifice social justice for the need for harmony.”

Leading families of Boston joined Unitarian congregations as did the educated elite. In the 1850s, he says, two-thirds of the wealthiest Bostonians were Unitarian, as were 80% of the faculty at Harvard University and three-quarters of its student body.

After the Civil War, though, their numbers began to decline, so the Unitarians began a campaign to expand. Once again, they targeted the educated elite, seeking to found churches in college towns. They had some success before the program ended at the turn of the century.

Universalism followed a different path. It first took root among farmers and tradespeople in the hill country of northern New England in the early 19th century and then spread mostly to small towns in the Northeast and Midwest. Intellectual rigor mattered, but educational achievement didn’t as much. And this had its roots as much in theology as the social situation of its people. Unlike the Unitarians, who saw religion as a matter of self-culture, Universalists had the goal, as Mark Harris puts it, of drawing the entire human family in “one moral community.”

Both denominations struggled in the early 20th century, and many churches closed. In the post-war boom, it was the Unitarians who put a priority on starting new congregations, and like their forebears a century before they targeted college or university towns. The “fellowship movement,” as it was called, was a huge success, resulting in the founding of dozens of congregations, including this one.

But unlike their predecessors a century before who sought to cultivate congregations of the elite, planners of the fellowship movement projected a vision of their new starts as egalitarian centers, drawing people from many backgrounds and making a religious home for all. In an early report, Lon Ray Call, who led the Unitarian extension work, argued that the faith was “now growing most rapidly among those without college training or any religious background.”

And yet, it is hardly surprising that these congregations started in college towns, led by college faculty or other professionals, attracted people of similar backgrounds. And, again, hardly surprising: they were less welcoming to and generally rarely recruited into membership people of other educational or cultural backgrounds. And so it remains in many of our congregations. A national survey of religious identification 20 years ago found that of all religious identifiers Unitarian Universalists had the highest level of what was called “socioeconomic attainment,” essentially education, employment, income, and property ownership.

Now, on one level this is hardly anything to complain about. That people of means and educational achievement find a home in our congregations is a good thing. But another aspect of that survey is worth taking note of. Of all the religions asked about in the survey, ours was by far the smallest in size. And not only that, but since then our numbers have continued to dwindle.  So, the question arises, are we just a boutique religion, a convenient gathering place for some progressive folks of privilege? Is that our vision of ourselves? Are we, as Mark Harris puts it, a faith of the few?

Well, clearly not if we take seriously how we describe ourselves and our aspirations, not if we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; and acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth – to quote just the first three of our seven principles.

We know that the appeal of this religious movement is broader than those demographics would suggest because many people who don’t fit them are coming to us now and have been for many years. The problem is that some have a hard time finding a home here, and we lose when they leave.

Successes in life – wealth, education, professional achievement – are to be celebrated – Ph.D.’s and Priuses are grand things – but they only get us so far. The famous passage in the Book of Mark in the Bible where Jesus declares, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” speaks to this.

The point I take from it is not that there is anything wrong with riches. It is that riches get you only so much, and a couple of things they won’t give you is peace of mind and heart.

My experience losing my wallet was a good reminder of this. As I was scrambling to find it, I was suddenly aware in an almost existential way of how vulnerable I was.  I depend on the privileges represented by the cards stuffed in my wallet to ease my way through the world, to expand my options when opportunity presents itself and to shelter me when the storms come. Without it, the world was suddenly a scarier place. And it reminded me of how for so many people, that scarier place is where they live. By dint of luck or circumstance they lack the privileges I carry in my back pocket.

For those of us who carry such privileges, it’s easy to make them a lens through which we view the world. But they give us a distorted picture, one that overlooks how fragile our hold on such things is.

There are those among you, I know, who have first-hand experience of this. Job loss, illness, divorce – you name it – can unhinge your life and with it all the assumptions you held about how you would make your way in the world. But more important, they separate us from each other.

This takes us back to an important gift from our Universalist forebears – the understanding that our hopes, our values, our very identities are realized in relationship, and all that we do to divide the world into sheep and goats only serves to estrange us from ourselves.

Our congregations, then, if they are to be successful, must become places where we are invited to imagine a different way of being, a way of being that begins with our ultimate commonality, the truth of our unity. It can be a hard place to get to, and sometimes we run up against each other’s sharp edges along the way. But we are called from that deep source within us that we name in many ways – hope, love, God – to return and reengage.

The work that this religious movement, this faith calls us to needs all of us – as I say each Sunday, whatever our heritage, whatever our history, whomever we love – if we have our hope of making an impact on the world. And none of us brings a privileged perspective to that work because we are all of us, however we make our way in the world, fragile and fallible beings with our own struggles and our own fears.

In the end, as Annie Dillard reminds us, that will have to do. There is no one of purer heart or cleaner hand who can do this for us, no one who won’t stumble or get their tongues tied with awkward faux pas. We have only the simple balm of humility and gratitude to offer each other in the hope that in our fitful ways we can find healing and a way forward toward the promise of peace.

photo credit: http://theseattlesalmon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/prius-stickers.jpg

Wonder More (text & audio)

 

The path began on packed, dun-colored soil leading into a grove of eucalyptus trees, winding along the edge of a suburban development and then into a narrow ravine. As we hiked, we looked into the trees and occasionally spotted a bit of fluttery motion up in the highest branches.

But it wasn’t until we reached a kind of glen at the center of the grove on the edge of the ravine and sat quietly on the trunk of a fallen tree that we really began to see them. Clustered on branches and flitting lazily between them, hundreds of Monarch butterflies came into view. They were soundless as they dived and soared or simply perched in the cool shade of the massive trees, redolent with their primal perfume.

Debbie and I had spotted the Coronado Butterfly Preserve, just north of Santa Barbara, California, one of the largest wintering sites for Monarchs on the west coast, in our guidebook, but we had no idea what to expect. What we found was somehow both less and more than what we expected.

We had watched those nature specials on TV about the Monarch wintering sites in Mexico where millions of butterflies coat the branches of trees, and experienced butterfly exhibits at museums where dozens of butterflies dance in the air around you and even land on your clothes.

This was nothing like either of those. The butterflies, to be honest, had no interest in us at all, and their numbers were far from overwhelming. And yet, I found I wanted to hold my breath, not quiet believing I was seeing what I saw.

In fact, I think that the fact that this spectacle hadn’t been ginned up for our benefit – other than the town choosing to preserve the space and blaze a trail into it – added to its magic. The human impulse to wonder, we know, is easily tripped. Entertainers across the ages have perfected many ways of making that happen, and we play along. It feels good to experience a “Wow!” every now and then.

But we also learn to calibrate our responses when that impulse is stirred. In the movie theater, the chase scenes and special effects may make our blood race, but in the end we know we’re being manipulated. We’re careful, though, because there is something credulous in our impulse to wonder, something in us that unconsciously wants to believe what we have just seen.

Parents often are surprised to find that a film they remember as heart-warming and fun contains a scene that strikes terror in their child. I, too, have learned to avoid certain kinds of films that I feel are likely to contain images that I would just as soon not have imprinted on my memory.

But in our increasingly visual culture we seem to be going the other way – with more and more graphic and heart-racing images being thrust into our field of view. Some people seek shelter from this assault on the senses, while others increasingly seek it out, finding in the stimulation a way of enlivening the dull routine of day to day. Whatever our response, it takes its toll on our impulse to wonder, something our culture teaches us either to distrust or exploit.

So, into this maelstrom comes Mary Oliver with her musings on a summer day. She begins her poem with these questions – “Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear, and the grasshopper?” These are the questions not of catechism with foreordained answers but of credulous wonder. They are open and opening – they set the mind meandering – and they are specific, at least the last one, because it is addressed with an eye to the grasshopper that Oliver has lured into her hand with a few grains of sugar, the one who – Look at that! – is moving her jaws back and forth, instead of up and down, the way that we do. I wonder why that is. And, huh! It has these enormous and complicated eyes. I wonder what that must be like. And then, those pale legs that so thoroughly wash its face, and wings that, zzt! carry it away.

She says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” but then she goes on to offer a suggestion – strolling through the fields, falling down into grass, lying idly, and paying attention.

Jeffrey Lockwood knows a bit about grasshoppers. A member of a UU congregation in Laramie, Wyoming, he is also an entomologist – expert on insects – at the University of Wyoming. In his book, Grasshopper Dreaming, he notes that grasshoppers are a topic of great interest for the farmers of the west, primarily because they want to kill them. Grasshoppers, after all, can decimate crops.

So, Lockwood tells of a project he undertook shortly after arriving at the University of Wyoming to learn more about how grasshoppers behave.

His strategy was not very different from Mary Oliver’s: he sat in a short-grass prairie not far from Laramie and simply videotaped a particular species of grasshopper – and not just on a summer afternoon, but for hundreds of hours from June through September. As you might imagine, spending that much time with grasshoppers gave him a keen insight into how they spend their time – their behaviors, their interactions. In the scientific paper he wrote afterward, he was able to conclude categorically that the main thing that grasshoppers do each day is – nothing! That’s right – nothing!

For 43 minutes out of every hour, Lockwood found, grasshoppers did not appear to be “doing” anything. They simply sat there – perhaps taking in the scenery, perhaps digesting their food, perhaps in Zen meditation – who knows! In his paper, he called this “resting.

This, of course, makes no sense under our present day theories of ecology. After all, he said, he discovered that the daily mortality rate of these insects was 2%. That means that only about a third of those born in the spring will survive to reproduce as adults. Wait a minute. Isn’t survival supposed to be the prime instinct? What are they doing just sitting around? Shouldn’t they get at it: you know, eating, mating . . . whatever? Time’s a’wastin’! But, no. As Lockwood puts it, “grasshoppers are incredibly blasé about reproduction or feeding.” No big fight for survival. Hey, chill, dude!

Where Lockwood goes with this is not to rewrite Aesop’s fable – maybe the grasshopper had it right over the ant to begin with – but to invite the move to wonder. In looking over the landscape, we humans can become so intoxicated with our ability to define and describe that we can fail to acknowledge how much mystery and randomness surrounds our lives. As he puts it, “unable to manifest humility or reverence, we conquer the void by dint of language and faith.”

Lockwood explains this by pointing to our proclivity to assign names to things. As in Genesis when God invites Adam to name the creatures he has made, we fit what we experience into a framework we create, which enables us to explain it. This certainly has some utility, but we fool ourselves if we miss the circularity of that process and what it leaves out.

Like Meg Barnhouse’s uncle, in our reading, who assigned the hand of Providence to every event, we can tie ourselves into knots when we insist on jamming all that we experience into a box of our own creation. The fact remains that every explanation we make is limited by the information we have and the imagination we can bring to the task – both of which are always finite and incomplete. In the end, most of us learn to hold our conclusions lightly, aware, even expecting that they will be adjusted if not contradicted in time.

I have always felt that Isaac Newton made this point best. “To myself,” he said, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

It occurs to me now that Newton’s observation really is not a lament of all he hasn’t uncovered but a declaration of wonder at the beauty and mystery of the world. Jeff Lockwood, too, finds a great sea of wonder in the resting grasshopper, remembering, as he puts it, that in the great scheme of things, the grasshopper exists for no particular purpose. It just is, he says, “and that’s enough.”

So Mary Oliver would say, and so I found myself saying about the Monarch butterflies tracing loopy flights over my head. The sun at high noon, the stars in dark space, from the hymn we sang earlier: they exist for no purpose. They simply are. The glad joys that heal, the tears in our eyes, the longings we feel, the light of surprise – they exist for no purpose, but to enliven us, to awaken us.

I have been intrigued in the last year or so to follow the emergence of a group that has chosen to promote wonder as one of its founding principles. The Sunday Assembly, which describes itself as “a global movement of wonder and good,” has been gathering what it calls “godless congregations” mostly in Britain and the U.S.

The group was started by a pair of British comedians, and it convenes what they call Sunday “events” that include talks and music that, they say, “celebrate life” and seek to “make the world a better place.” Their motto: live better, help often, wonder more.

The group’s debt to Unitarian Universalism is easy to see – we’ve been using the phrase “celebration of life” to describe worship since the 1950s – though they also offer the twist, at least when its founders are leading, of merging worship with improv together with pop songs. It’s a fascinating thing to watch.

I’m not especially concerned with The Sunday Assembly as a potential competitor – organizing congregations, its founders will discover, is challenging work whatever your grounding. But they do have some interesting ideas and perhaps a few things to teach us, so let a thousand flowers bloom!

Beyond that, though, I appreciate how they are joining us in holding up wonder as a religious value. Thirty years ago, when our association came together to identify the sources of the rich and living tradition from which we arose, we began here: “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

The move to wonder is essentially the first step in our spiritual or religious lives. It is that in us that steps away for a moment from the quotidian details of our daily comings and goings and reaches for a vision of the whole, that opens to us a sense of the larger context in which we live.

And the thing about wonder is that it doesn’t take diligent work to achieve it. In fact, the opposite is usually the case: strolling through a New England meadow on a summer day, or a grove of eucalyptus trees in a California suburb. It’s the kind of thing we don’t always give ourselves permission for – good ants that we are, busily checking things off our lists.

But Mary Oliver doesn’t let us get away easily. Tell me, she says of her romp through the meadow, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Do we have time, maybe, to wander and wonder a little more? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Youth Sunday 2014

Below are the speeches from some of UUCA’s youth at the February 16 Youth Sunday services.

 

Olivia Patterson

As humans, and, perhaps more relevantly, as humans living through an age blossoming with industrial science and exploration, we are continuously taught the values of comparison. My generation, born to become accustomed to the mundane normalities of an unprecedented age of technology, have been bombarded, over time, to look first at our surroundings before coming back to congratulate ourselves on matters both pressing and insignificant. Since I was an underclassman of elementary school, teachers, mentors, and other role models have encouraged me to measure my sense of success upon the successes of others. Vices to promote comparison–even healthy comparison–surround us on an hourly basis. It’s impossible not to compare ourselves and our accomplishments to those of others when we live in a time where the tools to find almost all of the information that we could possibly ask for are as accessible as couple clicks on our smartphones to grasp and internalize.

Paralleled with the growing importance our society is continuing to place upon self-love and the growing awareness we have for the consequences that develop due to a lack of it, the reality of just how much comparing we really do between ourselves and others is confusing and overwhelming. In the end, however, like most problems we have to solve, the answers ultimately lie within us. Finding personal satisfaction is so difficult in a society that measures each individual success in a quota or a goal, but when we learn to accept ourselves, both for our strengths and for our shortcomings, we can begin to own the truth that it is not up to others to determine the things that make each of us beautiful, unique, and valuable.

May we light this chalice today as a reminder to strive towards satisfaction with the little things that make each of us special without the nagging voice of a comparison.

Kenzie Himelein-Wachowiak

Way back on the other side of this winter, amidst warm days and back-to-school fervor, before the words “Youth Sunday” had ever left any of our cynically crinkled mouths, I was presented with a challenge that required more insight than I had time for; My governor’s school essay endowed me with significant power: specifically, I was to identify a problem that plagued society, and detail how I would go about correcting it.

The essay was quite open-ended, leaving the array of applicants an opportunity for political rant, contemplative spiritual discussion, or intense analysis of human nature. While I try to allocate a specific slice of my effort towards considering the needs of others, I admit that I can be quite selfish at times. This state of mind can be forgivable, since it is the default setting of being; that is, the only thoughts and feelings you are acutely aware of are your own. Still I am slightly ashamed to admit that I bypassed the most obvious and the most rampant plagues on the population and selected one from the very short list of problems that I am, in my excessively comfortable lifestyle, familiar with.

One snowy morning, I was absent-mindedly flipping through my psychology textbook when I came across an interesting paradox. According to numerous surveys, those who valued happiness tended to be less happy than those who didn’t view it to be important. Though the finding was presented as one of the science’s many conclusions that contradict common sense, as a person who is practically living the concept described, I can’t say I was even remotely surprised. Just flip the words around a bit and I think you’ll see: Those who are the most unhappy, the most dissatisfied with their lives, view the trait they lack as being the most crucial to their actualization. In the end it’s just another vicious cycle of wanting what you don’t have.

The night before it was due, and not without excessive use of the backspace button, I constructed an essay that I hoped would be taken as original rather than trivial. It detailed a looming dissatisfaction that I have noticed not only in myself but in others as well, fueled by a society in which worth is measured by letters on a report card or digits on a paycheck. The feeling of inadequacy that results from such assessment has a way of eating you from the inside out, making you question what not too long ago you thought to be happiness.

To those of you who are still wondering how I proposed to solve this persistent problem: It was really quite simple, and reading back through, I hope not too naive. I am not arrogant enough to assert experience where there is none, and I have been sparing, at best, with the phrase “I understand.” Yet I believe sympathy can be a worthwhile substitute for empathy, and thus the essence of my solution could be summarized in one word: Listen.

I encourage you to listen to the reflections today, intended to address a concern that is common despite its ugliness. General unhappiness is an intricate phenomenon, yet one that can often be at least slightly alleviated not with grandiose or material musings but with genuine connections to oneself, others, or a higher power. I miss the days when smiles would frequent the faces of those close to me, and perhaps it is my discontentedness that actually fuels my capacity for hope, but I am not willing to accept the notion that those days are behind us.

McKenna Sarae

This reading comes from Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World. In this scene, the “Savage” refers to John, who by birth is considered an outsider to both the utopian world of technology and the Reservation where so-called primitive people live. He is having a debate with Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe, about his disillusionment with utopian society. He argues that its technological wonders and soulless consumerism are no substitute for individual freedom, human dignity, and personal integrity. Reading follows but cannot be published on our website due to copyright laws.

Molly Horak

“Life isn’t measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”  When I first heard this quote, it stuck in my mind.  Why is life not measured like this in the first place?  Why had it taken me 16 years to realize it?  So I promptly went home, searched Pinterest for a crafty idea, and painted a sign that is now hanging above my bed.  It’s the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night, and I swear, in the few months that I’ve had it hanging, it has certainly changed my thinking about my life.

Earlier this year, in our YRUU class, we watched a TED talk entitled “Before I die, I want to…” In it, a New Orleans woman turned an abandoned building in her neighborhood into a chalkboard wall, where people would write their dreams and goals for their lives.  This poignant video got us thinking, and the next week, when we walked into class, one of the walls in our Jefferson house classroom was turned into a “Before I die…” board.  Over time it filled up with dreams large and small, as a tangible reminder of what we should strive for in life.

But while the wall was supposed to be a positive reminder of our life’s ambitions, it quickly began to have a very different connotation to me.  Instead of making me feel encouraged about where my life was headed, it made me feel like none of my dreams were attainable.  I couldn’t just hop on a plane and travel the world; I was no closer to moving into a perfect house in a big city, or getting a job that I love and starting a family.   I began to realize that though my dreams were big, and always will be big, they might not be accessible at this moment.

So then, what do I strive for?  Where does my life go now?

I don’t think that we should give up our big dreams because they won’t happen tomorrow.  But, I do think smaller, more manageable goals are the way to go.  Each day, I try to do three things- make someone laugh, help someone in need, and do something fun for myself. Maybe I’ll talk to a friend that I don’t see any more, or I’ll invite a girl in my class who just moved to America to sit with me at lunch. Some days I succeed, and others I don’t, but I’m constantly trying, and that’s what matters.

I also began to notice the little things that made me happy during the day—the simple, mundane, everyday activities that make me smile. When my favorite song comes on the radio; laughing hysterically with my friends.  Acing a test at school when I had been convinced I was going to fail or cooking dinner with my mom.  I began to see that while I wasn’t going to drive off in a new Ferrari anytime soon, my life was pretty great.

We live in a materialistic world that equates happiness with success.  The bigger your paycheck, the larger your house, the more people think that you have it all.  But that’s not necessarily the case.  I think that personal happiness comes when you yourself are satisfied with your life, not what other people think is the ideal lifestyle. By appreciating what occurs in my life, I’ve begun to see that while my life may not be perfect, it’s what I’ve got, and I should make it count.  I’m grateful for the positives, and I know that the trials I face are only going to make me stronger.  I say thank you more, I frown less, and I understand that while it’s not always going to be a walk in the park, I’m going to make sure that I embrace whatever happens with open arms and gratitude.  Because life isn’t measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Quincy Kitson

Do you feel like something’s missing from your life? Do you feel sad, blue, or unhappy? Do you feel trapped or caught? Are you dissatisfied with your life? Well, chances are popping a Prozac is not the answer. Instead, I’m here to tell you about the wonderful new discovery that is human interaction. Now while this may seem a little odd coming from a 16 year old that uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Ask fm, Snapchat, Path, and Tumblr, I’m here to give a speech on human interaction. Lol.

Before I begin, I want to dismiss one major idea. As we proceed through life, we become increasingly self-sufficient. This can eventually lead to the idea of “rugged individualism”, which roughly means you think you can go through life and be totally satisfied without the help of others. I’ve come to the conclusion that this idea is #bogus.

Let’s start with the assumption that you’re happier when with your friends. Yes this is true, it’s been proven, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you’re probably happier when you’re with other people.  Remember this doesn’t mean you have to always be socializing, it’s also ok to occasionally spend a day binge watching breaking bad. It only means you need to occasionally leave your bedroom and share your happiness with other people. It’s often said that happiness is contagious. Well, it just so turns out that the people that said this may have been on to something. On multiple occasions, scientific studies have shown that there is a correlation between your happiness and your friends happiness. One study by Psychologist James H. Fowler even found a correlation between your happiness, and your friends’ friends’ friends’ happiness. So next time somebody gets onto you for having 900 Facebook friends, you now have an answer.

That brings me to my point about technology. [Mira Skit]. Instances like the one Mira just portrayed, are becoming more and more common as we attempt to “modernize” ourselves. I think it’s important to address this, as it seems to be an intergenerational issue. The other day I was scrolling through my twitter feed when I noticed something by a friend of mine from middle school. It said “The day you reach 10,000 messages with someone is pretty special:) we’ve grown so close these past two months. #younglove #forever”. This is just one of many examples of the sad reality of some teenage relationships. Basing any kind of human relationship off of your connections of a social networking site is no substitute for real communication. I mean, if you chatted every day on Facebook with Anna Long from Taiwan, that wouldn’t make you best friends. So cross off creating a twitter account for yourself from your to do list for satisfaction.

As a final point, it’s important to note that family and friends have a lasting impact on your satisfaction with life. Real sciencey people describe this as “hedonic adaptation” : our tendency to quickly adapt to our changing circumstances. This is why people who win the lottery, for instance, usually find themselves at the same level of satisfaction they had before they won. Basically what happens is, you win the money, you buy some stuff with that money, and in a relatively short time, you’re fairly accustomed to your new life style, and your levels of satisfaction return to normal. Close relationships on the other hand, appear to have lasting impacts on levels of satisfaction for years to come. Instead of quickly returning to their previous levels of satisfaction, people engaged in close relationships tend to remain happier for longer periods of time. Now Federal law requires I list the side effects of this new medication for dissatisfaction called human interaction so I’ll list them for you now. “Side effects may include: being content, happiness, and above all satisfaction.

Larissa Wood

It was one of those cold November days where nobody’s used to the below-freezing chill, or the fact that the sun sets at practically 4 o’clock, and three of my friends sat cuddled before a fire sipping hot cocoa.  Yet, somehow amidst the cookies and music, we got to discussing global warming and the ever-impending doom of society.  I flicked off every single lamp in the room, and now our little huddle was solely lit by the flickers of the fire.

Our little quartet was made of three UUs and a Southern Baptist—Emma, Kenzie, and her boyfriend Bear. Kenzie leaned back on the couch and said . . .

“Oh, Bear, I’ve been meaning to ask you this—what do you imagine Heaven to be like?”

He leaned back on the couch, taking in the long inhale of a good question.  He tasted the air, it was laced with the lingering scent of cookies and wood smoke.

And then he told us about how his heaven would be like Earth but with everyone you never met, but if you had met would have been your best friend.  And how everyone you missed would be there, except the people who hadn’t made it there yet, but they would come later, and how there would be plenty of work, because he couldn’t imagine the idea of never having to work—because that would be boring.  And I looked at the fire, as it quickly dwindled away; the coal embers wavered like shreds of pastry.  I smiled; it was beautiful.

As UUs, I think Emma, Kenzie, and I can all attest that we listened . . . wistfully.  We have never had such faith in an afterlife like the one he spoke of.  Yet, I know that I also listened with ever-constant skepticism—wondering what work wouldn’t get boring in eternity, and what about all the people he loved who he believed would go to hell.

But, my point is not that he believes some of us may go to hell, or that heaven would get boring, but that this Heaven he spoke of was beautiful and grounding. When he spoke of heaven, he stared off into the fire with a sense of contentment that I have rarely ever seen on Bear’s face.  I sipped my hot chocolate, tasting that luminescent happiness of heaven.

One of my friends once said that Atheists wouldn’t be so bad if they could stop condescending religious people as stupid. I’m pretty sure I slapped him, but his blatant generalization, as most stereotypes are, is rooted in a truth.  A truth I find very sad.  For, ignoring the many flaws my skeptic-raised brain can nit-pick in every religion including our own, faith as a whole has the power to give so much support, hope, guidance, and community to people.  There is a reason humanity has created religion after religion.  It is not, and will never be, stupid.  With all of our critical thinking prowess, perhaps this human species thinks a bit too much about this universe that we are inexplicably dropped into.  Spiritual satisfaction is hard to come by.

When one dies, there are always two sets of three letters – one, being RIP. Rest in Peace:  in a world of such tension, turmoil, and dissatisfaction, death if anything seems to deserve rest. With peace goes the other three letters. “He was at peace with GOD.”  God.

Please don’t cringe.  I know how the occasional Unitarian tends to wince at this word, but we really shouldn’t be too avoidant.  The word itself is just three letters, right?  And yet, dang, those three letters are undeniably the three most powerful scribbles in human history.

But, when we think “at peace with God,” I think that really means at peace with yourself and your morals: to be satisfied with the way you have spent your life, to forgive yourself for your sins (and I don’t mean Biblical sins as much as the regrets of all poor decisions made), and to accept death.

I find that pretty formidable as a 17-year-old high school student that has not really done much with her 17 years.  And honestly, writing this speech feels horribly inadequate when half of my friends suffer from recurring depression, and two of my friends have seriously contemplated suicide.  Who am I to profess to you, to this wealth of memories, pain, and wisdom, that I know the secret of satisfaction?  The idea of that makes me feel sick.  I don’t know if I believe satisfaction is possible, furthermore, I don’t know if I believe it is desirable.  For, generally speaking satisfaction breeds complacency, and complacency breeds stagnancy.  In such a broken world, being satisfied with everything would either be naive or sociopathic.  Rather, I think it is spiritual satisfaction, sanity and survival that I stand here striving for.  I have no instructional manual for satisfaction; I think that’s something one has to construct for themselves.  But personally, I believe that accepting the dichotomy of joy and pain, understanding the lack of definite answers, and finding peace with what is solid is integral to at least part of that manual on satisfaction.

I laugh when I say my best friends, the mountains, and my favorite books are my spiritual rocks.  But to me, the fact that they actually exist in such meager perfection is reassuring and humbling. Someone’s rock may be the promise of heaven, and I think it’s important for all of us to respect it. But as much as we need solid rocks of core beliefs as sources of guidance and satisfaction, finding the beauty in transient, temporary, and even painful things is just as important. Heaven cannot be the only place of perfection, and if we only cling to perfect things, there is a danger in regarding everything else as broken.  As beautiful as Bear’s heaven was, that moment by the fire, drifting with wood smoke and oncoming twilight, was just as beautiful.

And I think spiritual acceptance and satisfaction comes from knowing that death may await us, but this broken life right here is full of heavens.  The taste of hot cocoa is magic. Crying is a reminder of the infinite capability we have to care. The hand of a friend is Godly perfection. The sunshine that comes through those windows may land on faces lined with wrinkles and precancerous freckles, but that sunshine is heaven.  And that ought to, it must, be enough.

Emma Himelein-Wachowiak

 One of my favorite childhood memories is of picking violets for my Grandmother. The memory is really just a blur, but it’s a pretty blur; one of purple flowers, green grass, and my mom’s smiling face.

I was happy, and she was happy, and my Grandma was going to be very happy. So why does looking back on this memory make me sad? It could be because I miss having that same “carefree” type of relationship with my mom. It could also be because I miss my Grandmother, who I now know saw this beautiful day as one of her last. But maybe it’s just because I miss looking at this reality, one made up of violets, grass, and smiles; and being able to call that “enough”. Maybe I just miss the satisfaction of being a kid.

Childhood is painful to remember because of our societal knowledge that it is temporary. Despite what “Back to the Future” and other brilliant films have taught us, we cannot go back in time. Our spontaneous acts of throwing bread crumbs to ducks, jumping in leaf piles, and flying kites have come and gone; and are now to be filed away in a drawer we call “remembrance”. Childhood is temporary.

Or is it?

Author Patrick Rothtfuss once spoke the following words:

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”

I think what Rothfuss is trying to say through this quote is that maybe, deep down, we’re just all kids who one day decided to be adults. We used to live in the present, -we used to live in the now-, and then one day “the now” was simply not enough. Our futures were hung over our heads like meat being dangled to dogs, and we salivated over their irresistible temptation. School, college, work, family, we had to check them each off our lives as items on a grocery list. Life became a game of chess and we had to contemplate our next move before we even finished the one we were on.

What so many of us fail to realize is that while childhood is temporary, the concept of childhood is not. This philosophy of “spontaneity” has no age limit. We can still throw bread \crumbs to ducks, run through leaf piles, and fly kites in the sky. And yet we can do so much more, because now we have enough coordination to ride our bikes, hike up mountains, and light fires to toast marshmallows in. We have enough patience to sing in the shower, do Sunday morning crossword puzzles, or watch the sunset. We’re loving enough to have relationships, spiritual enough to go to church, and childlike enough to be satisfied with this now that we are so lucky to be given.

Maybe one day Doc will show up in his time machine, (and I’m still counting on that). But until then, it is through spontaneous acts like these that we are truly transported back to that magical realm of violets, grass, smiles, and being a kid.

Kenzie Himelein-Wachowiak

While fighting horrendous writer’s block for this very composition, I stumbled upon a quote by Ernest Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you’ve ever known.” I liked it so much that I turned it into a sub-par T shirt for my dad, but that’s beside the point. Perhaps it’s the way I was raised, in a church that shied away from definitions, but I don’t appreciate endless clichés or glittering generalities. I believe that writing should be a series of insightful, provocative, and entirely true sentences. And if you leave this service today with anything at all, I don’t want it to be that you need to find more friends or give more money to charity, or even that teenagers really are capable of critical thinking. Instead, when you leave today, I want you to pick up your pen and your paper, physical or metaphorical, and I want you to write your own, true story. Here’s mine:

I don’t have the secret to satisfaction. I don’t even have a hint. I care too much what people think of me, I plan extensively for a future that I often doubt I’ll ever succeed in, and sometimes certain things happen that make me feel as though I’m completely unprepared to deal with the frequently monotonous and occasionally heartbreaking occurrences that make up what we in high school like to refer to as “the real world”. By no means am I asserting that these qualities are unique to just me, or my generation, or churchgoers or the impossibly privileged or anything like that. If I have acquired any knowledge through my humble observations of the human race, it’s that we all, no matter how different, share relatively the same hopes, desires, and fears. Perhaps we all strive for satisfaction, for love and security and day-to-day joy, but it’s our fear of failure, of inadequacy, of that looming panic that surrounds the idea of being on our death beds and running through our waning minds everything we SHOULD have done; perhaps it’s that fear that holds us back in the end.

I may not have the secret to satisfaction, but I know what makes me happy. Long hugs, warm trail runs, late night phone conversations, genuine words between friends, making someone smile who hasn’t in a long time. And maybe I’m being naive, but I can almost convince myself that if I witness or I partake in enough of these small, worthwhile things, I can become content.

I assume most of you are familiar with David Foster Wallace, a brilliant man who, judging by the fact that he committed suicide in 2008, never achieved this rare state of satisfaction. I recognize when my own words are becoming inadequate, so I hope you’ll allow me to quote from his most famous work, “This Is Water”, a commencement speech given to the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon college.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an 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 the hell is water?”…

Foster Wallace continues, and then concludes with this: “What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water. This is water.”

And while it’s hard for me to follow the painfully true words of a genius, I will leave you with this: to all the fish out there, myself included in this somewhat childish comparison: This is water. It may be murky, it may be nothing or it may be exactly like what you expected it to be, but through it all, you are never, ever alone.

God, Again (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The writer Eric Weiner tells of how one day he found himself doubled over with abdominal pain in a New York City emergency room. As he shivered in his paper gown waiting for the doctor, a nurse arrived to draw some blood. The woman, about his age with features and an accent that seemed to him Caribbean or West African, paused and said quietly, “Have you found your God yet?”

 

READINGS

Self Portrait by David Whyte

http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_self.html

Job 38:1-7; 12-13; 16-18

Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge?

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?

Speak, if you have understanding.

Do you know who fixed its dimensions, or who measured it with a line?

Onto what were its bases sunk?

Who set its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the divine beings shouted for joy? . . .

Have you commanded the day to break, assigned the dawn its place, so that it seizes the corners of the earth and shakes the wicked out of it?

Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been disclosed to you?

Have you surveyed the expanses of the earth?

If you know of these – tell me.

SERMON

The writer Eric Weiner tells of how one day he found himself doubled over with abdominal pain in a New York City emergency room. As he shivered in his paper gown waiting for the doctor, a nurse arrived to draw some blood. The woman, about his age with features and an accent that seemed to him Caribbean or West African, paused and said quietly, “Have you found your God yet?”

Taken aback, he stammered, “Why?” Did she know something he didn’t, he wondered. She didn’t reply but just gave him what seemed like a wise, knowing look and left.

Weiner’s medical episode ended uneventfully – turns out to have been just a severe attack of gas – but the nurse’s question weighed on him. Had he found his God . . . yet? It set him wondering. She wasn’t asking whether he had found a God or the God or just plain God, but his God, as it there were one out there for him, waiting.

For a while he put it aside. It wasn’t a question he felt was relevant to his life. God, religion: he had left all that stuff behind in his youth, growing up in a culturally Jewish but not especially religious household. And besides he very much saw himself as a rationalist – someone who looks to science and reason as a guide to living – and he saw little about the notion of God that seemed rational to him.

Still, he wrote, he had to admit that in his experience, while “reason is an excellent tool for solving problems (it) offers little guidance in identifying which problems we should solve and why.” In the words of G.K. Chesterton: reason doesn’t account well for those moments in life that “bewilder the intellect, yet utterly quiet the heart.”

There was something about that nurse’s question that nagged at him, but he had no notion of how to begin to answer it. Searching for a spiritual category where he might plant his flag, he gave up, declaring himself simply a “confusionist” armed with this credo: “We have absolutely no idea what our religious views are. We’re not even sure we have any, but we’re open to the unexpected, and believe – no, hope – there is more to life than meets the eye.”

For Weiner, this puzzlement was the goad for a journey that he recounted in a best-selling book, Man Seeks God. The book tells of Weiner’s travels around the world to learn about and experience eight religious traditions, ranging from Sufism and Buddhism to Franciscan Catholicism and Kabbalah.

Few of us have the resources for such an adventure, but for many of us Weiner’s label of “confusionist” rings a bell, especially when it comes to this notion of God.

I remember when I was around 9 or 10 years old playing with a friend by a stream near my home when he casually asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I didn’t know what to say, but to hide my embarrassment I just mumbled something like, I did, and that ended the conversation.

So, I guess I could date my own history of wrestling with the notion of God from that moment. It wasn’t as if I had never heard of God. In my Unitarian Universalist religious education classes I had encountered God and gods from many cultures in many guises. But I had never instructed on an answer to that bald question: Do you believe in God?

I know now that the stories I heard and the lessons participated in were intended not to deliver received answers on the mind-boggling questions that religion poses – who am I, what matters, where did I and all of this come from – but to encourage my wondering mind to work through them and come to answers that made sense to me, answers that surely would change as I changed and grew, but that were rooted in my own understanding and experience.

That has been true of this religion since the days of its founding in the early 19th century when William Ellery Channing declared that “the great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own.”

And it remains true of us today. When a volunteer teacher in our Spirit Play classes reads a story, he or she will invite the children to comment on it with a reflection that begins with the words, “I wonder . . . .” I wonder how that felt, I wonder what they meant, I wonder why she said that. And you’ll recognize that I’m inviting you as our worship theme for the month to do some wondering of your own.

Looking back on my childhood encounter, though, I see that there was something more than puzzlement behind my confused answer at the streamside: something that I now recognize as shame. Young as I was, I had lived long enough to perceive that at the time in the larger culture there was really only one socially acceptable answer to my friend’s question, and I gave it.

Things have loosened a bit since the early 1960s, but the presumption is still strong, especially here in the South, that when asked, one will respond as I did. So, if nothing else it challenges people like us who find integrity affirming a range of responses, from “yes” to “no” to “Well, tell me what you mean by God,” to broaden the conversation and work to find some clarity for ourselves.

Karen Armstrong begins her book, The Case for God, by declaring, “We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile.” God, she says, is bandied about by so many people in so many settings that we are left with the presumption that the concept of God should be easy. You know, God: Supreme Being, Creator of all Things, infinitely loving, ultimately inscrutable, utterly transcendent, and yet counting every fallen sparrow. Simple!

Wait a minute: did you say simple? With so many imponderables wrapped around it, this tiny word quickly expands beyond our common capacity to make sense of it, and so it becomes a convenient screen on which we humans can project our hopes and fears; our aspirations and ambitions, pinning on attributes, such as pronouns – him, mostly; and motives – smiting these people, blessing those others.

Probably no work offers a more effective caution against this practice than the ancient Book of Job that I quoted earlier.  You’ll recall that the book begins with God looking down from on high and praising his good servant Job, while Satan insists the Job is only good because he’s treated well. Test him, Satan says, and you’ll see him curse you.

So, God does, inflicting him with every measure of disease and misfortune. But Job insists that he holds to his faith. Friends arrive, and while they commiserate, they suggest that Job must have done something to deserve all these ills, for God only punishes those who deserve it. This goes on for some time, and Job bemoans his outcast state until the figure of God breaks in with a long soliloquy, part of which you heard.

It is an amazing passage. As the writer Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, God speaks, not apparently because Job has been irresistibly persuasive in arguing why he has been ill-served, but, she says, “because God cannot stand one more minute of his yammering.”

The language in these questions is lyrical – “Where were you when the morning stars sang together? Have you seen the gates of deep darkness?” I can imagine the writers pushing their imaginations to the limit – how to express the inconceivable? how to communicate how infinitely unknowable the ways of the universe are?  The question that the book seems set up to answer – why do bad things happen to good people – is blown out of the water, and along with it the neat image of a friendly God who watches over us and finds us parking spots.

Forget that! The wisdom that Job offers us is that suffering happens, and we are left to make of our lives what we can. But, God? Well, back to the drawing board.

Karen Armstrong observes that theology, literally the study of God, “is a very wordy discipline.” People, she says, “have written reams and talked unstoppably about God.” (Speaking from the experience of four years of seminary and 10 years of ministry, I can only say, “Oh, preach it, sister.”) And while much of it is impenetrable and some of it is actually beautiful, it doesn’t necessarily take us much closer to making sense of God, if there is any sense to be made.

Armstrong argues that the trouble began when in our modern age, the Christian church and its scholars took to applying the language of science – which she describes as “logos” – to the study of religion, which she says had been the imaginative realm of what she calls “mythos.”

One unfortunate result of all this, she says, is that it pulled religion out of where it originated, as a rich and metaphorical guide to living, and set it up in the academy as an artifact for arcane study. The old image of scholars counting how many angels can dance on a pin was the product of this way of thinking.

In fact, Karen Armstrong argues, religion holds the most promise not as a place of proof texts, but as “a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.” The notion of God, too, she says, works better when it comes out of the clouds, loses its pronouns and invites us to reflect on what is most deeply real and impinges on us most profoundly.

My colleague Galen Guengerich has argued for describing God as, in his words, “an experience that intimately and extensively connects me to all that is.” And a consequence of this experience, he says, is to invite us to see ourselves as agents of the best there is, call it the divine, call it all that upholds life and love in the universe.

Could that be “your” God? Perhaps, perhaps not. The sense of transcendence that Galen describes is something that all of us experience in one form or another, but there are many ways of framing it that need have nothing to do with God.

Our music today offers a sense of the variety of ways that transcendent appears to us. Joan Osbourne invites us to find the holy in the scrubby stranger on the bus, the other we avert our eyes to avoid. Pete Seeger believed he found all he ever needed in the songs he used to break through the boundaries that keep us human beings apart. And Mendelsohn’s beautiful chorus lifts us up with its bounteous imagery of God as the unsleeping source of compassion that quickens our languishing hearts.

So, in answer to Eric Weiner’s nurse, must we expect that at some time we will hitch our own spiritual wagon to some understanding of God? No, not necessarily, and really that’s not the central question. I think that David Whyte’s poem, which Bob read earlier, comes closer to the point. Called “Self Portrait,” it is, I’m told, something he wrote one night in a period of spiritual crisis while he was looking in the mirror. So, the person to whom he is speaking is one he knows well.

When you let go of the labels, the clever scripts that you’ve cobbled together for when the “religion” question comes up, when you are fully present to yourself: what do you see? To what, to whom do you belong? What is your answer when despair visits you? As the world pushes and prods, wheedles and pleads, how do you find your center?

Are you prepared to give yourself fully to the truth that lives within you? I love the vividness of his imagery – do you know how to melt, holding nothing back, into that fierce heat of living that feels like nothing less than falling toward the center of your longing?

And how will you live day by day with the consequences of all the commitments you have made in your life, the love that both nourishes and tears at your heart, knowing that one day all of it – you and I, too – will be gone?

Oh friends, let us set to wondering. Let us be good company, and let the space we create and hold here be the crucible for our work.

It matters not if there is one God or many Gods or any Gods, when it comes down to it. What matters is that we be witnesses to the beauty and wonder of the world, that we live with integrity and compassion, that we honor that ineffable transcendence in which we and all things participate, the stream that, as Tagore put its, runs through the world, that shouts in joy through the grasses and is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, moving through us this very moment.

Photo Credit:  Foter.com / Public Domain Mark 1.0

The Arc of the Universe–MLK Jr. Day (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The figure of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Civil War colonel who collected this beautiful spiritual you just heard the choir sing, evokes the kind of story that we Unitarian Universalists like to tell ourselves about our historical engagement with civil rights.

 

READING
From “Justice and Conscience” by Theodore Parker

“Look at the facts of the world.  You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but a little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure that it bends toward justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.”

SERMON

The figure of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Civil War colonel who collected this beautiful spiritual you just heard the choir sing, evokes the kind of story that we Unitarian Universalists like to tell ourselves about our historical engagement with civil rights.

A crusading abolitionist and Unitarian minister, Higginson made his churches in Newburyport and then Worcester, Massachusetts focal points in the fight for freedom for America’s enslaved blacks. He helped harbor runaway slaves and was a member of the Secret Six in Boston who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Theodore Parker, author of the quote at the center of our service today, was another member of that group.

When war came, Higginson joined as an officer. Then he got word that the Union was looking for a leader of its first regiment of freed slaves, the 1st South Carolina, and even though he had little military experience, he jumped at it. He joined the regiment in November 1862, and it set off for its first engagement the following January. As the regiment was leaving, Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew – another Unitarian – furnished Higginson with a supply of copies of Lincoln’s newly signed Emancipation Proclamation. Higginson later wrote in his memoir, “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” that many in the regiment couldn’t read, but that, in his words, “they all seemed to feel more secure when they held it in their hands.”

The regiment took part in no major battles. Instead, it was assigned to raids to capture supplies, but even then they engaged in some sharp combat and, Higginson reported, acquitted themselves well. It was the first time in the Civil War that blacks had taken part in combat, and their success persuaded the Union to muster more black regiments. Higginson later recalled in his memoir, “it was their demeanor under arms that shamed the nation into recognizing them as men.”

You see what I mean? Great story!

And then there’s Theodore Parker, whose words recast by Martin Luther King Jr. became a rallying cry for the Civil Rights movement. In that sermon on justice and conscience, he declared that there is a moral law in the universe as inexorable as physical law and that justice is its demand. It is something, he said, that we feel like a physical tug on our conscience. We may falter, we may quail, we may turn aside, but there it remains. And when we pay attention, in Parker’s words “in (our) cool and personal hours” when we are most ourselves, we cannot help but acknowledge that we “love justice with a firm, unwavering love.” It is, he said, the “natural fealty” of our conscience.

It was both the spirit and the theology of Parker’s words that appealed to Dr. King: justice was not a convenient or conditioned concept. Its demands are woven into who we are and ever have been, and it will out, it will push relentlessly to be realized. In Parker’s words, “things refuse to be mismanaged long.”

Inspiring words, inspiring story. And yet, it turns out that even Theodore Parker had his personal reservations about just what abolition might bring. Toward the end of his life, he wrote “an Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like the Africanization of America; he wishes the superior race to multiply, rather than the inferior.”

I have been reading Theodore Parker for years, but I only read those words in the last year or so, and I have to say that when I did my heart sank. Really? Even Parker, the radical, arch abolitionist whose 3,000-member congregation in the 1840s was the most integrated Boston had seen, underneath his defiant public stands was privately mired in prejudice?

But let’s be honest, in that time how many weren’t? Even as Thomas Higginson cut across the grain in his defense of African slaves, there was a noblesse oblige to his crusading, and even then he was regarded as a renegade among Unitarians. Both of the churches he served before the war eased him out after just a few years in favor of preachers who were less inclined to rock the boat.

We cast about for figures whose purity makes them idols to emulate and find that they all have dirt on their hands. And that makes it all the easier for us to throw up our hands in defeat. “See, even Parker was a racist. What hope do we have of changing this?” What hope?

It’s a question that resonates in my mind this Martin Luther King Sunday. We have each struggled in our own ways with the pall of what has been called “America’s original sin,” racism that is marbled so deeply into American life that none of us escapes its stain and its wound. And we Unitarian Universalists are not exempt. It has taken us some time to accept that. To see that even nice, liberal-minded folks live amid, benefit from and sometimes inadvertently advance practices that demean and oppress other people.

It is a hard learning. It’s not the way we want to be. And yet, there is a release in coming to terms with it, a chance for us to shift our perspective, to open our eyes to things we previously chose not to see, to shed our hubris and open our hearts.

Many teachers are available to help us in this work. Today I want to tell you about two who have been helpful to me. I begin with a professional colleague, the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed. Mark has told his own story of growing up in Chicago and ultimately entering our ministry as, in his words, an “integration baby.”

His most recent book, Darkening the Doorways, collects stories that answer the puzzling question of why we Unitarian Universalists learn so little of African Americans in our movement. The answer is not that African-Americans have not been among us, but that most of their stories have been lost or never told. And so Mark has made it a practice to seek out and raise up those stories. It was in Mark’s book that I read that dismaying quote from Theodore Parker, a common opinion at the time that may help explain the result of an early encounter.

In October 1860 at their annual meeting Unitarian ministers were joined by an African-American Baptist minister, the Rev. William Jackson. Jackson had been active in the abolitionist movement and likely had come to know Unitarian ministers in that way. But even more he had found himself drawn by the message that he heard from them.

So toward the end of the day, Jackson stood and declared that from what he had heard at that assembly he had been converted to the Unitarian perspective and stood ready to preach it. When he was done, one of the Unitarians, William Potter, rose to say that the ministers should raise money support Jackson and his congregation. A collection was taken that garnered $49, a respectable sum at that time, but there the matter ended. As historical accounts put it, “Mr. Jackson was sent on his way.” That ended his contacts with the Unitarians.

Sad to say, for much of the next 100 years while African-Americans still came, that chilly reception was pretty much the norm for aspiring clergy. Even though as early as the 1840s black candidates were graduating from the Unitarian seminary in Meadville, the trick was finding congregations that might ordain and settle them. And, aside from a few abortive attempts, that didn’t happen. Exceptions included churches in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Harlem, New York, both founded in the early 20th century by determined African-American ministers. Neither one, though, was fully recognized by the denomination, and both closed after a matter of decades.

Universalists also attracted interest from African-Americans, who were among the charter members at congregations in Philadelphia and Gloucester, Massachusetts. But with the exception of a long-standing mission settlement in the Tidewater area of Virginia, Mark reports, the movement’s appeal to African-Americans proved limited.

The story of our denomination’s struggle with race in the 1960s and 70s is a bigger tale than I have time to tell today. Still, Mark Morrison-Reed offers one telling anecdote that opens a window on it. Shortly after our two movements joined in 1961, the denomination embarked on creating a new hymnal intended to represent our radically inclusive faith.

Unfortunately, that hymnal, while innovative and expansive, failed to include, as Mark puts it, “one word or song written by an African American or reflective of that experience.” Our current hymnal, printed in 1993, corrected that omission.

Still, that incident speaks to a blind spot that has haunted us. Deeply and authentically committed as we are to racial justice, we have not always done a good job of living it, of making room for experience beyond our ken. These days, anxiety over how we respond to racial oppression tends to focus on the relative lack of diversity in our congregations. I’ve heard it raised in this congregation.

Mark offers counsel on this point that I find helpful. We are caught in a paradox, he says, because while we say we want diversity, the truth is that emotionally we really don’t want to change. We like our congregations as they are, the people we know, the things we do. Promoting diversity involves welcoming and even seeking out people who are different from us, and that will change our community – perhaps in good, even necessary ways – but change us all the same, and it’s bound to be uncomfortable.

So, why do it? Not to meet some self-appointed authority’s notion of what is morally appropriate for a liberal religious congregation. No, we seek out and welcome diversity because of who and how we understand ourselves to be.

As Mark puts it, this drive is spiritually rooted in an intuition central to our religious identity: that “we are deeply and inextricably connected to one another and all that ever was or shall be. We want one another. We yearn to feel connected – and whole.” And in the end, it’s not about who we hope to bring in our doors. “It’s about healing ourselves.”

So, that brings me to my second teacher – actually not just one teacher but many involved in precisely the sort of work Mark was talking about.

Shortly after moving to Asheville, I was looking for ways to get oriented to this town, and several people encouraged me to consider signing up for a program that would introduce my to a side of this city most people don’t see.

It’s a gathering where people of many different backgrounds and experiences, white and black, talk about their experience with racism and the effect it’s had on their lives. Building Bridges, it’s called, and over each nine-week session participants learn much about how racism works – about the stereotypes we all carry, the privilege that we with white skin live with, the way racism is promoted through institutional practices and how it appears in schools and housing and even the simplest economic transactions.

There are readings and presentations, but the heart of the program is found in small groups, each facilitated by two people, one white and one black, who invite participants to share their own stories, their own struggles.

It is a place where white people like me get to hear for the first time what it’s like to have store clerks follow you around with suspicious eyes, to have landlords lament that they have no openings, to have police officers pull you out of a car and search you for no apparent reason. And it changes you to hear it.

Building Bridges took shape here in the early 1990s. Our member Sue Walton, one of the early organizers, says there was a lot of skepticism, especially among black leaders, that Asheville was ready for this. But one of the African-American ministers offered his church for a starting place. That first night, she says, the organizers were overwhelmed with the turn out, scrambling for space wherever they could find it. They were off and running.

Our member Dawn Klug, a long-time small group facilitator, says the program appealed to her because it taught her Asheville’s unique story around race. “As a white woman, I grew up never talking about race,” she said. “It’s helped me start to learn.”

Jackie Simms heard about Building Bridges while attending this congregation. She and her husband, Fred, had been in Asheville a few years and were feeling isolated, wondering if they had made the right choice. The program, she says, gave her access to people she never would have met, and also a new vocabulary and a constellation of friendly faces that made opening and exploring feel safe. Asked at the time to say something in a service here about her experience, she wrote and delivered this poem:

PREJUDICED – ME?         NOT MUCH

A Bele Chere Festival some years ago –

My husband, my daughter, my mother, me –

Genetically sun kissed all.

Having fun, Exploring this possible new home.

Very hot July day, A cool drink – good idea!

Hmm (yummy). A frozen fruit drink,

Small paper parasol in it.

Good drink.              Cold, refreshing.    Slowly sipped.

The last few sips.                The drink gone but enjoyed.

The parasol – pretty. Bright colors, tiny.

I wear it in my hair.                     No one knows me here.

More to see.  More to eat.                        Tired now. Let’s leave.

Hmm. A single guy – white face, black pants

black shirt, black motorcycle helmet.

Does he have on a black leather jacket, too??

Stay away.  Stay away.

A gust of wind. Parasol swept away – toward the guy!

Don’t go near him – Hell’s Angel.

He stoops to reach parasol. Now what??

Parasol inches from his hand! Another gust.

Parasol swept farther.      Far away.

He looks at me. . .  Kindness in his eyes!

Realization: He wanted to retrieve it for me!

I’m touched. I thank him for his kindness.

His caring – more important than the parasol.

Parasol gone. It’s OK. Caring stays. I hope he knows. . .

He walks forever – chasing parasol.

In his clasp – returned to me. Emotion rises –

Tears fill my eyes.

Prejudiced, me?     Wrong, me?     Touched, me?

A lesson here. How to live it.

A need for bridges.

You see, I happen to believe that Theodore Parker, flawed and fallible as he may have been, had it right when he is said that there is a moral force for justice that is inherent to our nature, something that works on us and will not let us go. The only error in his great metaphor – the arc that bends toward justice – is that it omits the benders.

Yes, justice is imminent in the world, but agents are needed to bring it into being. I think that he knew that; indeed, he was a great bender himself. But it needs to be said. We cannot wait for justice to happen. We need shoulders brought to the wheel, and they may as well be ours.

I have told you about Building Bridges, a good place to start, and the group’s next session begins next Monday. Check the flyer in Sandburg Hall for details. If you can’t make this one, another starts this fall. And there are other opportunities for good work that you can learn about at our social justice table.

My colleague Rosemary Bray McNatt was right: it is hard work, but in the end if there is no justice, there will be no peace. We can read and applaud all the good and noble thoughts of inspiring leaders, but if we do not bring justice to the world, none of us is safe.

So, I close with her admonition: Nothing that Unitarian Universalists need to do is more important than making justice real – here, where we are.

It’s All Good (text & audio)

 

It usually comes at the end of a list. A list of bad things. Like this: Well, at least one of the kids has been sick since mid-December, I got in a fender bender yesterday, and I just found out that my company is outsourcing my whole department. But it’s all good. Usually followed by a half smile and a rapid change of subject.

It’s all good. It makes me think of the famous scene from the Princess Bride – that word? I do not think it means what you think it means!

It’s all good. I can’t say I don’t appreciate what the phrase is trying to accomplish. I think it comes out of a wish to appear strong and capable – to be “looking on the bright side.” When things are really going badly, we don’t want to be a downer. We don’t want people to think we’re not competent, or that we are falling apart at the seams. We think we want or need privacy.

This glossing over our lived reality may help us hold it together in the short term, but in the long run, we are losing an important opportunity. We lose the opportunity to pull off the mask of attempted perfection and show our true face.

What would it look like, do you think, if we told each other the truth? So often, we know, through conversations with other friends, or through social media that something is “up” with a friend. But we aren’t sure how to broach the subject, and so we say nothing. Perhaps we ask something general, like, “are you ok?” And then our friend says, “I’m fine,” because how do you begin to answer the question when it feels like everything is falling apart around you.

When I worked as a chaplain, a colleague and I developed a shorthand that was very helpful – we’d say “good morning,” or “hey, how has your day been?” and if one of us answered, “oh, I’m fine,” without thinking it through, the other would pause, and say, “Hmm… are you? Or is this, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine?’” Because we had learned that when either of us said quickly, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” we usually weren’t.

Why are we so set on convincing each other that it’s all good? That we’re just fine, really. Is it some kind of competitiveness or one-upmanship? Or is it something else? Perhaps we have an honest wish to not be a “downer,” a need to go unnoticed. But if you are truly self-differentiated, you can say, “things are difficult, but I’m in a strong place.” “All of those things – about my sick kids, my job and the rest of my life – are true, but we are coping.” Or, “you know, this has been a really hard time for me, and I’m having a hard time getting back on my feet.”

This is NOT glossing over the truth, but diving deep and allowing the truth to stand on its own.  And when we are not trying to avoid our lived reality, we can more easily move through it.

We might also say ‘it’s all good’ because we aren’t sure the listener has the courage to hear what we have to say. Did my friend ask me how I am as a perfunctory conversational trope? Or did she really want to know the answer? Will he listen as I tell him the truth?

Telling the truth requires us to risk vulnerability.

Hearing the truth requires us to acknowledge that we can’t fix or change another person’s pain.

And neither of these is easy to do.

When we risk vulnerability, we are exposing a soft underbelly that is actually full of possibility, full of depth and potential relationship. I am not suggesting that we bare our souls to every person we meet. The first step is being a good listener – when we allow ourselves to practice, we can model the response we wish to receive.

Try it. Ask a friend how they are, and really mean it. Make eye contact. Pause. And listen.

Remember the Velveteen Rabbit of children’s nursery fame? What is it that made him “real?” Living. Fulfilling his life’s purpose, which for the rabbit, was to inhabit the dreams and imagination of a little boy. In the story, it is called becoming “real.” Brené Brown calls it authenticity. She says, “Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” [1]

My life’s purpose is to risk being present with people, to hold up a mirror, to be available to truly see you when you need to be seen, to hear your story and listen deeply.  With that in mind, being real, for me, is accomplished by showing up as fully engaged and fully committed to my ministry as I can be in a given moment—risking the experience of vulnerability with you at the same time I am listening deeply to your lived reality.

In my first sermon here at UUCA, I used a reading that includes my favorite quote, “What you risk reveals what you value.” Some moments the commitment is clear and simple. But sometimes it isn’t easy. It has been especially difficult to stay present these past few months since the second minister call process began. It’s an odd process, to be sure. It is kind of like having a performance evaluation done by 600 people. Well, no, it’s not kind of like that. It is that.

As the process unfolds, there is a fair amount of anxiety in the system – which is related to many different things. Some of you are not sure what the process exactly means. Others of you are so close in the middle of it that you can’t imagine thinking of anything else. There are questions on the table about whether I am a good fit for this congregation and questions about what it means to commit to a second called minister.

And through it all, I am getting an extended object lesson in vulnerability. I have no action to take at this point but to continue to show up and do what I do. To continue my ministry of presence. To continue to risk. To lean into the uncomfortable moments and let the discomfort remind me who I am and why I am here. I am here to witness and honor your moments of discomfort and struggle, to celebrate your joys and to help you dive deeper. And as you dive deeper, I am reminded of my own experience of depth, my own ability to stand firm in the midst of chaos.

I am made real by my engagement in this process.

We each have an opportunity to reflect upon our own life’s purpose. How do you become real? How do you find a way to express your own authentic experience in a fast-moving life? The vulnerability required to do this can feel impossibly daunting, and so you can start small. Start by looking at your own experience and being honest about where you are in it. Do you feel grounded? What are you dodging or avoiding?

This month’s theme is “Capital T Truth.” If we risk sharing our “lower case t truth,” which is whatever happens to be true for us in a given moment, we open the door to finding the capital T Truth. We live in a consumer culture that teaches us that the capital T Truth is an idea or a concept we can learn how to do and once we master it, we are fixed.  But this is not accurate. You are true when you allow yourself to be all of who you are. The capital T truth is YOU. Do you have a face you show to the world, and a face you are afraid for anyone to see? The more you are able to peel away the mask and show your true face, the more the two faces begin to be the same face.

It’s NOT all good – is it really OK to say it? The line between being a downer and being honest is, again, about authenticity and self-differentiation. It’s NOT all good, so try something like this, instead, ‘You know, I’ve got to be honest, this is a hard time, but I am doing my best to stay grounded. To remember the things that are good. And to let myself feel how I feel.’

Perhaps the line between honesty and obfuscation can be our engagement in trying to shift what can be shifted. What are your coping mechanisms? How are you getting yourself through? It’s ok to say that you are struggling without being stuck. And sometimes you are stuck.

The Real You is worthy of honor. The real you is capable of being stuck and OK at the same time. The real you is strong and bold and can push forward with the same force and commitment you used to use to avoid the feelings of vulnerability. The real you can handle the capital T Truth. And only you can decide who in your life can hold this truth with you.

What are the consequences of true honesty? “you know, things are pretty difficult these days, but we are coping.”

What would you lose?

The illusion of perfection?

A self-protected place that feels safe but is really quite lonely?

Authenticity requires vulnerability, and “it’s all good” shuts down all possibility of either vulnerability or connection.

Part of the problem is our fixit culture. If you are talking to someone who is going to try to fix your problem and won’t be able to hear your full experience, then of course you won’t want to share what’s true. But what if we interacted in a different way. There is a different paradigm. A paradigm based on connection and honesty instead of fear of exposure

According to Brown, “One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on “going it alone.” Somehow we’ve come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we’re very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It’s as if we’ve divided the world into “those who offer help” and “those who need help.” The truth is that we are both.”[2]

And if we are both offerers of help and needers of help, then the truth is that we can learn from one another. We can sit together in the midst of the capital T Truth

The true cost of honesty is connection. It is the risk of deeper relationship.

Brown “…defines connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.” [3]

I feel this same kind of connective energy in our weekly candle lighting ritual. It is such a beautiful dance. There is a profound power in the silence – in the honoring of our joys and sorrows without speaking them aloud. These profound moments, shared in silence, sometimes with a tear or a smile, the touch of a hand, a pause as the candle is placed in the chalice. These moments are pure and authentic and have a depth to them – it seems as if I can feel the currents of your lives as you come forward and share the light that represents your heart.

And yet, even in those moments of deep connection, we do not know the substance of one another’s lived experience.

Joyce Sidman tells us

“It is time to look into

each other’s faces,

we who glide along the surface,

time to dive down

and feel the currents

of each other’s lives.

Time to speak until the air

holds all of our voices.

Time to weave for each other

a garment of brightness.

To dive down and feel the currents of each other’s lives.

This requires presence and attention.

To speak until the air holds all of our voices.

This requires strength and trust.

And so I trust you with my voice today.

Promise-Making, Promise-Keeping (text & audio)

 

READING

Click here to read “Directions” by Billy Collins

SERMON

“Do you promise?” The question always catches our granddaughter for a second: then her reply, with a sober expression framing her big brown eyes: “Yes, I promise.”

The request is never anything of particularly great moment – thankfully her life is not yet that complicated – but even a five-year-old recognizes the weight of that question. And she’s never shy about making a similar request of us and expecting a response that is equally as serious. It is a part of our bonding with each other, the testing and trusting that creates intimacy. But it’s also an introduction to something larger and deeper that is within and between us all.

Martin Buber famously declared that we human beings are the “promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing” animal. Promising is not just something we do; it defines and creates us as social beings. And, as Buber’s formula suggests, it can be a challenging  thing to negotiate. Not all promises are easy, not all promises are wise, not all promises are kept, and even when promises are broken that doesn’t necessarily end a relationship.

And still, promise-making is at the heart of who we are, of what we do as human beings, and, I want to argue today, something we liberal religious folk can offer up as a source of hope for the world.

Last week I told you that this is a community where you are invited to discover what your heart and mind and soul declare must be true about how the world is and our place within it. We frame that in the first half of our congregation’s mission statement, which I remind us of each Sunday – “we nurture individual search for meaning.”

The second half of that statement reminds us that we do this in community: not simply for our own edification, but with an end in mind, that we work together for “freedom, justice and love.” And it’s important to remember that those words at the end are not tagged on as an afterthought – “hey, join us here and figure yourself out and, oh, if you have the time you might want to help us out in this other work.”

We believe that this other work is integral – no, even more: necessary to any hope we may have of finding integrity and peace, of knowing who we really are. And it’s bound up in a process of promise-making that we call covenant.

This notion of covenant is very old with us and so, as you might gather, has followed some twists and turns along the way. It dates back to the 1550s in Great Britain to a religious reformer named Robert Browne who pushed for a radical shift in church life. Inspired by leaders of the Reformation in Europe, he drew on the image of God’s promise-making in the Bible to argue that churches should be gathered in a similar way. Churches, he said, should be formed based on a covenant among persons.

And instead of agreeing to a common doctrine, he said, people could agree to walk together on the basis of certain religious principles. They could choose their own ministers and teachers, put forth and debate issues to learn the truth and welcome diversity of opinion, even protest and dissent.

This notion took root and crossed the Atlantic with the Puritans and guided the formation of those first congregations in New England. In 1648 this arrangement was codified among the gathered churches in something called the Cambridge Platform, which both described and defined how covenant worked. Essentially, it laid out the practices that congregations followed that reinforced the ties within, among and beyond them through regular worship, meetings and mutual care.

In the years that followed, though, the role of covenant faded in many congregations as disputes over belief began to divide them. More conservative congregations began to set high bars of orthodoxy for people to be admitted into membership, and some congregations – including many that were later to become Unitarian – put aside the old covenants to avoid religious disputes.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that, once again, reformers in our movement called attention to this covenantal tradition and offered it as a way of reestablishing who we were and what we had to offer to the world.

What they discovered is that this notion of covenant addresses a fundamental tension in our movement. In a way, that tension is represented by the two halves of our congregation’s mission. On the one hand, we encourage and defend the right of each person to make up her or his own mind about what is true on religious questions – the search for meaning that we take to be a lifetime’s work. But if the gatherings of our congregations are to be anything more than the fitful herding of cats we must also agree on some principle that unites us.

Historians of our movement went digging into the files of some of our older churches and discovered these old documents with such expansive sentiments as these: Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest of truth is its sacrament and service is its prayer.

Covenants like these do nothing to inhibit the wide ranging explorations that we as individuals or congregations may undertake to learn and come to terms with what is true and right. But they do provide some context for the work and some understanding of the spirit in which this work is done.

So, it’s no surprise that in the mid-1980s when calls came to revise the founding documents of Unitarian Universalism to make them more inclusive, the words that were chosen were framed as a covenant. The language that we proudly point to today, that you will find mounted and framed in the foyer outside this sanctuary, is presented as principles that we as member congregations covenant to affirm and promote. They are not statements of belief; they are promises of how we will behave with each other and in the larger world.

A little over a decade ago a task force was gathered in this congregation to take us to the next step. As a member congregation of the UUA, we agreed to affirm and promote the principles it adopted, but how about with each other? What promises do we need to make to each other to make this safe space for us to be about the often challenging and emotionally risky work of building a spiritual life?

The result of that process was the covenant that we read together last Sunday as we welcomed new members and friends into this community. I invite us to read it together each time we widen the circle of this community both as a way of bringing newcomers into the promises that unite us and of concentrating our attention for a moment on the work we try to do here.

Because the fact is that we all have rough edges that can damage others, and conflict is a fact of life in any gathering of people. We serve ourselves and each other best when we acknowledge that and commit ourselves to finding ways to work through those conflicts or find healing for the injuries we do to each other. It’s tough work and can make for some uncomfortable moments, but our hope is that we will come together again and recommit ourselves to this path.

But, when you think about it, what really leads us to choose this path? The way we usually frame the answer to this question is to say that as individuals with free will we decide that it is in our interest to commit to others and bring a community into being.

Now, that’s fine and there is probably some truth to it, but, to be honest, if that’s all that underlies our commitments to one another, it’s pretty tepid broth. If my decision to enter into covenant with you is based simply on my calculation of how it will benefit me, it won’t take much for that calculation to change. I may decide that I just don’t feel like it any more, and, hey, don’t give me grief, I get to decide what’s in my interest or not. OK, but then this covenant we thought we had really doesn’t stand for much, does it?

So, what else might guide our promise-making? Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry, offered a way of thinking about his in a talk she gave to General Assembly about a dozen years ago.

She suggested that the covenants we make are centered in the covenants we inherit. The fact of the matter, she said, is that “we receive who we are before we choose what we will become.” Our very existence, after all, emerged out of a web of relationships that were simply given, and everything that we do or achieve is woven together with persons and forces that ebb and flow throughout on lives. We can elect to drift on obliviously pretending that nothing we do touches anything else, but plainly that’s not the way it is. And thinking this way puts us deeply out of touch with the world before us and the very source of meaning and strength that might awaken and transform us.

When my granddaughter and I trade promises, we are not negotiating contracts to achieve our mutual interests. We are building connections of love and trust that help realize a deeper hope in both our lives.

In her book An American Childhood, Annie Dillard compares the work of writing a book to raising a child, and she could just as easily be talking about the place we move from in shaping our covenants with each other.

“Willpower has very little to do with it,” she says. “If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. . . .  There’s nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.”

This is something that I think our liberal religious notion of covenant has to offer the world. We don’t create covenants with each other out of mutual self-interest. We don’t do it for fear that God will hate or condemn us if we don’t. We do it because it’s what we’re here to do. It is how we best realize the hope that we as human beings are for the world.

We are given the opportunity to tap a well in our hearts that is wider and deeper than we can know but that many of us learn to keep sheltered and hidden. We might imagine that the promises we make limit us, but in fact the opposite is true. The promises we make release the latches that make the love that we shelter away available. The testing and trusting we do with each other takes our commitment to greater depth and opens previously unimagined possibilities.

Of course, some of the promises we make are not kept or turn out to have been ill advised. So we take a step back and look for ways to reconnect. As a community we offer consolation, care, and space for healing and renewal. In the end, we remember that, while we may have been wounded, the heart is a muscle that is strengthened by being used.

Opening our hearts to each other, Rebecca Parker points out, prepares us to open our hearts to the world, to make our communities centers of resistance to oppression and injustice. The work can be challenging, but we gain courage from knowing that we are leading from the source of our strength, joined as communities gathered not out of convenience or artifice but out of our understanding of a truth at the center of our being.

It is hard, as Billy Collins puts it, to talk of all the ways we are touched and shaped in this brief snatch of eternity that we are given, where we take the vast outside into us before the lights wink out. It can be frightening, lonely.

We look for travelers to share the way with us, people who will walk along side, who will be there when we knock on their doors, hoist a pack and join us for a bit. In our promises with each other we build a structure that supports us all, that creates a crucible for our striving and searching and a shelter against the storms. Each person who joins our covenant adds a brick to that structure that, it is our hope, in time may help heal the world.

A Wild Delight (text & audio)

 

When it comes to spiritual guides, I have admitted to you before, I have a weakness for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes, his webs of prose can be enigmatic, even infuriating. “What on earth are you getting at here?” I want to shout at times. But at other times I am grateful for the graceful beauty, fresh insight, and brilliant extravagance of his writing.

Perhaps nothing that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote has been more frequently quoted than the passage that Bob read from Emerson’s first book, Nature. The image of the “transparent eyeball” taking in “the currents of Universal Being” is striking and unusual. And, apparently some in Emerson’s own circle at the time thought so, too. There is a famous caricature of Emerson drawn by Christopher Cranch, an artist who was part of the Transcendentalist circle, that shows an enormous eye with a kind of pork pie hat on, perched on a small torso, complete with morning coat, striding on long legs over the countryside.

After all, from what we know of Emerson, a sweet, avuncular sort of fellow, it wasn’t the kind of expression that one would expect. In all of Emerson’s writing, outside of his journals, it is really his most personal testimony of his own spirituality.

But, of course, when we consider the project that he had in mind in writing Nature, we can understand why it is there. Nature was in many ways Emerson’s declaration of his own rebirth. With the death of his first wife, Ellen, he had given up his pastorate at Boston’s Second Church (Unitarian) and traveled to Europe to clear his mind and find a way forward in his life.

He was deeply impressed by the art and architecture of ancient cities, and he was intrigued by poets and philosophers who were challenging old ideas about biblical narratives and finding the roots of religion in personal experience. But when he got back home, rather than enlist himself with any particular thinker or school, Emerson took off on his own.

But what did that mean? The pulpit had little appeal, even if he did do supply preaching now and again for most of the rest of his life. Instead, he fashioned a notion of himself as a kind of free-lance scholar – one who would read and think and write  – whose work, he later declared would be “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”

In this time of talking heads, we think that we have a pretty good idea of what that meant. We can imagine him appearing on Oprah, writing a blog on the Huffington Post. But, no, there was something more. Even though he had given up the preacher’s robe he still had something of a longing for the preacher’s vocation.

He was interested not merely in “facts” but in, as he later defined the preacher’s work to new graduates at Harvard’s Divinity School, “converting life into truth.” That is, he hoped to persuade his readers that merely by attending deeply to the elements of their experience they might discover insight that would thrill their souls. And that that experience would awaken something great and holy within them, that it would, as the poet Mary Oliver said of Emerson’s hope, “turn all the heavy sails of one’s life to a moral purpose.”

So, it is no surprise that the image that came to Emerson in Nature was that of an eyeball, for the thrust of his urging is always, “Look, Look!” For, in looking we might for a moment erase that boundary between us and the blithe world. We might taste for a moment the erasure, not of the self but of egotism, that preoccupation with self, and become, in his words, “the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”

It’s because of passages like this that some see Emerson here proposing a new form of American mysticism, and that’s not far from the truth. When Emerson gathered a cadre of Unitarian ministers and like-minded folks that became known as the Transcendentalist Club, his goal was to clear the decks of what seemed to him the stodgy theological debates that prevailed at the time over such things as the nature of Christ’s divinity, Original Sin, the meaning of biblical miracles and all that.

In many ways he was speaking to himself as much as graduating students at Harvard’s Divinity School when he urged them to cast aside what he called the “secondary knowledge” they had taken in during their years in seminary.

“Let me admonish you to go alone,” Emerson said, “to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . . Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost – cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”

What exactly he means by “deity” here is unclear. It is given no specific image or essence. It is more like the welcoming sense of warmth and exhilaration that he describes back in his book Nature. “In the presence of nature,” he wrote, “a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says – he is my creature, and (in spite of) all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me.”

If this is mysticism, though, it is mysticism with a twist. Unlike, say, with the Christian or Sufi mystics, who find communion in giving themselves over to the divine, Emerson views the “wild delight” we find as something more like a reunion. In Nature he writes, “the greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and vegetable. I am alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me, and old.

“It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly and doing right. Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.”

Emerson sees nothing especially privileged about this experience. It requires no special study or preparation, no incantations or physical exercises. As Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson puts it, “Experiences of the kind Emerson here describes have happened to nearly everyone who has ever sat beneath a tree on a fine clear day and looked at the world with a sense of momentary peace and a feeling, however transient, of being at one with it.”

And yet, the question remains, once you have had such an experience, what do you make of it, what do you do with it? For Emerson it is more than a pleasant moment on a sunny day. It is the doorway into a deeper way of living.

In many ways, Emerson opened the modern conversation around something that we have come to call spirituality. Like many people today, Emerson looked at the landscape of leaders and institutions making claims about how the world works and our place in it and what he saw seemed merely rehashed and derivative.

“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” He was not disputing the testimony of Jesus, or Moses, of Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Mohammed.

Worthy guides, all. But, in his turn of phrase, why should not our experience also count? Indeed, if our spirituality is to be authentic, how could it not? Critics who see in Emerson’s argument for what he called “self-reliance” a kind of go-it-alone bullishness miss the point. Emerson himself makes the point in his essay by that name, “Self Reliance,” and please excuse the language of his time that uses male gender to make a point that universal to all:

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

The point is not that we have nothing to learn from others or that we can only find wisdom by wandering off on our own. It is that in the end we simply must make sense of it ourselves, and for that work we can trust our own faculties, our own minds and hearts. In this he was less a scholar than a provocateur: take ownership of the vision that living in the world gives you; look and see and act on what you learn.

The religions of the world, today as in Emerson’s day, are full of those who warn us of our fallibility, of our error and our sin, and so would have us distrust what our minds and senses teach, who urge us to give ourselves over to settled doctrine, to a way long trodden by others.

From the title of his first book, we imagine Emerson raising up the natural world as the great source of all inspiration. While I’m sure it’s true that he enjoyed his constitutionals in the brisk air of Concord, what we know about Emerson the man is that, unlike his friend Thoreau, his true home was not so much the woods, as his study. What he received on walking out of doors was literally a breath of fresh air, the vision of a world broader than his mind could ever encompass that put to shame the limited orthodoxies and philosophies that peopled his books.

“Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe. The sun shines today also.”

The words are old and a little high flown, but I find they resonate with me still. I’m a bit more of a nature boy than Emerson was and so the natural imagery definitely connects, but I also recognize the larger point here. It is not that by wandering in the woods you will find your spirituality. It is that we should be wary of facile of theories of the world that are cooked up in closed rooms.

The world in its astonishing beauty and complexity can be trusted and the world will ever surprise us, and we will each engage it with our own genius and on our own terms. It is this perspective that makes Emerson one of the founders of a modern liberal religious sensibility, what has been dubbed the “Spiritual Left,” and to my mind makes him relevant to us today.

Those of you who are new to us know that in some settings communities like ours are lampooned as places where, as they say, “you can believe anything you want.” In fact, the bar is much higher. Joining this community, you are invited to believe what you must, what your heart and mind and soul declare must be true and to engage with this community in sorting out the implications of those convictions.

It’s a process that I’ve abbreviated in this month’s worship theme as “choosing to choose”: taking ownership of what calls to you, whether it be in the woods or the town, and following where it leads you.

We offer this place as a crucible for all of us to work this out, to learn and grow and raise our children in an atmosphere of acceptance and trust where the blithe winds of the world and the brainstorms and controversies of centuries can blow through, where we hope to awaken something great and holy within you that will enable you to turn all the heavy sails of your life to a moral purpose.

Photo credit: craighagan / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Staying Put (text & audio)

 

I have to say it’s been interesting hearing people’s reactions to this week’s sermon title. “Staying put, huh?” I wouldn’t say the response has been entirely positive. Viewed from one perspective, “staying put” sounds a bit like “being stuck,” a kind of hide-bound view of the world that is stubborn and inflexible. We live in a culture that celebrates change and novelty. So, who would want to “stay put?”

That’s certainly true of us here in Asheville. We are a place on the move. Most of us here are transplants. We pulled up our roots from wherever we were and decided to give Asheville a try. We saw it as a nice place to retire to, or maybe just wanted to be near the natural beauty of this place, the agreeable climate, or the funky vibe.

It’s not for nothing that several years ago a writer surveying what he called the “geography of bliss” identified Asheville as a place where you could find it. Now, I do think it’s a little over the top to describe Asheville as “one of the happiest places” on earth, but people keep coming, and here we are, and, yeah, it’s true, it is pretty good.

This is also true of us as a religious community. Few of us grew up as Unitarian Universalists. At some point in our lives we fell away from whatever tradition we were raised in, if any, and set out looking for something different, something that more clearly matched our view of how the world worked and what matters, and here we are.

Of course, it’s also true that the hunger for change can turn into a kind of mania – skipping from place to place, from relationship to relationship, from religion to religion without really taking time to get to know, or to invest oneself in any of them. This kind of living leaves us scattered, shallow and unfocused, ultimately out of touch with others and even with ourselves as we scurry about frantically.

And the consequences of this way of living can be even deeper. If we’re always on our way to the next thing, we never truly value the things we have. We find ourselves unmoored morally and spiritually, searching for meaning without knowing how to find it.

So, yes, change is important, letting go what no longer serves us, what is destructive, dysfunctional, worn out and oppressive, but in doing so we need to have an eye for that which is life-giving, enriching, generative and hopeful, a way of being that can sustain us and support us for the long run, a place in our lives where we can stay put with integrity and joy.

This topic has been knocking around in my head for a few years, after reading a book by my colleague Michael Schuler on, in his words, “making the good life last.” He begins by disputing the assumption in popular culture that equates “the good life” with material abundance and personal stimulation.  Instead of finding personal satisfaction, he says, we become more like what the Buddhists call “hungry ghosts.” We long for happiness and contentment, but we seek them in ways that only dull our cravings and never satisfy us. We compulsively seek out pleasure and prestige, but our discontent remains.

Life that is truly satisfying, Michael argues, is life that is sustainable. That is, it contributes to our own and our community’s wellbeing; it promotes a healthy earth home and fosters enduring relationships; it contributes to the common good and restores our minds and bodies.

But in order to make life sustainable, he says, we must be prepared to shift our priorities, to leave off doing some things and adopt or emphasize others. He boils down the work ahead of us to what he calls four keys of sustainable living: pay attention, exercise patience, practice prudence, and stay put.

Attention, patience, prudence . . . OK. But stay put? Let’s spend some time with this. We can begin with some thoughts from the novelist Wallace Stegner, who observed that in American culture we tend to be divided into what he called “boomers and stickers,” boomers being the folks who pull up stakes and head out to the boomtowns, and stickers being the ones who stick around for a while.

Historically, the boomers who itch for greener pastures tend to be the ones who are celebrated. But, Stegner observed, “neither the country nor the society we build out of it can be healthy if we don’t stop raiding and running. We must learn to be quiet part of the time and acquire the sense not of ownership, but of belonging.”

And belonging, of course, comes from more than just plopping down and calling some place home. It involves taking notice of where we are situated and sending out tendrils to make connections with others.

Michael Schuler points out that in earlier times there was a process of what he calls “entanglement” that came with moving to a new neighborhood. You’d be invited to someone’s porch to learn the local history or chat at leisure over the raking of leaves. Thread by thread you’d come to know each other, with relationships sealed by holiday gifts of brownies or spiced nuts, agreements to take in each other’s mail, or watch each other’s children, so that when sadness or hard times came, help arrived unbidden.

Scott Russell Sanders points out that the word “common” at the heart of community, communion, and communicate grows from two roots, “the first meaning ‘together’ or ‘next to’ and the second having to do with barter or exchange.” So, he says, “embodied in that word is a sense of our shared life as one of giving and receiving.”

He noted that even Ralph Waldo Emerson, our famous Unitarian forebear, while preaching self-reliance, “lived in a village, gave and received help, and delivered his essays as lectures for fellow citizens, whom he hoped to sway.”

Man of the mind though he may have been, Sanders says, you would have found leather buckets hanging by Emerson’s door in Concord, for he belonged to the village fire brigade.

For many of us, there were good reasons for uprooting ourselves from the soil where we were planted, and, as Sharon suggested, it is healthy for all of us to be wary of settling in, to retain a little restlessness so that we never are content to accept the unacceptable. But Emerson’s leather buckets also remind us that at some point we are called us to send out tendrils that can entwine with others, that bring us into a web of community and find there the treasure that our heart seeks.

Feeling entangled with a place also can build deeper connections. When asked what the most important thing was that every person could do to help resolve the environmental crisis, poet Gary Snyder is said to have replied: “stay put.” When we develop a commitment to a particular piece of ground, we can better understand, not just intellectually but almost viscerally, as it were, how we are linked to the land.

Last summer when I was looking for a way of deepening my own understanding of my connections to the Earth, I came upon an adult education class developed by the Northwest Earth Institute called “A Sense of Place.” Currently, Christine Magnarella Ray and I are currently leading about 20 people from this congregation in an eight-month class based on that curriculum. We blend classes discussing readings from the curriculum and discoveries that our class members have made about different natural systems with field trips to places as various as the Cherokee Indian Reservation and Craggy Gardens to center ourselves in this part of the world.

This sense of place is part of what staying put can give us, a deepening appreciation of how we are linked not just to this land but to all life. Among the readings I have turned to for this class is a book called The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell, a biologist at the University of the South. Haskell spent a year visiting almost daily a patch of old-growth forest that is about a meter square in eastern Tennessee and documenting everything he found there.

For his entry at around this date, toward the end of his year, after he has already documented insects, birds, spring flowers, trees, mushrooms and much more, Haskell turns to the most unseen realm of all: the microbial community under the leaf litter.

It is the earthy smells more than the visual clues that tip him off to what is happening in this microscopic scene, he says. With billions of microbes, many still unknown to science, interacting in that tiny spot of forest soil it is only an impressionistic glance, the least precise of his examinations all year. And still, laid out before him is this vast panorama – bacteria and fungi breaking down nutrients of all sorts and interpenetrating the tiny rootlets of plants.

It shows him, Haskell says, that Tennyson’s description of “nature red in tooth and claw” needs to be updated. We apex predators attend to the competition at the top of the food chain, but lower down we come to learn about the sharing and collaboration that hundreds of millions of years of evolution woven into the chain of life.

And that correction translates all the way up the chain to us as well. We are not fronting the world on a lonely crag; we are in community from the moment of our births until the days of our deaths – community that grows and deepens as we extend ourselves to it, as we interpenetrate the world and each other’s lives in ways greater than we can know.

And that carries us back here. One of the great gifts that we give each other in this community is staying put, staying in the game, being “long-haul” people, in Rudy Nemser’s words. It is, as our worship theme this month suggests, “choosing to choose.” That is to say, giving care and intention to the commitments we make, grounding them in something solid, and sticking with them

We enter this place affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person, but only over time do we learn all the wonders that each of us has to offer the other. The gift of community is something that improves with age, as we watch each other’s children grow, share each other’s triumphs, mourn each other’s losses.

For the past 10 years here I have been in a privileged place to watch all that and to see some of the virtue of staying put, the strength that we find when we stay with each other and treasure the depth of relationship and commitment that comes with that practice.

I told you earlier this year that I would make a practice of sharing with you some of the stories of how this congregation has made a difference in people’s lives, and today I’d like to share with you some of the people who have been among our long-haul players. Today I want to tell you about the Unicorns.

You have to go back about 40 years to find the origin story and even then it’s surrounded in some myth. I’m depending on the memories of a few of the originators, hoping I get it right.

It was said to have been a snowy December evening in 1972 when the minister at the time, Tracy Pullman, invited some younger parents to a gathering. The congregation was quite a bit smaller at the time, and Tracy hoped that these folks might form some sort of organization to get young parents like themselves involved.

They liked the idea and began organizing parties. The question came up early as to whether the group should have a title, and they agreed it should. Different iterations were tossed around until someone suggested that they were a kind of corny group of Unitarian Universalists, and so they were dubbed: the Unicorns.

It had, and still has, no official status. It was just a way to get people socializing, and from the start that was what attracted people to the group. They were young parents who got together for parties and picnics as well as “advances,” not retreats, at area YMCA camps and then an annual beach trip that I’m told continues to this day.

As the congregation grew, though, the Unicorns also took on other projects, raising money through bake sales and other ventures. When the time came in the late 1970s to construct the addition that doubled the size of Sandburg Hall and added a suite of offices and religious education classrooms downstairs, it was funding from the Unicorns that paid for schematic drawings of the project. Their initiative also helped bring in a professional fundraiser to raise money in the congregation for its construction.

Over the years the group has grown and shrunk as some members were added and others left. They have been present at the weddings of each other’s children and memorial services of each other’s loved ones and even one of their own.

They include three former congregation presidents, several former trustees, a religious education director, many RE teachers, a long-time treasurer, canvas chairs, search committee members, auction committee chair, social justice chair, a former UUA Board member, one member who arrived as a minister and another who was ordained into ministry by this congregation and later came back to serve it.

Among those still with us are Larry and Lisa Holt, Patsy Keever and Jim Aycock, Pat and Ron Godbolt, Doug and Jean Kean, Bob and Ann Lewis, Patty and Randy Vanderbeek, Clark and Anna Olsen, Chuck Campbell and Sarah York.

Individually their involvement has waxed and waned, but they have stayed put. They have watched ministers and other staff come and go and seen membership numbers rise and fall. They are long-haul people who have been here when we needed them and are with us still.

Walt Whitman, who knew the language of the heart as well as any, captures it best: Will you seek afar off? Surely you come back at last, in things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best – happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place – not for another hour, but this hour.

Photo credit: djwtwo / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Caution: Perishable (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
I’ve been a gardener for as long as I can remember. It was a passion I picked up from my father, who, despite a busy career as a psychiatrist, always managed to be cultivating something. Digging in the dirt was a good antidote to the heady work of his day job, as it is for me. His gardens, though, would wax and wane depending on how much time and energy he had to devote to them, and I’ve found that’s true of me, too.

 

“Perishable, It Said” by Jane Hirshfield
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/236974

SERMON – Part 1
I’ve been a gardener for as long as I can remember. It was a passion I picked up from my father, who, despite a busy career as a psychiatrist, always managed to be cultivating something. Digging in the dirt was a good antidote to the heady work of his day job, as it is for me. His gardens, though, would wax and wane depending on how much time and energy he had to devote to them, and I’ve found that’s true of me, too.

Usually by the end of the summer everything in my garden is growing pretty wild, but then the first frosts of autumn come and shut everything down. I actually enjoy the fall clean-up that follows: unraveling the withered tomato vines from their cages, pulling up the brown stalks of basil or zinnia, and cutting back the spent branches of perennials. All tossed in the compost heap to nourish next year’s crop.

It’s a spiritual discipline of sorts. I knew as I set out those tomato seedlings in May that some five months later I’d be ripping their withered remains out of the ground, hoping in the meantime to get a bounty of delicious fruit.  So, there they are, the wise words of Ecclesiastes, coming to life in my back yard – to everything there is a season, a time to sow and a time to reap; a time to live and a time to die.

Still, these philosophical reflections are often interrupted when I discover that in that frost last night that knocked down the tomatoes I inadvertently left some tender plant outside, a fern or something that in the spring we had brought out to the porch from inside, that I had meant to, but forgot to bring inside, and there it is, crumpled and grey.

Shoot! A stab of sadness and guilt. That wasn’t supposed to happen, and if I’d paid any attention to the weather it wouldn’t have happened.  I would have brought it inside and the plant would be ensconced happily in our heated home. Instead, it’s finished: more fodder for the compost heap.

It’s always a reminder to me that this business of perishability is serious and often unpredictable stuff. We watch the autumn leaves turn color and fall and wax about the circle of life, but we are less philosophical when the chill winds have our loved ones in their sights, or even ourselves.

Perishable, yes, but not him; perishable, OK, but not yet. There must be some warm, protected place we could go to, something I could do, we could do to stave off that catastrophe. None of us has a “use by” stamp on our foreheads, but with Jane Hirshfield we find ourselves examining the backs of our hands, the bags under our eyes from which our young self views in the mirror the improbable pouches and wrinkles that emerge on our faces.

As time marches on we see the signs of impermanence everywhere we look, and we feel something sinking in the pit of our stomachs, a vanishing we can’t see how to fathom. Some of us withdraw and separate ourselves from the stream around us, whose pace seems to be ever accelerating.

And yet, there is Jane Hirshfield suggesting that we might find in the “perishing perfumes and clashings” of the world around us, a “strange happiness” that comes to us not outside of but from within that world, indeed within ourselves. What might that be about?

WORLDLY WISDOM?            By J. Barrie Shepherd

SERMON – Part 2
Our theme groups this month have been wrestling with the notion of authenticity. What do we understand to be our authentic selves? How might we come to know them? And how might that contribute to living with a sense of integrity and peace?

It’s tricky work because really what we are seeking is not to discover what makes us each unique, special people, but to know and feel ourselves fully as we genuinely are. Let me tease out that distinction a little because it’s not obvious in the culture we live in today.

Garrison Keillor sizes the situation up with his description of Lake Woebegon as a place where “all the women are strong all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.” We grow up in a culture that teaches us to link our identity with excellence and achievement. We are celebrated for how we excel and what we achieve.

Growing up we give attention to the good student, the poised dancer, the nimble athlete. Childhood is full of awards and certificates. It is what makes us “special.” As adults, we stake our claim to some vocation or perhaps some characteristic or skill that helps set us apart in some way. She’s a hot-shot lawyer; he’s a terrific cook. It gives us standing.

But the old wisdom warns against this viewpoint.

Here’s the Tao Te Ching:

He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm.

She who rushes ahead doesn’t go far.

He who defines himself can’t know who he really is. 

Because, here’s the thing: few of us are so confident in our skills that we want them to define us. Instead, dwelling on what makes us “special” inevitably feeds a secret sense that we’re not good enough. Praised for being special we are haunted with the feeling of just how special we aren’t. A kind of quiet shame pervades our perceptions like a low-lying fog.

These feelings often lead us to a kind of antic behavior, either working to be super achievers or skipping from place to place from job to job from relationship to relationship looking for . . . something. As the poet J. Barrie Shepherd puts it, “scanning, skipping to the end at times, searching for the one, the word, the sentence that an tell me what it’s all about.”

But the author Brene Brown, in one of the TED talks you’ll find referenced among the resources for theme reflection on our Web site, argues that beneath all that activity is something else: a numbness that separates us from ourselves.

We don’t like the feelings of fear and shame that bubble up at the edge of our consciousness and so, in her words, we numb ourselves. When something difficult arises or some conflict emerges, we withdraw. The problem is that we can’t selectively numb our feelings. In her words, when we numb guilt or fear, we also numb happiness and gratitude.

And we do that numbing in different ways. We may pull away, or turn to some sort of addictive behavior. Another way, she says, is to adopt a rigidity that in our minds makes everything that’s uncertain certain. Religion, she says, can be part of that. We move from an inquisitive sense of faith to a dogmatic one. As Brown puts it, “I’m right, you’re wrong. Shut up. That’s it.”

We liberal religious folks like to make this observation about this kind of behavior among conservatives, but the fact is that we can be just as narrow and self-righteous in our own ways. But I think it can help to recognize that response as the voice not of confidence or authority but of shame and of fear, and it doesn’t have to be there.

For, what is authentic about us is not our academic degrees or lack thereof, our artistic gifts or lack thereof, our physical beauty or lack thereof: you get the point. What is authentic in us is that which engages and participates in the blooming, buzzing world around us.

And the way that we gain access to it is we allow ourselves to be seen, not as the reflections of icons or images, but as we truly are. It requires, as Brene Brown puts it, that we be vulnerable: hard to do, but that’s part of why we exist as a religious community, to hold each other in covenant as persons of inherent worth and dignity, offering safe space for healing and exploring, where in time we teach and learn from each other the disciplines of love.

That’s the key to our release from our fears and to coming to know our authentic selves. As Brene Brown puts it, we need to learn to love with our whole hearts and practice gratitude and joy, even when we’re worried and afraid.

It is a place, as poet J. Barrie Shepherd writes, “beyond the unrelenting streaming of words,” where we are attuned to a deeper strain of life, something “without any hope or need for explanation, (that is) moving on, while we stand wordless, gasping in its tumbling wake.”

DROPLETS                 by C.K. Williams

SERMON – Part 3

A few weeks ago in the middle of the morning while we were both at work Debbie and I each got a disturbing call from the woman who periodically does cleaning at our home. She noticed that some rooms in the house were turned upside down and some things seemed to be missing. We both drove home quickly and discovered that, such enough, we had been robbed: TV, computers, cameras and the like gone, and the backdoor, which likely I had inadvertently left ajar, was wide open.

We did what you do – called the police, inventoried our things and made plans to secure the house and replace what we could. Describing the incident to others, I turned to a bit of gallows humor, saying that I had been planning a service on impermanence and so was now given an object lesson. Philosophically, I would say, oh, it could have been worse, and, after all, it’s just stuff.

And still. Those of you who have been through something like this know that the loss – including in our case some irreplaceable family items – while significant doesn’t compare with the sense of violation that haunts you for some time afterward: The vision of someone ransacking your lovingly appointed space, tearing through drawers and closets, and unceremoniously hauling your stuff away.

It leaves you feeling spiritually damaged – suspicious, wary of others, more protective of your space and loved ones: Yeah, a lesson in impermanence, but at first an experience of grief.

I found it interesting that my personal response to the theft was to sort through my remaining things – clothes, books, household items I hadn’t used in some time – and look for things I could clear out. It fits with an urge I’ve been feeling lately to shed stuff. The less I have, after all, the less I have to worry about someone taking. But more, it echoes the kind of visceral sense I’ve experienced of my own impermanence and the folly of attaching myself to the stuff around me, since I won’t be taking it with me.

That passage I quoted earlier from the Tao ends this way:

He who clings to work will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao,

just do your job, then let go.

And perhaps letting go is the answer. I’m not happy having lost the things that we did, but most of them were mere conveniences.  They can be replaced or perhaps even done without.

But in the process of this mess I also got a window into a deeper bounty in my life that I don’t attend to often enough with the response of empathy and compassion from our friends and loved ones.

Even when the rain is hard, C.K. Williams observes, it only disturbs one leaf after another on the little tree planted by his friend or lover. Instead, of alarming him, the downpour mingles with his partner’s piano playing into an intensity of feeling so powerful it tames, at least for a moment, that most existential of dreads, the fear of one’s own death, until, transformed into a transient mist, it falters and fades as the music goes on.

What an improbable wonder this fleeting, heart-breaking, soul-stirring life can prove to be!

A RESCUE       by John Updike
http://uuashevillecom.revaudettefulbright.com/wp-content/uploads/ARescue.pdf

Debbie and I started planning for our Thanksgiving celebration, coming up the week after next, some months ago. All of our three daughters had announced they would be unavailable for one reason or another, so we mulled over who we might ask join us for a simple meal. In the end, we invited Debbie’s sister, Suzanne, from New Jersey and envisioned a quiet day. Then we received an invitation from Stephen and Susie Jones here to join them and their son, Drew’s family. We loved the idea, and so, the gathering started to grow.

Meanwhile, about a month ago my mother, Cynthia, a member of this congregation living at Brooks Howell Home, fell while transferring to a wheelchair and broke her hip. The surgery to repair it was simple, but her frail health and lack of stamina have impeded her recovery to the point where we are unsure of her future.

In conversation with my sister and three brothers we decided that it made sense for them to visit soon, and, well, Thanksgiving was on the horizon. So, perhaps it made sense for them to come then. Three of them agreed, along with my mother’s youngest sister. We contacted Stephen and Suzie with the news, and they insisted on bringing everybody along. So, what started as plans for a quiet meal has grown to a gathering of 15.

It is an occasion I look forward to, but one also tinged with impermanence. Indeed, Thanksgiving for many of us is a kind of thermometer of change. Each year for various reasons different faces appear at and disappear from the table. So in the gathering before the sweet potatoes are passed there is always a moment to take stock of where we are. This year will be a special moment for many in our gathering.

I’ve long been a fan of the piece the choir sang for you today, Copland’s “The Promise of Living,” but for the past several weeks I’ve come to know it quite a bit better, thanks to Debbie. Diligent new choir member that she is, she has found myriad moments to practice her part – playing it through on our piano at home, or plugging in the MP3 recording Milt supplied so she could practice as we drove in her car. It has become a kind of sound track of our lives, and so it’s on my mind.

The song closes out the first act of Copland’s opera “The Tender Land,” and the lyrics, written by Copland’s one-time partner Horace Everett, constitute a hymn of praise centered on that cycle of change we began with this morning: sowing and planting, and the labor of harvest. But it adds another dimension.

Things vanish all around us. Circumstance brings us down. And still, as Jane Hirshfield puts it, there is a “strange happiness” that rises in our breasts, a happiness centered not in the things we surround ourselves with, things of “perishing perfumes and clashings,” but in something else, in the fragile fallible world we inhabit.

Late in the day that we discovered our robbery, having visited my mother in her declining health, I had a moment where I felt weighed down and exhausted. A church meeting was scheduled to start in a half hour, but I had no energy for it. Impulsively, I turned to the computer and Googled the only thing I could think of at that moment that might bring comfort. A pianist slowly began playing Copland’s distinctive open chords and then the tenors and basses entered, “The promise of living with hope and Thanksgiving is born of our loving, our friends and our labor.”

As in John Updike’s rescue, we have the opportunity to set free an agitated essence of air within us, to release it like a self-flung ball to the lovely, perishing outdoors. There is no avoiding the perishing of so much in our lives – the stuff we treasure, the people we love, even ourselves in the bargain. And yet, there is a promise to our lives that we realize in giving our authentic selves to them. It is, as Copland’s farm family sings, born of our loving, our friends and our labor. And it is enough.

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.

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:

  1. in part, the gentle Jesus of my childhood who walked by the Sea of Gallilee and loved little children
  2. then, a teacher I vaguely dismissed to the ranks of many religious seers
  3. 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/

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

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.

Sermon from February 17: What Passion Makes Possible (text only)

MEDITATION–

Sometimes we need to take a step away
to see something we care about more clearly,
to size it up in the larger context of our lives.
So, today we gather in different space
with a big screen, stage and theater seating,
but none of this changes who we are:
people who join as one community
in an ongoing journey of religious discovery
inviting each of us to a walk of faith.
This space may feel strange, but it is soon made familiar,
for we hallow it with our hopes;
we bless it with our laughter.
May this time away renew our spirits
and inspire our service to the vision we hold
of peace and freedom, of justice and love
made real in beloved community.

SERMON: Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–

Randy Pausch would have been the first person to tell you that he had always been a nerdy kind of guy. He was the kind of kid who brought a dictionary to the dinner table and whose hero was Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.

Growing up in suburban Maryland in the 1960s and 70s, he persuaded his parents to let him decorate the walls of his room with his own drawings of cool stuff. His idea of cool stuff was a rocket ship, a submarine, pieces from a chess set, and the quadratic equation. He even painted a silver elevator door on one wall with up and down buttons and, above the door, floor numbers one through six, with the number “three” illuminated, in his one-story, ranch-style home.

Like many kids, he spent a lot of time in his imagination, dreaming about futuristic things like alien worlds and flying in space ships. So, for Randy the big event of his young life was a trip to Disneyworld in California. He couldn’t believe the amazing rides he went on and all the cool things he could do. He walked away determined to make stuff like that some day.

As you can imagine, Randy was pretty good in school. In fact, he went on to get a PhD in computer science and got a job as a college professor. But even then he hadn’t given up on his dream of getting inside the rides at Disneyland. The funny thing was that when he wrote to the people at Disney who designed the rides – they called themselves Imagineers – they didn’t seem to be interested in hearing from him.

Here he was teaching college students how to create virtual reality scenes on their computers. He felt sure he could contribute something to the people at Disney, but no dice. Randy was undeterred. As he saw it, those hurdles were there just to make him show how badly he wanted to do it.

One day he learned that Disney was developing a new ride based on the movie “Aladdin” that would use elements of virtual reality. So, again he pestered the Disney people until finally one of them agreed to meet with him. He says he probably did 80 hours of research for the interview and talked to every virtual reality expert he could find. In the end the Disney person agreed to let Randy work there during his upcoming six-month sabbatical. So, he finally got to work at Disney.

Randy tells the story of one night on a warm California night driving home from the Imagineering headquarters in a convertible with the soundtrack of “The Lion King” playing on his stereo and tears streaming down his cheeks.

And that wasn’t the end of Randy’s connection with Disney. Coming back to the university where he worked, he arranged for some of his students to have internships at Disney. His class on “Building Virtual Worlds” invited people across academic disciplines to enroll and turned out to be among the most popular at the university. Randy eventually was recruited to write the entry on Virtual Reality for the World Book encyclopedia, and the teaching tool he created to introduce students to virtual reality, called Alice, is being used across the world to teach people computer programming.

By the summer of 2006, at 45 years old, you’d have to say that Randy was a pretty happy, successful man. Not only was he a celebrated college professor, but also he was married to a woman he adored and had three young children.

But then came these strange pains in his abdomen that he couldn’t explain. A battery of tests gave him sobering news. He had pancreatic cancer, a particularly deadly form of the disease. But Randy was determined to stay alive for his family. He underwent difficult surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, but in the end the cancer came back.

Walking out of that appointment after learning that his life could end in months, Randy realized that he’d need to find a different perspective on the days ahead, a perspective that helped him make the best of what life he had left.

One reason we know so much about Randy’s story is that earlier in the same year he received those disappointing test results he had been recruited by the university to take part in a lecture series in which star faculty were invited to reflect on their lives. It was called “The Last Lecture Series.” Never before, though, had the person giving the lecture known for a fact that he or she would not live long after giving the lecture. It really would be Randy’s last.

Randy wasn’t sure at first if it was a good idea to go through with it: preparing a lecture would take time from his family and his energy was waning. But he finally decided to go ahead with it because he hoped that sharing the passion that he had given to his life might encourage others to find a path to fulfilling their own dreams.

I want to tell you a bit more about what Randy had to say at that last lecture. But first I want to talk to you about why it came to my mind to tell you his story at this service where we have gathered here in this downtown performance space in one strong body to celebrate this community and talk about why we support it.

Like Randy, most of us go about our lives knowing in a general kind of way that the days given to us are limited, but figuring that the time when those days would end are far off. Like the boy in our story we have moments in our lives when we receive love, or guidance, or wisdom. We experience how good those moments feel. We have a sense of being deeply connected to each other, to our own inner calling, and to the world. And we say to ourselves, “I’m always going to remember this moment.”

But memory fades. Life moves on. We get busy with other things. In his lecture, Randy talked about how he felt that he “won the lottery” with the parents he had. He grew up always knowing that he was loved and supported. When he headed off to academia – top grades, top honors – he was a kind of golden boy, feeling pretty cocky, like he could do anything. He was, he admitted in his lecture, a bit of a “jerk.”

Randy said it was a legendary computer science professor in college who set him straight. One day the professor took him out for a walk, put an arm around his shoulders and said, “Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as being so arrogant, because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.”

Now, I don’t think that any of us necessarily arrives at this congregation as a “jerk.” But we all come here with things to learn and blind spots that limit how we experience each other and the world. Part of what we offer as a community is safe space for each of us to learn and grow. We gather for small group ministry, in classes, in dinner and hiking groups and more. All of this is religious work, for it connects us to life-affirming values that can help us grow into compassionate, spiritually mature, loving and giving people.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Randy showed up to give his “last lecture” wearing his Disney Imagineers polo shirt. Even with his PhD and other academic credentials, that shirt remained special to him because it symbolized a dream that had stayed with him since he was a boy that he was able to achieve.

And what made it important was not just that it was a childhood dream, but that it connected him to an important part of himself, a passion to create scenes and images that help people better understand the world. In a book he wrote about his last lecture, Randy said that as a high-tech guy, he never really understood what actors and artists were talking about when they talked about things inside of themselves that “needed to come out.” His lecture, he said, taught him that throughout his life there had been many things inside him that needed to come out.

And of course that’s true of all of us. The writer and teacher Joseph Campbell studied many different religious traditions, and the advice he gave his students about their own religious searches was, “follow your bliss.”

He was clear, though, that “follow your bliss” meant more than just “do what you like.” It meant finding that path, that pursuit that you are most passionate about and giving yourself to it. And there, he argued, you will find your own fullest potential and the way that you can serve your community to the greatest possible extent.

Here’s what he said: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

Notice that Campbell didn’t identify any one track, any one way that he argued would bring you bliss. Rather, he said, it is up to us to find the track that is ours and to be aware that the track will shift and change as we learn and grow.

There are many things we find ourselves passionate about over the course of our lives, from baseball to ballet, from rose gardening to rock and roll. We are all of us Imagineers of a sort, looking for ways to put our passions to work in our lives. But beneath all of that is something more, some way that we feel connected more deeply to each other and everything around us. From time to time something resonates within us, perhaps in a beautiful spot, listening to music, reading a poem, or sitting gathered in worship or with someone we love.

We struggle for words to describe this feeling, this knowing, this emerging truth. And so in each other’s company we try them out. We venture haltingly, listen carefully, reflect what we hear and affirm, or simply let silence work on us.

When I look back at the trajectory of my own life, I am amazed at how I have changed and in ways that I never could have guessed, nor do I believe that I am done with my changes.  But I am grateful for a religious home that makes room for those changes and gives me companions who are ready to journey with me.

That’s what a religious community like this is for, to create a place where we can discover and name our deepest passions, our places of bliss, and put them work in our lives and in service to the greater world.

As your order of service reminds you, this is Stewardship Sunday, when we kick off the Annual Budget Drive that asks you to make financial commitments that will sustain this community for the year ahead. So, here’s my pitch. I promise it will be short.

The colorful brochure you received today describes how this congregation proposes to spend its money in the coming year in worship, education, caring and outreach and to support programs and maintain the campus where all of this happens.

I must tell you, it is such a privilege to serve this vital beacon of liberal religion. In the eight years I’ve been your minister you have grown and deepened as a community and stood fast as an advocate of justice, freedom and love. I’m proud of you.

This year, though, our Annual Budget Drive presents us with a challenge. In recent years, we have used money from a grant and bequests to help fund staff and programming needed to serve the congregation we have grown to be. We need to close that gap with our pledges. I have worked with the staff to keep next year’s budget tight. The only significant increase for the coming year is a 2% cost-of-living increase for all staff. This is important, since many of our staff received no increase last year. And for some of our part-time workers it will ensure that we remain a Living Wage employer.

To do all that, we ask you to consider a one-time major increase in your pledge. Details are in the brochure. We know that not everyone is in a position to increase, although we are encouraged by the results of some of our first visits. So far our team has received commitments of $101,450, well on our way toward our goal of $640,000.

Thank you so much to those who have responded, and as you weigh your options, please bring to mind the hopes and passions that this community serves.

Even though Randy Pausch was, by his own description, a high-tech kind of guy, the religious part of his life mattered to him, too. And that’s why he and his family were members of a Unitarian Universalist church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In an interview with the UU World magazine in the last months of his life, Randy said that the support of his church community had made a big difference to his family.

It was a place where, like this congregation, people heard the heartbeats of each other’s passions, where they carried the baskets of each other’s gifts to a crossroads where they could be shared.

Randy died on July 25, 2008, a little over four years ago. His family was with him, and he knew he was loved. I reflect that in the past few weeks I’ve conducted memorial services for two of our members, Joe Haun and Joe Major. And it was good to have a number of you there with me helping to tell their stories and comfort their friends and families.

This is what we do for each other. It’s part of the passion that we bring to this community, the love that we give and receive in one another’s company.

When I think of all this, my mind turns back to the words of our opening hymn, “drifting here with my ship’s companions, all we kindred pilgrim souls, making our way by the lights of the heavens in our beautiful blue boat home.”

I’ve said before that sometimes our sanctuary back on Edwin Place feels like a big boat, with all of us gathered together, sometimes sailing under sunny sides, sometimes riding out a storm. And even though this space today really bears no resemblance to that one, with you here I can almost imagine us there: a place where our hopes and passions, where the commitments we make to each other fuel a fire that keeps love alive.

Sermon from February 3: Being Straight (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–

So, let me begin with myself. All of my life I have identified with the male gender. Growing up I knew myself as a “boy,” placing myself in the same group as people who identified themselves or were identified to me as male, and distinguished myself from “girls,” people I identified, or others identified or who identified themselves as female.

I can’t specifically recall when I began to awaken to myself as a sexual being, but I’m guessing it was around the age of 11 or 12, and, with the exception with some consensual touching with a male friend at around that time, I have always been drawn to people who I identified as women as sexual partners. In my life today I live in a monogamous couple with the only person with whom I am intimate, my wife.

Now, let me acknowledge that this is not the sort of information that we ordinarily exchange with each other, and I am not offering my own tale with the expectation that you will all suddenly start sharing your own stories with each other. We are all entitled to our privacy. We have the right to decide for ourselves how much of the details of our lives to share and with whom to share them.

Instead, I offer my own story to draw attention to several interesting aspects of stories like mine in our culture and the consequences they have for our religious lives. In the vernacular we use today I am identified as “straight” or heterosexual: a man who is attracted sexually exclusively to “the other sex”: women.

But more importantly, and here’s where the trouble starts, my sexual orientation is widely conceived as “normal”: the standard, the way things are supposed to be. As such, it loads me up with all sorts of privilege. In any public setting, people feel comfortable asking me about my wife and making provisions to include her in social gatherings. I am entitled to thousands of benefits under federal, state and local law.

But, beyond all that is a privilege that people with a sexual orientation like mine have a hard time wrapping our heads around. If you are regarded as “normal,” then no matter where you go, you are “just folks”: Nothing out of the ordinary. On meeting you, people give you the benefit of the doubt and are ready to think well of you.

If your sexual orientation is different, it can be otherwise. If it’s true that my sexual orientation is “the norm,” then any other arrangement is, by definition, “deviant.” It deviates, strays from, the norm. Now, technically speaking, all of that is simply the language of science, but part of what this demonstrates is the way in which the language of science can be employed to obscure, misinform and oppress.

So, where do we get this idea of what normal is? It’s true that we humans are issued two basic varieties of plumbing when it comes to the machinery of reproduction. But even there the story isn’t as simple as it looks. There are many variations in our physical make-up as well as in our genetic heritage that shape sexual identity and expression.

And, of course, it’s often remarked that our most important sexual organ is to be found not between our legs but perched on top of our necks. How shall we calibrate anything like “normal” when it comes to the extraordinary variety of human desire?

The writer Hanne Blank sought to track down the history of this notion of a “normal” sexual expression and discovered something interesting, which is contained in the title to her recent book: “Straight – The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.”

Yes, she writes, men and women have always had sex, but the notion that people have particular sexual orientations and that one might be identified as normal has only existed for something like a century and a half.

She traces the term “heterosexuality” back to Germany in 1869 during efforts to modernize Germany’s ancient legal codes. One legislator had his eye on eliminating a provision that stipulated harsh punishment for men having sex with men, arguing that it was wrong to punish actions that harmed no one. “Homosexuals” and “heterosexuals,” he said, were simply two types of human beings.

Nothing came of his efforts – Hitler later used that provision in German law to imprison and murder homosexuals in concentration camps during World War II – but that new word – heterosexual – later made its way to medical texts. There, though, it took a different turn and was used to describe what was then called “healthy sexuality.”

The word first appeared in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in 1934, where it was described as “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.”

Meanwhile, the growing influence of Sigmund Freud carried this conversation in a new direction. Freud held that heterosexuality was the norm among adults, but that to reach that state our innate sexual impulses must be channeled properly as we grow up. He argued that any other orientation – from disinterest in sex to same-sex attraction – was the result of trauma or some arrested development. It was by definition dysfunctional and in need of treatment to be cured.

Mental health professionals have since repudiated this theory of Freud’s, though it took the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. In the meantime, the notion that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t identify exclusively as heterosexual suffused our culture and remains embedded in many people’s understanding.

Alfred Kinsey’s work in the 1950s opened a door beyond that. From interviews with thousands of men and women about their sex lives he learned that the variety of people’s sexual desires and experiences were far greater than most suspected. He proposed that people’s sexual responses ran on a continuum of seven stages from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. But what was especially important is that he offered the data without judgment.

His studies opened a conversation about not only sexual orientation, but also practices. Where do you draw the line? What counts as heterosexual, homosexual, and what else? As scientific as these distinctions are made to sound, the actual science is pretty hazy.

As Hanne Blank puts it, “science has yet to prove that heterosexuality – or indeed any sexuality – exists in any way that is relevant to material science.” Researchers have gone hunting for the “gay gene,” sought traces of the “heterosexual brain” and tried to tease out the ingredients of the hormonal cocktail that determines sexual orientation. None of it has paid out yet.

It may be, she says, that for these categories that seem so important to us – homosexual, heterosexual – there simply aren’t any physical, biological distinctions significant enough to separate people into what’s called “natural kinds.” Perhaps this is just one of many aspects of human variability.

Also, as the conversation around sexual orientation has continued we’ve come to realize how limiting these old notions are. People today identify not only as gay or straight, but also as bisexual, attracted to both genders, and gender queer, rejecting traditional images of either masculinity or femininity.

And the whole notion gender itself is proving problematic. Different combinations of our X and Y chromosomes may place us on one side or another of what is traditionally recognized as male and female, and that designation may or may not gibe with the sexual identity we claim. Some people born with what is considered a conventional physical identity grow into a different sexual identity and so come to know themselves as transgender. One researcher has suggested that instead of two genders we might recognize as many as five.

We’ve also come to realize that what we call sexual orientation encompasses a broader range of feelings and identities than were previously considered. Researchers who have updated Kinsey’s scale have expanded the reach of questions they pursue.

Participants are asked not only about who they have had sex with but also about who their sexual fantasies are about, who they are attracted to, who they are emotionally drawn to, who they prefer to exchange non-sexual physical affection with, who they prefer to socialize with, what sexual identity they socialize with, how they identify themselves and how they identify the political personality they express to the world.

Each of these areas touches on different ways we relate to others, how we are drawn to them and how we interact with them in ways we don’t often think of as sexual yet that shape our experience of our sexual being.

As a straight man who came of age some 50 years ago I have to admit that much of this is still a little hard for me to understand. But as a religious person who is committed to affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person I recognize that my understanding it is not the point. Ultimately, my concern is not how or why people are drawn to each other, but that their interaction is not exploitive, harmful, or abusive. If, in the words of Marge Piercy, they are living a life they can endure; if they are making love that is loving, then it is something I can honor and bless.

When we define a narrow standard and declare all outside it to be deviant, we shut people off from the reality of their lives. And, as Adrienne Rich warned, whatever is unnamed, undepicted, censored, misnamed, made difficult-to-come-by, buried in memory under inadequate or lying language becomes not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. And so, is it any wonder how often people declared to be other, outsider, deviant choose to hide themselves or even end their lives rather than suffer disapprobation and shame?

We as a religious community have a duty to call those people back from the edge, to be, as Holly Near urged, a gentle, loving people, to widen the tent of acceptance and affirmation, to declare a new normal that embraces the broad diversity of human identity and expression.

Walt Whitman, poet of America and flamboyantly gay man, captured a truth of our lives in his poem. In the 1890s, highpoint of the Victorian Era, that laced up period where human intimacies were not discussed in polite society, he declared, “I sing the body electric.”

And isn’t it so? From early in infancy we are aware of an electricity that moves in our bodies, that sings to us – different songs in different seasons, to be sure – but singing all the same. We’re not always sure what we hear, and sometimes the tune changes – louder, softer, suddenly shifting to a different key.

In the end, as Whitman puts it, that passion that arises within us “balks account.” There is no telling whence it comes, or even, really, fully describing it, but in and of itself it is perfect. That is to say, it is what it is; it is ours.

It is not something that needs to be explained. It is merely something that is to be known. And that knowing in all its full dimensions is not easy, not for any of us. We test and experiment, bounce in and out of relationship, and if we’re lucky come to an understanding, an understanding grounded in loving relationship.

In such relationships, we learn, it is possible to find fulfillment, to find peace in the expression of our truth, embracing the curious, breathing, laughing flesh of our physical being, and being content to affirm that, while all things please the soul, these please the soul well.

Sermon from January 27: Living with Love (text)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–

I was taken a couple of weeks ago as I was standing with about 70 or 80 people in the basement of First Congregational Church downtown after one of the “We Do” actions by the Campaign for Southern Equality at Buncombe County’s Register of Deeds office. Seven same-sex couples, one after another, had just gone to the counter, asked for marriage licenses and been politely denied. It had been a carefully choreographed moment, as each of these has been, framed to bring attention to an injustice written into this state’s laws, their refusal to recognize the sanctity of commitments between people of the same gender, by the very people who seek that right.

For several of the participants, this was a return trip, only the most recent occasion when they had taken part in such an action. As we stood in the church hall, they were each given an opportunity to speak about the experience. What caught my attention was that in their reflections these women focused their remarks not so much on the moment of being turned back in the registrar’s office, but on the cheers that came from the dozens of people who awaited them outside.

No matter how often she does it, one woman told the group, she’s amazed every time by the warmth she feels in that moment. “The emotion doesn’t abate” were her words. It brought me back to what had been going through my own mind only a short time before.

As I loitered on the grass outside that nondescript office building in downtown Asheville, shifting my weight from foot to foot as these couples offered themselves to the unavailing machinery of bureaucracy I found myself reflecting for a moment on whether I was clear why I was doing this?

The action had come in the middle of a busy day and as time dragged on I had begun nervously eyeing my watch, thinking about the rest of the day, the commitments piled on my calendar. It wasn’t until the couples emerged from the building and smiled shyly as the dozens of us there hooted and cheered. It wasn’t until I heard the choke in their voices in their thanks to those gathered that it dawned on me again – oh, yes, that’s right: standing on the side of love.

In this congregation we argue that there are three dimensions in the religious life – within, the interior reflections that we each engage in to clarify for ourselves the source of our spirituality and what it demands of us; among, the ways we gather with each other to learn and grow, to share our lives and support each other; and beyond, the ways that we carry our own learning and reflections into our larger lives and in service to justice.

We tend to get the within piece, the individual search for meaning, pretty quickly. It is, after all, what got us in the door. We needed a religious community where there was room for us, where we weren’t going to get squeezed in a box or guilt-tripped, a place that was safe and accepted us fully so that we could explore our spiritual sides.

And the among piece comes with being a part of a community, finding our niche, people we can connect with, activities that engage us. This part comes easier for some than for others. More socially oriented people usually gather their clan or find their comfort spot pretty quickly, while some shyer folks can feel overwhelmed or marginalized. It’s a place where we as a community stumble at times and people can fall away. So, we work at building systems that help us all connect with each other and stay in touch.

The beyond piece is interesting. It’s not uncommon that people arrive at our congregation with a history of their own engagement with justice work. So, they don’t need to be persuaded that there’s a connection between their inner work and their work in the world.

And yet it has always seemed to me that we are less than clear about the nature of that connection, what creates that bridge. So, today let me be plain: the connection is love.

There. That was easy. Are we done? No, hardly.

Let’s step back a moment. I want to acknowledge that the word love can be and often is thrown around pretty freely. “I only did that/said that because I love you.” “We only hurt the ones we love.” Yadda, Yadda, right?

I’m reminded of the ambivalence I’ve experienced at times over the years among some people in our movement when we get started talking about love.

I remember years ago when I was still in seminary getting push-back from a long-time member at my home congregation after a service that I led. She said she objected to my using the word “love” to describe how we in the congregation sought to regard each other. “I would really describe it more as ‘respect’,” she told me.

And I remember some years ago us gathering in this sanctuary to talk through the key concepts that we wanted included in the mission statement for this congregation. Individual search for meaning, freedom, justice – all these came quickly. Love took a while to emerge.

So, what’s that about? Well, part of it, I think, has to do with what is often rightful skepticism. We’ve heard talk of love in other religious settings, and it can feel pretty squishy and even inauthentic, bound up, as it often is, with a theology we just don’t buy.

You remember the Peanuts cartoon: Lucy is taunting her younger brother, Linus, for his dreams of being a doctor. “You could never be a doctor,” she says. “You know why? Because you don’t love mankind. That’s why.” And Linus replies, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Love, Love, Love. Yeah, great when we’re singing along with the Beatles, but less easy or obvious when we’re confronted with people acting in ugly or disrespectful ways.

In a recent article, the philosopher Stephen Asma writes that as nice as the idea of universalized love may seem, it’s not really how the world works. Empathy, he says, is not something that we can just conjure up by willing it so. Instead, in his words, it’s “a natural biological event – an activity, a process.”

“The feeling of care,” he writes, “is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells, flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors (and oxytocin and opioids). Care is like sprint racing. It takes time – duration, energy, systemic warm-up and cool-down, practice and a strange mixture of pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order, if you ramp-up the care system every time you see someone in need. The nightly news would render you literally exhausted.”

Sure, our heart strings vibrate a bit in response to the suffering of others, but that’s nothing like what he calls “the kinds of active preferential devotions that we marshal for members of our respective tribes,” in others words, family and our circle of closest friends.

Now, there is certainly truth in what he says. We have special bonds to those closest to us that set our hearts racing. And to suggest that we can live in such a way as to raise our feelings about everyone we know – heck, everyone on earth – to that level is pretty foolish. But, really, that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Love, after all, has many dimensions. Yes, it applies to those with whom we are most intimate, but it also applies to other relationships as well in different ways. I think the theologian Paul Tillich puts his finger on it when he remarks that, “love is the moving power of life.” It is what drives everything to everything else. It is the way in which we and all that we care about are realized.

Some years ago, the writer Karen Armstrong, won a prize from the TED talks to come up with an idea for making the world a better place. Being a scholar of religion, she chose to investigate ways that religion, the source of so much divisiveness in the world, might help people live together in mutual respect.

The project she chose was to bring together leaders of a half dozen religious traditions to see if, working together, they could create what she called a Charter for Compassion that, in her words, “would restore compassion to the heart of religious and moral life.”

Her book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, which T.S. read from earlier, lays out a program, distilled from teachings of the world religions, detailing how anyone might learn to cultivate compassion in their daily lives. Her program leads us through disciplines we might anticipate – cultivating empathy, mindfulness, compassion for ourselves, and so on.

But a key element, she said, is the admission of how little we really know about each other, that there is a mystery at the core of each of us that eludes our grasp. This, she noted, is part of what’s expressed in the Hindu greeting, “Namaste,” where, bowing with joined hands, one honors the sacred mystery of another. Too often, Armstrong says, our interactions with each other lack that reverence. Without thinking, we make blithe assumptions about others, often based on our own needs, fears, ambitions or desires.

But on occasion we are shaken out of our ordinary way of thinking. It may be an unexpected encounter, chancing on some natural beauty or coming on a particularly haunting piece of music.

In some way we experience what Armstrong identifies as a moment of what the Greeks call ekstasis, where for a time we step outside our own perspective and see the world from a different vantage.

This is the image that Jane Hirshfield’s poem suggests to me: a state of mind where we can identify with everything around us – the trees shedding golden leaves, the fish in the pond, the water itself – a place of deep appreciation, where for a moment we are given over to life, where our heart is calm and still, refusing nothing.

It is in such a place, I think, that we recognize love as the moving power of life, the power that carries us from our inner work within to our gathering among to our encounter with a larger world beyond us.

And, of course, this circuit continues, as our work beyond informs our work within that inspires our gathering and round we go again. The more practiced we become, the more easily our heart engages.

This, it seems to me, is much of the work we are doing here – inviting each other to engage our hearts at different stages, in different places. It will require risking at times and loosening our grip on old certainties. But in the end it is no great reach to locate ourselves in such a way so that we are standing on the side of love. It is where we want to be anyway.

Sermon from January 20: Parting the Waters (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–

As you approach Kelly Ingram Park on the outskirts of downtown in Birmingham, Alabama, there is nothing much to distinguish it. Filling a full city block, it’s planted with trees and crossed by meandering paths. It’s not until you enter and catch sight of the sculptures planted along the paths that you get a hint of the tumultuous events that were centered there, now half a century ago.

One depicts two children, life size, on one side of the path, looking stolidly through bars representing a jail on the other side of the path. Another depicts a water cannon on a tripod aimed at two children against a wall, one crouched over, the other facing the wall with her arms held in front of her, her back turned to the cannon.

The most arresting may be the sculpture that appears on the cover of your order of service depicting guard dogs leaping aggressively from walls on each side of the path with barely enough space for a person to walk between.

Last fall this park was the first stop on the Living Legacy Tour of Civil Rights sites of the South that I took part in. As one for whom most of the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s were mostly snatches of news clips reaching my pre-teen eyes or ears, it was a good place to start. Fifty years after those formative times we have lost many of the concrete reminders of what was going on and what was at stake then. But Kelly Ingram Park remains a place where history in its most graphic form is in our faces demanding to be known.

So, in this month of beginning when we also celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to focus our reflection on Birmingham, a place where the Civil Rights struggle was reborn into a movement that transformed our nation and continues to challenge us today.

Protests against racial discrimination had their beginning in Birmingham in the early 50s, when a petition seeking the hiring of blacks as police officers was denied. In 1956, a newly formed Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, headed by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, following up on the successful Montgomery bus boycott launched an action to integrate city buses there. It got nowhere, though. The leaders were arrested, and the powerful council headed by Bull Conner ruled that continued segregation was necessary to prevent “friction” between the races.

A high profile racial killing and repeated Klan cross burnings made many wary of going further. Over the next six years 17 black homes or churches were bombed with no arrests made, giving the city the nickname of “Bombingham.”

It wasn’t until January 1963, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, that national civil rights groups came together to build a coordinated strategy for dealing with segregation in Birmingham. Most actions up until then had taken place in small towns. Birmingham was a complex and vibrant city, a center of the steel industry, and, despite small town ways, more cosmopolitan. Birmingham also posed a challenge in logistics – the recruiting and directing of many people – and enlisting allies. The local black clergy association, for one, was deeply suspicious of the group.

But the issue was heating up. The arrival of Freedom Riders in May 1961 brought renewed attention to segregation, and in May 1962 college students conducted a voter registration drive and “selective buying” campaign that severely reduced black purchases. Determined to move forward, a gathering that King chaired in Savannah, Georgia launched what became known as Project C, for Confrontation – a campaign of boycotts, marches and nonviolent resistance to start in Birmingham that spring.

Birmingham itself, though, was in transition. The city’s three-member council was being replaced by a nine-member council and mayor. Many moderate whites and their black allies saw this as a moment to end the Bull Conner era.

In the March election, just as the desegregation actions were beginning, Conner and his opponent, Albert Boutwell, were tied in the election for mayor. The moderates urged King to delay any actions, fearing a blow-up that would work to Conner’s favor. In the April run-off, Conner was defeated, but incredibly he and the other two commissioners refused to step down, leaving a divided government and Conner still in charge of the police.

The protests began the next day with lunch counter sit-ins, but most of the counters just closed down. Protests in subsequent days sputtered as well. Little was reported about them in the news media, and Boutwell, the new mayor, urged people of both races to, in his words, “calmly ignore what is not being attempted in Birmingham.”

Still, King was determined to go through with his plans. So, on April 12, Good Friday, he joined a protest march, violating a city injunction prohibiting him from leading demonstrations, and was arrested and jailed. In jail, he learned in a phone call to his wife, Coretta, that President Kennedy had called to ask her about him. But he was discouraged to find himself criticized in much of the national media as a radical, with Birmingham’s Mayor Boutwell, of all people, being quoted as calling for “mutual respect and understanding.”

But what really irked him was a letter published on the front page of the Birmingham newspaper from what are described as eight “leading Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clerics” attacking the protests as “untimely”, saying they would “incite hatred and violence” and that such “extreme measures” were not justified.

These were the very people who at some level King had seen as allies, leaders who had objected to Governor George Wallace’s declaration of “segregation, now and forever!” at his inauguration only four months before. For him, it was an awakening, a moment of clarity. As he began scribbling on margin of the newspaper he discovered a new voice, a more universal, prophetic voice. He framed his indignation as personal disappointment, but the point he made was broader. He was zeroing in on the tamed and temporizing church, the one that affirmed high principle, but stepped away when the principle was most clearly at stake. Against the claims of clerics that he was creating tension, he invited them to observe something that from their place of personal privilege they had missed.

Those who were marching, he reminded them, “are not the creators of the tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” And leaving no question of how strongly he felt, he turned to a vivid metaphor, comparing racism to a boil that, rather than be ignored, “must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light before it can be cured.” There was no turning back now. The stakes were too high.

Just how high became clear days after King was released from jail. Other movement leaders had been training high school students in non-violent methods, and when King returned they urged a bold shift in strategy. Rather than seeking to enlist fearful adults, it would be the children who would lead the next wave of marches.

On May 2nd at around 1 p.m. a group of about 50 high school students marched two abreast out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing “We Shall Overcome” as bystanders watched in Kelly Ingram Park across the street. They were promptly arrested by police for violating court injunctions and were loaded into paddy wagons. But no sooner was one group arrested than another group emerged from the church.

And so it continued throughout the day. By nightfall some 600 children were in police custody and the city was running out of places to put them. So, the next day the police strategy shifted from arrest to deterrence. Bull Conner ordered fire hoses brought in and as the children approached he warned them to turn back, “or you might get wet.” They did.

Many of the first group retreated after being soaked, but others just sat on the sidewalk and endured the spray. So, Conner ordered water cannons that forced the spray from two hoses into a single nozzle – devices said to be capable of stripping the bark off trees at 100 feet. Television cameras captured the spray from those hoses propelling children tumbling over and over down the street, as if in a high wind.

Meanwhile, organizers directed other groups of protesting children away from the hoses, outflanking firefighters with hoses. So, Conner ordered K-9 units to rush the demonstrators with dogs. City leaders and pundits criticized march leaders for putting children in danger, but King replied that these people showed no such tender solicitude when it came to the many deprivations these children endured due to segregation.

A couple of days of pandemonium ended with a truce of sorts between the march leaders and the city, but the tide had turned. As the protests continued, white business leaders began meeting secretly to talk about how to end this stand-off, and eventually King was brought quietly into the conversation. After several tense days, a settlement was announced that would integrate Birmingham’s public facilities – rest rooms, water fountains, lunch counters – release prisoners of the movement who remained in jail and set up a biracial committee to hear ongoing concerns.

The agreement left much to be done. Several bombings followed, including the home of King’s brother, A.D., and the motel where King usually stayed, followed by some rioting in response.

But the agreement held, and, what must have been sweet in King’s ears, a month later President Kennedy gave his first address on the subject of civil rights, and his words echoed King’s rhetoric in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail:

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it,” Kennedy said, “And we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world – and much more importantly, to each other – that this is the land of the free, except for negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except for Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect for Negroes?” Extemporaneously, he added, “we owe them, and we owe ourselves, a better country.”

In one of the sad ironies of the Civil Rights movement, among those listening in his car radio to Kennedy’s address that night was Medger Evers, a field worker for the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers’ wife had let the children stay up late to let them hear what their father thought of the speech. When Evers arrived home, he had barely gotten out of his car before he was shot with a deer rifle; he died shortly afterward.

King went on in August to give his electrifying speech in the March on Washington, but in Birmingham, controversy still surrounded desegregation. In September President Kennedy federalized National Guard troops to protect black students after a federal judge ordered that they be admitted to three public schools.

Only five days later, at 16th Street Baptist Church as preparations were being made for Youth Sunday – “The Love that Forgives” was the topic – a bomb exploded in a stairway of the church leading to the sanctuary and four girls preparing to take part in the service were killed. The city was stunned, and at a service where King spoke remembering the girls, 8,000 people attended, including 800 pastors of both races. A small black marker outside of 16th Street Baptist inscribed with the names of the murdered girls may be the most haunting memorial of the Civil Rights Era in Birmingham today.

50 years later, then, we are left wondering what this transformative time, only about eight months at a pivotal moment in American history, has to teach us.

Audre Lorde’s searing poem serves as a reminder of what was and remains at stake for people in such oppressed circumstances. It’s a perspective few of us here have ever glimpsed, of living on a shoreline where the simplest decisions – where to step, whom to talk to – are potentially life threatening, where fear is wielded by those in power as a weapon to silence, fear, even, of the rising and setting of the sun, of full or empty stomachs, fear that those we love will be snatched from us, fear that our voices will put us in danger or be misconstrued, yet knowing that silence perpetuates the soul-killing reality of their lives.

In the end, as Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, as the students pouring from 16th Street Baptist Church understood, it was better to speak, since as far as their oppressors were concerned, they were never meant to survive.

This is the awakening that King experienced while writing his letter from the Birmingham City Jail. The seeming moderation of the white clergy was in the end a repudiation of the black populace and their claim that their very being was at stake in the segregated South. Their call for order in the face of injustice and humiliation made clear where they stood on this crucial question of survival.

Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.

And what’s remarkable is that facing that existential threat, King elected not to dismiss or demean his critics. Instead, he appealed to them to look to their hearts, to find that vital and hopeful essence within them and then see the same essence in those with standing up to high-power hoses and police dogs, to feel the deep human connection to each of them.

Return to who you are, Return to what you are.

Return to where you are born and reborn again.

By that essential nature – the light of human conscience, he called it – he appealed to them, too, to awaken, to see in these marchers people of dignity and worth, brothers and sisters in a struggle for freedom.

Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.

Sad to say, it was an imaginative leap too large for most to make. And so, while the genius and moral strength of the Civil Rights movement won many victories for an oppressed people, we are left even today with a kind of spiritual deadness that pervades many conversations around race.

It may be, as Naomi Shihab Nye says, that too few of us have learned the “tender gravity” of kindness. Perhaps it is because we have not experienced or acknowledged the losses and the sorrows that have piled up around us, experiences, she tells us, that teach kindness as the deepest thing inside.

Amid all this tumult, the tragedies that continue to multiply, it may be that it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, kindness that makes no judgment, that simply sees in the other, one like ourselves.

It’s a continuing legacy from the struggles of Birmingham: that we might step beyond our comfort and risk coming to know the larger truth of our oneness as one people.

May it be so.

Sermon from January 13: Beginning Again (text & audio)

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–

Even today, many years later, there is something in me that resists going there. It was 1999, with all its cosmological portent – the coming of a new century, a new millennium. But I didn’t attend to much of it, stuck as I was in my own “slough of despond,” as John Bunyan once called it.

After 20 years in newspaper journalism, 15 of them at one newspaper, steadily working my way up in positions of increasing prominence and visibility, I had, without entirely knowing how or why, been bumped out of a job I loved. Oh, I could say it wasn’t my fault, that it was economic pressure, pressures, really, that were affecting the whole industry that forced the cutbacks that my employer undertook.

I wasn’t the only one affected. Some people lost their jobs. At least I was still working. All the same, the position I ended up with didn’t feel like a plum. I had been a reporter with a byline with relatively flexible hours, hunting out and then writing stories in a field I enjoyed. My new assignment had me working second shift, parked in front of a computer for eight hours a day picking over other people’s copy.

To say I was unhappy doesn’t quite tell it. What it really felt like was repudiation, a judgment that I had been weighed and found wanting, that I had not simply failed but that I was, in fact, “a failure.” The metaphor that Bunyan offers in Pilgrim’s Progress is a good one. This place feels like a swamp where you wallow about, bedaubed by dirt, addled, unsure of any way out with this soul-sapping burden on your back, weighing you down.

Anticipating the direction where my life seemed to be taking me, I asked the people organizing worship services at the UU church we attended whether I might address the subject in a worship service. Sure, they said.

And thus emerged my sermon, “The Art of Failing.” I cringe a bit now looking back at it. I certainly felt very brave standing in front of those folks confessing my misfortune and asserting that there was some “art” to be found in that moment. We’ve all heard the talk – taking lemons and making lemonade, making “beautiful” failures that bring us to some transformative place. In the moment, though, it was hard to see how that happens. Most of what I remember feeling at the time was how hollow the message coming from my mouth felt in my own ears.

Failing isn’t something that we like to dwell on much, and the further on we get in our lives such losses feel less like setbacks and more like existential judgments. It’s said that when you’re in your 20s or early 30s you have this narrative running in your head – “I’m young, I have promise. I have everything going for me.” Setbacks, sure, but you recalibrate, lick your wounds a little and move on.

For me, this sermon came right about the time of my 46th birthday. Whatever narrative I might have thought I was living had faded, and the passing of time was taking on new weight. I was in need of a new story, but where would it come from?

Beginning again – it’s a fact of life. Jobs change, marriages fail, stuff happens. We need to let something go and find a new direction. Where do we start? It’s tempting to begin, as I did, by making our lives as full as possible. I began scrambling for free-lance writing jobs, bearing down on my resume and getting it around. All productive stuff, at one level, but also in many ways it was work to keep my frantic mind occupied. If I was busy, I wouldn’t have to dwell on the fear and sadness I was feeling. But at the same time this busyness kept me from opening to something new.

The Buddhist writer Pema Chodron remarks that fear often arises from a sense of poverty, a feeling that we are lacking something and we need to scramble somehow to find it and fill our gaping need.

We can’t relax with ourselves. Instead, we are preoccupied by this script that runs as if on a loop, repeating over and over, reciting our inadequacies. Wherever we go, it runs like elevator music, below the level of our consciousness, until every once in a while something happens that seems to reinforce this script. Then, the music swells and we’re reminded: there it is again, proof of our inadequacy.

Where’s the way out? I’ve suggested this month that we might think of the process of beginning as a discipline. Oddly enough, in this circumstance, beginning starts with a full stop. Like rebooting a balky hard drive, we need to disrupt the scripts and simply be present to ourselves: unrated, unevaluated, unjudged.

Let the busy mind settle down:
enter into a moment where we are not awaiting,
not hoping, not longing,
just welcoming, accepting.

In that space, Pema Chodron says, in time we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. Here we find a moment of what the Buddhist’s call maitri, a complete acceptance, or unconditional friendship with ourselves as we are. It’s not something new that suddenly arises. It’s not a matter of fixing or improving some debility, making up for some lack, but a settled awareness of and appreciation for who we are. It is in essence accepting our inherent worthiness.

Pema Chodron is careful to distinguish this from the phenomenon that she calls “self cherishing.” This is essentially the practice of seeking always to protect and comfort ourselves, seeking to assure that we are always happy and in no distress. To do this, though, we put up walls against potentially disturbing experience and become self-absorbed.

It is, as the Buddhists say, the root of all suffering, and it is the center of our experience of failure.  Failure, after all, is the experience of falling short of our expectation. And where does the expectation come from? Well, it is the dream of the ego. We cherish this image that we have constructed of ourselves. We persuade ourselves that it is us, oh marvelous, wonderful us. We may even grow a feeling of entitlement. It’s what we’re due, after all. We’ve put in the time; we’ve hit the marks.

But, no. Sorry, not going to happen. We can rant, we can weep, we can withdraw, and still, there it is: evidence, in the end, not of our unworthiness, but of the unworthy expectations we have created for ourselves.

And here the Buddhists offer an interesting perspective that takes some reflecting to sort through. They say that we need to just sit with ourselves, letting go of the scripts, the expectations, the assignments we give to ourselves. And with all of that cleared out, something appears: something true, something good. And here’s where the twist comes in: Pema Chodron argues that as soon as we begin to know ourselves, we begin to forget ourselves. We no longer need to be so self-involved. From that settled place we not only fully appreciate ourselves, but we also appreciate others and the wider world.

The story is told that early in his career the writer E.B. White wrote a letter to his wife, Katherine Sergeant Angell saying that he felt like a failure and thought he ought to give up working at the New Yorker, where he was one of its treasured writers. Angell wrote back to say that whatever his misgivings, there was no denying that he was a writer, and a good one. “For you to give up now would be like a violinist good enough to perform in one of the four or five leading orchestras in the world giving up fiddling because he couldn’t be Heifetz. It doesn’t seem sensible for such a person to give up music, the thing he most loved in the world, because he can’t be Heifetz.

It’s a feeling that any of us knows. Given the chance, most of us wouldn’t have any trouble naming half a dozen people who perform whatever calling we may have better then we do.

And? None of that changes the truth that we live, how we are called to be who we are. It is ironic that one of the ways we best assure our own suffering is to create extravagant and heroic visions of ourselves – the best, the richest, the smartest, the foxiest, the suavest – images we can only disappoint.

Part of beginning again is correcting our vision, giving ourselves the space to see who we are, how the world is, the abundant reality we inhabit. I think this is what draws me to Wislawa Szymborska’s poem – her picture of life as scattered images, snapshots of seemingly random moments that knit themselves into our experience. The world for each of us is described not by some overarching scheme but by a collection of these moments – getting covered in leaves, stroking the fur of a dog, a nighttime conversation with the light off, stumbling on a stone, following a spark on the wind with our eyes.

They are our context. That doesn’t give them any privileged meaning, but they do locate us. They are the place where we begin. And so, perhaps life is less like the scroll of a heroic journey than a series of improv workshops. And we could hardly want a better guide on this path than Tina Fey.

So, here we are, you and I, entering this scene. One or another of us, or perhaps the leader of this workshop, or someone from the audience tosses a premise into our midst. What do we do? Well, calling the game off or withdrawing into ourselves isn’t an option. We’re in this. The only way forward is through.

So, what does Tiny say? The first rule of improvisation is: agree. Don’t question the premise, don’t dispute the scene. Accept it and then engage willingly with those that you’re thrown in with. Our own ego fades into the background as we give ourselves to the circumstances before us. Start with a “Yes,” Tina says, and see where that takes you.

But don’t stop there. In improvisation, we need to do more than just say “Yes” to the situation. We also need to add something of our own – our own insight, our own compassion, our own genius to the situation. This doesn’t mean pontificating or philosophizing or otherwise commenting on the situation at hand. It means stepping in and helping to advance the action, to move the situation forward.

That’s the second rule of improvisation. Don’t be afraid to contribute. Forget about second-guessing yourself. “Oh, I don’t think it‘s good enough.” Launch into it. Anything that keeps the action moving will keep the scene alive.

And in making your contributions don’t be timid or tentative. The least helpful addition to the scene is the offering of questions. What’s going on? Where are we? Who are you? Your guess is as good as mine. In posing questions, we take ourselves out of the scene and put the onus on others to move it forward. Take ownership of your perspective, your insight, your vision. You may open a wonderful new direction for the scene to take.

And that, of course, leads to what Tina Fey calls “the best rule,” the fundamental assumption underlying all improv work: There are no mistakes, only opportunities!

Really? Oh, gosh I don’t know. I mean, sure, this is fun – life is an improv workshop. I get it. But there are no mistakes? I don’t know about you, but I make all kinds of mistakes, and some of them are real whoppers. Only opportunities? Isn’t that a little Pollyannaish?

Well, OK. Let me tweak that a little. Yeah, we make mistakes. Perhaps a better way to put it is: there are no failures. Failure, remember, implies exhausting our resources, coming to an end. Our mistakes do not bring us to an end: they merely bring us up short.

Like working through an improv scene that gets convoluted and confused, we discover that we need to shift gears and find a different path. It may not be newspaper journalism any more. Perhaps it’s a line of work that not only provides an outlet for writing but also opens up my heart.

So, yes, opportunities: happy accidents, in Tina Fey’s words. We are offered many opportunities in our lives to begin again: to find our callings, to begin new relationships, to let go of unhelpful scripts. And we begin by making friends with ourselves, the jumble of experience, insight and aptitude that we carry into the abundant reality of the world.

In the end, it’s enough. We’re enough. So may it be.

Singing Out the Old Year, Sing in the New

Music was the center of this single service at the year’s end. Together, we sang and learned about some of our favorite hymns, rounds, and chants. All voices were welcomed for this intergenerational service. (Audio of this service cannot be published on the website due to copyright laws.)

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