Table of Contents Allergies of the Spirit 6/14/09 A Gay Day: Celebrating Our GLBTI Family 6/7/09 Moving Closer to Civilization 5/24/09
Imperfect Blessings 5/17/09 God as Mother 5/10/09 If you See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him 5/3/09 The Knack of Happy Living 4/19/09 Death's Recurring Story 4/12/09 God what? 4/5/09 Harnessing the Energy of Love 3/22/09 Truth and Reconciliation 3/15/09 What Do You Do When You've Got the Blues? 3/8/09 Remember the Ladies 3/1/09 There is No Life Without Roads 2/15/09 Dedicated conformists: Martin Luther King’s Vision 1/18/09 The Hooks that Grab Us 1/11/09 There's Nothing New about the New Year 1/4/09
Sometimes Children Know Best 12/21/08
Rituals of Our Lives 12/07/08 Seeds in the Apple VS Apples in the Seed 11/23/08 The Cracked Water Pot 8/24/08 Learning to Trust Again 8/31/08 Life Lessons 9/7/08 Tangled Webs We Weave 9/14/08 What are You Doing with Your Life? 9/21/08 The Changing Religious Landscape 9/28/08 AA: The Value of a Higher Power 10/5/08 Real and Emotional Discovery 10/12/09 Bogeys and Boogeymen: Real and Otherwise 10/19/08 Voting Your Life, Voting for Life 11/2/08 Soul Drought: Or Know-it-Alls Know Nothing 11/9/08 Everything is Never Enough 11/16/08
***
June 14, 2009 Allergies of the Spirit Like many different religions, and many UU congregations, we here honor the animals by offering this annual Sunday blessing for the beloved pets of our members, and to remind ourselves how important the animals are to our world, and especially how important our pet friends are in our lives. For many people, our pets are our families. For Unitarian Universalists, our Seventh Principle reminds us of the interdependent web of our world, of which we are a part; and not the only important part. These days of so many reminders of increasing global climate change, and possible scenarios that could bring about the destruction of humankind, we are reminded also that should these prognostications come to pass, we would not be the last creatures on this planet. Like many of you, I have allergies, mild to be sure, but I found myself needing the services of an allergist a couple years after I moved to Delaware in 1995. Before you say that all allergies are worse in Delaware--by the way, something I have heard in every state I’ve lived in about their allergy conditions--my son who had much more severe allergies, improved dramatically in Delaware. It all depends on what you are allergic to, and for me mold is a big one, and we do have lots of mold in this Mid-Atlantic region. So at this time of year, I regularly take Zyrtec which mostly keeps my allergy symptoms in check. I venture to say that of our congregation probably 90% deal with some kind of allergy problems. Over the years I have heard from members about their allergies to dogs, cats, strawberries, shellfish, milk, wheat, corn, bleach, perfumes and fragrances, lints, various chemicals, dust, mold, mites, mushrooms, antibiotics, and several varieties of trees and plants. Indeed, some of us are even allergic to ourselves, this is the nature of autoimmune disease, and many skin conditions are in effect an allergy to one’s own dead skin cells. So nearly everyone is allergic to something, and in addition, most of us are allergic in spirit to many more things and people. Everyone is allergic in spirit to someone or something they just don’t like. An allergy as I am sure you know is a hypersensitivity reaction by the body to foreign substances (antigens), that in similar amounts and circumstances are harmless to other people. But being allergic does not mean we have to stay allergic, indeed many children outgrow their allergies, and I was surprised to learn from my allergist that most allergies manifest in the thirties or older; so allergic reactions are not static things. What is also interesting is that allergies are treated by minute injections of the very substances to which you are allergic; thereby gradually desensitizing the person to the antigens. What about people to whom we may have a kind spiritual allergy? How do we learn to become more tolerant, even accepting of such irritating people? I have a story that illustrates at least one approach. There was a sheep-raising farmer who lived next to another farmer who was raising wheat, as well as four children, and a couple large dogs. The dogs were scaring the sheep. The sheep farmer was upset, for dogs can do a lot of damage in a herd of sheep, but did not know what to do. He could shoot the dogs or poison them, be nasty to his neighbor, or even take him to court. So, he thought and prayed about it, and looked to his own conscience before taking action. Finally, he thought of the perfect solution. As soon as some new lambs were born he gave each of his neighbor's children one of the lambs as a pet. The children were thrilled. But their father soon recognized that he could no longer allow his dogs to run rampant as before. He restrained them for the sake of the pet lambs. The two farmers became friends. Kindness won. Now we usually don’t have such nice and neat solutions to our problems. We usually will need more fortitude and kindness in order to inoculate ourselves against those people and situations that so irritate us. When it comes to our pet friends, we can be as stubborn about them as we can be about our children. I always remember the late humorist James Thurber, who loved his dogs, and wrote: If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons will. Some people do not like animals except as they may be found in nature. Some don’t like dogs. Some hate cats. Some are allergic to them, and seek to avoid them. So amidst all these different ways of looking at and dealing with our various situations viz-a-viz pets, ours and others, we are often called upon to find compromise, to be diplomatic, and certainly find kindness in our hearts and minds if we are to not be frequently in a state of discomfort, even frustration and anger. I have lived with people who love some animals and dislike others. I wish I could always know why some people are so disposed, but I cannot. Sometimes it is obvious, like roaming cats that make litter boxes of their neighbor’s flower beds, or dogs that do their business on a neighbor’s front yard. For me this is fairly clear, for when you live in a neighborhood that is subject to leash laws, that means the owners must keep their pets under control, then there is no question that we who have cats and dogs owe it to our neighbors to respect our contiguity. I have often been asked what to do about neighbor’s pets who overstep their bounds; of course the animals don’t know they are doing so, but the owners should. Such disregard can certainly create an allergic spirit in a neighbor. I am a dog and cat lover, but I also remember when my son was a toddler, I got very irritated with a neighbor down the street who walked her dog, a lovely golden retriever, by our house early in the morning, and always allowed her dog to urinate, sometimes defecate on our lawn. What had not been much of an issue before my son was born became a big issue afterwards. I certainly did not want him playing in a yard that had become a dog’s toilet. My husband and I got progressively more upset as we saw this neighbor passing, until one morning my husband went out and asked her to please not let the dog use our yard for its bathroom. We instantly made an enemy of that woman. She would walk by afterwards and, if we happened to be outside, say loudly something like: “Come away, Amber, they hate dogs there.” No, we didn’t hate dogs; we just loved our son more. Later, when he was about five-years-old, his allergies were getting very bad, and one his most severe allergies was to sycamore trees, the nearest tree was in another neighbor’s yard, yet I would have never expected my neighbor to cut down that beautiful old tree. Situations are not all equal. Pets can be such a joy in our lives. I have been privileged to have many cats and dogs in my life, and have learned what unique personalities they have. Like people, each pet has its own way of communicating, showing comfort, pleasure, sorrow. We have many pet stories in our family, as do all families where pets are loved. But animals are more than just our pets. Animals are part of what makes our world as it is; all creatures are an integral part of the interdependent web of which we are a part. When one part of creation is ignored, we do so at our peril. But beyond what nature needs in regard to the balance of creatures--and we human mammals are by far the most destructive, and using more than our fair share of the earth’s resources—but beyond this fundamental aspect of nature, animals have been tremendously important to our lives—and in some surprising ways. Such as how animals have saved human life. One of the best documentaries about this came from Ernest Harold Baynes, who wrote, Animal Heroes of the Great War. Baynes wrote of one instance, that of the carrier pigeons who got messages through for the Resistance in WWI and II, that the animals were even given citations: Diplomas, [along] with the citations were issued and kept at the headquarters of the French Pigeon Service, and because pigeons cannot wear medals on their breasts, special bands with the colors of the decorations were made for their legs. Among the other animals cited for their services by various nations, including the U.S., were: camels, cats, oxen, dogs, donkeys and mules, goats, and horses. In many cases animals were able to get messages to people in hostile territory by carrying them in their harnesses, or in their fur, etc. Cats (often considered Unitarian in their personalities), dogs, and other animals were trained to go predictably from place to place with no suspicion (food offerings no doubt figured in greatly). Even today, rescue dogs play a big role in various kinds of disasters, like earthquakes; and for sniffing out illegal narcotics among other things. And, of course, both dogs and monkeys are important as guide animals or helpers for people who are blind or physically disabled. We owe much also to people, like the Gibsons in this congregation, who take their dogs to nursing homes which has been shown to be highly therapeutic. There are many more ways we know that animals serve us, have saved many, and in great numbers give us the pleasure of their company. I hear from people from time-to-time that they do not think we should have this Blessing of the Animals because they are allergic, or just don’t like it, and I know that allergies can pose serious problems, but my friends, if we ceased to enjoy all the things that people are variously allergic to, then we would cease to have community, to have the joy of celebration altogether. From a Unitarian Universalist faith point of view, we are a religion of personal responsibility; each expected to find spiritual meaning by his or her own seeking, striving, learning. We are here to share and learn and grow together, living with difference on a regular basis. We value our diversity, and want to the degree possible to help one another in this process. Personal responsibility figures largely in this issue of allergies of the spirit. When confronted by people or situations of irritation, we are called to find responsible ways to be kind, considerate, and live according to the Golden Rule—like the farmer with the sheep. If I wish to visit your house, but I am allergic to your pets, I should be willing to do what I can to mitigate my allergy, like taking medication and/or wearing a surgical mask. I should not expect you to do away with your pet to accommodate me. For example, I have various issues with food, and when I go to events where I am unsure if there will be food I can eat, then I carry my own; I don’t expect others to cater to me, to keep me happy and healthy. Now there are exceptions to all such attitudes. You may have noticed that we have a “nut free zone” in our Religious Education wing because we have a few children who are highly allergic to them. But the family members have been willing to help with making sure snacks are safe, and in helping to teach their children that they are responsible for their own safety as well. Responsible parents never assume it is the job of all the other parents to keep their children safe; it would be foolhardy to do so. Our faith teaches us that while we sincerely seek to respect the worth and dignity of each person—this is where we start in our human interactions-- our faith also teaches us that we are each ultimately responsible for what we think, believe, speak, how we act, what we eat and drink, how we treat our neighbors, how we look upon the world. This is hard work, a daily work of the heart-mind-soul that calls upon all our spiritual resources: our intelligence and kindness and thoughtfulness. And this is a work that we cannot do alone. There has to be common ground, a meeting place of the minds. If we are allergic to anything, we are the first line responders, the people responsible for how we deal with the problem. We can only hope that by our kindness and consideration that the other parties will be equally responsible, kind and considerate. We will find many people extremely easy to work with, just like some pets are far easier to have than others; but we also find that many people are self-centered and can only see from their point of view, which further calls on all our resources to be both caring and reasonable. One of my colleagues once argued that cats have an inalienable right to roam. It is their nature, and to restrict them goes against nature. He quoted an old law in England that allowed cats to roam freely so that they might keep the population of rats in check; rats that carried the fleas that carried bubonic plague and at the time both rats and plague overran the cities. This was a case of a greater need than whether flower beds were violated by the cats. My response, is that we now have other methods to deal with rats, bubonic bacterial disease is no longer a plague, that cats can quite happily roam inside their owners’ homes, and that the conditions have changed so that neighborhood harmony is more important than the cats having the right to roam. Further, as to the nature argument, it also goes against nature to have animals living in our homes, so we must expect modifications. The most important part of the treatment of severe allergies, is these shots that give the patient minute quantities of the very thing to which they are allergic in order to sensitize them. The allergy is lessened gradually, until it becomes less threatening. Spiritually we can become more sensitive to other’s needs, even as we respect our own needs or the needs of the larger community. This is the long and short of what it means to live with spiritual focus, to live according to the oft quoted, less oft lived, Golden Rule. The main thing is to move away from absolutes, which prevent us from ever finding common ground. No matter how much our spirits are moved by the sufferings of all the members of this congregation, indeed this community, we cannot address them all equally. We can strive to do the best we can to meet as many of the needs as possible, without sacrificing the very need that brings us together: our need to live whole and engaged amidst an often broken and imperfect world. As one of our early Unitarian spiritual leaders, Francis David, taught over four hundred years ago: We need not think alike to love alike. May we then become ever more aware of our various allergies of the spirit, and out of the personal responsibility to which we are called as free people of a free faith, become more sensitized to our own failings as we seek to point to the failings of others. This is the heart of what it means to be a community, indeed, the heart of what it means to be human. As that great Russian author Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov: Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. *** June 7, 2009 Gay Day: Honoring our GLBTI Family
No doubt some of you heard this past week that Dick Cheney said that he supported gay marriage. I looked around to see if any pigs were flying by! Do we think that this conservative former vice-president came to this, by all measures, liberal point-of-view purely out of rationally deciding this was the right and meet view to hold? Or, do we think that this conservative former vice-president has a lesbian daughter, and that having a gay family member is a modifying factor in his conservative views? I think it was the later. Comic evening-talk-show host Craig Ferguson said of this astonishing event: Dick Cheney said today, he supports gay marriage. I think he only supports gay marriage because he sees marriage as a form of torture, but anyway, he supports it. But I like comic Jimmy Fallon’s comment best: In New Hampshire the state Senate approved a bill that would help legalize same-sex marriage. Yeah. Their new state motto is Live Free or Bi. As to Vice-President Cheney, I am reminded of a woman I knew well back in 1960s-70s, whose husband used to be cruel about people with disabilities, using words like retard, gimp, half-wit, among others, which she always found very offensive; then in 1968, their second child was born with both mental and physical disabilities, and this self-same man became one of the hardest-working people for the rights of the disabled. For at the time, parents were still expected to put these children in homes, this was prior to the disabilities act that came into being in the mid-1970s. This story is a reminder that lots of things that are hard for us to understand when they are outside our family circles become much easier when they touch our nearest and dearest. Likewise, many people who have felt negative about differences in sexuality often come to this kind of new day in their thinking. I am going to tell you four personal stories, familiar to some of you who have been long time members; two of these stories have a great deal to do with why I am a Unitarian and why I believe our UU support of gay rights is so absolutely essential. My first story is about my mother who died two years ago; she was born in the early 1920s, in a rural area, of a deeply religious family, in a deeply religious community. She was the first born child, and was by all accounts a compliant, dutiful daughter and student; when she was still quite small, it was discovered that she was left-handed. Now at this time, some people still paid attention to an old, old superstition, mostly forgotten now, that existed for hundreds of years, that left-handedness was in some way connected with evil, or the devil; indeed, the word sinister is Latin for left, dexter for right. So, you can see how the meaning is even entrenched in our language. When my mother’s parents saw that she was left-handed, they did what generations of people had done before, and punished her for using her left hand; then when she began first grade in the nearby country school, the teacher tied her left hand to the side of her desk in order to train her to use her right hand to learn to write. She was one of the last generation in this country to be punished for left-handedness, for science was discovering that the brain has a kind of wiring for left and right, so by the time my generation was born people just accepted that you were born left or right handed, and occasionally ambidextrous. My poor mother was never able to quit being left-handed, she was an extreme lefty, and in many passive kinds of ways was determinedly left-handed in our home. My two younger brothers and I are all very comfortable with using both our hands, because we grew up with everything geared as if we all were left-handed. Mother set the table for lefties, we learned from her of course to do things left-handed, I still drink with my left hand most of the time, measure things, do many things as if I were left-handed. The long and the short of this story is that my mother did not choose to be left-handed, as anyone but a fool today would acknowledge. She just was. And I heard her say to one of my aunts that she disliked signing things in public, and was always self-conscious and a bit ashamed of being left-handed. Sounds like something out of the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? My friends, there are many who are still dealing with the detritus of the those fearful, mysterious, unknowing ages, when the teachings were less about fact or reason, and more about superstition. This certainly true for many in our GLBTI family. The really sad part of this story for me is that when a cousin of mine came out as gay in the 1980s, my mother was among the first to condemn him for choosing to be gay. Human beings have a peculiar ability to see the world in very narrow ways. The second story is about this self-same cousin. My cousin Mike and I grew up together; though he was a couple years younger, we were close, and I thought he was terrific. We had a lot in common. We were both big readers, liked to make up games, good in school, etc. Like all of us who grew up in the country, he helped with chores, did the rough and dirty work we all did as country children. But from as early as I can remember, I knew there was something mysteriously wrong with Mike. No one ever came out and said what it was, but it boiled down to words like sissy, pansy, a mama’s boy; and it was true that he was more effeminate than most of the boys in our family; and true that he helped his mother in the kitchen, but I had no language, no understanding of why this made him in some way bad or less than other kids in our wide circle of cousins. Children can be very cruel, and he was very much picked on and bullied. When he grew up he left home for college, became one of that early line of computer engineers, and he went abroad to work, leaving our backwater behind, and I didn’t see or hear much of him for years. He pretty much cut off contact with our wider family, only rarely writing his parents. Then when he was in his 30s, he came back home for a visit, and at that time made an announcement to his parents and a few other relatives, including my parents, that he was gay. The bush telegraph of rural areas spread the news like wild-fire, and I heard from several people, as I first heard it from my mother: Did you hear about Mike? He’s decided to be gay. Of course, my Christian fundamentalist family pounded the Bible about what a sin this was. It was one of the few times I really confronted my family, asking them: Where have you been for the last thirty odd years. You’ve been saying things about his difference since he was four or five years old, and now you say he chose to be gay. I was incensed on his part, for all the sufferings of all those years. Sadly, like so many of his generation, Mike died three years ago of AIDS. Amazing how narrow people can be in their reasoning. My third story is about my son Adam, now twenty-seven, who ten years ago this August, told me he was gay. I knew he had been very unhappy for a while and had sent him each week that summer to see a psychologist the area who specializes in children and adolescents. Now here is what makes this story important: It was not that my son was gay, but that despite what he knew about my support for the rights of gays and lesbians, he still had anxiety about telling me that he was gay, and especially about telling his father. My first reaction after assuring my son that I loved him, and that his being gay did not change that for me, was to contact PFLAG. Now I had moved from being a supporter of gay rights to wanting to be an activist for gay rights. These last ten years, along with Jane Frelick, I have served on the Board of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and have heard many people share their fears and anxieties about finding out their children are gay; and hearing from gay children (of all ages) about their fears of coming out. The two primary themes are religious concerns, and fear that gay sons and daughters will be safe in a world, a country, still rife with anti-gay sentiment. Change happens slowly, and most change does not happen unless sparked or spurred on by those who most want to see the changes happen. Change also comes with knowledge, but knowledge has to work its way through all those centuries of religious and social/cultural biases, fears, and traditions; so there have to be people willing to put their hands to the plow to break through that old soil of what constitutes cultural mores. We of this Unitarian Universalist faith are those people. We are that cutting edge of willingness to see the truth that eventually sets all people free. You will hear and see the acronym GLBT, and increasingly, GLBTI, used in conjunction with discussions about gays and lesbians. GLBTI stands for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and intersexed. Some of these terms are more comfortable for some, even UUs, than others. What science of gender knows is that our gender is not as clearly defined as appears on the surface. Certainly the overwhelming majority of men and women are heterosexual, but there is a continuum from gay to straight, with some in the middle which is bi-sexuality, then there are people that nature seems to have confused, who feel like men or women, though their bodies say otherwise; then there is that relatively small group of intersexed whose genitalia did not fully develop in uteri, and who have for many decades be assigned a sex, though there is a big push from adults who had been incorrectly assigned to wait until adolescents when the correct gender will make itself known. This has also touched my family of origin, but I did not know it until I was in my 50s, and it concerned by mother’s brother, born a couple years after my mother, who had some things wrong with him, but it was never spoken about, but in the mysterious ways of families that don’t talk openly about things, we all knew there was something very different about him. He never married, died in his mid-forties, and was a fiery evangelical lay preacher, much looked up to in my wider family. On one of my rare visits back home, his name came up in a conversation one day, and I asked my mother point-blank what exactly was the matter with my uncle, and learned that he was a child who had been born with this undetermined sexuality or intersexed (this actually occurs with greater frequency than cystic fibrosis). I learned that as a boy he was very much plagued by other boys who called him terrible names, and was not finally able to have the surgery to correct nature’s error until he was forty years old, and sadly he died at forty-five. Now, my story is not so very different from any other families; what makes it sad is the religious and conservative nature of my family of origin, which could not talk about, much less accept, differences. We of this faith have been helping to change how people view all kinds of old, entrenched ideas for at least three centuries now; from religious freedom, to slavery, to women’s right to own property and vote, to civil rights, to rights for the GLBTI family. We make a difference in people’s lives, every day. We give people of all kinds of differences a safe place to be people of faith. We work for the rights of all people, especially those oppressed for no more reason than who they love, how they were born, what they believe about God, how they look, how they live. We live for the day when the issues for the GLBTI family are as of little concern as whether I can vote or wear slacks, which by the way, my grandmother could do neither. So, it is a gay day, here, and we celebrate all that the members of our whole family bring that has long been spurned or denied. We celebrate that difference is just that, different; not bad, not unnatural (for certainly nature is responsible), not unworthy. When I became a Unitarian it was in response to the spurning of gay clergy by what I thought was my then liberal Christian religion, because of my love for Mike. I have stayed a UU because I know that we understand that we can learn to recognize what is good from that which is bad, and that difference does not equal bad. I am a minister who lives in hope that the actions of our UU movement will enable more people outside our faith to learn that we lose a great deal when we want to cut out people for any reasons that have to do with differences that nature creates. The real evils are those of the human ego that seeks to control, or marginalize, or even kill whole groups of people simply because of difference. My dearest wish is that one day the marriage services I perform for our gay friends will be recognized by the state, and that I may one day be able to do wedding for my own son. Gay marriage threatens no one, but widens the circle of love, which we so desperately need in this world. People who think gay marriage presents a threat to their marriage need to get to a counselor and fast. So I live with memories and in hope. I am heartened by more and more states recognizing gay rights and marriage. I live for a truly Gay day, a time when we no longer sideline people out of our ignorance or old cultural and religious ideas that are more about superstition than anything else. What a beautiful day it will be. A time to celebrate. A time to rejoice. A true hallelujah time for all humankind. ***
May 24, 2009
Moving Closer to Civilization
I am glad for this annual day of remembrance. After all, it was established to remind us of the costs of war, first as Decoration Day during the Civil War, then after World War I, as Memorial Day, for the specific purpose that we would never forget the great cost of war. Though I am also mindful of the ancient Greek precept that when we forget our foolish ways, we are bound to keep repeating them, because these days this is less a holiday of remembrance for those people knew who fought and died in wars, and more a long weekend vacation. Which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but I rather wish we left our days of mourning to stand alone, so that we could keep our focus on why we have Memorial Day in the first place. For, Memorial Day ought to be our yearly civic reminder that wars have cost our human family millions of lives, and a reminder that wars have been with us as long as we have any record of human events, and sadly remain with us even in this moment. We are mindful that at this very moment someone is losing his or her life defending ideas of liberty or religion or territory. At this very moment someone’s daughter, son, husband, wife, mother, father, uncle, aunt, cousin, or dear friend is bleeding or dying for causes they probably do not fully even understand. Which makes it hard for me to imagine how anyone can send someone off to war for anything less than the noblest of motives; especially how anyone who never served in the military can send young men and women off to war. At least the Napoleon and his ilk of the era before the 20th Century were out on the battlefield themselves, putting their lives at risk, not sitting in safety in a land far away directing war where they do not smell the stench of dying and death so as to be aware of the real costs. A dear friend of mine, whose granddaughter was the first woman from Delaware to die in Iraq, her squad was sent to defuse a bomb, and the vehicle she was riding in drove over a roadside bomb; all but two of the six were killed. My friend, who is also a minister, said that it was hard to respect people who could call for war that would send her granddaughter into harm’s way, but had not had the courage to serve in war. When my son was in the air force flying in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq, I lived in fear for those years. There is something essentially demoralizing about hoping and praying your own child will come home safe, knowing that others will not. Still, we hope for peace; peace in our country and peace around the world. However, I suspect that most of us are not very optimistic that world peace is something we will live to see. Yet, for all the warring that is with us even today, the surprising thing is that we are actually a more peaceful world than in generations past. Organization that monitor warring, like the United Nations, tell us that we are, despite all the terrible conflicts that are still happening, we are they say getting to be a more peaceful world. So, truly, we can have hope that this may be a trend that will continue forward as a part of the process of our world becoming more than just a civilization, but actually civilized. For, as long as we have wars, and rumors of wars, with children, women and men dying in wars, humanity is still far from being truly civilized. That phrase, wars and rumors of wars, comes from the oldest book of the New Testament gospels, the book of Matthew, in which Jesus warns his disciples (NRSV, Mt 24:6): 6 And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. This passage is considered a prophecy of the age to come, and in fact the years since Jesus, the world has known the greatest period of war and violence. But it is a much later book of the Christian New Testament that tells us why we have wars and violence, in the book of James 4:1: Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? Like all the evils of humankind, war comes from human ego, the cravings within people for power. Jesus also taught as all the great preachers and teachers have recognized that the love of money is the root of all evil; and what is this love of money but the love of power. We see the root even in our little ones who grab and grasp, and shout, it’s mine; to which the good parent responds that it is important to learn to share, to not be greedy, to respect that it is better to spread the fun around. Yet, in adult life we see people still shouting in one way or another: it’s mine or I want more or my way is the right way. Only the greatest of leaders down through the ages have been willing to teach the very lessons parents teach their children. What of our adult wasteful living, our pollution, our excessive materialism, are these not the very same conditions we would try to teach our children are not a good way to live? We live in a time of crisis for the earth: far too many people on the planet for the available resources, disproportionate or inappropriate use of fossil fuels, all with the increasing likelihood that by 2025 we will experience worldwide drought, famine, and increasing disease which is always the by-product of stressed populations. Already there are great shortages of potable water from many populations, including right here in the United States. California has an incipient war developing between farmers and environmentalists over water use. We need the crops, people and the creatures of the world need the water, too. We all must learn to share. This is what a civilized people would do. Fortunately, the one thing that can give us great hope is that we now live in the age of communications, when we can learn and know so much more and so much faster than ever before. It is this, I believe, that is the principal factor for our increasingly more peaceful ways, and that which reminds us that compromise is better than false precepts that give rise to wars that are really all about greed or revenge. As the peoples of the earth grow and change, our cultures increasingly are melding and changing. Since the time of Ida which made news this past week, that recently discovered fossil that may be the so-called missing link, which lived some twenty-four million years ago, to our modern 6 ½ billion people, we have grown for many different reasons, probably largely the environment drove the evolutionary changes, but nowadays we have media driven expectations and fears that may do more than anything prior to affect the kind of world our children and grandchildren will know. I feel confident that my great-grandchildren will know a world that is as vastly different for them as my world is compared to what my frontier great-grandparents knew. I hope that it is a world that is much more appreciative of the need to protect and preserve all life, especially Gaia, the interdependent web of all existence which our 7th Principle reminds us to respect. The irony I can see in this is that my great-grandparents were highly conscious of the need to protect the water and land, for as farmers they lived much as people had for centuries prior to the industrial age. What goes around comes around, is an old saying that comes to mind. Teaching our children to respect life, the lives lost in wars as we do this Memorial Day, and all life, is the first line in this work of preservation, the second line is to re-teach ourselves as adults that the lessons of the kindergarten are meant to be followed all through our lives: caring, sharing, protecting. Speaking of children, I have a story for Memorial Day: One Sunday morning, the pastor noticed little Malcolm standing in the foyer of the church staring up at a large plaque. It was covered with names with small American flags mounted on either side of it. This was an old and large church, so there were many such flags. The seven year old had been staring at the plaque for some time, so the pastor walked up, stood beside the little boy, and said quietly, "Good Morning, Malcolm." "Hello, Rev. Bob," he replied, still focused on the plaque. Then asked: "Rev. Bob, what is this?" The pastor said, "Well, son, it's a memorial to all the young men and women who died in the services." Soberly, they just stood together, staring at the large plaque. Finally, little Malcolm's voice, barely audible and trembling with fear, asked, "Which service, the 9:00 or the 11:00?"
Harichandana Devalla writes regarding cultural changes in India, which mirrors what we hear of western culture in every generation: Take the case of India. We say Indian culture is declining and we Indians are losing our culture, meaning, we are losing [the] values. Was there one unique Indian culture since the planet Earth came into being? No, Indian culture or the Indian way of life, like every group of human beings [has] evolved and changed over centuries. The earliest known culture [in India] of the Harappan Civilization [of the Indus Valley 400,000-200,00 years ago] changed over the centuries with the raise of the Aryan civilization. It changed again with the [rise] and fall of every ancient kingdom. More changes came from the medieval kingdoms and finally through the British rule. At every stage, Indian culture did not decline; it only absorbed the new features of every phase of civilization and is where it stands today. Where India stands today is where all cultures and nations stand, poised on the brink of a vastly different way of living with one another if we are to hope human civilization will continue at all. John Haynes Holmes was the minister, and minister emeritus in his retirement, of the Community Church in New York City, for a total of fifty seven years. He went there as a young man, prior to the first World War, and was at that time one of fifteen very active pacifist Unitarian ministers in our movement, but by the end of World War I, only six remained in their pulpits; the other nine had been forced out. Holmes was a great social reformer, and led the way on several issues from immigrant protections and most especially sanitation which was deplorable in New York City at the turn of the last century, among many others. He was also among the first in the west to recognize the greatness of Mohandas Gandhi, particularly, of course, Gandhi’s pacifism, the Mahatma’s belief in non-violence. Homes preached famously at the time of America’s entry into WWI:
Other pulpits may preach recruiting sermons; mine will not. Other parish houses may be turned into drill halls and rifle ranges; ours will not. Other clergymen may pray to God for victory for our arms; I will not. In this church, if nowhere else in all America, the Germans will still be included in the family of God's children. No word of hatred shall be spoken against them and no evil fate shall be desired upon them. War may beat upon our portals, like storm waves on the granite crags; rumors of war may thrill the atmosphere of this sanctuary as lightning the still air of a summer night. But so long as I am priest, this altar shall be consecrated to human brotherhood, and before it shall be offered worship only to that one God and Father of us all.
I believe Holmes was a beacon, a leader, despite the fact that I am not a pacifist, though I wish with all my heart I could be one, and I believe equally that eventually the world must learn to live as one, or destroy itself in the process. I think that Holmes and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and all those who have had the courage to live by their convictions are models of what it really means to be civilized, models of the very best kind; people who live according to their convictions, and in the cases of Gandhi and King, died for their convictions. Would that it could be as the late 19th –
early 20th Century American poet-philosopher Thomas Bailey Aldrich
wrote just after institution of this holiday: Memorial Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays....The grim
cannons have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach
blossoms. We have a long way yet to go before we can call ourselves truly civilized. In the meantime, let us remember. Let us remember what people thought they were dying for, what their families believed they had sacrificed for, which is peace. Peace, and love, and understanding.
***
May 17, 2009
Imperfect Blessings So much of what we want in life no matter how wonderful those things may be often come to us far from what we initially envisioned. We do not always have the ability to truly know when it is a blessing or a challenge that will be placed before us, but even the best things usually come as imperfect gifts Most of you know that my favorite adage comes from Lao Tzu the founder of Taoism, which paraphrased states that: Every front has a back. Which means that no matter how good or bad a thing is there is its equal and opposite pairing. Like this Taoist story, I may have some version of this before: This story tells of an old farmer who had worked his crops with horse and plow for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "Maybe," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "Maybe," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "Maybe," answered the farmer. The next day, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "Maybe," said the farmer. Such is the nature of blessings; they are often as not imperfect blessings, meaning that they carry with them some possibility or trait or unknown that can lead us to regret what we once thought was wonderful. Children come to mind. We who have them know that for all we love them, that there are times when you ask yourself, if I had it to do all over again would I do this. My daughter provided me with a story that fits quite nicely. This past Tuesday morning was an especially trying one, and my granddaughters, Haley and Morgan, aged 7, had been uncooperative on several levels that morning, and finally were in big trouble. Exasperated, my daughter Stephanie told them that she’d had enough. She said: I am at the end of my rope! Then they were told that they both were denied the privilege of attending a school friend's birthday party. Morgan, the more sensitive of the two, began crying and said: "Mom, if we promise to be really, really good, will you please go back the beginning of your rope? These are the twins that she went through a great deal of pain and suffering to conceive, who are now almost eight years old, and, as it turns out, her little blessings are proving daily they are far from perfect. What about the love-of-your-life who in those glorious early months of passion could do no wrong; who was perfect in those first, blissful month, yet became one day the person who snores, or doesn’t put things away properly, or can’t manage money, or--you fill in the blank. Mr. or Miss Perfect turned out to be an imperfect blessing after all. In fact, there is probably almost nothing that you love, desired, longed for, prayed for, worked for and finally got, that did not at some point prove to be less than how or what you imagined. This has happened to me so regularly that I now anticipate what form it will take. But, I must confess that it took me a lot of years to not think it was very unfair when my dream things turned out to be just real things. Of course, life itself is an imperfect blessing, and is the place from which we ought to begin; but, it seems that as we get more, as we have more blessings, so often we are less and less satisfied with everything that does not come up to snuff. Further, there our modern media world encourages us to think perfection is or should be the norm. How rarely do we see in the visual media less than perfect bodies, or houses, or teeth? We can make ourselves miserable when life shows us that we are not outside that box called reality, but right here inside it with all the others who have or have yet to learn that there is little that is as good as we might wish. However that is looking at things from the side that asks for perfection. What if we can learn to see the good in the less that perfect; if we could learn to not let the perfect become the enemy of the good as the saying goes? We can, I believe, learn to do this, if we do not already. We can, as one solution, learn to find ways to compensate for what is not perfect in our lives. Though I am reminded of a less than perfect way to do this: An eighty-year-old man's golf game was hampered by poor eyesight. He could hit the ball well but he couldn't see where it went. So a friend teamed him up with another eighty-year-old man who had perfect eyesight and was willing to go along to serve as a spotter. The eighty-year-old man hit the first ball and asked his companion if he saw where it landed. ‘Yes I did,’ said the ninety-year-old pointy generally in the direction. ‘Well, where did it go?’ the eighty-year-old golfer demanded. The spotter paused, then replied, ‘I can't remember.’ Whatever creates difficulty in our lives, be it perceived at one time as blessing or not, calls on the skill of circumspection. Circumspection or discernment; meaning we have the ability to see the situation in light of the big picture of one’s life. Like our less-than perfect-children, who are nonetheless, each according to his own, loving, kind, reasonable students, respectful, and each with his or her own set of skills and talents, which may not be those of other children. And, to measure what we find fault with in our children against the larger framework of all the children we might have had, to determine if we have unrealistic expectations; or as is more often the case, seeing that we have unrealized dreams of our own that we are expecting our children to live out. Like the parent in my family who wants his son to be a professional baseball player like he wished he could have been, and now can’t be happy with his son who does not play the game all that well, and in fact much prefers differential equations—but it could as easily be hairdressing or writing poetry. In such instances, I say the parent is the more imperfect blessing, not the child. Being a circumspect parent means that we try to value our children for themselves and not for what we would have them be. And, as someone told me years ago, many parents who had high expectations for their children can reach the point where they are happy if the child is just not in jail. Real life can be a great leveler of expectations. One of the great aspects of the Sweden’s culture and economy, is that education is free (one of the reasons taxes are high), so people who decided on one career when young, but later find it wasn’t all they hoped, can go back to school, which happens fairly often; in fact, the Swedes have on average three changes of jobs/careers over their lifetimes. How many of us would have had a couple changes if we had the chance. While I have always been a teacher, I have had four directional changes from where I started in elementary education, moving on to working with intellectually gifted children, then wound up teaching English in college, and then became a minister. Next year I will have been in my career path for forty years, which is just about as long as the average life span only a couple centuries ago; so it is not surprising that many of us may have several changes along our life’s career trajectory. Accepting that blessing of one time, can become more imperfect to us later on. One of the fronts to the back of all these lay-offs, job losses, is that many of those people will wind up making changes in jobs that they would not have had the courage to do while employed. Of course, there will be those who wind up worse off, so I don’t mean to paint a rosy picture of this terrible economic upheaval. Simply, to say that we often will come to these places, be they hills or valleys, that force us to do something differently, and that can often be a moment of great spiritual and intellectual growth. Troubles are not without their blessings, hidden beneath the suffering. This is how we got the old adage that every dark cloud has a silver lining. You know that these old sayings are not just trite clichés, for they developed out of centuries of human experience and observation. Of course for every saying, there is also its positive or negative counterpart, precisely because this is how we know life. Whatever there is in your life at this moment that you see as sorrow, there is probably going to be a better outcome than you can imagine at this point in time. This is where we have to have faith; have to believe out of our inner wisdom that we will find a way to get through it. Have faith that we have the right stuff, the strength of spirit, to get by. And to accept that the blessings we have or hope for will have their life-given imperfections; yet, love them still. If you look back over your life, you can see the truth of this. For the stuff of your life lies within you, the good and the bad in your life or mine is not a thing separate, but part of who we each are, and how we draw upon the well of inner resources we each have within us. In hard times we are prone to thinking that imperfection is the norm, for we are having the downside uplifted for us practically every minute of every day in this age of 24 hour communications. But life is not, even at its worst, all bad. Our faith calls on us to believe in our own possibilities; to trust that our own seeking will help us find the way we would best go. As a dear colleague, Rev. Gary Smith, always has as his benediction: Have courage/Hold on to what is good/Return to no person evil for evil/strengthen the faint-hearted/Support the weak/Help the suffering/Honor all beings. In this way we find all the good in life there is to know. *** May 10, 2009
God as Mother First, a very happy Mother’s Day to all those mothers here with us today, and to all the mothers we remember and hold in our hearts. Good, bad, or indifferent, there is something about mother, indeed the very word mother, or mom, or mommy, that sets in our minds the image of one who is love; who is caring for us, teaching, nurturing, cooking, cleaning, reading to us, comforting, sometimes yelling, often the peacemaker, ever the chauffeur, sometimes the person who leaves early and returns late because of work—working for her family, who has always more to do than ever can be done. This is in part what we understand and recognize as a good mother in this age. But I also acknowledge that mothers come in all types, and that there are those mothers who may be indifferent, or even bad mothers; yet, such mothers may only heighten for the children a picture of what good mother can or ought to be. There are those who theorists about religion, the mind of religion, theological psychologists, who, like Freud and others since, theorize that the reason we have the many concepts of God, Goddess, or other such deities that exist around the world in every culture, has everything to do with parents. With the fact that for so many years human children are dependent upon the all-powerful adults in their world; so it was, they say, not at all surprising, only natural, that humankind--especially back in those dim millennia of our prehistory--that people would assume some larger or greater parent who brought all things into the world. Further, creation stories around the world more often than not have a woman who brings the world into being. These long hundreds of thousands of years later, it may be difficult for peoples of the west in particular to envision god as female, a mother god. But, what if our picture, especially our language, our developmental understandings of the divine, or deity, God, were framed as female as mother god, she? We have had ages of the divine, of god, framed as male/father, so that for most people, if they have any understanding or conception of god, then it is far more likely to be of a male, that tall white man, with flowing white robes, and an equally flowing white hair and white beard (also tells us a lot about western culture). God, as this larger-than-life masculine being who is somewhere out there in the great beyond. Rarely do people nowadays think of the god as woman, the feminine divine. Yet, women, especially mothers, remain powerful in many ways in all our lives. I have a story from the Korean War era that fits the subject nicely: A drill sergeant was frustrated in his efforts to make a soldier out of one recruit. The recruit lagged behind on marches, used any excuse to go on sick call, grumbled constantly about the food, and never made his cot up properly. But one day, a noticeable change took place in the young man's attitude. When the drill sergeant was asked to explain what had caused the soldier's change in attitude, the sergeant replied: "Threats and punishment didn't work, so I had to resort to the ultimate weapon. I wrote his mother!"
So we see that mother is and remains powerful, even god-like, for many of us. But if we think about that long line of human evolution, millions of years of evolution, and in the time-frame of so-called modern man, human beings, which is somewhere on the order of 150-200,000 years, the fact is that for most of that time, it was the female who was worshipped as the supreme deity, Goddess of all. Consider that for most of that period, of those millennia, the most magical event, the most sacred event that the people would have witnessed was childbirth. So, as the earth, still termed even today as Mother Nature, in her season brought forth leaves, flowers, fruits of the earth, so too did the woman bring forth the children of the earth. The earliest archeological artifacts of a religious nature are those round, fecund female statues depicting the goddess as abundant, heavy limbed, protruding breasts and belly, all that would have been understood as fruitful. Of course, this was the time of prehistoric or preliterate peoples, when the only evidence we have of their thinking comes down to us in these clay idols, and pictures on the walls of caves, and the earliest of human stories; which tell us that for those ancient human beings, God as Mother was how holiness was seen. There is a wonderful bit of history about this gradual change from the age of the God as Mother, to the age of God as Father. It is in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, in the book of Jeremiah. One of the most important things that separates ancient Israelites from the other peoples of that place where civilization began, the most important thing that about that ancient tribe who eventually became the people of Israel, aside from the salient fact that they were among the earliest to put their sacred stories into writing, is that they are among the first to begin to understand God as one, a single power, and as an invisible god, that is monotheism, which was in its developmental stages. Biblical archeology suggests that it may be that the ancient Israelites learned of this concept in Egypt during the time of Akhenaten, the Egyptian pharaoh who conceptualized God as the Ra, the Sun God, monotheism seems to have first appeared at this time, and there is clear evidence that there where Israelite slaves held in Egypt, which is also supported in the Hebrew Bible, for it tells the story of Moses who leads the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to the promised land; the land of Canaan, which the book of Genesis says God promised to the Israelites, and whom in the Torah he called his Chosen People. By the time of the book of Jeremiah, in the 7th Century BCE, or roughly 2800 years ago, some of the Israelites still worshipped multiple deities. The supreme of them all in the land of Canaan was Asherah along with her brother-husband, Baal. So the writings of the Bible increasingly refer to their enemies as heathen worshippers of these who now becoming called false gods. So part of the work of this 7th Century prophet Jeremiah is to admonish the Israelites to stop this sinful worship of Asherah and Baal, for which God is punishing them by repeatedly allowing them to be subjugated by the Babylonians among others. This particular story in the book of Jeremiah is about how the priests and elders of the village have forbidden worship of Asherah, but times have gotten worse and worse, until things are so bad that the women rise up and tell the local authority, the religious leaders, that they don’t care what they say, they are going to “bake cakes for the Queen of Heaven” as Asherah was called, in hopes of relieving the suffering of their children and families. There is throughout the earliest books of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament) this tension between the newer worship of Yahweh, God, and the old ways when they worshipped the Goddess mother Asherah. Keep in mind, that by this time, masculine gods had been progressively becoming more important, and increasingly dominant throughout this part of the world. As we read through the Hebrew scriptures, and certainly evident in the New Testament story of Christianity, over time God moved farther and farther away, from the early days when he walked in the Garden of Eden, out to Heaven, and to the time when God no longer walks with the people, or speaks directly to them—at least not where anyone else can see his form or hear his voice--and there always has to be a mediator. So, from the time of Moses we have God talking through a single leader, giving him the directions or code of ethics; as with Moses, for the Israelites, the Ten Commandments. From this point, God uses the priesthood as the conduit for the people to know his will. And so it has continued right up to this time in the 21st Century. Although, we are beginning to see challenges to this mediation, as our own UU faith richly demonstrates. The scholars who study our religious origins, know how god moved from being mother to father, how the masculine divine eventually overrules and in the western world, destroys the feminine divine, and that she refused to go away entirely. The Cult of Mary which developed in the Middle Ages is one powerful example of how the people could never entirely let go of the need for God as Mother. Many of the female saints named by the Church during this period are clearly Christianized versions of the earlier local female gods that simply would not go away. The Church was rather clever, modeling the earlier tactics of the Roman Empire, which of course is by this time one and the same, by not attempting to entirely destroy the local beliefs and customs, but instead they recast them to feel the same, with changes that were palatable to the local people. For example, the practice of carrying the statue of Mary around a local village comes directly from earlier pagan or native religious practices of carrying statues of local deities around the village as a totem of protection, and to insure both safety and fertility for the community. And this practice was re-imagined for the modern Church with the creation of the Stations of the Cross. So instead of having to parade around the increasingly larger towns and cities, the people could move around the church stopping at each of the twelve stations of the cross. These stations are meant to replicate the earlier “stopping places” of those ancient village processions. What if, though, God had remained a figure of the female, the mother? How might the world be different if we saw God in the way we see mothers? Would people have come to see God as less about authority and more about nurture; less about power and more about sharing; less about war and more about peace? Of course father God can be seen in all these ways, but history does not give us as much of the nurturing father, as of the angry, domineering, punishing, and distant God the father. When I first heard the singer Bobby McFerrin’s version of the 23rd Psalm done with God viewed as Mother, I wept at how changed that beloved psalm was, how differently I reacted to the words: The
23rd Psalm [and especially this part]
God as mother, for those who experience God in their lives, is I believe a powerful way to see that the Genesis story of creation actually says that God made man in our image; not in my image but our image, and must include both masculine and feminine appreciation. Whether or not we speak of or believe in or conceptualized god a mother or father, or preferably as without gender; we need to continue to work toward a world where the distinctions between the sexes is less about religion-determined hierarchies, and more about completeness of who we are as male and female. Glory be to Mother, to the one who gave us life.
*** May 3, 2009
If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him
Had we been attending on May 2nd we would have noted celebrations around the world for the birth of the Buddha (although this date is not consistent across cultures). But around the world there are something on the order of just under 1 ½ billion people who identify as Buddhist. The Buddha, from whom we get the religion of Buddhism, would not have called his teaching as religion, nor would many other Buddhists in the world. Which comes in part from the way Buddhists themselves see the teachings, not as a set of beliefs, but as a way to live; also it is often not regarded as a religion because Buddhists do not worship a deity or deities, or have hard and fast rules or notions about how to live; and, because to make of it a religion is to in many ways violate what the Buddha taught. But if we understand religion as organization, which is how we always ought to think of it, spirituality is what we all have and attend to in varying degree, but, purely as organization, then Buddhism is clearly now a religion; indeed several religions. To be a buddha is to be enlightened; this is the meaning of the term, anyone can be a buddha. The man to whom this appellation became identified was a man, a prince in India, of Hindu religious origins. His name was Siddhartha Gautama, born at the end of 6th Century B.C.E. The short version is that he left his protected princely environment for the first time when he was twenty-nine years old and was deeply shocked by what he saw; he looked with horror upon the poverty and suffering just outside the walls of his home, and was so overwhelmed by this suffering that he left his home, his wife and family, and began a life of wandering from place to place hoping to find answers to this terrible suffering that exists in the world, not just poverty and injustice, but all of the suffering human beings experience. After long years of this wandering, having gained a following, as all such holy people will, he one day rests beneath the bodhi tree surrounded by his disciples, and there he experiences his enlightenment. So then Siddhartha Gautama, becomes buddha, or as people say of him, The Buddha. As with all the great religion icons, stories and legends emerged to explain what happened to Gautama. As the principle legend tells it he meets various temptations, and time and time again rejects them; is in fact untouched in any way by them. Various temptations continued through his confrontations with the King of Death, the Lord of Dharma, duty, and so on (not unlike the story of the temptations of Christ prior to his crucifixion), until it was clear that Siddhartha was no longer himself, a human unconnected, free from desire, truly now one with everything. So it was that this man, Siddhartha, broke past the net of separate things within which feeling and thought are entrapped, as Joseph Campbell put it. The Buddha was so completely struck by his enlightenment, that, as the story says, he remained seated there unmoving for seven days, then he arose and standing seven paces from where he had been sitting remained standing for yet another seven days staring at the place of his enlightenment. And through four more of these seven day wonderment episodes, until he became wholly understanding and knew that which cannot be taught. Meaning, that enlightenment cannot be truly communicated, only known. Perhaps the enlightenment state cannot be taught, but we know that for 2500 years people have been teaching the character of the Buddha’s enlightenment which he described as the Four Noble Truths, which are: All life is sorrowful. There is release from sorrow. The release from sorrow is Nirvana (or death into nothingness). The fourth noble truth is the Way to be released from sorrow, which is known as the Eightfold Path of his doctrine: right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, livelihood and effort, right meditation, right rapture. From this basic foundation arose the many different varieties of Buddhism that exist today, but they are of two principle types, the first is Theravada Buddhism and is based, they say, on the Buddha's earliest teachings; while Mahayana Buddhism sees all of life as deeply interconnected and focus more on the Buddha’s later teachings. In general, they share the same foundational beliefs of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Theravadan Buddhism does not believe in supernatural beings, while Mahayana believes that holy, almost if not truly supernatural beings inhabit the world. There are no reincarnation beliefs, but the goal of both is absolute release, or what Hinduism views as nirvana—utter absence of being, oblivion. All with millions, I am rather counting on my peaceful oblivion, for life, existence, is suffering. Even suffering that we would/do accept. We know that to love means to suffer, for when we lose the person or object of our love, we will know sorrow and pain; yet most of us willing accept that as the back to the front of love. So the purpose of the contemplative life, the hours, even years of active meditation that is part of Buddhism, is all about finding release from suffering, to perhaps become enlightened oneself. For in Buddhism, anyone can become a buddha; Buddha the teacher is set apart only to the degree that he showed the way. There are Buddhists, as Karen Armstrong writes in her book Buddha, who would say that to write a biography of Siddartha Gautama is a very un-Buddhist thing to do. In their view, no authority should be revered, however august; Buddhist must motivate themselves and rely on their own efforts, not on a charismatic leader. There was a ninth-century Buddhist master, founder of the Lin-Chi line of Zen Buddhism, who commanded his disciples: If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. Which over the years has increasingly been restated as, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. Which sounds rather drastic—until you understand the reasoning. Indeed, one of the teens at our YRUU youth service asked me last week: What’s with the title on next week’s sermon? (I always feel I’ve hit the mark if a young person notices my sermon titles.) And, speaking of the young, there is great Buddhist story: Four
monks were meditating in a monastery. All of a sudden the prayer flag on the
roof started flapping. The younger monk came out of his meditation and said:
"Flag is flapping" Of course, you all know the old Steve Martin Buddhist joke: A Buddhist monk walks up to the hotdog vendor and says: Make me one with everything. Buddhists do have a great sense of humor, which I experienced a Tibetan Buddhist retreat some years ago. Laughter may be one of the most releasing of all expressions, for when we laugh, we most often laugh at our human foibles. Letting go of taking ourselves too seriously. This statement though, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him, is meant to uplift the idea that dhamma, or dharma, teaches that suffering comes from attachment; that is, desire, longing, holding on to all kinds of things including beliefs. For the Buddha, the only way to find the inner transformation that can bring peace is to become immune to the sufferings of life. To let go of all the desires that can bind us to ongoing suffering. When you hear sayings like: Let God and Let Go, which is something one might hear in AA, or more generally in Christianity, this is a similar notion of giving over any thought of having control. The only control, a Buddhist like the Lin-Chi founder would say, is that we in fact have no control except to learn that we learn to have control only over our thoughts. This is one of the painful lessons of parents of adult children; we must let go and accept that our children will chose the paths that they want, not the ones that we want for them. This, I can tell you from much professional, and personal, experience, is one the greatest sources of suffering for many people. So, to learn to recognize whatever it is that you make an idol of, whatever it is that we long for, strive for, have ambitions toward, all these are sources of suffering for us. One of the good things that happens in disasters, like our economic disaster of the past year, is that we learn we can live without many of the things we thought we just had to have. We can learn that we can be swallowed up by easy credit that gives us heavy debts; that we can be far happier with less; that less is more, as the famous architect Mies van der Rohe so beautiful stated of buildings. Less is more is the pinnacle of Buddhist thought; that the more we want, the more we have, the more we long for, the more we desire, the greater our suffering. So, as you often see within Buddhism, many aspire to the ascetic life, the monk’s life, a life of great simplicity; even to the degree that do not strive for food, but in some sects carry a bowl in which they depend on the good will of others. But, even simplicity can become a source of suffering, if a person makes the simplicity into a desire. The Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron teaches in her early days of meditation practice, she desired, longed for, a kind of practice, a simplicity and ease of meditation she thought she saw in others, but that she could never achieve, which is the very essence of the saying, If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. In other words, longing in any form is the root of suffering; even longing for the lack of longing. I was asked by my daughter what I would like for Mother’s Day, which as I hope you all know is next Sunday. For years my children have given me my favorite fragrance, which I love. But it makes me think of what Rita Rudner, a wonderful comedienne, once commented: Why are women wearing perfumes that smell like flowers? Men don't like flowers. After all, who are we wearing it for? I've been wearing a great scent. It's called New Car Interior. One the greatest sources of pain in relationships is wanting something that the partner does not or cannot give. Very often, the problem is that the partner is unaware of what it is we want. A woman once said to me that her husband never sent her flowers. When I pressed further, it turned out he often brought her flowers, but what she really wanted was to be sent flowers, to work. My recommendation: Tell him that you want him to send you flowers, to work. Want to know what happened? He did! We create so much suffering for ourselves, totally unnecessary suffering; but, we also must live with suffering over which we have not control. Things which we must learn to accept as beyond our control. Buddhism challenges our western ideology of more and better, for often more is just more, and not better at all. As people of faith, seekers after a truly better way, it is our work, the work of the spirit, to recognize what we do or don’t do that creates our own suffering; we can do little about another person’s sufferings, but we do have the ability to mediate our own. Beloved, look within, look to your longings, your desires, your needs, your beliefs, whatever it is that creates a lack of fulfillment, or an insatiable need for fulfillment. Like those of us have from eating sugar, that creates an ever greater need to eat sugar, and an ever greater suffering because we both want the sugar but don’t want what it does to us when we eat it. A vicious cycle of longing. This pattern can be true of making money, achievement, status, love, revenge—anything, indeed everything can become a source of suffering. It is, then, our spiritual work, your work and my work, to learn to recognize the Buddha of desire that needs to be destroyed, eliminated in our hearts-minds-souls, if we are ever to have peace. ***
April 19, 2009
The Knack of Luck and Happy Living
Many long years ago as I was reading a book the title of which I have forgotten there was one phrase which popped out and stayed with me. It was: the knack of happy living. The narrator was talking about a person who had a very hard life in many ways, but still had the knack of happy living. She noted that some people are lucky in this way. She, like most of us, believed that it is better to be a happy person, a person who can find joy in simple things. No doubt I remembered this phrase because at that time I was beginning to see that this is largely true; for, it seemed then and seems even more to me now, that there is indeed a knack, a facility or ability, to see good even amidst the bad, to have a propensity for the positive, to be open to those gorgeous bits of serendipity or good luck that occasionally fall upon the path we happen to be walking. This knack may come to some people with little effort, but I believe it can be learned, for I learned it myself. I did not grow up, for the most part, with people who had this knack of happy living. I remember my maternal Grandma Martin once saying of farmers (all my family at that time were farmers, fruit growers, dairymen), that they were never so happy as when they were miserable. Indeed, the farmer has a tough life. If there is not enough rain then the crops won’t grow, if there is rain, then you cannot get the hay in; so there is always something to worry about. Such people always can tell you the downside, will be the devil’s advocate, are the leaven to the optimism they see as foolhardy. Their views usually are justified by their experiences; or, as Prof. Wiseman noted, is it really that they are living out their expectations? As Wiseman, and the speaker in that book I read noted, some people seem to have the ability to remain cheerful and be optimistic even when times are hard. Then there are those people who seem to have such good fortune, are lucky, while others seem to be followed by dark clouds of troubles. One does have to wonder, is this all simply fate, God, chance, good fortune, or is there more to the picture? Louis Pasteur, the French scientist from whom pasteurization comes, once made the retort to someone who said he was lucky to have had the results he did in his experiments, forgetting that it was thousands of hours of work that led to his success, that chance favors the prepared mind. In other words, luck comes to those who are working toward some goal. Which is not to say we will necessarily get what we were initially looking for, but that to those who remain open minded and willing to look at what is offered up in any given moment for the possibilities therein, then, yes indeed, luck does have a way of coming to us. Some years ago when I did a sermon in which I talked about luck and serendipity, someone sent me this anecdote: My cousin Laura was in charge of an awards luncheon for her bridge club. She chose a very nice restaurant. However, after her group of elegantly dressed ladies were seated, Laura had no luck getting the waiter's attention. Borrowing a cell phone from a realtor who happened to be seated at the next table, she called the restaurant and asked to have menus sent to her table. It worked! Laura, according to her cousin, was a good example of the kind of person who has good luck because she doesn’t settle for less, fulfilling Pasteur’s maxim delightfully. These past several months have been hard times for millions of people in this country, and billions around the world. We are in tough times when it can seem like little can go right. Most of us have experienced anywhere from mild to great fear for our jobs, investments, retirements, and how to pay the mortgage, college and training school costs, all the very basic concerns of our lives. We should be worried, we should be concerned about how these great financial problems are dealt with, especially since most of it is not in our hands. Yet, there is always something, even amidst the bad stuff that can give us hope, even a little happiness We certainly have the right to be fearful for our jobs, or homes, all the important things of our lives. The leadership here at UUSMC is very concerned for the financial health this congregation now, for we see that our Stewardship canvass is not going as well as in years past; we may have to do some major cut backs, including staff. My praying and meditation has increased along with my concerns. But there is a difference between real and legitimate concerns, and run-away fear that immobilizes our lives. There is every reason to be hopeful, every reason to be thankful, every reason to find happiness when and how it presents itself to us. For good fortune, luck, and happiness are as Prof. Wiseman noted in this morning’s reading, far more a matter of how we view the world than anything else. One of the many virtues of prayer and/or meditation, is the ability to find happiness, for in prayer and meditation we stop and live in the moment, and look to what is good, even as we pray and hope that our difficulties will end. We can in the moment be thankful for the beauty of this spring morning; can be grateful for good vision or mobility or any of the bounteous blessings of healthy minds and bodies. Those with the knack for happy living are able to call on these blessings to ease the pain of greater challenges. I do believe in luck, for I have had a couple of very lucky experiences in my life; I do believe in serendipity, that things one could never imagine or plan for do appear on our pathways, but as Wiseman noted, you do have to be willing to see them, to perhaps move out of your comfort zone in order to experience them, to believe that there are more ways than you imagined for good things to happen. I have been profoundly impressed by how hard times make people willing and able to do things they would never be able to do if they had stayed in the comfortable places. Hard as it can be to imagine, losing a job has the ability to give you courage try new, and often far more satisfying, lines of work. Hard times do have hidden blessings. But if a person is determined to believe the worst, then the worst is very likely to happen. Still, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy; there is always far more in the world than our minds can envisage alone. Which is why the more insular and self-focused a person is, the less likely s/he is to enjoy the benefits of happy chance and happy living. One has to move out beyond the small box of the self in order to benefit from the bounty of the larger life that lies beyond. I know this is not always easy, and it is harder for those who are more introverted, but we can do that which is not easy, and we always benefit by stretching ourselves to do that which does not come easily. This is the spiritual growth, the mental, even physical growth, that can only come from the effort to move out and beyond. These are the lessons of life that we generally would not seek, but get so much out of in mind, body, and spirit when we are forced to go through them. Sometimes we have help from our families and community, and invariably we do better when we do have this support. I’m mindful of this story: Shortly after the holy days of Easter and Passover, a priest, a minister, and a rabbi went off together on a fishing trip. They tried every kind of bait they could think of, but the fish weren't biting. So the priest got out of the boat and walked across the water to another spot. Then the rabbi got out of the boat and walked across the water. The minister got out of the boat, too-and started to sink. He floundered around, climbed back into the boat, and tried again. Once again he sank into the water. He clambered back into the boat, and tried once more, this time almost drowning. Finally the rabbi said to the priest, "Do you think we should tell him where the rocks are?" The knack of luck and happy living is being both willing to step out of the boat, but also in nurturing the attitudes and community that will help us find where the rocks are that will enable us to know happiness, to have that sort of good luck that is not about treasures of gold, but treasures of the heart. Santayana taught us that: the knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. No less true for luck. Luck happens, but like a thirsty person (or mule), you cannot drink from that spring unless you are willing to go to it. You know that all the greatest stories of humanity, from the ancient Greeks to modern times, are about the journey of the soul; moving into unknown, foreign, usually frightening places and going through the pain and sorrow that is the discovery of the self that makes the hero the stuff of legends. Each of us is on just such a journey, we risk not just comfort, but our very being when we embark, but oh how much more we stand to gain when we stride forward boldly, versus sitting down and hoping the good stuff will rain down upon us. The knack of luck and of happy living lies in possibility, in venturing out into new territory of the soul. Be not afraid, those who love you are with you, and will help you find the solid rock of life, a foundation of love, hope, and yes, a little luck.
*** April 12, 2009
Death’s Recurring Story: Do we want to grow old or just not die?
Spring, rebirth, new life, burgeoning, growing, increase, change, fertility, promise, hope, and rejoicing—all these are words are part of what Easter has always meant, and what it means in the Christian sense, and what is means in the natural world, and what is means in our own lives. Spring as when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, to quote Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his poem “Locksley Hall.” Spring, when the birds begin their busy singing; and as Christina Rossetti wrote, spring when life’s alive in everything. Easter in the Christian message is a story about death and resurrection; that Jesus died and on the third day he arose from the tomb to a life everlasting. But as good UUs know, Easter is a message that comes from long before the religions we know today; from that time when there was no certainty that the long, cold winter, with all its deprivations, when food and warmth were hard to come by; winter, when there was no certainty that the dark days would end. We know that it is not some curious accident that we have spring flowers, bunny rabbits, chicks, and eggs as the primary symbols of the season; for these are the symbols of growth, fertility, and renewal that are the long held promises of spring time. We also know that every culture and every religion has celebrations at the spring time of year, for we of humankind have always wanted and continue to want to rejoice that indeed the sun has returned bringing its precious warmth to heal and nurture and feed us. I am always happy to have you suggest topics for sermons, and this one came courtesy of Kate Bowen, who has given me several over the years. Kate was telling me last year that while reading book, a mystery by Margaret Maron called Up Jumps the Devil, in which one character says: We all want to live to be old. But Kate had a reaction to this, and the question she posed to me was: Do we want to grow old, or just not die? And she further posited: The answer to this question may have a lot to do with how we age. To which I agree wholeheartedly. Easter in the Christian story, and all the spring time stories handed down the ages, really has as much to do with death as to do with life and the renewal of spring. For we cannot have one without the other, though we spend far more time considering life than we do considering death. And that is as it should be, but I believe it is a mistake to entirely avoid the subject of death, for regardless of what we do, we will never avoid it entirely. I recently spent some time with a family discussing their future funeral arrangements. This is such a good thing to do, indeed it is the last gift one can give to one’s family; to take from them the burden of trying to figure out what you would want. I know my family dislikes that I bring the subject up fairly often, but I have had my funeral plans done for years, and redo them occasionally as my situation changes, or I think of something I feel ought to be added or subtracted. In fact, I believe that my close contact with death has given me a far greater appreciation for my life, so I find nothing morbid about writing one’s own obituary, and planning one’s own funeral. I recommend to all of you to celebrate your life by contemplating your death. (And, if you have not already, make sure you have a will, living will, health care proxy, and write out what you would want in you memorial, and even your own obituary. Regardless of age, this is a very important business to take care of now.) The well known scientist, and better known science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov wrote: Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome. In the main this is true. Easter in all its varied spring celebration forms is about the transition between birth and death. The story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem to face his death (unusual in itself), the resurrection after three days, the descending into hell then ascending to heaven. This story is comes down from the ancient Babylonians, from the far older epic of Gilgamesh, the young Sumerian king, reared up on the heart of the fertile crescent at that place of convergence of the Tigress and Euphrates, where modern Bagdad is now. He too was born of a virgin, had a beloved friend, suffered the anguish of trying to find meaning for a life than ends in death, and trying to find a way to have immortality. He goes through many torments that are repeated in the later Christian story of Jesus. At one point Gilgamesh agonizes about his obsession with not wanting to die:
O woe! What
do I do now, where do I go now? But unlike the Christian myth of Jesus who does get immortality, Gilgamesh ultimately realizes that people cannot live forever, that the best we can do is live the best lives we can, with some greater purpose, which for him is building up the great city of Uruk as a monument to his life, and in the present by being a great king for his people; reconciled at last to his mortality. A flower rises slowly from the bulb planted perhaps last fall, emerging into the sun warmed world, pushing forth in green stem and leaf, developing into bud that opens to lovely full flower, then slowly fades and dies, all without consciousness. We take this burgeoning of plant life, and most animal life, as a matter of course; accepting that plants and animals come into the world, they live, they perish as the natural course in the cycle of life. Only we human beings fight against the dying of the light, as poet Dylan Thomas put it. For we have sentience, the ability to feel and perceive our condition. So it is natural for us to celebrate life, and to wish to avoid death. At least while life is full and worthwhile Kate’s question then is very perceptive. Do we wish to grow old, or do we just not want to die? Of course we joke about the hard stuff saying, growing old is better than the alternative. Or as my dear mother-in-law now in her eighties and dealing with the challenges of memory loss, often says: Growing old isn’t for sissies. Based on the amount money people around the spend to stay looking young, trying to hold on to youth, to stay healthy and fit —a number in the billions of dollars—we know that youthfulness is highly valued. We love life when we are youthful and healthy. Again, I think this cult of youth is only to be expected, and I do not see great harm in it in the main, especially when that energy is focused on good health through eating a healthy diet and exercise. But when it comes to the excesses where young men and women in their thirties are getting facelifts, then I say it has gone too far. But the impulse comes out of our great value for life. Personally I think laughter is better than plastic surgery. Nothing bespeaks youthfulness as much as the ability to smile and laugh and show that you still find joy in your life. Michael Pritchard who has done great work with youth wrote: You don’t stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing. If growing old means that we grow morose with the knowledge that our lives are nearing the end, then I don’t think most of us would want to grow old. And, further, when is one old? I have known people in the very bloom of youth who were old in this way, in their thinking. They do not rejoice in life, they don’t see the beauty in the possibilities that life has to offer, even when times are hard. But there are people in their advanced years, in the eighties, nineties, and centenarians, who are filled with the stuff of youthfulness. Our own Jane Frelick is one of the liveliest people I have ever known, and she will be ninety next February. If growing old is to be like Jane Frelick, then, yes, most of us would want to grow old. Jane has been one of my best sources for jokes, and we all appreciate her lively sense of humor. She may have been the source for this story about three little girls talking about Easter: ‘I don’t understand Easter,” said the first. ‘What I know about is the Passover story. We go to my grandma’s house for the Seder that tells the whole thing. But the only time my mom talks about Easter is when she takes me to buy new closes at the Easter Sales.’ The second child said: ‘I think Easter is fun. We all go hunting for Easter eggs that the Easter bunny has hidden, and whoever finds the gold one gets a big chocolate bunny in the Easter basket. And, I wear my new Easter dress and hat, and we go to church, just like always, except on Easter there are lots of white lilies everywhere and lots more people, and all dressed up. The third girl said: ‘It isn’t exactly like that at my Unitarian church. In Sunday school, we learned that Easter is about olden ways when rabbits delivered eggs, then a rabbi named Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover Seder with all his twelve disciples. But what he had been teaching made some people afraid of him. So some leaders had Jesus arrested, and on Friday they put him to death on a cross, then buried him in a stone tomb. ‘And , uh-um, Easter is the third day and he comes out,’ She pauses for a moment trying to recall the rest of the story, then says: ‘and—uh-um . . . I’m not exactly sure about the last part, but I think it is if he sees his shadow then there are six more weeks of winter.”
Do we want to grow or do we just not want to die? This last part is a far trickier question, for if we are filled with the wonderful essence of life, have joy in our living, then of course we don’t want to die. It would beg rationality to say we want to die; which is very different from being afraid to die. Nature has given us a strong biological urge to life, to living fully, which is the main reason why abstinence-only sex education is stupid in its foundation. Nature is blind to all but the urge to reproduce. Nature doesn’t care about our college plans, or our wish to live out the American dream of a well-planned life where you don’t have children until you are financial, emotionally, and intellectually ready. Indeed, if we waited on all these there would be very few children; not enough to keep the world going. Nature says: Life, more life, more and more life. Which is why we have over 6 ½ billion people on the planet, and are running out of room and resources at an alarming pace. So our impulse, our drive towards living and creating more life, is what it means to be a human being. Despite the recurring story of death, the absolute and undeniable reality that we will all die. We want to live, but we all can come to a point when living is not as desirable as death. I have long felt that we of the clergy have had a greater understanding of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who had watched a great deal of human suffering, and believes that people should have the right to decide when living is nothing but torture and dying would be far preferable. We of the clergy see people reach the point when life ceases to be meaningful for many reasons. And, beloved, when life no longer is about what we understanding as living, when the meaning, the point, the value of life has become degraded, then most human beings can reach the point when they are ready to go. Death can at that point be a gift. Some of us will be more than ready to go to whatever we believe lies beyond this beautiful life we may now cherish so greatly. The recurring story of humankind is about preserving life, avoiding death, and eventually accepting the transition. Like Gilgamesh, we may have to find a way to reconcile life with death, our mortality with our desire for life to go on and on. However we come to that reconciliation, I hope we always turn our impulses first to living fully by being people of love and hope, and truly believing in the redeeming possibility that resides in each new day, and even unto the last day that we live. I recently came across some variations on the Reinhold Neibuhr prayer, known as the Serenity Prayer which reads God
grant me The variation I would have us remember is this:
The recurring story of spring is that summer, autumn, and winter will follow. Let us celebrate the reality that is our life in all that we do while we have life, and to celebrate the reality that is death, in our acknowledgement that they are both real, that they are both true, for each one of us. ***
April 5, 2009
God what?
Back in the years prior to the melding of the two denominations of Unitarians and Universalists into our current Unitarian Universalist Association, or UUA, which finally happened in 1961, it is remembered that God and Jesus as God were among the primary sticking points. For Universalists were traditional Trinitarians, though generally progressive in their religion; and, as one colleague, the Rev. Wells Behee, who was there remembered, and I paraphrase: [T] he vote for Consolidation of the [Unitarians and Universalists] concerning Jesus was highly debatable. By Monday the Universalists had finally voted to reject Jesus as the Son of God. But the Unitarians voted for Jesus on Monday and the local newspaper carried the news that, ‘Jesus is up.’ [Day after day for] the week, the newspaper's banner was ‘Jesus Is Up.’ ‘Jesus Is Down.’ ‘Jesus Is Up." ‘Jesus Is Down." Meanwhile people not immediately involved in the negotiations bought the newspapers to keep abreast as to what was happening in the Unitarian Assembly.
This question of Jesus being up or down continues to be debated across denominations, and within our own UU movement. From the very first century after Jesus’ death, there was controversy about whether Jesus was god, related to god, or simply human, and this was focused in the theology of Arias, called Arianism, which is one of the many so-called heresies, meaning a disagreement with the established church. Of course, the church had yet to be established in the 1st Century, C.E.; that did not happen until the 4th Century C.E. The issue of monotheism as a Unitarian theological position, meaning God is One not three, then, is as old as we date what would become called Christianity in the 4th Century. Both God and Jesus are part of that debate. What or who is Jesus: man, god, demi-god, or myth? What-who is/was God? Lo these 2100 years later, we in the west find ourselves just as conflicted about the both Jesus and God, but even more conflicted about God. Is there a God? What is the nature of God if there is such a deity? How or who is being true to God? How can we know what God is and wants, is not and does not want? Most of what people believe is encapsulated in various religions doctrines and creeds; those rules and regulations and statements of what constitutes the set and system of beliefs for any given religion. After over five hundred years since the Protestant Reformation, and the rebirth of Unitarianism and the birth of Universalism, the world has seen the founding of hundreds of Protestant sects around the world (there are at present over five hundred different Protestant groups or sects in the U.S. alone, even more worldwide) we know that we are if anything even farther from any agreement about what God is, or if there is indeed anything remotely to be understood or called God. Within different denominations this is true, and this is equally true within our own Unitarian Universalist Association. We also have within this congregation a wide diversity of beliefs about God or Goddess, heaven or an afterlife of some kind, mystical and magical beliefs, natural and supernatural, believers and nonbelievers. I do not exaggerate when I say that it is harder to be a UU minister than any other denomination’s clergy, precisely because as I look out at the assembled congregation, I know that we do not all believe alike. I do not have a single, predictable road down which to walk as your minister. On the positive side of this, we UU clergy like to remind ourselves and our members: We do not all have to believe alike to care alike. And this is undoubtedly true. Still, as every UU minister will tell you, and I am here to tell you now, it can be frustrating on occasion to try to accommodate all our differences. Yet, the major issues boil down to whether we talk too much or too little about God, and whether there is too much or too little ritual-children-clapping in the service. For my part, this is a natural part of the territory and to be expected. I try to live by my second favorite aphorism: Blessed are the flexible; they shall not be bent out of shape. I encourage you to adapt it as your own. Wherever you find yourself on the theological spectrum, that is your theological right and responsibility as far as our UU position goes, for we do not have a doctrine or creed to which all must agree (or pretend to agree) in order to be in community. In fact, I believe we run the risk of become UU fundamentalists ourselves if we believe that only our particular position counts, or counts more than others on any of these matters. And there are some congregations that get reputations for being rather stridently either theistic or atheist (or politically partisan) congregations, and not particularly welcoming to those who do not agree. For my part, this goes against the whole point of being a non-creedal and non-doctrinaire religion. We need to be willing to sit side by side with people who have vastly different beliefs if we are to live out the diverse nature of our UU faith. Having said all that, it is my role to present a broad view of religion and religious beliefs while staying true to my own beliefs. One of the reasons many UU congregations have, as we do here, a lay-led Sunday each month, is to further uplift the point that the minister’s voice is not the only one that counts. Here our different voices can be heard, if we are all true to the ethics bound in our Seven Principles. Today my sermon is focused on the nature of God (please accept this to cover Goddess-Spirit-Source, or any other way to understand a Higher Power). How and what people are inclined to believe about God. If there is something we might call God, how much does that God have to do with our lives? Is God a creation of human need that is simply an extension of our need for parents? Is God some kind of magic man in the sky who grants wishes or gives punishments according to some mysterious principle that seems not have much connection with justice? Is God purely love? Is God a spirit of life that grows out of us and our longing? All of these questions and more are part of our seeking after truth. What do you think God is or is not? We know by reading our history as it has been written now for something over six thousand years, that the answers to these questions are as manifold as the creatures on this planet. God has been and still is for some, a person, a place, a thing; a man-like or animal-like entity; or many spirits or entities that are avatars of the Supreme Being; a spirit with no form; something that either is in us, with us, or beyond us. God as a force for both good and evil; or only good, with evil from some other supernatural forces. How we hear God talked about most often has to do with what God did or will do, who God has or will reward or punish. The most common way we hear God talked about in the wider context, comes via the news, and most often following upon some disaster. A tornado tears through a community killing dozens, and the ones who survive who are interviewed will very often say in one way or another: God spared me. God was looking after me/us. They seem to be saying that they were the special recipients of God’s favor. Further, they often believe that everything must have a reason related to God, so God is saving them for some special purpose. For myself, I wonder at this logic. God what? is often my incredulous reaction. For what they are not saying, but implying, is that God saved them but he killed all the other people. Perhaps it was my own upbringing in Christian fundamentalism, a religion with a strong view of heaven and hell, reward and punishment--which I always found frustrating even as a small child--but the idea that God arbitrarily picks and chooses people to be saved in this way strikes me as at the very least unfeeling, and the worst brutish and mean. Another area of God usage which I find offensive is to hear from various religious people, and especially religious leaders, that God wants them to do this or that as if God sent them a telegram or text message with directions for everyone. God wants you to live abundantly, so give, give, give to this ministry, and God will give to you, reward you. As you reap you sow; so give more than you can afford, and God will reward you equally. I wonder if anyone ever does an audit. Or, we hear: God gave us this world, this land, this place, this building, this message, and you cannot challenge anything we do or say. God, then, becomes the justification for all kinds of terrible wrongs and evils. What kind of God would want people to fly planes into the World Trade towers in order to show that God is great? It defies logic for many of us, yet at this moment in religious meetings across the land, this kind of message is going out to people longing to find meaning for their lives. I well remember hearing people in my family talk about how this or that terrible person, someone like these people who have been cheating the people in our current financial debacle, would get their punishment in the next life. I always found that a cope-out in some ways. After all, would we not be more likely to expect and demand justice if we believed this was the only life? Or consider all the hundreds and hundreds of years of mistreatment of people through such notions as the divine right of kings; that is, God made me king, or part of the aristocratic order, and you must obey my every command. You must accept your condition as God’s will. This kept millions of people in servitude to often abusive masters. This system was finally challenged in the Enlightenment period of the 1700s and 1800s, and helped to lead to our American Revolution. The founding fathers of this country were overwhelmingly deist, meaning they believed in some creator force that set the world, the universe, in motion, and then left us to our own devices. They tended not to believe that God was guiding anyone, except as we are guided by our good motives, one’s own conscience, which was what God gave us as our guide. In many senses, and in the motto on the nation’s currency, In God We Trust, the meaning was as All, or as the theologian Paul Tillich termed it, Ultimate Reality. The Everything of which we are a part. Not a man-like being out on the first rock in the seventh heaven, pointing at people arbitrarily giving this one a great life and another all sorts of terrible trials and tribulations. The reasons for such a diversity of belief about God, has mostly, I believe, to do with how we each see the world, and our need for our lives to have meaning. For those who need God to be protector, giver of purpose, who will provide an after-life where we will be rejoined by our loved ones, relates to our need for comfort, hope, desire for life to have a greater good to it. For those who need God to be punisher, giver of rights, justifier of death and destruction, seems to relate to both ego, the desire of power, and the need for justice—many such believers of this kind of God have suffered great poverty and injustice. For those who see God as love, the force of life, God is usually about common need, striving together in community, altruism, and possibility. This is how most UU theists see God. For those who have no need for any of the traditional understandings of God, often science, the laws of physics, the world as complete unto itself is more than enough, and gives purpose and scope, and a sense and trust that ethics are our guide. To be good does not require a belief in the supernatural. I know many atheists who are among the kindest, most caring people you could hope to know. Then there is that large group of us who are neither absolute believers nor absolute non-believers. We are the agnostics, who are willing to say we simply do not know if there is or is not a God, or something god/goddess-like. We are willing to live in our ignorance, but open to whatever might unfold to guide us toward either end of the spectrum. We find that such a position of not knowing is in line with much of what we experience in life. There is, for example, a great deal I do not know about any number of things, like nuclear energy, and I have fluctuated between positions now for thirty years or more, and I am still not convinced wholly of one position or another. I await more evidence, even while I acknowledge both the possibility of the dangers and the good that have and can yet emerge from nuclear power. I feel no compulsion to be driven to one extreme or another, except as I have evidence. I think there is yet a lot to learn. For me the only absolute position on either nuclear energy or God is a fool’s position, a fundamentalist position that is born primarily of either fear or need and not of knowledge. We gather here as people of faith, different beliefs, different spiritual expressions, but of common hopes and dreams for a healthy, productive world where we can strive as we are willing and able for something that is for ourselves, but also greater than ourselves. UU Tess Baumberger wrote: If there is a god, it is all around us, everywhere, We cannot separate ourselves from others into good and bad, right and wrong, without creating holes in the fabric of humanity. This is what I believe our strict adherence to rigid beliefs does to us. We ought to always feel the freedom to question, to ask such things as: God did what? What is responsible in fact? How do you know? Why do you believe what you believe? And to respond to rigidity in our own UU way: This is what I think. This is what I believe. This is what is precious and sacred to me. I need you to respect my beliefs if you want me to respect yours. I will never talk enough about God for some people, and will always talk about God too much for others. But here is what you can hold as true from me, I believe that whatever the nature of God, or even if there is no God, that the most important thing is always how we care and respect one another; the most important thing, the most constructive-creative-motive thing, the most healing thing, the most purposeful thing always is love, in all its many and manifold forms. *** March 22, 2009 –Stewardship Sunday Harnessing the Energy of Love This Sunday sermon has long been named the Sermon on the Amount by Frank MacArtor who for fifteen years led our stewardship efforts. But, in fact, I rarely talk about money in this sermon, for while money is an important tool of our well being as families and a congregation, it just that, a tool. Money is not the source of our well-being. What is more important is our understanding of the intrinsic value and values of our faith, and the importance of taking care of what we both value and love. Further, as we are all too well aware these days, and as the it is written in I Timothy of the Christian New Testament: The love of money is the root of all evil. The larger passage, in 1 Tim 6:6-10 (NRSV) says: Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. Note the passage does not say that money is the root of all evil as this passage is often misquoted and misconstrued; the passage states clearly that it is the love of money which is the source or root of evil. Surely between the Bernard Madoff pyramid scandal, the tanking of the banking and related insurance bodies in the last six months, the even more egregious scandals of large bonuses paid to people who caused the downfall of their companies (which no amount of persiflage about salary organization can make reasonable)—surely all this has taught us that it is not money, but the greed and avarice, the irresponsibility and indeed love of money and its partner power that are the root of the evil that has led to great suffering in this country and indeed around the world. If we could harness the energy of current public anger and outrage, we could power this country for a century—and perhaps right a great many wrongs. (We should note that people in Paris are rioting over all this. Revolutions have been caused by the same kinds of abuses, both in France, and in America!) People are rightfully angered and outraged by such total disregard for the common good of our nations, a disregard, a repugnance for common sense regulation and management, all of which allowed for the great recession we now are in. But, the counter side of greed and mismanagement is good management, good husbandry/good wifery of resources. Like Jesus’ parable of the talents; talents being the money (actually a measure of either silver or gold) of the region of the holy land of that time. In this parable, the master gives three of his servants (slaves) money to manage; two of them invest wisely, but one just digs a hole and hides it, which means the money was safe, but it was not put to use, did not grow. The first two servants invest and double the money, but the last is castigated for not at least putting the money in the bank where it might have gotten some bit of interest. The master is so outraged he dismisses the slave. Now this parable is much quoted and misused, for the following part of the quote: For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. (By the way, this is not a saying of Jesus, but something added later; probably by the writer of Timothy.) If you have ever wondered why people in evangelical and fundamentalist churches give so much, even when they have little, and they do give far more than people in congregations where people are more prosperous, it is in part because this quotation is taught often by clergy, which motivates people to give so much of what little they have to give in the hopes of reaping a reward. Not a practice this minister endorses, though I do think most of us can be better stewards of this faith. This phrase has been very good at harnessing the energy of millions of people to give so that they too might have abundance. Harnessing energy is a big topic these days. This time last year gas had gotten up to $4, over $200 a barrel, which had this nation in fear, creating great concern for all who have to drive, which is most of us; but with the positive outcome of enlarging our value and promotion of renewable energy. Renewable, to get more from the same source, now that is harnessing. And, as President Reagan once said, …believe me, when you're my age, you just love hearing about alternative sources of energy. Mary Wymer, writing about energy research, stated in an article ( a sort of Energy 101): Energy is often defined as the capacity to do work. It exists in many forms, including kinetic, thermal, electromagnetic, chemical and nuclear, as well as sound and light energy. While one energy form may be transferred to another, the total energy remains the same. So, most energy research efforts are aimed at improving efficiency and better harnessing energy (research.ua.edu/archive2009/energy.htm). Energy then is the capacity to do work, and few things get more done, faster, and with better results than those things that come from what we care about; that come from love. I preach and talk a lot about love. About the many forms of love, the spectrum of love that begins with the smallest acts of kindness and polite behavior, moving to the love we have for friends and family, to the great passions, and ultimately to the highest form of love which is respect. Respect is so important that it is impossible to love romantically someone you cannot respect. This is always an important sign for those of us who work with people who are experiencing problems in relationships. You can repair damaged relationships as long as respect remains, but not once respect is gone, then it is far less likely. Love does in fact make the world go round. And no matter how much we say it, we can never say it too much. I have lots of quotes about love from children, and my favorite so far is this from Rebecca, age 8: When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love. That is love. Love is thinking about and doing things for people because you care about them. Even in the great enterprises of capitalism, we know that we must take care of the weakest among us if we are to have a healthy and strong and caring system. Greed is what runs people, families, companies, and especially countries into the ground. While love in all its forms makes for good families, good organizations, good congregations, and good nations. When people talk about the founders of this country, they should always talk about love; it was love of humanity that led them to their democratic ideals. The Declaration of Independence says in part: That to secure these rights, governments are instituted . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. The Preamble to the Constitution does not talk about free market principles, it states: We the people . . . in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Love as compassion, a caring governance, is the foundation of this nation. Here is how I came to understand the importance of love. As some of you have heard over the years, I was reared in a Protestant Christian evangelical fundamentalism that was much more focused on the God of punishment and Hell, than on the God of love, though I was also taught that God was love. As I became to be a young adult and was challenged more and more about the nature of God, of religion, and what was real versus what was manufactured of religion, I found myself backed into a corner. The corner was that if there was a god, then how could I be in relationship, in truth, with that God if I said I believed things that I did not—like the virgin birth, or that one religion was the only right religion. It was clear to me that I had to be more concerned with truth of my own heart than with doing what family and friends might approve of; i.e., doing religion for appearance’s sake. I recognized that I only knew what I knew because of my upbringing in the family religion, then my exploration into a more progressive form of that Protestantism, but still within the western context of religion. I tried to imagine what it was like to be someone born in rural China, or Africa, or some other place where the religion was very different from my part of the country. So I spent a lot of time considering how one could know what was the “right” religion, and if not the right religion, how could one know that there was God and what the nature of God might be. Eventually, all this concern for and about religion led me to spend three years studying the nature and history of religion at Harvard Divinity School, where to my pleasure and surprise, I found that people generally agreed, despite differences in religious affiliation or no affiliation, that God was more about love than anything else. Which set me to considering further questions about how we know religion, or God, or any of the related things of the spirit. I did a rather involved paper for one of my professors on this topic. In my paper, I discussed that if one looks around the world the one consistent thing we see is love and its related ethics. Interestingly, ethics vary only slightly around the world, while religions vary dramatically from place to place. So if one posits the thesis that there is a God, then God must be unalterable, consistent, and unquestionable around the world, in all places, and therefore God cannot be based in doctrine or religion. God must be based in love and ethics. Consider, for example, that there is no question about such basic things as that all humans must breathe, eat, drink water to survive. There is no part of the world where there is a “right” way to survive. Such a scenario might posit that here in the Delaware Valley we have to eat, and drink, but we don’t have to breathe; therefore, ours is the right way to live. But as all of us who live here in the Delaware Valley know, we also have to breathe. So these are the fundamentals of human life about which there can be no question, no argument. Every human being, indeed every mammal, and most creatures, must eat, drink, and breathe to survive. God, then must be erga omnes, which is Latin for, in relation to everyone the same. Which led me to my theological position of deus caritas est which is that God is love, or perhaps more to my thinking, Love is God. Love is universal, love is what makes us do what we do, love of all kinds, even love of money which is can become a perversion of love. So, even this theological position is not perfect, nor are any of the others. Perfect is usually a fiction. With so many people looking for jobs these days, I am reminded of comic Ken Kraft who said: The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when s/he fills out a job application. Still, we can see even in the negative which has been too much with us of late, that harnessing the power of the love of money can incredibly powerful, and that power incredibly destructive. Love can be that powerful. Power, though, is what causes the damage. Happily, love is far less likely to be perverted than most of human emotions. Love is far more constructive, as we see in our own lives, and as we often see when disaster strikes and people rally to help. The key to all the best in life is first in self-knowledge. Know thyself was engraved above the Temple of Delphi in Greece, and a part of the Socratic era of idealizing knowledge and learning, and attributed to Socrates among others, including the gods. Know thyself may be the most important spiritual lesson, for without self knowing, without examining one’s motivations, desires, fears, hopes, we may bounce from thing to thing like a steel ball in a pinball machine. Knowledge gives us direction, a sense of both purpose and meaning, and hope. Knowledge paired with love gives us hope, and hope and belief in our brothers and sisters in the human family, especially those whom we care for most. Yet for all the simplicity of these statements, it is clear that it is a challenge to us have such self-knowledge, and generally too few people have a sense of that love which allows us to look at our own foibles and those of the people around us with compassion and honesty. We need compassion coupled with honesty in order to deal fairly with others. After all, if people simply want to freeload on others, they are misusing and abusing the caring of others. All of which brings to mind the Serenity Prayer. The Serenity Prayer, attributed to the great theologian of the 20th Century, Reinhold Niebuhr, who brought it out of the mists of time, said of its origins that it had been circulating in one form or another since the time of the Roman poet-philosopher Cicero. This prayer, nowadays most often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, and printed on the cover of your order of service today, says: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. This is a prayer about self-knowledge and about love for ourselves, for we need to be able to have compassion, which is often the most difficult from of love, if we are to have it for others. Then we can harness the power within, the power of love to create a better life for ourselves and for others. That is why we gather here: for the community of compassion, to learn, to grow, to work toward a better self and a better world. We gather to renew, to get more from the same source, to replicate both knowledge and love, which is harnessing the energy of all the best that we have to give for ourselves, and for others. Let us then be harnessers of the energies of love that bring us to this community of faith. That is the sermon of the mount, and the sermon on the amount, with blessings on the efforts of the stewards and the stewardship of this congregation.***
March 15, 2009
Truth and Reconciliation for a War-torn World
In October 2006, not 50 miles from here in Lancaster County, we remember that awful event in the terrible killing of the five Amish girls at the Nickel Mines school, by a deranged man, Charles Roberts, who was known in the Amish community. After the horror of the event, the thing that most stood out for people, especially in the media, was the practice of Christian forgiveness which is deeply believed and felt in the Amish community. They even reached out to the man’s widow and children, and shared the funds that poured in from around the world to aid the families of those murdered children. As was reported on CNN: On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, ‘We must not think evil of this man." Another Amish father noted, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God.’ Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethern community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: ‘I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.’ Jeff Jacoby, a columnist at the Boston Globe, wrote an op-ed piece about the killings and the act of forgiveness that followed. And he asked some of the questions that many of others were also asking, or pondering as unusual, such as: What are the normal reactions to such atrocities in the world? And how we would react if we were the parents of the girls, or had lived through some atrocity like the holocaust? In general, as he concluded, it would be not be abnormal for people to react with anger, hatred, vengeance. Many, perhaps most people, would react with fury, revulsion, a desire for revenge. I believe the reason this reaction of forgiveness was so dramatic to people in the media and generally, was that we have become so accustomed, so inured, even accepting of vengefulness, from those who have suffered such terrible injustices wanting revenge, the death penalty, the avenging for sometimes ages of previous wrongs. We know that in South Africa, after generations of abuse of the native African peoples that it would not have seemed strange to us had a civil war broken out after the fall of the apartheid system. But, as we know, the reason it did not was because Nelson Mandela, the first black president of post-apartheid South Africa who spent 25 years in prison in the struggle for human rights, along with Bishop Desmond Tutu, was determined that there was a better way. That better way came to be known by the commission set up to address the wrongs, and the fears; that is, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As you heard from the reading, a portion taken from the beginning of that document: Constitution states that the pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society; AND SINCE the Constitution states that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [good relations] but not for victimization; Or as Mandela has said at various times, truth and reconciliation is not about forgiveness so much as it is about moving from violence to productivity. As we enter the sixth year of our war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we enter into what we hope will be our final year at war there, as we enter into a new period of self-determination for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, we must hope that the leaders in both countries will move toward enacting a truth and reconciliation commission in the vein of that of South Africa. What has been interesting is that the model has also been used in this country, in Greensboro, N.C.
The Greensboro massacre took place on November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five marchers were shot and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party while in a protest. It was the culmination of attempts by the Communist Workers Party (known as the Workers Viewpoint Organization at the time of the shooting) to organize mostly black industrial workers in the area. In 2005, Greensboro residents inspired by post-apartheid South Africa initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to take public testimony and examine the causes and consequences of the massacre; the efforts of the Commission were officially opposed by the Greensboro City Council. The Commission determined that Klan members went to the rally intending to provoke a violent confrontation, and that they fired on demonstrators. It also found that the Greensboro Police Department had infiltrated the Klan and, through a paid informant, knew of the white supremacists’ plans and the strong potential for violence. The Commission also concluded that some activists in the crowd fired back after they were attacked (Wikipedia). The primary message here is that any time violence, hatred, enmity become a part of the way a dominant group acts towards a subordinate group, if there is ever to be equality, if there is ever to be peace, there must be a move towards both addressing the truth of what has happened, and the need to be reconciled. To reconcile, is to patch up differences, to bring together, reunite, resolve the past in order to move towards a better future. We do not have to read very much history to know just what a revolutionary idea this is. Consider that France and England had a 30 Years War, and a 100 Years War, with plenty of lesser battles, and skirmishes in between. The Balkans has been so intractable for over 600 years, that most Europeans expect the Balkans to remain a problem area. There was some hope after the fall of the Soviet Union, the break up of Yugoslavia, that had artificially bound these Balkan countries of Monte Negro, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia; some hope that they might move forward toward democratic ideas like the Czech Republic and Slovenia. But, as we know, hardly had the countries reemerged before Slobidan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and other Bosnian Serbs set out on the nationalist agenda toward ethnic cleansing. Balkanization is a verb to illustrate such intractable divisions within countries. What a pathetic legacy for a people! And UN peacekeepers continue to have to be there in order to avoid further violence, and that is now twelve years or more the case. Now we know that human beings have this propensity towards revenge, but that in the course of civilization we have learned the benefit for all people if we can behave out of an agape, a brotherly love, frame of mind. That putting our grievances aside will benefit everyone, not just the accused. We also have history lessons and religious lessons that teach us there is a better way. There is a story from Buddhism about a poor man, beaten down by life, who had lost all hope and ambition, found lying in filth in a gutter; found by a religious community, a teaching community, with great heart and an open spirit. The community lifted up the degraded man, and embraced him as one of their own. The community patiently loved and patiently taught him until he became whole once more. And, according to the story, that man grew in strength and hope and eventually joined the community. Over time he became the finest teacher and leader that the community had ever had. Not hard to relate this story to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for over twenty-five years, yet emerged from that horrible condition to become the wise and compassionate leader of his people. The great Harvard scientist of almost
a hundred years ago now, Louis Agassiz, said famously: Every great scientific truth goes through
three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next, they say it
has been discovered before. Lastly, they say they have always believed it. Agassiz’ statement is equally applicable to humanity’s efforts toward true civilization. Some years ago, there appeared on a Greenwich Village bulletin board a note which said: Dear John, Come home. Forgive and forget. I have destroyed that cherry-pie recipe. Helen. A story in a sentence. We each struggle with our own need to find forgiveness, for our own need to be in truth with our family and friends, and learn to reconcile. The writer/poet Anne Lamott gives us a good example, as told by the Rev. Wendy Bell, of the Harvard, MA Unitarian Church: We don’t have to start with the Gestapo or with Charles Roberts. Anne Lamott started with a woman whom she called “an Enemy Lite” – the mother of a friend of her son’s whom she had judged to be an enemy from early on…. because she had “mean eyes” and because she was skinny and beautiful and because she had a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on her white Volvo and because she baked. I bet we all have “enemy lites” – people whom we’ve judged to be our enemies for one reason or another although they may never actually have caused us harm in any real or present way. We hold grudges against them. We find it difficult to let go. But forgiveness is for us not for them. And if you want to practice forgiveness, it’s good to start with an “enemy lite.” With whom will you start? A New Yorker once showed a cartoon in which a man in a business suit was being turned away by St. Peter at the gates of heaven. In the caption, he was saying to St. Peter: Don't you realize you are criminalizing a policy difference? Differing points of view can be hard to overcome. We are well aware, after six years, that the Sunni and Shiite Islamic factions are fighting not so much about religious truth, for they existed side-by-side for generations; what they are really fighting about is power. Who will be in control in the new Iraq. This is of course not democracy, which is what we understood our actions were there to impart. To create a democratic Iraq was, we were told, the purpose for deposing Saddam and his evil cohorts. Yet, what we have had for all the years since that March 2003, is a struggle for power that is unlikely to go away any time soon. No matter how long we stay as peacekeepers, or even if we leave, this struggle is likely to go on until some people in leadership determine to move toward truth and reconciliation. I rather admired Gandhi’s approach to the British, who also were dealing with factions struggling for power. Gandhi effectively told the British to go, and let the Indian communities figure it out for themselves. Which is what I think we should do in Iraq. After all, the Iraqis are not apt to respect what is forced upon them from a foreign government. And don’t we owe them enough respect to believe they can figure out their own problems better than a western government? At least, this seems as if it should be our thinking, if democracy is really what the war was/is about. Dallas Willard, professor of Philosophy at the Univ. of Wisconsin, and a scholar of the works of C.S.Lewis, wrote: There is no such thing as a fact that accommodates itself to what is merely believed about it or to how it is thought of. Some facts can be changed, no doubt, but never by belief alone--nor, we should add, by wish or desire alone. Some facts can be changed or abolished by will and action, but many cannot be changed even by these. Desmond
Tutu, Anglican Bishop of South
Africa, stated in the course of this Truth
and Reconciliation: When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said
‘Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and
they had the land. An especially interesting statement in light of the fact that Desmond Tutu is an Anglican bishop. Clearly stating a truth, to which he is reconciled. I know that many people hope that soon, by 2011 is the date projected, that U.S. troops will leave Iraq; that the processes of healing can begin for the much beleaguered peoples of Iraq. We can but hope, pray, work toward this goal. One way we work for such larger goals of truth and reconciliation is to work for them in our own lives. Wherever we are at war, mentally or spiritually, let us take the lessons of reconciliation that grew out of far greater sufferings that most of us can know. The greatest spiritual act we can perform is to forgive; and if not forgive, be reconciled, so that we can move on, move forward towards a better life. Move towards beliefs and acts of love, and away from beliefs and acts of hate. Let us then live in hope that for the warring nations of the world that they too will move towards a better way, the better way of truth and reconciliation. *** March 8, 2009 What Do You Do When You’ve Got the Blues What do you do when you’ve got the blues? We have any number of options of course: cry, complain to somebody who will listen, have a few too many drinks (the worst remedy), or find some way to distract ourselves. What I do most of the time is go to my joke file, for I find it impossible to stay dreary and blue if I am laughing, at least for a while. Here was one that recently gave me a big lift. A man wrote: Tommy, one of my grandsons, walked into the convenience store and asked the clerk for a box of laundry soap so that he could wash his dog, Petey. The clerk was appalled and told the boy, "Son, you can't use laundry soap on a dog. It might hurt him. Are you sure you want laundry soap?" "Oh, yes," Tommy insisted. So the clerk sold the boy a box of laundry soap. The next day, Tommy skulked into the store with a very sad look on his face. "What's the matter, Tommy?" the clerk asks. "Petey died," the boy blurted out, tears wetting his cheeks. "That's terrible," sympathized the clerk. "But remember, I told you that laundry soap might hurt your dog." Tommy responded, "I don't think it was the laundry soap. I think it was the spin cycle." Even macabre humor can lift us out of our low places, for humor jostles our thinking out of the ruts we are inclined to get into, especially when we are blue. To say we are blue or have the blues, usually means a temporary low period, not a more serious depression. And the difference between the blues and depression is state well in the following: "I think the difference between just having the blues and depression lies in the symptoms," said Raymond Crowe, M.D., UI professor of psychiatry. "If 'the blues' persist for more than a couple of weeks and are accompanied by trouble eating, difficulty sleeping, or suicidal thoughts, you should see someone." So keep in mind I am not speaking today about people with more serious forms of sadness or depression; rather, my focus is on all of us who can find ourselves, sometimes for no particular reason, feeling low, out of sorts, or generally just not ourselves. I came across a number of articles in the last couple of years discussing some recent and cumulative research that shows some interesting support for what many of us were taught growing up like, smile, you will look happier and feel happier better. As a child, I was always getting grief from family members about my somber expression—might have had something to do with all the hell fire I was being raised with! But I paid heed and would smile, only to find that I did in fact feel happier. There are researchers out there who have been studying the human affect, which is our normal facial expressions, for many years now. One behavioral scientist, Dr. Mark Stibich, has written on smiling as an important part of our affect; so important that it can affect you health and well being. Smiling is a way we stand out, and make our bodies function better. So, in effect, smile if you want to improve your health, your stress levels, and you attractiveness. For, it is true that we far prefer to be around people who have a happy expression, and will avoid people who always wear an downtrodden expression. We know instinctively that the smiling people are likely to boost our spirits, while the Gloomy Gerties will leave us trying to make a quick get-away. Stibich lists the following benefits we gain from smiling: 1. Smiling Makes Us Attractive We are drawn to people who smile. There is an attraction factor. 2. Smiling Changes Our Mood Next time you are feeling down, try putting on a smile. There's a good chance you mood will change for the better. 3. Smiling Is Contagious When someone is smiling they lighten up the room, change the moods of others, and make things happier. 4. Smiling Relieves Stress Stress can really show up in our faces. Smiling helps to prevent us from looking tired, worn down, and overwhelmed. 5. Smiling Boosts Your Immune System Smiling helps the immune system to work better. 6. Smiling Lowers Your Blood Pressure When you smile, there is a measurable reduction in your blood pressure. 7. Smiling Releases Endorphins, Natural Pain Killers and Serotonin Smiling is a natural drug. 8. Smiling Lifts the Face and Makes You Look Younger The muscles we use to smile lift the face, making a person appear younger. 9. Smiling Makes You Seem Successful Smiling people appear more confident, are more likely to be promoted, and more likely to be approached. 10. Smiling Helps You Stay Positive Try this test: Smile. Now try to think of something negative without losing the smile. It's hard. When we smile our body is sending the rest of us a message that "Life is Good!" [So avoid] depression, stress and worry by smiling Certainly I do not want to suggest that all life’s troubles will be made better by simply putting on a happy face, as the song says; but it is equally certain that we often can get into the habit of being blue, or simply find that multitude of life’s difficulties are getting us down so that we can go for a long time without joy, when even just a moment of joy would make us feel immeasurably better—even if the problems remain. The mystic Bengali Sri Chinmoy writes in a poem titled “In that Smile” of someone it is easy for us to envision: His sparkling smile: No doubt you have seen people who were indeed transformed in a smile. A person whose whole being seemed to radiate and change them seemingly from one person into another. Children often exhibit this magical transformation. Sometimes they learn what power is in a smile or a laugh. Both my children learned very quickly that the quickest way to get out of trouble was to make mom laugh. Comics of desperation my daughter said. Regardless of motive it works. My husband also knows that a laugh brightens my world quickly, and has made it his job to keep finding things that make me chuckle. There has even been a good deal of music written to extol the virtues of smiling. As you heard in the interlude, there is “Let a Smile be Your Umbrella” done by many great singers of the 40s and 50s—Perry Como, Bing Crosby, my particular favorite is the Andrew’s Sisters version, and many more. The beginning lyrics: Just let a smile be your umbrella, Then there’s the old song “When You’re Smiling” written by Irving Berlin, and memorably performed Louis Armstong: When you’re smilin’....keep on
smilin’ Sometime last year I heard a public radio program about this phenomenon of smiling improving the moment, and even a whole life. While I had known, as indeed I think most of know, that a smile made one feel better, what I did not know was just how powerful the effect of a smile can be on those with whom we interact. A number of studies have shown that people can take bad news from their boss if the boss greets them with a smile, and often uses a smile in her/his interactions. That we can make people feel more positive towards us, perhaps help us more readily, by smiling and showing a friendly demeanor. For instance, waiters/waitresses have been shown to receive far better tips if they are friendly and smiling. And, it has been demonstrated that airline booking agents tend to be more helpful, if it’s possible to help at all, to passengers who smile and don’t gripe and complain. Big surprise! Yet, I know people, and you know them, too, who are convinced that the best way to get service people to react is to be stern and demanding and even rude. That would never work on me; like most people I tend to feel less cooperative with people who don’t speak respectfully to me. I believe we are all more likely to want to do more for people who give us their smiling faces rather than negative ones. We look for smiles as affirmations of our own worth. Your smile invites people into your circle; tells people that you desire to engage and be on a respectful basis with them. Your smile conveys all the things we hope we convey in our best selves. American poet Emily Dickenson, wrote this telling poem:
A lot of people in the 1960s could not stand the heavy weight boxer Casius Clay/Mohammed Ali. He was cocky, they said. He was arrogant, yet he was sports reporters dream athlete, and Howard Cossell among others said they loved his happy personality, his playful way of treating all the racism inherent in the times; he no doubt used humor to cover a lot of pain and difficulties. Many do. There is a classic story, about a flight attendant who brought down the great boxer Mohammed Ali: As the jet was rolling down to the runway, the flight attendant instructed the heavyweight champion that he needed to fasten his seat belt. He looked at her, smiled, and bragged, "Superman don't need a seat belt." She gave him an even bigger smile and said, "No, Superman don't need an airplane, either. Will you buckle up please?" Ali laughed as he fastened his seat belt. When you’ve got the blues sometimes you want to listen to some music that is in sympathy with your feelings. That is how the Black American music was developed that became the “blues.” And if anyone had a right to be depressed over their condition it was African Americans in those days of Jim Crow laws. Yet, for many music was the way to deal with those hard times, for music makes you feel better. There is a link between the way the brain treats both music and facial expressions, and we have an innate reaction to both. There is a restaurant in Wilmington that my husband and I went to a couple times, and after the second time I said to Tom that I did not want to go there again. Both times they played this “I lost my wife and my dog, my house burned down, and I’ve nowhere to go” blues. A glass of wine and that was enough to put me off my food—not an easy thing to do ordinarily. I think it was Ester Steffens who sent me this many years ago, which is from an actual ad in a newspaper: From a Miami Beach weekly: ‘Having trouble with your husband coming home late-or not at all? Let us make a confidential investigation for you. Special discount if your husband is over seventy-five years of age.’ And this one: There’s the one about the fellow who went to the hospital for a complete checkup. He was very depressed, and said to the doctor, ‘I look in the mirror-I'm a mess. My jowls are sagging. I have blotches all over my face. My hair has fallen out. I feel ugly. What is it?’ And the doctor said, ‘I don't know what it is ---------but your eyesight is perfect.' See a little smile and a laugh does make you feel better. That is one reason I always try to find some bit of humor to put in my sermons. I had a wonderful mentor in the Rev. Gerry Krick of the West Newton Unitarian Church, where I served two years, who told me that even if the congregation doesn’t get the point of, or don’t agree with, your sermon, if they laugh during it, they will feel better about it. In the January edition of Discovery News, Jennifer Viegas did an article on “Smiling? You can Hear it in the Voice,” about the research of Amy Drahota: Smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can actually identify the type of smile based on sound alone, according to a new study that also determined some people have "smilier" voices overall than others. The research adds to the growing body of evidence that smiling and other expressions pack a strong informational punch and may even impact us on a subliminal level. "When we listen to people speaking, we may be picking up on all sorts of cues, even unconsciously, which may help us interpret the speaker," lead researcher Drahota. Smiling is a clue, it is in fact a great deal of information, related to lots of things about the people we hear, see, and know. Yesterday I did the memorial service here for Ray Bates, a member for about ten years, though we haven’t seen him much in several years as his health worsened and he moved in with his daughter in Rising Sun, MD. The main thing I remember about Ray was that he had such a great sense of humor. The last time I saw him in the hospital, he was still wise-cracking, even though he was in his final hours. I think it is a very good thing to be remembered as someone with a good sense of humor. It means you were well liked. And, speaking of funerals,Garrison Keillor said this: They say such nice things about people at their funeral that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days. We do not, any of us, have all that many days in our all too brief live. Too few to waste them on being gloomy if we have an option. Dr. Bernie Segal in the 1970s was diagnosed with cancer, and during his time of treatments made a point of watch the films he had always found funniest, like the Marx brothers, Abbott and Costello, and the like; he wrote a book about how humor helps in healing. So this research has been around for a good while now. The main things, my friends, is to accept that while we all will have some hard times in life, while we will sometimes get the blues, we do have the option to lighten load, to brighten the day, with something both free and easy—a smile. Try it sometime. I have, and what happens is you immediately start thinking of something pleasant, and smile even more. Smile, smile often, smile when the last thing you feel like doing is smiling, and I promise you the world will seem a little less dim and gray. Spirituality, our seeking after things of the spirit, is what we are really talking about. The spirit shines through the eyes, especially smiling eyes. Our being is infused by our view of the world. So the spirit, the self we are sharing, makes clear and uncontestable statements to others. I believe most of us hope that our spirits are filled with goodness and seek to imbue our circles with the goodness. A smile is the seal of the compact of spiritual community. Smile, it is good for the spirit, and it is also good for the spirits of all around you. ***
March 1, 2009 Remember the Ladies Abigail Adams wife of John Adams wrote to him during the early days as the revolution was being planned, March of 1776, that she desired him to remember the ladies. A clear sign that among intelligent women, and there have always been women of great intelligence, the old ways were becoming less acceptable. Keep in mind women could own no property, whatever they had automatically belonged to their husbands, and many a woman’s inheritance was lost as a result. John Adams in response, being both playful and truthful, stated that the cause for freedom was already being accused of setting in motion all kinds of unrest, like among indentured servants, slaves, Indians, children, and he remarks that it seems now that the largest group by far appears to also be straining at the traces, saying: Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight. Such was the condition Abigail Adams and all women of the time found themselves: totally dependent on the good will of men. I suppose you have noticed that every month has been designated by Congress as a special month to lift up those groups that have historically been under-valued and under-represented at all levels of society and government, which I think is a good thing, and therefore live in hope that one day all these designations will be unnecessary. That will, of course, be the true test of the attention of both the Congress and the nation. The fact that we have yet to elect a woman to the highest office in the land, though women make up over 50% of our population, and that relatively few women serve in the House or Senate, all tells us that there is still a long ways to go. So it was then that in 1987, the month of March first received its standing as: “National Women's History Month in order to encourage the recognition of women's many accomplishments throughout history.” While women have made significant contributions to the nation and to the world, it has rarely happened without sacrifice and a fight. The fact that March became Women's History Month, dates back to March 8, 1857, when: a group of female garment workers in New York City staged a protest to demand better working conditions and pay. Police aggressively halted [indeed violently halted]the demonstration, but several years later the determined women formed their own union. In 1981, March 8 was observed as International Women's Day to acknowledge women's continuing struggle for recognition and rights. The first date correlates with the suffrage movement and women's early struggle to get the vote--an on going struggle for women in many parts of the world today. I want to emphasize that many men of Unitarian and Universalist congregations (remember we were two separate denominations until 1961) during those early days were great proponents of women’s rights, as you men of our modern UU congregations continue to be. So, as I speak today, it is with a deep appreciation for the front-line thinking of women and men in our movement for many of the accomplishments in the realm of social justice that have been brought about, even to the fact that the members of this congregation called me as your minister in 1995. As long-time students of history know, Aristotle’s maxim teaches that if we do not learn from history, we will continue to repeat our mistakes. We need to learn from history, even the history that is happening all around us in this time. As a product of the feminist movement myself, as a feminist--for how can any woman not be in favor of women’s rights and women’s desire and ability to succeed--I feel keenly that change comes about because we make it happen--not from wishful thinking. I also believe that men are equally invested in the feminist movement, for they are after all sons of mothers, the husbands of wives, the fathers of daughters—men are not disinterested parties. Remembering the ladies is indeed a good idea for all of us. We are at present in a period of transition when many significant changes have occurred, and what we do now is still somewhat in question. I always remember my Grandma Dean, who was very interested in politics for her day and especially in our rural part of the world, at least to the extent that she never missed an opportunity to vote. This in spite of the fact her religion told her that women should be silent in the church, and subservient to their husbands. She, having been born not long after the end of the Civil War, had read newspaper accounts of the “Bloomer” brigades, and the marches for women’s right to vote, and being among the first women to vote, she valued the right to vote far more than we women do today. Like many of my age, I was the first person in my family to complete college, which was not even an option for the majority of women of my grandmother’s generation. But I also remember one of my first college friends wanted to be admitted to the College of Engineering, and was told point blank by the dean that women were not fit to be engineers and did not get to study engineering. Women were still primarily studying to be teachers, nurses, and private secretaries. Private secretary is a designation lost, happily, to the young people of today, but meant a great deal prior to the 1970s, for it indicated that the secretary in question had a college degree, or had achieved the highest level of that profession, usually as the right hand of the man in charge. The women and men today who do this work are quite rightly called “administrators” for that was what they always had been in fact—if not in pay or recognition. I had an aunt by marriage who was a private secretary, and very highly thought of in our family, but another of my aunts—her name rarely spoken—disgraced herself by joining the WAC during World War II, and staying after the war was over, for it was well-known that “real women” did not stay in the military. These were the only two women in my large extended family who worked outside the home. Young women under forty now represents a wide work force of women who have never felt particularly limited in the fields that they could pursue to study, or the work that they could chose to do—which is not to say that all forms of such bias and discrimination are gone, but compared to previous times in women’s history in this country, barriers are far fewer, and many of the current barriers are related to race and class barriers that affect both men and women. What does remain significantly different is the amount of money most women make compared to their male counterparts. Still in the range of seventy-six cents on the dollar of what a man would receive. And we see this is true even in a recent survey in our UU ministry. Yet, all this has been improving over the last thirty years, though I remain concerned that these pay differentials will not go away entirely, and it has to do with the responsibilities that women must shoulder who expect to have a family. Women today are realizing that despite what we their mothers often told them, there are differences between men and women, there are differences in what you can expect to do, be, and achieve if you are a women, and both men and women are affected by these differences. The world of humor also recognizes these differences. One day a female colleague told her friend, Stan, that she was going home early because she didn't feel well. Since Stan was just getting over something himself, he wished her well and said he hoped it wasn't something he had given her. A fellow worker piped up, "I sure hope not. She has morning sickness." My daughter represents many young women of her generation, for she planned to have a career in business, and was doing all the right sorts of things to assure her success. She had long said she did not want to have children, but wanted to be successful in her chosen field, then she turned thirty and it was not long after that she began to feel strongly the urge to be a mother. Over then next couple years that urge persisted. Many people say that this is the biological clock ticking away in a woman’s head. Perhaps that is so. Nonetheless, she planned (No doubt, you’ve heard the joke: Want to make God laugh? Tell her your plans!)—she planned to have her babies (by now It had become They), take her three-months of maternity leave, then go back to her job. Now this was an exceptional company and an exceptional job that allowed her to do quite a bit of work from home, though she did have to going into New York City two or three days a week. A month after going back to work, she realized that something had to give. She and her husband would have to make some sacrifices, but it was manageable—which is not true for so many young families. It took her another two months to disengage from her work, and she knew that she would not be able to step back into that work a few years from now when her girls were older. A very difficult choice. What will happen to the women, children, and men of the families who make these choices? And what will happen to those who have no choices? By the way, are there any women here who do not work? Of course not! Women who do not work outside the home, work nonetheless, in fact, they usually work as much or more. As ths story illustrates: One day a man came home from work to find total mayhem at home. The kids were outside still in their pajamas playing in the mud. There were empty food boxes and wrappers all around. Entering the house, he found an even bigger mess. Dishes on the counter, dog food spilled on the floor, a broken glass under the table, and a small pile of sand by the back door. The family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing, and a lamp had been knocked over. He headed up the stairs, stepping over toys, to look for his wife. He was becoming worried that she might be ill, or that something had happened to her. He found her in the bedroom, still in bed with her pajamas on, reading a book. She looked up at him, smiled, and asked how his day went. He looked at her bewildered and asked "What happened here today?" She again smiled and answered, "You know every day when you come home from work and ask me what I did today?" "Yes," he replied." She answered, "Well, today I didn't do it!" One change that is happening, almost without anyone’s notice, but represents what has become a 21st Century paradigm, or pattern, for women’s work is the number women-owned businesses. The way many bright, hard-working women, both young and not-so-young, are handling the challenges of taking care of families, making money, and staying current in their respective fields, is to start their own businesses. I was surprise to learn, though, as I looked into this subject, just how far advanced this movement is already. According to the some fairly recent government data, there are over four million women-owned business in this country, which is something around thirty percent of all businesses, and which accounted for nearly five-hundred billion in gross receipts. Though the percent of government contracts that went to women-owned businesses was a mere, shall we say, a lousy, one percent. I have no very recent data, but I suspect that these figures are not much changed as of this year. Women are on the move in the direction of entrepreneurship, and I expect we will see this continue to develop as the 21st Century matures. What I am less sanguine about, is whether they will prosper at all levels of entrepreneurship; for instance, will that lousy one percent go up proportionally to the number of businesses women own? We who have the interests of our female half of the population at heart will want to be listening and observing how this trend develops. But what of women who do not want to be business owners, or career track professionals? Do they have a role, a place in this century of the working family? As a laud to the homemakers of history, let me say that I believe they have always had the hardest work, and do it all with no pay. My mother was the hardest working woman I have ever known, bar none. She rose at 5:00AM (went to bed after midnight as often as not), cooked three meals from scratch every day; she tended a house without most of the so-called modern aids—though she considered her electric kitchen range and electric wringer washer the height of modern convenience. She sewed most of our clothes, washed and ironed them all, tended a vegetable garden the size of this sanctuary footing, canned most of the fruit and vegetables we ate out of season, crocheted garments, antimacassars, baby clothes and afghans enough to carpet Pike Creek Valley, did hundreds of hours of church work, and managed all the family finances. And, she was typical of the women of her family, her community, of this nation. I confess to occasionally feeling a bit puzzled when I hear that many women of today have no time, for compared to my mother’s generation, mine has had a wealth of time, not just opportunities. I think, primarily, that what has changed is what we want to do with the time. Of course, that is not true for many women of the laboring force. And, of course, children are far more involved in activities that require them to be shuttled around a great deal. There is true story about a church in New England that held a Sunday service patterned after those in colonial America; I believe it was to celebrate the 1976 bicentennial: The pastor dressed in long coat and knickers, and the congregation was divided by gender: men on the left side of the aisle and women on the right. At collection time, the pastor announced that this, too, would be done in the old way. He asked the "head of the household" to come forward and place the money on the altar. The men instantly rose. Then, to the amusement of the entire congregation, many of them crossed the aisle to get money from their wives. Joline Godfrey, in her book on women entrepreneurs, Our Wildest Dreams, states: “The ability to grow, feel competent, and empowered within the ‘context of meaningful relationships’ is a fundamental dimension, of women’s experience.” Further, she says that women no longer want to just accept their roles as defined by the male power structure of the culture; rather women today are: “Claiming their truths, they are claiming their own identities.” I appreciate the point made by Terri Apter in her book, Working Women Don’t have Wives, that all too often the work place assumes that workers will have wives at home. Or that women who work have husbands whose work is more significant financially and can afford to, for example, forego the need for health insurance because the husband’s work will provide it (though that is not without a significant cost to both the husband and the wife). Nowadays, despite the rhetoric we are hearing about what constitutes a family in this country, many families are headed by women who are single, abandoned, widowed, or divorced or all female heads-of-households. Women head families, and they need to be able to earn a living wage. Women need health insurance, retirement plans, worker’s compensation insurance, and child care tax deductions, as much or even more than ever before. We have a world in flux, economies are in decline, jobs are being lost by the hundreds of thousands, and the best estimates of our economic forecasters is that women will increasingly be needed to keep families together financially. What all this means to our daughters and granddaughters of the coming generation is hard to know, but one thing I think is fairly certain, they will not be content to do as generations of women have had to do around the world, which is be quiet and take what is on offer by the mostly male leadership. I believe women will expect the sacrifice and the success to be distributed more equally. Among all the great financial abuses we have been hearing about in recent months, I have noticed the ones making the news are not female. Further, aid agencies have been learning that if they put the money in the hands of women, it goes where it was intended, unlike so often happens with ruthless leaders like Mugabe in Uganda. Unitarian Universalists have long fought for equal rights across racial and gender lines, and I am certain we will not back away from our Principles when it comes to the women of the world today and tomorrow. In this past year when we had the unique opportunity to make our wishes known, more women than ever turned out to vote, and more people were thinking about how women and children are particularly affected by the decisions we each make. The challenge is not to disenfranchise one group to lift up another; the challenge, and this is a spiritual challenge of profound meaning, is how we lift up each other so that we all benefit as we are willing to work and contribute. We are now in a time when more than ever we need to remember the ladies, and remember all who have been disenfranchised by a system ready to excuse greed, and even blame the poor and working class for the problems we know they did not create. Let us as people of faith understand the role of remembering. Remembering that history does have a nasty habit of repeating itself. Remember that the reason, as Jesus taught, that the poor will always be with us, is because the greedy will always be with us. Remember that if half of our population is treated poorly, then the whole system is ultimately weaker for it. Our faith calls us to be people of action, and that what we believe is less important than what we do with what we believe. All of which means we do not just stand by and accept it when the systems in which we work, live, and worship are simply upholding a status quo that shows we neither remember, nor care to remember. Let us be UUs who live out our faith declared in our Seven Principles, which means writing to our leaders, and, equally important, by being leaders ourselves. *** February 15, 2009 There is No Life Without Roads The Irish poet priest John O’Donohue in his poem, For the Traveler: Every time you leave home, another road takes you into a world you were never in. Sometime last year I heard a public radio news program talking about the positive changes in Afghanistan. Considering that what is front and center of the news these days regarding that country of long and great suffering (in which we find ourselves five years into war) it can be a challenge to move from the destructive and negative to look for the positive. But, that perhaps is what made the simple statement of some rural Afghan mayor-tribal chieftain-spokesperson (I did not catch his position or significance in the story) catch my attention. He was talking about the rebuilding of the Kabul-Kandahar Highway when made a this simple, and to me, profound statement: There is no life without roads. No life without roads—it’s true! I had never stopped to consider the absolute truth of this, to us, mundane reality of daily living. There are no days when I am not on a road if I leave my house. For all of us in the so-called modern world, no single disruption outside accident or health crises causes as much difficulty as when the roads are blocked and we are prevented from moving from place to place. That we are here at all is a testament to the roads of all kinds that have allowed humankind to move out and beyond the place of human origins in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia. Once you start thinking about roads, about paths that led to roads, and how roads become the great highway systems, it can intimidate even the strongest hearted person, it becomes so clear that everything we consider human relies on our ability to go from here to there. Further, very little progress is possible without the ability to travel. Roads and our journeys upon them are so deeply ingrained in our human psyche that the metaphor of journey is in our every day speech, so deeply a part of who we are that we are no longer conscious of the significance of our ability to move with ease where and when we feel like it. I have read that one of the major challenges for the Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and I would say by extension, for any peoples in a warring situation, is all the road blocks, the inability to get across town without check points, or other obstacles to journeying from home to school, or hospital, or business places. Consider, that when countries make war, the first act is to close down the media (the roadway of the modern communication), the second is to close the roads, to bomb the bridges, to interfere with normal movement of the people. And, now, when we are routinely in the air, we know also that our understanding of paths, roads, routes, extends even to the sky; and, as the terrible tragedy of this past Thursday with the crash of the Continental flight in Buffalo is a reminder, there the weather rules the lanes of air traffic. Have you ever noticed the stark contrast of suddenly being aware that you hear no traffic sounds; say at some early morning hour, or when on a vacation to a remote place? The sounds of travel are almost always in our ears; especially at this time of day in this location. But in fact most places of human habitation are routinely imbued with the sounds of vehicles of some kind or another. Roads are in all but the most inaccessible places. Steven Wright, that deadpan comedian even noted the sometimes strange ubiquity of roads in this question: Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii? This, by the way, is true—routes 61-99. According to scholar Mary Bellis, the first roads as deliberate constructions—that is, roads that did not have their origins as extensions of the footpaths that led people from one spot to another—were made some four millennia ago, or in her words: The first indications of constructed roads date from about 4000 BC and consist of stone paved streets at Ur in modern-day Iraq and timber roads preserved in a swamp in Glastonbury, England. These timber roads were called corduroys, which is where the name came from for the corded fabric—whizzer britches--of my youth. These were roads made of logs linked together, rather like a raft, only covering long stretches of ground. Can you imagine the bumpity-bump of wheels on those roads. It would have been enough to drive me crazy, I can barely drive down the cobbled road of Monkey Hill at the children’s zoo in Wilmington. So for around six thousand years human beings have been developing and improving the ability to move with ease from place to place, and primarily for the benefit of commerce. Since the advent of agriculture, and the end of the hunter-gather phase of our evolution, as communities could grow, harvest, manufacture goods, there has been the equal need to move those products from one place to another, instead of the people going to the places where the food, water, etc, happened to be. We don’t have them much here, but in Europe truckers strikes easily shut down commerce, and could here too. I live just off route 41, which in this area is a major truck route from the Lancaster-York surrounding mid-state areas, to interstate highway 95. The only time trucks are not coming steadily down that road is from about six pm on Saturday until Sunday afternoon. But even then, there is still a trickle of truck traffic. Transport, the use of roads, our need for roads is undeniable, even for the most basic level of modern life. Virtually all our food, clothing, everyday items, must be freighted from place to place. Consequently, we are always looking for ways to make this commerce happen faster, cheaper, easier. Television writer-producer David Shore wrote: People choose the paths that grant them the greatest rewards for the least amount of effort. In general, this is the point of roads, the greatest reward for least effort. Because of this goal of human beings, we now can travel around the world in less time than it took people in 1800 to go from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.. Nowadays a car trip of less than three hours on the turnpike. Eric Weiner, the reporter for National Public Radio, who wrote the book The Geography of Bliss, was writing primarily about finding out where people are happiest around the world, and in the course of distant travels he finds that attitude, not just personal, but cultural, is highly significant. Where peoples felt safest, where they felt connected, where the felt they could trust others, were the places of greater happiness. And, as you heard in the reading, he comes at the end of his many journeys, to understand that happiness is about connections, stating that happiness is relational. Roads are ultimately relational, for they allow one group to connect with other groups, creating bonds with other peoples in other places. For thousands of years port cities, especially seaports, were the most cosmopolitan places; places where many peoples came together and existed in relative harmony because they all benefitted by the commerce that was central to the existence of these ports. The rivers, lakes, oceans, seas were the earliest of David Shore’s paths that grant them the greatest rewards for the least amount of effort. The hinterlands, those inner, landlocked areas were the most primitive, slower to progress. Growing up in Idaho, rural Idaho (which I was told just last night must be an redundancy and I agree) I noticed in my teens that the coastal areas of the country always seemed so far ahead of the Midwest and western areas of the country. It has always taken longer for roads, trains, electricity, and certainly fashion to get to these more inaccessible, more difficult to reach areas. Makes sense that these areas are also more conservative, or in our modern parlance, these are the red states. All of which uplifts the fact that access is important, that one of the values of modern communication is that it can reach all equally well, all meaning all that have access to electricity. Power is power, we could say. Power used to be primarily the roads which allowed commerce and military might to move with ease. But, more and more these days, power is electricity and satellites and cell towers; these are new pathways for information, goods, and services, and defense. It has become ever clearer in the last six years of war against terrorists that are often only loosely connected small groups, that our war machinery is out of date. Our military no longer squares off against Germany or Russia, army to army, any more. There is no war on Terror, like there was war on Japan or Germany. Terror is not a place or some organized, easily identified group. Saying we are going to have a war on terror is like saying we are going to have a war on hunger or poverty or sadness; a euphemism, not an entity. Still, like in all wars, the main goal of the a terrorist is disruption. Roads have often had religious or spiritual meaning. Pilgrimages were about traveling to a place identified as sacred for some reason, and this predates Christianity many centuries. We UUs often talk about life as a spiritual journey. We understand much of what happens in the course of our lives as being points along the path, some speeding us further along, others acting as roadblocks. So the whole idea of movement from place to place and from time to time is deeply rooted in our spiritual being. We only rarely see ourselves as static beings, not moving, not going forward in some way. In fact, this is often identified as a characteristic of depression; being stuck, unable to see ahead, to plan, to think beyond. On just about every level, that Afghan man was absolutely correct in saying that there is no life without roads, be they roads to move people and goods, or be they roads of the mind. We often joke about wanting to stop the train and get off, when our lives are hurried and harried, those times when we truly need to just get away for awhile. Naturally, I have a story about both travel and getting away: Two explorers, camped in the heart of the African jungle, were discussing their expedition. "I came here," said one, "because the urge to travel is in my blood. City life bored me, and the smell of exhaust fumes on the highways made me sick. I wanted to see the sun rise over new horizons and hear the flutter of birds that never had been seen by man. I wanted to leave my footprints on sand unmarked before I came. In short, I wanted to see nature in the raw. What about you?" "I came," the second man replied, "because my son was taking saxophone lessons." Our reasons for travel are indeed various, and this bit of humor also reminds us that for many people, the idea of vacation or a get-away is not about staying home, but rather going to some distant, perhaps more peaceful, place. Travel figures in more vacations than does just staying home doing nothing (although that has its virtues, too). Mystic poet-priest John O’Donohue reminds us of the road of life in his poetry: Every time you leave home, another road takes you into a world you were never in. The great value of taking the road both well traveled, but especially the road not traveled before, is that we indeed go to other worlds, we learn to fear less the distances and the differences of those who live in other places. We become more cosmopolitan in our understanding, and generally more tolerant in our thinking. The old phrase that travel broadens us, is true. For, as writer Henry Miller stated: One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Not all that long ago, a couple hundred years ago and even less in some places, the people over the hill twenty miles away were foreigners. Any place that was beyond the easy reach of walking or horse-drawn conveyances, were perceived as distant. To my knowledge, my great-grand parents, who lived in the later 1800s, never traveled farther than about twenty miles from their farm; they never rode in a car, much less an airplane. All the world was other. What a different world for their great-granddaughter, when most of the world is accessible. Today, the only places where people remain untouched, I should say relatively untouched, are places like the remote Amazon jungle tribal communities, but the fact that we know of their existence tells us that they will not remain “primitive” or untouched all that much longer, but what has kept them untouched is the difficulty and dangers of getting to them. I cannot imagine that any part of the globe will be untouched by the end of this century. While not all that roads have brought us, or taken us to, has been what we might have wished—war the foremost thing that comes to mind—it is hard for me not to see this main line of connection as good. As you know, my favorite saying comes from Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, states: Every front has a back. The paths that connect us, the roads that allow for life, do not come without bumps and ruts and the constant need for repair. A perfect metaphor for life. If we are to maintain the roads of our lives, we must be vigilant for the eroding that happens. We cannot expect someone else to do the work for us, but we also know we can do better work together than alone. All the things you know as well as I about taking care of the stuff of the material goods and the spiritual goods of life. Sometimes, you see where a road was abandoned, how quickly nature takes over, the pavements soon crack, the weeds grow up, the construction falls apart. I always feel a bit of sadness about such places. Last year, I went with my father to my great-grandparents old homestead, and the road I well remember my dad driving down, taking the family on a Sunday afternoon visit, that road can barely be discerned now. Nature has reclaimed it, and the old house is now storing hay—I cried seeing that the path to my grandparents is gone. Yet, just down the road, other family members live in a house of the same era, where all is well, the property and roads maintained. Beloved, our spirits are the roads without which there is no life. That you are here testifies to your understanding that these roads must be well cared for, repaired, that they take us to others with whom all this work can be done in community. Roads give us community. As Erick Weiner wrote quoting Karma Ura: Happiness is one hundred percent relational. The roads, both real and spiritual, are truly all about relations between people. If we are to go to the places, careers, families, countries that will broaden and enhance our lives, we need the roads that now encompass land and sky and air and molecules. May we embrace this understanding of the road. The roads taken and those not taken, for as poet Robert Frost taught us so well, it makes all the difference.
*** January 18, 2009 Dedicated conformists: Martin Luther King’s Vision So much has been written about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so many sermons as well, that it is truly a challenge to think that one can say anything new. But, then, is there really anything old about the deep and devout cry for justice that rings down through human history, and especially down through the history of this great nation. Indeed, our greatness has always been marred by the acts of injustice that have been and continue to be perpetrated in our name. So this day, this Sunday when prayers are being offered up across the land, and around the world, for this new president, our first African-American president, his family, and his administration, it seems only right to not look just to that which is new, but to remember the past and how we got here. To remember, that without the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we probably would not be witnessing this wonderfully momentous inauguration of Barack Obama. Would that Dr. King could have lived to see this day. Yet, I believe he would have felt it far greater that his children and grandchildren have lived to see this day. Those of us old enough to have heard Dr. King’s “I have a Dream” speech, offered up there at the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of tens of thousands--a speech declaring the need to protest for civil rights—know that his passion moved both black and white Americans to move out of the languor of complacency, to action. Then, in two years President Lyndon Johnson would sign the Civil Right Act, which was a long time coming when placed in the light of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863; a road of a century. One is reminded of the quote by John Gibson, an American jurist of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, who said in the mid-1800s: The wheels of justice grind slowly, but exceedingly small. Gibson, himself was quoting Euripedes in the 5th BCE, who said this of the gods. As we are all so very conscious of the inauguration this Tuesday, of our 44th President, and when we are told that this will be the largest gathering for any inauguration in our history, you might be surprised by just how little the Constitution says about installing our presidents. I quote Article II, Section I, which states (do note that it says he, and I can only dream that one day that he will be a she): Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: ‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ That’s it. Clearly, though, there is plenty of flexibility beyond the oath or affirmation, and we have seen the ceremonies expand considerably in the last century, but it is still remarkable that that one sentence statement is all that the Constitution requires. Of course, that one sentence holds all the hopes and dreams and expectations of our democracy in the words preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, had a far simpler inauguration, but his words ring down through the decades from that March 4, 1861, and especially these words that are often repeated by politicians: The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature The better angels of our nature are sorely needed now, even as they were for Rev. King as he worked to lead this nation towards real and working civil rights for African-Americans who had long been deprived of them. What remains for me so surely a sign of the better angels that existed in the Black community under the leadership of Dr. King, is that all this was achieved without a revolution, without a rebellion, or a civil war, between blacks and whites. There was certainly violence, mostly directed towards African-Americans. Who can forget the fire-hoses directed a young people in Memphis, or the bombing of the church in Birmingham that killed four little girls, or the attacks on marchers in Selma (that took one of our Unitarian minister, Rev. James Reeb), and all the atrocities that the struggle for Civil Right wrought in this land that was supposed to be about equality for all. Certainly there were riots, there were acts of violence, but in the whole framework of the Civil Rights Movement, the message that came often from Dr. King was one of nonviolent protest. He took Gandhi and Jesus for his models. How easily now we take for granted that this movement came about with so little violence. We forget our own Unitarian and Universalist history in doing so, for we were at the front lines of the abolition movement and walked along side Dr. King and other black leaders in the struggle to end racial segregation. But all this effort took time, and planning, thoughtful planning; and there was always the vision of the road ahead, of the horizon beyond; and for Martin Luther King, Jr., the road must not be paved with corpses as we see even today, as people fight for recognition, and freedom. Here is an excerpt of an interview Dr. King had with Arnold Michaelis (www.thekingcenter.org/prog/non/excerpt.html): Today there is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It is
either nonviolence or nonexistence. I feel that we've got to look at this total
thing anew and recognize that we must live together. That the whole world now
it is one--not only geographically but it has to become one in terms of
brotherly concern. Whether we live in America or Asia or Africa we are all tied
in a single garment of destiny and whatever effects one directly, effects one
in-directly. In just that brief excerpt, Dr. King gives us much to consider. Such as what it means to be a creative minority; as Unitarian Universalists, we of this small denomination often feel that size matters too much, yet it has been our history that we can have a big voice at times that matter, like in the Abolition Movement, in the Suffrage Movement, in the Civil Rights Movement, and now in the Gay Rights Movement. To be a creative minority is to be part of every great change that has happened in civilization. But what strikes even more significantly, in terms of the Civil Rights Movement, and Martin Luther King’s role, is this statement: I cannot live with the idea of being just a conformist following a path that everybody else follows. All too many people are not just conformists, they are dedicated conformists, not willing to rock the boat of their families or community traditions, even when they know they are weak, unwise, and even damaging. There is a strong lemming tendency within the human species; lemmings, those little gerbil-like animals of the arctic that migrate rather frantically when their populations get too large, and will sometimes go to a mass death rushing headlong with the pack. Too many people want to be part of the pack, want to be in the majority, want to be accepted more than they want to live what they know is right and good. These are the dedicated conformists. I have had people tell me that they do not believe a word of the Bible is literal, that they do not agree with the teachings of the church, or the religion they were reared in, but nonetheless figure it is better to stay in that religion to avoid family problems. One would think that being in an honest, truthful place with your god or your own conscience would be a greater motivation, but it is not. Gallup does frequent religion polling, and repeatedly finds that most people do not believe the tenets of the faiths they espouse. Talk about dedicated to conformity. Again, if you do believe in God, would you not be more concerned with being in truth with God? Of course, the root issue is also touched upon by Dr. King in that interview, when he says: I'm concerned about living with my conscience and searching for that which is right and that which is true . . . . In recent years I have found myself often, way too often, wondering if people leading this country--the politicians, the preachers, and teachers--were concerned with that which is right and true, or with even looking at things with their consciences. I am hopeful though, for those better angels to rise up in this new century, and with these challenging times. And I hope, that like Dr. King, more leaders will call on people to examine their own hearts and minds, to recognize the injustices in our midst, the racial and social and economic and environmental injustices we are still confronting, and then ask them/us to act in a nonviolent, but meaningful way, to move forward the causes that will affect all our lives. As much as I admired him, Dr. King was no saint, but he was a great man. Great men and women are those who refuse to be dedicated conformists; they are willing to risk whatever benefits may exist in the status quo, for the greater good of justice, freedom, truth. I cannot talk of Dr. King, without briefly quoting from his “I have a Dream” speech made at Lincoln Memorial Civil Rights march, on August 28,1963: Let us not wallow in the valley of despair . . . my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." [and] With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
The scholar, Margaret Zulick at Wake Forest University says the "I Have a Dream" speech will remain an important artifact of history because it bridged the racial divide. She states:
Much has been said of the eloquence of Dr. King, and of Barack Obama. Eloquence, beloved, is a good thing, if what that eloquence--that beauty and power of speech--does, is move forward good and grand and even occasionally great things. The reason Dr. King’s words and actions were seminal, and will remain in the realm of greatness, is because they were about refusing to be a conformist; about refusing to take the easy road. And for believing, as did Lincoln, and as I believe does Obama, that there are better angels that live amongst us. Better angels who occasionally step up, speak up, and live unafraid of the consequences. I can only quote Dr. King who said: This hour in history needs a
dedicated circle of non-conformists. The saving of our world from pending doom
will come not from the actions of a conforming majority, but from the creative
maladjustment of a dedicated minority. Therefore, brothers and sisters, let us feel that call once again, as we meet this new day, this new day which needs us, needs dedicated non-conformists, needs our creative minorities; needs us all if we are to ever have a better, cleaner, perhaps even one day peaceful world.
***
January 11, 2009 The Hooks that Grab our Spirits I rarely use movies to make a point, but I just saw a rerun of a movie called “Office Space” that serves my topic well today. “Office Space” is, as the title implies, about three IT (information technology) office workers at a computer company called Inetech, all of whom hate their jobs. One of them, Peter, happens to go with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend to a psychotherapist who does hypnosis as a part of couples therapy and gives Peter the suggestion that he will relax, cease to worry about how much he hates his job, and so forth, but before he has a chance to bring Peter out of the trance, the therapist falls over and dies of a heart attack. The rest of the movie centers on Peter’s disengagement from his job and his simple honesty about what he will and won’t do, to the extent of dumping the controlling girlfriend, and not coming in to work at all on some occasions. All of which coincides with a company downsizing when they bring in two efficiency experts, both named Bob, to do evaluations and get rid of ineffective employees. When the Bobs interview Peter, he is pleasant, straight-forward about his own lack of interest in the job, and when prodded further by the two men, who are by now enthralled with Peter who is not afraid for his job and is therefore being simply honest, he points out that he has eight bosses all of whom he has to answer to for even minor infractions, works in a boring cubicle, and no real incentive to do more or better since his condition will not improve by working harder or faster to make more money for Inetech. The upshot is that Peter learns from the Bobs that his two buddies (who are actually very hard working) are going to be laid off, while he is getting a promotion and four employees to supervise. Peter is outraged and tells his two friends, and together they hatch a plan that has been talked about in jest before, where the programmer can take the fractions of a penny and redirect that to an account and over a couple years they would have a two or three million dollars. They follow through with the plan, but to their shock and surprise, instead of a daily trickle of a few dollars, a whopping $375,000 is put into the account over the next couple days. They panic, and attempt to return the money by getting a cashiers check made out to Inetech and slipping it under the door of their main supervisor (a particular jerk), only another even more disgruntled employee who has been harassed by this boss for ages, finds the check, then sets the building on fire. In the end, Peter’s two friends find other tech jobs, and he takes a job in construction, cleaning up the burn remains of the Inetech building, and finds this work much more satisfying. So what does the movie “Office Space” have to do with hooks that grab us? Aside from perhaps the hook to get you into the movie synopsis, the hooks are the ones that all three characters are dealing with because they stay working at place they detest, but are afraid to leave. When Peter has his hooks taken from him, when his fears and protection modes are erased, he experiences this incredible joy which clearly radiates from him. He even walks up to a girl he has admired from a distance, a waitress at the TGI Fridays-type restaurant he and his buddies frequent; and he asks her to have lunch with him, without fear of rejection, and his ease makes her willing to go out with him. He is able to tell the truth without defensiveness or anger or animus, which turns him from a scared rabbit sort of person, into a rather charming, self-effacing, but honest person. In other words, he has been freed of his greatest fears. This notion of become free of one’s fears is at the heart of the religion Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard, a well-know science fiction writer before he founded the Scientology religion, focused the Scientology religious practice on the idea of getting clear, meaning free of fears that hamper us, hold us back; perhaps that is part of the reason it seems to have such a following amongst movie actors who must constantly face rejection as they try out for roles, or perform to critical audiences. The hooks that grab us are those founded in our fears, yet it is not always easy to discern what fears are at the root of our behaviors, especially behaviors that are inhibiting, or those that are destructive to positive relationships. Rather like the disappointed young recruit in his second week of basic training who was writing an irate letter to his congressman, complaining of the many indignities and outrages to which he was being subjected. He wrote, "And the food, I can describe it only as slop. Back home, I wouldn't feed it to the pigs for fear that it would poison them. No decent garbage man would have anything to do with it. ---And to make matters worse, they serve such small portions." So what was the real hook, the bad food or an insufficiency of food? I believe this bit of humor depicts very well the problems we have in understanding our own fears and motivations. Certainly, we are all subject to various kinds of hooks. We are all victim to cravings, urges, needs, wants that make our lives difficult. Indeed, the major portion of becoming a mature adult is learning what our particular hooks are and how to deal with them most effectively. Spiritual growth comes through these challenges we all must face. Issues that gave rise in Christianity to the so named Seven Deadly Sins: anger, pride, sloth, gluttony, lust, envy, and greed. Greed certainly is in front of us these days. What, we ask ourselves, makes someone like Bernie Madoff bilk thousands of people of their life savings in an elaborate pyramid scheme, but greed? There was a man on one of the public radio programs a couple of weeks ago, who had spent time in prison some years ago for the same kind of crime. He had written a book back then about what led him--and others he knew who were in prison for similar so-called white collar crimes--from being a well-educated, prosperous businessman, to a crook. As he told the interviewer, the whole thing begins in a sense of inferiority wherein such people believe that they will be more respected if they have more money, and the things the money can buy. From that need for respect and attention, they get on the slippery slope of dishonest and criminal actions. All of which they rationalize easily with various excuses like: everyone does it, I’m just getting my own back, or I’ll pay it back, and so forth. But the crux of the matter, the hook, is the need to feel better about oneself. As an aside, I am personally very angry that this Madoff who bilked people of billions of dollars is on house-arrest instead of jail, since I know that some poor shmuck who wrote a couple thousand dollars in hot checks would most likely be jailed. This is a good example of classism. Pema Chodron, an American woman who became a nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition back in the 1970s, is a wonderful speaker/writer on these issues of hooks that grab us. Hooks are her translation of the Tibetan word shenpa. Shenpa, she states in her book, When Things Fall Apart: Shenpa is the urge, the hook, that triggers our habitual tendency to close down. We get hooked in that moment of tightening when we reach for relief. To get unhooked we begin by recognizing that moment of unease and learn to relax in that moment. We shut down in many ways, for some it is withdrawal, but for others it is defensiveness, anger, lashing out; for others still, it may be in passive aggressive behaviors, or triangulation when we try to get someone else to do the dirty work, and many other unpleasant modes that we all know and recognize when they are coming at us, but often do not see when they are coming from us. Shenpa is also translated as attachment, those things we cannot let go of, even if we recognize them as negative in our lives. Jealousy is a particularly good example. When a person is excessively jealous, they often can see it, but they have not been able to find the inner switch, as it were, to turn it off. Jealousy is rooted in fear of loss; the fear that the person loved will leave us or displace us in his/her affections. We can be jealous of other people, but also of golf, painting, or any other activity that might pull the person we love away from us. I have told this story to a few of you, but it relates to the fact that my son and I are very close, and I used to have a mild worry that when my son grew up he would marry some woman who would not like me or I would not like, and she would drive a wedge between us. So when I learned my son is gay, after going through the initial fears for his safety (this was, after all, about the time of the Matthew Sheperd killing in Wyoming), it dawned on me I wouldn’t have to worry about the daughter-in-law. I felt an immediate sense of relief that I had not, up to that moment, even realized I was harboring to such an extent. I know that part of that silly fear related to the fact that I have known several bad son’s-mother-daughter-in-law bad relationships, and read of many more over the years. Of course, it is equally possible that he could have a partner I wouldn’t like either, but that doesn’t worry me. It does not worry me because I have rarely heard of someone who does not like their son’s partner. My base of reference is far smaller. And, perhaps, there is something less fearful in the opposite sex relationship. Attachment is normal at one level. We are attached to people, places, things, but when the attachment we have to whatever it may be gets to the point that it causes us pain, then we have a problem. Some years ago, a woman I’ll call Angie, told me she could not be happy because her husband had taken a job in Massachusetts (where we were), and taken her away from her childhood home in North Carolina. She was seriously considering divorce, and taking her child back to their former home. Now, the new home to which her family had moved was absolutely lovely, and she enjoyed a high quality of life by anyone’s standard, but she was miserable, and could not reach out to embrace the possibilities that lay before her because she was so attached to the life she had had back in her home state. Part of this was related to leaving her extended family, but it didn’t take long for her to reveal that what was equally at work was her fear of living in the north. She felt that people were prejudiced against southerners, and she was intimidated about speaking since she had a southern accent. It was a bit of good fortune that I knew another woman in the congregation from a nearby southern state, of similar circumstances, but who was very happily ensconced in New England and even enjoying the attention that her southern drawl elicited. They became friends, and before too many months, Angie was doing better. I don’t know if she became truly reconciled and even happy, but I hope so. Attachments, as Chodron teaches, can be about big or small things, but that our ultimate happiness rests in learning to recognize when shenpa has taken hold. As she states: [Shenpa] an everyday experience. Even a spot on your new sweater can take you there. At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down. Then we feel a sense of withdrawing, not wanting to be where we are. That's the hooked quality. That tight feeling has the power to hook us into self-denigration, blame, anger, jealousy and other emotions which lead to words and actions that end up poisoning us. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld said: According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. So to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. That is not a bad way to think about the issues or problems related to these hooks that take hold of us. The hooks give us no pleasure, no contentment, just anxiety, even terror. The hooks make us miserable. Some people become so miserable that in some cases death can seem preferable to the suffering they daily face. The antidote to shenpa is loving kindness, for oneself and others, but this does not come without effort. Counseling can do great good; also, talking with a friend, reading about the problem, are all ways to get free of the hooks that penetrate our well-being. Our UU faith teaches in our Seven Principles that respect for the worth and dignity of every person is where we begin, but that does not mean every person besides oneself. We need to have respect for our own being, our own need for compassion, love, and forgiveness, for then we have the ability to extend these important virtues, these life-sustaining virtues, to others. Last week I mentioned the 4Rs of Tibetan Buddhism: recognize, refrain, relax, resolve. These are tools for unhooking ourselves from the things to which we are excessively attached. Recognize what is prompting the negative feeling, refrain from acting upon the urge that feeling imparts, relax (you won’t die because you let go), and resolve to continue this path. Beloved, all of life is spiritual, all of life is a lesson in spiritual values and growth, and all of life is made better by lifting up the need for compassion, kindness, and love. Without these, we become ever more scarred by the hooks that grab us day in and day out. It is love, only love and understanding, that releases, only love that heals. *** January 4, 2009
There’s Nothing New About the New Year
Here we are day four of the year 2009 in the Gregorian calendar, and the gods only know what day in the scope of human creation. The idea of a New Year is certainly not new, and certainly not limited to our western culture that puts this now 2009 CE, instead of the old Christian designations of BC, or before Jesus, and AD, or anno domini, after the birth of Jesus. In scholarship since the 1980s, and now in currency in the media generally, the terms are now BCE, or before the common era, and CE, the present or common era. All this calendar business, these concepts that relate to the sun and earth in relation to one another, took quite a while to get settled, since in the ancient days they did not have the sophisticated methods for calculating the slight changes that a day here or there made, which is why we have the leap year and February has twenty-nine days once every four years. In ancient Rome of the Caesars, who were primarily responsible for calendar development in the west, the New Year was in March. The Chinese New Year is in the early part of the year, this year on January 26th; this was set first by the Emperor Huangde in 2637 BCE, so much older than the western New Year. This is considered a spring festival in China, since it is set between the winter solstice and before the spring planting season, so was historically primarily related to fertility. For many cultures, the New Year celebration is on a lunar calendar with the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah generally in September; but Rosh Hashanah is very different from the western party time, for this is the holiest day in the Judaism ending with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This September will be the year 5769, so the oldest continuously used of the western world calendars. The new year as most westerners understand it, with the party that lasts until midnight, the kiss between partners to assure a happy bond in the new year, the singing of Auld Lang Syne, is an amalgam of ancient Scottish, Christian, and others lost to history, a celebration that was in part centered on the noticeably increasing daylight hours, with propitiations to spirits, gods, goddesses for safety, success, fruitfulness in the new year. The oldest direct line in this ritual history comes from ancient Rome, when worshippers would offer promises/resolutions of good conduct to the god Janus (the two faced god looking backwards and forwards); a time when the slate was cleaned, presenting a time for new opportunities. Certainly the Scottish celebration of Hogmanay, the Scots word for the last day of the year, is synonymous with the celebration of the New Year (Gregorian calendar) in the Scottish manner which usually involved food and alcoholic spirits. In older times, this also involved being the first person to cross the threshold of a friend or neighbor, the giving of symbolic gifts such as shortbread, whisky and fruit cake, intended to bring different kinds of luck to the householder. With the gifts of food and drink then being shared with the guests; ergo, a new year’s eve party. Certainly, we now also associate the singing of Auld Lang Syne (which means times past or long ago); Auld Lang Syne is the poem written by the Scot and Unitarian, Robert Burns in 1788, which was then set to the tune of a traditional folk song. Now Auld Lang Syne is well known in virtually all English-speaking countries and is, of course, sung to celebrate the start of the New Year at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day There are many other New Year’s celebrations in the cultures of the world, but the idea of renewal, a new start, the marking of time from one twelve-month to another; all this is part of our all too human need to have a new opportunity to make changes, to get whatever our biggest challenges might be right in this new block of time. So it’s not surprising that we have evolved this cultural notion of starting off the New Year resolved to make changes, or do better in some way. According to general understanding, or accepted wisdom, we tend to believe that most people who make New Year’s resolutions do not keep them. It is the subject of many jokes, even adages. I came across a Mexican proverb that states: A good resolution is like an old horse, which is often saddled but rarely ridden. Or the wit who sent the following text message: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Most people who make New Year’s resolutions do so around issues related to weight loss, exercise, and habits. According to a 1998 survey by W.R. Miller and G.A.Marlatt, the most popular New Year’s goals people set, according to are: 37% - Starting to exercise;13% - Eating better; 7% - Reducing the consumption of alcohol, caffeine and other drugs, or quitting smoking More recently, we have the studies published by clinical psychologist, Professor John Norcross, of the University of Scranton, who has studied resolutions over the past 25 years. He says that he was impressed by the persistence of this annual ritual, but wondered how many people actually did make resolutions, and of those how many actually were successful. It turns out that somewhere between 40-50% of us do make resolutions at the New Year. But in keeping with my theme, it is good to remember that there really is nothing magical about the time, and indeed people can and do make resolutions at all times of the year. Perhaps the real magic is the mysterious thing we call motivation, so any time we are able to keep our motivation high is its own special magic. Norcross notes that what tends to happen to most of us who make resolutions, is that we confuse inspiration with motivation. Inspiration tends to be stimulated or influenced by others, and often wanes within days or weeks; whereas motivation is what keeps us going. And even more importantly, keeps us getting back on the wagon when we fall off, and nearly everyone does fall off at some point. So the key is how do we keep that spiritual component of motivation alive and strong in our hearts and minds? Prof. Norcross’ studies, like others mentioned, show that indeed most resolutions are around losing weight, starting to exercise, stopping smoking or other bad habits, but also resolving to be nicer to someone in family, and in bad economic times like now, there is a rise in financial resolutions to save, be more prudent in spending, and such. We naturally do feel inspired by the New Year, the new opportunity to start with a clean slate, so we make our resolutions out of the newness, freshness, and often without much mind to the year or years past. I have preached a number of times over the years on the need to reflect on the year past, to evaluate what was good in the year past that we want to continue, or improve, before we set out to make sweeping resolutions for the new year. England’s Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice in the 17th Century said wisely: The reason of a resolution is more to be considered than the resolution itself. We cannot hope to make real changes unless we are in touch with the reasons we have for wanting to make them. If the heart is not in touch with the mind, then the resolution is a wind egg as Aristotle called it, a thing of little or no substance. Why do we want to lose weight, or exercise more, or quit any number of bad habits? The why is the key to both the motivation, and the ultimate success in making changes. For, as we all know, it is far easier to wish for a thing, to say we want to do a thing, than to actually achieve the goal. So a spiritual scan, as it were, of both our intentions, as well as our past experience, is helpful. Perhaps, for example, upon consideration we really are only wanting to lose weight or exercise because we think this is what we are supposed to want, or what a partner wants for us, rather than what we really desire for ourselves. Unless our resolutions for change reside in our own being, then motivation will not follow. Most of us have experienced this phenomenon. Now I am happy to report that there is some great news in Prof. Norcross’ studies. It turns out that of that the 50% of the population who do make resolutions (and I am one of them), and two longitudinal studies support this, between 40-46% of people succeed. Further, compared with those who do not make such pledges, promises, resolutions, the chances of success are far better. In his last study, the likelihood of success for those had indentified same or similar goals but had not made such resolutions was only four percent (4%). So clearly making reasonable goals in the form of personal promise or resolution is actually a very good thing to do. That is wonderful news, for it helps give support to our desire to make these New Year, or any time of year, changes. Here are some things that Norcross identified as significant in those who have success: 1- First and foremost is setting realistic goals. For example, instead of saying I’ll go to the gym for an hour every day, it would be better to say, I’ll go to the gym at least three days a week. Stating grandiose goals will set one up for failure. 2- Of special significance is having a buddy, family or friends who have goals they also want to accomplish in the same vein. A check in as little as three times can help people keep on track. Having a buddy, Norcross says, helps what he calls self-efficacy, or the conviction you really can change. The checking in, also helps with motivation. We often can do with and for others what we can’t do on our own. 3- Remembering the difference between inspiration and motivation; for, inspiration while good, since it can start us off with such verve and vigor, is no match for motivation. Motivation is that dogged, determined part of us that refused to give up, even when we have slips along the way. For Norcross the import of resolutions is that resolution-makers are more serious, for they move from contemplation to action, and when motivated resolvers slip, they do not chuck the whole idea, but recommit; in fact, he noted that for many the early slips can even strengthen their resolve. So the spiritual piece of this is that slips are to be expected, but to learn from and get back in the saddle. Go and sin no more is not a practical theology for living, nor a practical way to manage one’s life--much better that we learn, and keep trying. The Tibetan Buddhists encourage a framework of the 4Rs to help on moving forward with goals of meditation or other goals in life. They are: Recognize, Refrain, Relax, Resolve. A much better system for dealing with life’s vicissitudes. While personal change is at the heart of resolutions, it is also good to remember what Robert Balzer, the first serious wine journalist, writing in the last half of 20th Century said in giving us the now famous quote: Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. Life goes on come what may. We can carry on as we have been going, or we can look forward to making real changes, even if only small ones. But each small change adds up to significant change over time. When I was a child there was a preacher who used to say: The problem with much of Christianity is that too many church members are singing "Standing on the Promises," when they are merely sitting on the premises. We can fall into habits of least resistance, even when we know they do not serve us well. Herein rests the hope of our resolutions. Certainly there is truly nothing new about the New Year, but what has always been in the promise of the New Year is the possibility for change. So it seems to me we can either take the easy route, or have the curmudgeon’s viewpoint that it is not likely to make a difference. Or, we can take a more optimistic view that each new day and each new year is open-ended with possibility. The fact is, that each new day of each new year we have an ever open invitation by life to make all things new. Why not grab hold of the brass ring of promise? Why not make the effort. We may not succeed, but we know we won’t unless we try. Let us therefore be resolved to identify and make changes we really want for our lives. This is truly the stuff of spiritual growth; it is the hope of our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes, a constant reminder that we are always creatures of hope and promise. May it always be so.
December 21, 2008
Children Sometimes Know Best
Remember that election for president we had a few weeks back? Well, it seems that all those CNN, NBC, CBS, PBS, Gallup, and others who did regular polls, could have gotten ahead of the game if they had checked with the nation’s children. In an article in News Hound (11/5/2008), the day after the election reported that Studies Weekly, publisher of children’s educational materials for ages 6-12 : . . . completed their first-ever national kids' education and voting adventure, and have tallied the votes. Almost one million children participated from all 50 states in the US. Children between the ages of 6-12 were given the opportunity to learn about both candidates, . . .voting rights and responsibilities, before the actual vote today. ‘This is a significant sampling of children's opinions across the country. We had high student participation in all 50 states in the country,’ said Ed Rickers, President of Studies Weekly.
Now this polling of 6-12 year-olds may simply show that children reflect their parents’ beliefs, but it also may indicate that children are far more capable of serious thought than we often credit them. As this poem, titled The Children, by Mark Jarman, tells us:
The children are hiding among the raspberry canes. They look big to one another, the garden small. Already in their mouths this soft fruit That lasts so briefly in the supermarket Tastes like the past. The gritty wall, Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow. There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know. They know the wall is hard, although it hums. They know a lot and will not forget it soon.
Children do know a lot, in fact learning is what they are designed for in the young years. Sometimes, though, children’s knowing is more intuitive, like the child in this anecdote one of you experienced and sent me several years ago. Arriving for a visit, a woman asked her little granddaughter, "Angie, how do you like your new baby brother?" "Oh, he's all right," the child shrugged, then added: "But there were lots of things we needed worse." I have in my files dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stories about children, many of them true; stories parents and grandparents have sent to me over the years, and especially since the advent of email. I was reminded of one this week, when I heard on the local news that the baby Jesus figure had been stolen from an outdoor crèche near Independence Hall in Philadelphia. I hope someone has had the decency to return it. But it did remind of this story of many years back, sent by a clergy friend:
It was the day after Christmas at a large church in San Francisco. The minister of the church happened to glance at the manger scene he had passed only a few minutes before, and he noticed that the baby Jesus figure was missing from the cradle. He immediately turned and went outside and saw a little boy with a red wagon walking down the street. And in the wagon, was the figure of the baby Jesus. So the minister walked up to the boy and said, ‘Son, where did you get that baby Jesus that's in your wagon?’ The little boy replied, ‘I got him from the church.’ ‘Well, why did you take him?’ asked the pastor. The little boy replied, ‘’cause, last Sunday before Christmas, I prayed and I told Jesus if he would bring me a red wagon for Christmas, I would give him a ride in it! And that’s what I’m doing.’
Makes sense to me. Ask kids what is important and they can usually tell you. They know that presents at the holidays are great, but they also know that it would be better to have their families than gifts. They know when they have good lives, and they know when they don’t. In fact, so much of what our children know cannot be captured in ordinary tests, for intuition, survival, acceptance, safety, and many other such things that children need are not subject matter for tests. I have been privileged to be a teacher all my working life; starting with first grade, working up through the grades to university students, and eventually to ministry with children and adults; and, I can tell anyone that first graders are as smart as people get. What they lack is experience. But what learners! As a student teacher I soon learned what foolishness it was to talk down to these little ones, whose brains where taking in far more, and far faster, than adult brains. Of course, that experience they are lacking is significant, and not to be downplayed, but that is not the usual problem; more often adults believe small children are not smart, not capable of learning as much as they actually are, which is why we can be so astonished to hear our own voices coming out of their mouths. Or be surprised by their logic. Or, be surprised they behave so well for some people and not others. The reason for this has everything to do with how smart they really are; children learn quickly when true discipline exists, or simply a constant stream of meaningless don’t. Our UU children tend to be very bright, gifted as they are with bright and caring parents; it’s no accident that they score at the top of the SAT tests. One of the best things that happens in our UU congregations is that we make sure our children are seen and heard, for we believe they deserve this acknowledgement of their spiritual worth. We believe that children should feel our acceptance early on, and that we should encourage their active engagement with people of all ages. This is radical thinking to many people, and until the last century, a rare practice, especially in houses of faith. It is good for us to be reminded that we have a precious gift in the minds and spirits of these young ones; for lest we forget, they are in part us, and we are them. The great mystic poet of India, Rabindranath Tagore wrote :
I asked of Destiny, “Tell me who with relentless hand pushes me on?” Destiny told me to look behind. I turned and saw my own self behind pushing forward the self in front.
There are only a few things that make me very sad in congregational life, but the one that I find most disheartening is to hear that children have to choose between having an hour on Sunday morning for their spiritual development, or participate in sports, or do homework. I know these are tough choices for parents and children alike, but it seems to me that perhaps one of the reasons faith communities across religions are having their young people drift away has to do with this encroachment into their time for spiritual growth. The stuff of the spirit, that which is inside your heart/mind, stays with you always, while much that is related to school and sports does not; though I know there is spiritual growth to be found in those as well. But how do we find balance? This is a question I put before you. How can we meet their needs, not just while they are little, but all the way through their YRUU and into Young Adult years. This will be an area where Mill Creek congregation can do great good in the years to come. And the children could tell us all this themselves. So perhaps what we will want to do is begin a purposeful listening to our children to find out what they need. You, the caring members, we, the parents, the adults who dedicate ourselves to them, will want to remember that what we do here, is what one day they will do, but only if we show them how.
***
December 7, 2008
Rituals of Our Lives
We are now in the most celebratory time of the year for those of us who live in the west of the northern hemisphere. This is indeed the time of celebration, and celebration is always marked by ritual. Even the simplest events warrant a toast, three cheers, or some way to mark the occasion like having a cake or opening a bottle of bubbly. Songs, too, mark these times, like birthdays. I will let you in on one of my pet peeves, which has to do with the Happy Birthday song. Usually it’s sung almost like a dirge, it might as well be Happy Funeral to You. Of course, it was meant to be sung with a lilt, a gay voice, as a cheery message in song. But, my gripe about tone aside, the song is tradition, a ritual that says: we are here to celebrate, we all know this ritual song, and we join in bringing you good cheer. All the major world holidays, especially those of this season in this country--Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa--are lessons on how we celebrate ourselves as we celebrate the season. Celebration means ritual, the customs of our culture, religion, nationality; the celebration may be about one or all depending on the country. As religion scholar Prof. Paul Driver has said: Ritual is the showing of a doing. Meaning, we can do something, like get married, without ritual; you can just go to the County Clerk and sign the license. But most people do not do that, most people want the ritual, the showing of what they are planning to do; in this case, get married. We want the showing because it reminds us and tells everyone else that some things are more important than others. Some things should be set aside, lifted up, singled out, or in some way designated as special. Further, the rites carry forward our history; the history of our families, culture, community, and so on. Rituals are one of the most consistent things about a culture, but even they change, morph, reconstitute over time. While I have never repeated sermons, I do sometimes repeat stories, because some stories are just that good. And today I repeat a story that I first came upon five or six years ago; it is a true story about the Polynesian Cult of Christmas (as gleaned from the Rev. Doug Gallagher). A story that shows how it is we all have come to the place we are today in our rites and ritual methods of celebrating. It happened during World War II, on a small tropical island in the South Pacific, where a group of military men built an airstrip. This was a dramatic event for the native people, who had never before seen airplanes. The commander of the company was a thoughtful man, whose leadership was enlightened, and he wanted to make every effort to be considerate of the islanders. So the islanders were invited to help in the project for which they received food and other things that might be useful, and the Americans joined in their celebrations, and so forth. The chaplain, too, made “a sincere, if slightly chauvinistic, attempt to get the islanders to participate” with his religious Sunday celebrations. That fall of 1944, as the holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas approached, the chaplain started early on to find ways of making the troops feel better, for there in the South Pacific, far from home, battling to end the war, they found the Christmas season more difficult. So the singing of carols, the gift exchanging, the partying, went on for a few more weeks than usual. And the islanders responded “enthusiastically,” we are told. They brought gifts of fruit and flowers, and so on, and learned the carols, and generally learned the story of the birth of Jesus as Anglo-Americans have learned it: the star in the east, Joseph and Mary, riding into Bethlehem, finding no room at the inn, the baby Jesus born in a stable, and so forth. The Christmas services were a big success for the Americans and the islanders, providing a friendly and thoughtful interaction between two very different groups. Not necessarily the norm at the time. Soon after the new year in 1945, the base was closed. Twelve years later, in March of 1957, that same chaplain made a journey out to the island on his way to the Philippines. He toured the once too familiar island and met up with an old woman he had known during the occupation of the island. He was very pleased when she told him that she was on her way to church, and invited him to go with her. This was a Christian minister’s dream, that a “primitive” people would be converted, which her use of the term “church,” implied. According to the story the church was in an outdoor circle. The singing was “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Silent Night.” The ‘sermon’ was a recounting of the Christmas story. And the service ended with everyone exchanging gifts. Historians of religion call this a cross-cultural exchange; in this case it was American to native islander. What the story does not tell us is whether the Chaplain tried to set the islanders straight, and disabuse them of their notion of Christianity. I would like to hope that he did not, for they had the most joyous, caring, and sharing of all the Christian celebrations We as human beings learn virtually everything from one another. We learn good things, certainly bad things, and lots of seemingly little or benign things, too. Rituals are principle among the things that are passed down through the generations; or passed across as in this case. Nowadays, as the vast media machinery takes our celebrations around the world in a split second, there is an increase in cross cultural exchange, in shared rituals. For example, in Japan and urban China, western style weddings are becoming the norm, with the bride in the flowing white dress and veil, the bridesmaids in gowns, the groom and groomsmen all in tuxedos. This could, one supposes, denigrate their own traditional wedding ceremonies, or perhaps it has simply become an addition with the religious words and meaning staying the same despite the change in clothing. Rituals are mostly thought of in the cultural context, but you and I have rituals that tell much about who we are, what we believe, what we need; these are important rituals of our lives. They are often very personal, even mundane, but we feel the emptiness when we have an interruption in their normal course. Consider what you do when you get up in the morning, get ready for exercise, for work. There is a predictable pattern, some would call it simply habit, but I’m inclined to see these patterns more in the light of ritual. They help us personally in the way the cultural rituals do as part of a family, place, religion, etc. You know how when you visit someone else’s house, or go away on vacation, where your routine has to change, and it never feels just right, and how it always feels so good to be back home where everything is where it’s supposed to be, and where all those daily rituals can take place unimpeded. This gives us comfort, security, a sense of well-being. None of which should be dismissed lightly. We need predictability where and when we can get it, since so much of life is not predictable. Of course, you can take all this too far; I knew of a woman who would only drink out of her own glassware, and only eat on her own china. When she traveled, she took all her own place settings with her. That goes from ritual to ridiculous, from home comforts to eccentric. Still, it goes to show just how devoted we can be to what gives us comfort, how ritualistic our lives can become. As we go through the coming weeks anticipating some of the greatest ritual times for our families, take stock of the rituals that are part of your life. Which ones give you the most joy, the greatest pleasure? Think about the rituals that you want to pass on to your children and grandchildren. What says family? What says culture? What says we are in this together? What says love? Here in this sanctuary we have this lovely tree provided by Judi and Steve Krause who have donated this and several previous trees. The evergreen tree bespeaks the ancient pre-Christian rites that eventually became part of Christmas celebrations. The tree also has come to be part of our collecting of mittens, gloves, scarves we give for those who need them. The tree in many ways gives us delight in lifting up the season as something special, a time of sharing and caring, all of which can be hard, and is especially worthy because the evergreen tree is not about electronics, is less commercial and more about beauty and simply joys. This month has a holiday for just about every religion celebrated in the northern hemisphere, many we know, but just as many we don’t. For each of the holidays, some of which our music celebrates today, people have felt deep connections to both past and present. The rites are what give meaning to our existence. So be they rites that are personal, or public (like singing the Star Spangled Banner at ball games), or private, we find meaning in that which we lift up. A showing of a doing. I light the chalice in my office, the one my son gave me at my ordination, every Sunday morning before coming in for the service, to remind me that I have an important work, a sacred task. And I lift up in my thoughts, in a brief prayer, my hopes for us here. I did not always do this, but once I started, I realized how much it added to my sense of the valuable work of faith we do here. Now, I could not imagine not doing it, for it has become the showing of the doing I love, even if it is only for myself. I believe that we are a ritual-deprived culture in our modernity. We tend to devalue many of the old rites, which of course has always happened, but in many cases we have not found new ones to replace them. We may feel they are not needed, but I believe deeply that they are needed. I have considered it part of my mission as a minister to help correct this deficit, so I have been encouraging couples I counsel before marriage to include a ritual in their wedding ceremony they can repeat each year on their anniversaries, like a lighting a unity candle. Speaking of marriage, and ritual, Bob Hope had a related joke, saying: Bigamy. The only crime on the books where two rites make a wrong. Think for just a minute about something of ritual quality that was done for you every year, or done in your family, when you were growing up that you now hold in your memory for its special significance. The repetition in fact makes these things we hold dear meaningful, and only sometimes do we call them rituals. That ritual in your memory is one way you can tell who you are and tell others who you are. Meaning is so derived. In this season of rituals, let us lift up the things we know are important, the things we value, and named them for the rites they are. Lift them up as rituals that show how much we care. Rituals are not just about religion, but religion has always known their value, so too let us reclaim their value. So hold them to your hearts. Talk about the old rituals with your children and grandchildren, the children of your families, and remind them that they will be the ones to carry them on. These are precious gifts beyond value, but valuable beyond measure. *** November 23, 2008
Seeds in the Apple VS Apples in the Seed
There is an ancient sacred chant I would ask you to join with me in repeating: We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way. The trouble with life is also the glory of life, which is we don’t know what is on the way. Not next year, or next month, or tomorrow; not even one hour from now. For all that we do know, which is wondrous on many levels, we do not know the future. I personally do not believe anyone knows what the future holds, though I accept this is not true for some of you. Certainly we can speculate, and the averages play out pretty well for those speculations, otherwise gambling halls would not prosper so well; but, certainty lies beyond our reach. So we live in hope, we abide by trust, and we pray in anxiety. Most of you know that I grew up in rural Idaho, daughter of a fruit grower, amongst hundreds of fruit trees, over 325 acres of apples and plums. My childhood memories are, shall we say, fruitful. Forgive the pun, but the truth is my childhood is filled with memories of the cycle of the fruit, eating lots of fruit, knowing the joys of harvest from that basic level that gave rise to the harvest festivals around the world embodied in our American Thanksgiving; the politics of our Thanksgiving notwithstanding. Thanksgiving is truly a holiday of the world, celebrated in every culture at some time during the year. Because deep in our ancestral memories resides the understanding of dire want of food, and the joys incumbent in the harvest. All orchards have a main crop, but they also have many varieties of different kinds of fruits that reside around the periphery, part of this relates to pollination, but also to the growers’ delight in growing things. We had several varieties of apples and other fruit that we grew, some very old, and now rare, one Jonathan variety was so large one apple easily covered a dinner plate. These were not all that good for eating raw, but my mother could make a pie out of just one apple. They were also not good travelers, and all such varieties are diminishing because fruit crops have to be sturdy enough for shipping around the world. I could bore you with lots of apple facts, but the one I like the best is that of over 2500 varieties of apple grown in this country, the crabapple is the only native variety to North America. The crabapple is really only good for jelly, and for crossbreeding to create other varieties. All the other varieties are immigrants, as it were; a lesson in and of itself. Apples have lots to recommend them, not the least of which became an adage, a wise saying, perhaps hundreds of years ago: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. My father, now 85, is proof of that, since apples remain a daily staple of his diet. Usually the last thing he eats in the day. I might add that my daily four mile walks are still out distanced by my father’s daily walks. Perhaps just one more apple fact. Depending on the variety, and size of the fruit, an average apple tree produces approximately twenty bushels or around 300 apples. Some varieties produce up to 500 apples per tree. So from one small apple seed grows a tree that can live up to one hundred years in rare cases, but most, especially for production purposes, live about 20-30 years as the norm. But the grower also has to consider the time it takes, after trees are set out in the orchard--usually three or four years--before the fruit-grower can get any apples from the trees. Apple trees can live for over 100 years, although most are only kept for 20 to 30 years. As you can see, a lot of hope, faith, patience, expectation come with the expertise of growing fruit crops. Yet, just think what a wonderful thing it is that one apple, that usually have ten seeds, and from them what exists, the possibilities within those seeds; they have such profligacy, such power within them. Now we know nature is over abundant. Nature provides far more seeds than ever come to fruition. Few trees result from all the millions of apple seeds produced every year. And this is true all through nature, even to the seeds and eggs in humans; millions of them when few children are in fact created by any one man or woman. Nature teaches that abundance is necessary for survival. Produce more than you need so that a few can survive, because nature also teaches that few do survive. Or a least this was true through out most of human evolution, and is still true in most of nature. Humans are doing rather better than nature intended. I could have had no better conditions that our current economic woes to preach about abundance. I was told only yesterday by a financial scion in Wilmington, that our country has plenty of collective, usable wealth at this time; in fact over ten billion more dollars than in 2004, but people are sitting on it. They do not want to invest, or buy, or develop, or support right now because of fear that the market will go down further. The problem is that the market will keep going down until some of those people decide to have the courage and the faith to put their money out there. Then, the whole great machinery of the marketplace will whirr into high gear as fast as it shut down. So much of human life is lived at this level of belief, faith, hope, and expectation. The problem of this age is that we have lost much of the wisdom of our agricultural past. That wisdom that allows a fruit-grower to plant a seed, more usually make a graft, and sit back and wait while the tree grows, then over the course of years becomes a productive part of the orchard. But patience is not the catch phrase of this era. A friend gave me this story about patience I think some of might relate to. She said: My Aunt Marie was standing at our front door after Thanksgiving dinner, ready to go home. Her four little children stood at her side, and her arms were full of coats. Her husband, coming down the stairs, asked why she was standing there. She replied, handing him the coats, "This time, you put the children's coats on and I'll go honk the horn."
No, our patience is not our long suite these days, for these are days of quick results, instant gratification on many levels. Just consider the Thanksgiving Day dinner, which once would have been in preparation for a few days, and now we can go to the market and get all of the meal prepared. Which is the up side to this message! So don’t mistake in my message that there is no good to be had in our modern age, for I believe wholeheartedly that most of what we have come to is better than not. It is all too easy to be nostalgic for conditions we did not have to endure. Still, we also need some of the virtues of our past, especially of our agricultural past, of patience, hope, faith, and certainly love. Of course gardeners and fruit-growers like things to move with alacrity. There used to be a store in California that attached this label to every package of seeds: Warning-After planting, step back quickly! Thanksgiving like all traditional holidays carries with it a great deal in the form of history, messages related to our families and community, stories that carry forward our personal history, but the traditions are always in the process of change even as the traditions are carried forward. This is the power of food. Food remains the constant as the traditions change ever so slightly from family to family down through the generations. I continue to use great-grandma’s tablecloth for Thanksgiving, though stained, patched, and—if it belonged to someone else I would say ugly--to teach the family history attached to it simply by using it. But my family’s Thanksgiving Days are an amalgam of the joined families since my great-grandma first used that hand-crocheted table cloth over a hundred years ago. Turkey, cornbread stuffing, apple and pumpkin pies, and the tablecloth, these are the constants. I remember when I was in college and first heard of a family who did not have all of what I thought were traditional foods for Thanksgiving; a girl friend of mine whose family was of Italian heritage always had an old family recipe lasagna for Thanksgiving and Christmas which she looked forward to as much as I did pumpkin pie. But all these years later, I confess that lasagna for Thanksgiving still seems very odd to me. We can know many things intellectually that refuse to gibe spiritually in our hearts. Apples have lessons to teach, so I heard often enough growing up. I had other family members in the same line; my Uncle James, who had orchards just across the road, used to have so much homely wisdom in his everyday speech. For instance, he couldn’t bear to see someone peeling an apple to eat, since most of the nutritive value is in the peel, saying things like: You are taking the clothes right off that apple. Or: Don’t you know the peel is the meal. He also used to say: People are like apples: some are good, some go to the bad, and most would be better made into cider; but they all have some use. He was the kind of rural philosopher that kept the country entertained for generations. We still have such wise people, but now they appear on programs like the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. Thanksgiving reminds us that we have much for which to be thankful. Give us this day our daily bread, was a prayer of many generations of people who did not feel the certainty that most in this county feel that food will be on the table. We know that now there are people who will not have enough, even in this country of such great wealth, which is why our Social Action Committee helped us provide food baskets for families who don’t have enough. A reminder that much is expected of those who have been given much; a part of the attitude of gratitude that many preachers will be availing their congregations this day. Gratitude, thankfulness, is like this understanding of the seeds in the apple versus apples in the seed. Each of us has the potential to do much good in the world, but what ultimately will make the world good, is how many others we, in the course of our lives, encourage toward goodness. Some people are like the single apple and take their seeds with them back to the soil, others disburse their seeds far beyond their own small plot. We have many people in this congregation who have spent their lives spreading the good news, to use the Christian metaphor. People who have an evangelical spirit towards life, towards all humanity. A thankful spirit that is abundant beyond their knowing. You here are givers more often than you are receivers. You are blessing upon the land. Reaching out in many ways to spread the message of thanksgiving in all that you do. This is how the apple becomes thousands of apples. I remain awed by the spirit of giving that emerges daily from this congregation; it is the minister’s privilege to see how it works, often quietly, but surely. You are people who are filled with gratitude, and from that source continue to reach out, push beyond, to do that little bit more than anyone might expect. Meister Eckhart, the great Christian mystic and humanist teacher of the Middle Ages, wrote: If the only prayer you say in your life is, "thank you," that would suffice. But, how important it is to say the Thank you. We don’t have to like everything about our world, or even about our own families, but if we can appreciate and be filled with gratitude for most of what makes the important part of life, then we will suffice in our being. A woman sent me this bit years ago which I find apropos. She said: I once asked my four-year-old grandson how he liked his Thanksgiving dinner. He thought a second: ‘I didn't like the turkey much,’ he replied, ‘but I sure loved the bread it ate.’ We may find our thankfulness variously, but it is the being thankful that counts. That, and passing on the message that we have a purpose in this life, and that purpose is to live good lives, to pass on our knowledge, but most of all to pass on love. Love is the heart of the metaphor about seeds in the apple versus apples in the seed. Let us plant all the seeds of love, from the smallest acts of kindness, to the greatest acts of giving, and in all, create a more loving, world, with more to share, that we might all experience abundance of the heart. We do not know what tomorrow holds, but for all that suffices, let us give thanks. And repeat our opening prayer: We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way. August 24 2008 The Cracked Water Pot Many years ago, a colleague of mine lost her congregation due to mental health problems which were real and eventually led to her death. At the time she was asked to leave her church she wrote a lovely letter talking about her difficulties, and asking the congregation for some compassion for her situation. She mentioned that she had a lovely old glass, beautifully decorated, the last of a set belonging to her mother or grandmother—I don’t recall all the details—but she cherished this glass despite the fact that it was cracked. She used it not for drinking any longer, but for pens and pencils, and such. A couple of years later I came upon the Chinese story The Cracked Water Pot you heard in the reading this morning. A story about compassion and understanding; understanding that value does not lie solely in perfection. A story that teaches us that good can be found even in that which is damaged. I just got back Friday evening from spending the week with our Coming of Age youth, nine fifteen-year-olds, who have such intelligence, joy, and surprise wrapped up in their gangly adolescent bodies. This was my fifth group to take to Boston, the culmination of their year of spiritual and religious exploration. These trips have always been a great pleasure, and my two chaperone companions, David Bonner and Wes Bowman, certainly learned what a wonderful bunch these emerging adults are and what a lot they have to offer to the world. They are, as I told them directly, capable of being angels among us in their lives. Angels by virtue of living from that loving kindness and compassion the Buddha preached, that we as Unitarian Universalists uphold in our Seven Principles, and in our actions as a community of faith. The cracked water pot is a simple story about learning to value that which is flawed, and since every human being is flawed to a greater or lesser degree, it is moral point worth noting. Teacher that I am and have been all my working life, I have seen repeatedly that we as parents, teachers, preachers, onlookers, can be very quick to condemn children who do not readily conform to the ideal of student behavior. In some ways I find it remarkable that so many do; statistically it is clear that more students than not try to fit this mold. However, having begun my teaching career at the first grade level, progressing to middle school, and eventually to the university, I have witnessed the phenomenon of the late bloomer many times. I see it still. Not always are these late bloomers those who adapt to the schools model, but often they find success through their own talents. Such young people are all too often are labeled early on as dumb, backward, incorrigible, or some such label that they must carry either for the rest of their lives, or until they realize that they are simply different, and march to their own drummer. Indeed many of the world’s most intelligent, creative, inventive minds did not fit the schools model very well. The sad part about these young people who earn these labels so early on is that they may have great gifts that will never be realized because they do not adapt well to our major mode of education. This was not so much the case prior to mandatory education. (I hasten to add that I am in favor of mandatory education which has done a great deal for humankind.) But for those who were not ready to read at age six, or sit still, or focus on teacher lectures, they were usually to be kept home a year or two longer until they were ready. Maturity is not a singular event; some children physically mature faster than they do emotionally or socially. Einstein is often noted for being such a late bloomer; although it is usually said he didn’t speak until he was four, but that was not true. He was simply a very quiet, withdrawn, perhaps shy little boy. My own experience was that I was academically talented, but very socially shy, and having been reared in a rural, very religious environment, I was terribly ignorant of the world. I have said many times, in recent years, that there is no way the average eighteen-year-old could be as ignorant as I was at eighteen. Or take the case of my youngest brother, who was born weighing only two pounds, who, nonetheless, was sent off to school at age six (we didn’t have kindergarten in my area back then), and expected to be at the same stage as other six-year-olds many of whom may have had a six or eight pound advantage from birth. He was a poor student through elementary school, and only began to come into his own by late high school; but, by that time, he had no love for school. Still, he managed to grow up a great deal during his time in the army; like most of the young men in our area, he was drafted during the Viet Nam conflict, and he learned skills that allowed him to become a fine machinist and eventually to supervisor position in a company where he’s worked for about thirty years now. We often have such unrealistic expectations; certainly there is that “average” for most six-year-olds, but what a mistake to expect all to fit that pattern. In our adult years we find similar issues. We are all cracked water pots in one way or another. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. Many in my family used to be very critical of one of my aunts whose house looked like a tornado hit it; she was a terrible housekeeper. Unfortunately, she could not afford help to get her house in order, so she suffered mightily from her sisters and other family members who could never resist an opportunity to remind her that she was far from keeping what they called a “decent household.” Yet, of all these women, she was by far the kindest, sweetest, had the best disposition. I loved her for her gentleness, her way of always making you feel welcome, of boosting us kids when we needed it most. Which, my friends, was the greater gift to the world: a spic-and-span house, or loving kindness? Someone once said: Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. This is largely what I am hoping we can learn from this concept of human compassion, from loving kindness, that we learn to look for the good amongst the less than ideal. Now, does this mean we have no standards, no expectation, no appreciation for scholastic achievement, good housekeeping, high level skills and virtues of all kinds? Not at all. We can value these things, aspire to them, treasure that they may make our lives better in many ways. But we should not value them to the extent that we cannot appreciate that which is less that great. All too often we let the perfect become the enemy of the good, as the old saying goes. All the great religions teach us this lesson in various ways, although I think the Buddhist do this better most of the time. And, the Christian New Testament, Colossians 3:12-13, states well: Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Or from Hinduism’s Mohandas Gandhi: The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems. As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn't supposed to ever let you down probably will. You will have your heart broken probably more than once and it's harder every time. You'll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was broken. You'll fight with your best friend. You'll blame a new love for things an old one did. You'll cry because time is passing too fast, and you'll eventually lose someone you love. So take too many pictures, laugh too much, and love like you've never been hurt because every sixty seconds you spend upset is a minute of happiness you'll never get back. Human life is undeniably bent on setting goals, on achievement, on improvement. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It only becomes bad when we lose our ability to be flexible, to find the virtues amidst the so-called failings, to be willing and able to have compassion for those who do not measure up to our or the society’s standards. Sometimes, the standards are the real problem and not our failure to meet them. Nowadays we are recognizing, even as humanity down through history has recognized periodically, that we have become far too materialist, far too wasteful, far too lacking in compassion for the poor and suffering. This trend has gone too far and needs to come back to a place of health for our human family, our environment, our future. Our society and its values, its standards change as we change, as what we value alters. Which means we are, you and I, the agents by which our families and our society become more caring and compassionate. But first we have to learn to value our own lives, to appreciate ourselves with our flaws, and in so doing, come to a greater sympathy with all humankind. ***
August 31, 2008 Learning to Trust Again If you have ever had your trust violated, this sermon is for you. Few things hurt more than having someone you liked, trusted, considered a valuable friend or companion, turn out to be against you. Turn out not to be willing to share with you their issues, but to broadcast them to others, to undermine you or your work, or speak against you in various ways. These actions are, or feel, mean-spirited and small-minded things to do. No wonder we talk about being heart-sick when we are hurt so, for it is truly the heart that is most damaged. When such a breach happens, we can begin to doubt nearly everyone (especially anyone new); for, after all, I trusted this other person and s/he betrayed my trust. There is anger in the head and hurt in the heart; there is a feeling of deep emptiness that seems as if it will never be filled. There are the words “never again” emblazoned on the memory, for believe in the moment that we will never allow ourselves to be so vulnerable again, and want to be able to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows of life as Shakespeare so aptly put it. There are also some straightforward earthy feelings and language I can’t use here, which mean the same thing, with a greater sense of outlet in the uttering as we rail against the disloyal, disingenuous person who abused our good will and trust. That we don’t have more diehard cynics amongst us is a testament to the healing power of time, and the healing power of love from those who truly care about us. I was just reading an article about people’s feelings toward the Internet. Not surprisingly, people like most of us who use the Internet and email frequently, are very mistrusting of emails or downloads from the Internet because of the high incidence of spam, viruses, and other forms of computer abuse or vandalism. You only have to get one bad virus to become very skeptical about any email that doesn’t look like someone or some organization you know. Which of course doesn’t help much, since many of the most egregious abusers have become sophisticated about getting addresses that look legitimate. Ultimately, most of us get good virus protection, but realize that there remains a certain amount of risk. Trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers and abusers of email has taken what should be a delightful system of Internet communication and sullied it for most people. Not enough, of course, for us to quit using it, but we feel it has been marred. Trust is complicated, yet it is also what makes human beings so wonderful; that we have this ability to believe in each other that is sometimes based on experience, but just as often on a gut level desire or hope that the trust we offer up will be rewarded in some way. Recently I had a painful experience of trust betrayed. Someone I had known many years, someone I had supported wholeheartedly, given many opportunities, and had in general encouraged, praised, and liked very much, was disloyal in a very hurtful way. I was shocked, dismayed, totally thrown off balance by what this person had done. Had I experienced similar behavior from some people I would have just been mildly irritated and considered the source, but in this case the person was someone I trusted, respected, and had felt we shared a mutual respect and sympathy. That is what makes such an abuse of trust so powerful; for, if I cannot trust the people that I think I can, then can anyone truly be trusted at all? Jacob Needleman hit this directly in saying that, trust is at the core of respect—not blind trust that blinds at weaknesses, but trust in something higher that can act through human beings over and above personal needs and desires. . . . As any number of psychologists and psychiatrists have pointed out, most people become less trusting when their trust has been betrayed. Psychiatrist Daniel Borenstein wrote: the degree of mistrust that is engendered varies between individuals and with the sensitivity of a particular betrayal. Which means we can expect different people to react on sometimes vastly different ways according individual temperament, etc. What might throw you for a loop might be much less difficult for your spouse, or best friend, and so on, and vice-versa which means we may not always get the kind of support we need when we have been hurt in this way. Because trust is at the heart of how we interact with others, we are at great risk for experiencing some abuses of that trust. We get mad when it is a business that takes advantage of us, but we put that into the realm the real estate business does with the term caveat emptor, or the buyer beware. We know that we do run some risks in dealing with strangers, and/or people who would have us trust them in a business deal. Benjamin Franklin had a lot of pithy sayings about it being foolish to trust, especially in business, which I take as an indicator he got burned a few times. But as we often hear, business is business. But oh what a different sense of betrayal we feel when the betrayer is someone we loved or liked very much. That is more than a slap in the face, that kind of disrespect is a real kick in the gut. So what to do? How do we move on? Where can we find the healing so needed to get beyond such painful events and experiences? A beloved friend and psychologist reminded me of Jesus and the crucifixion. When Jesus has been crucified he says, “Forgive them; they know not what they do.” Forgiving is often very hard to do, but it truly can help to consider that perhaps the person who hurt us was not in touch with what s/he was doing. Perhaps they were acting out of some pain or unacknowledged hurt or need that we cannot know. This is undoubtedly the most positive spiritual reaction we can have. Often this is exactly the case, perhaps most of the time, for much of what happens in human relationships is at the level of the unconscious or unacknowledged. Most of us have witnessed in relationships or marriages that break up, rarely do the couples part with good wishes, simply acknowledging the truth about why the relationship is no longer desired. The tendency is to thrash and rail against the evil other who has caused us all our suffering. In other words, sometimes guilt drives our need to portray someone as bad, when really they are not bad, or at least no different than they ever were. Rather than just say, I no longer feel this marriage is rewarding and have decided to go my own way, things are said to justify our actions. We want to think well of ourselves, and also we want others to think well of us, to believe we are justified in our actions. Human behavior is all very convoluted at times. It’s not easy being green, Kermit the Frog said. And, it’s not easy being human either. We all trail fewer clouds of glory and more ratty tails of misdeeds than we would like to believe. Out of all my hurt and anger I was forced to admit—after I had spoken to someone wiser than I-- that I know that there have been times when I have hurt others, too. This is the hardest part of coming full circle in learning to trust again. We have to see not only the culpability of the person who has hurt us, but our own culpability as well. Never an easy thing to do. Albert Ellis, on of the most irreverent of all popular psychologists wrote: You can learn to trust someone perfectly—but that’s risky. Even highly trustworthy people can always change. You can most probably, but not certainly, trust people if they have been regularly honest up to now. That is, if they are not too emotionally disturbed and if they subscribe to usual moral rules. Even when you cannot trust some people, you can teach yourself to feel only healthily sorry and disappointed about their behavior but not unhealthily enraged and self-pityingly about them as persons. Trust yourself to stop damning people as a whole, no matter how badly they now behave. Then you may—yes, may—help them to become more trustworthy. Of course, when we are in the midst of our pain, we are not interested in the person who has hurt us; this is an ego moment when we are more likely to want revenge, to get even, but this is not healthy and ultimately reduces us to that which we despise. But the beautiful truth is that time heals, time is the greatest physician for the spirit. Time does lessen the hurt, time does give us the ability to see things more clearly, and with greater perspective. And often we do come to the point of seeing the person who had violated our trust as deserving of sympathy and compassion. My summer reading was focused on Tibet Buddhism, and it is the goal of Buddhist spirituality to develop sympathy, compassion, and loving kindness towards all people, even those who have or would hurt us--a very tall order, to be sure. But what these Buddhist teachings help us to see is that any thoughts of anger, pain, violence, revenge we might have for others, are also damaging to ourselves. These potent thoughts of anger, pain, or revenge are like holding a radioactive substance in our souls that we plan to use on the bad person, forgetting that we are being poisoned in the process. This is a teaching I certainly must work on for myself, even though I believe it is true. This is the power and conundrum of trust violated. I have a friend who had a very bad experience with a coworker, his subordinate in the structure of the organization; and this coworker clearly tried to undermine my friend, going to some lengths to create problems. As a result, my friend has maintained ever since that subordinates are not to be trusted, despite the fact this incident happened nearly thirty years ago. He was that hurt by the experience. I have some sympathy with his feelings; but, with such an attitude, you run the risk of cutting your nose off to spite your face with such categorical thinking. Not all coworkers are out to undo us, not all friends are two-faced, not all spouses will cheat, not all. This is the thing we must remember: not all. Are there those who will hurt us, the answer is undoubtedly yes there are, but not all people want to hurt us. In fact, most people do not want to hurt us. From this point we learn to trust again. As much as you and I may hate to admit it, we can learn some very valuable lessons from such people; however mean, ego-centric, unkind they may be. We learn important things about what we value, about our ethical understanding of human relations, and even where we may fall short. Pain can be a kind of holy ground, a place for deep spirit-filled wisdom to grow with in us. Humor can help, too: A young rabbi finally summoned courage to complain to the richest member of his congregation, "I hesitate to bring this up, but it bothers me that you always fall asleep while I'm preaching.” To which the member replied reassuringly: "Look, would I sleep if I didn't trust you?" As an aside, I am never bothered by people falling asleep; after all, this is meant to be a place and time of spiritual enrichment, and if what your spirit needs is sleep, so be it. Trust may not always be evident, but probably not much of consequence would happen in our lives if most people were not playing according to the same values. Just consider driving! The fact is that we can trust most people in our lives, but as Albert Ellis pointed out, perfect trust is unlikely, or as the Buddhist would offer, an illusion. We also need to remember the times when we felt sure trust would not be held, and we were pleasantly surprised. One time my father had to go out of town on some business, and had a much larger amount of cash with him than normal. His wallet fell out of his pocket somewhere, and he did not discover this until he was back home, many miles from where he had dropped it. He assumed that he was just out of luck, and that he would have to suffer the loss. His major concern was the loss of this drivers’ license, and planned to go the next day and get another. Early the next morning, he got a call from a man asking him if he had lost anything, and you can imagine the rest of the story. My dad got back his wallet with nothing disturbed. Further, he sent the man a reward, and the man promptly sent it back. Such incidents renew our belief in the basic goodness of humanity, and also help us to heal when we face those sad experiences of disloyalty. For all I feel sucker-punched from the bad experience I had, I am so glad to know that it is an exception to the rule. Most people I know will have the courtesy to tell me if they are unhappy with me, or want something I seem unable or unprepared to give them. Most people are far more rewarding than I would ever expect on first encounter, so as my daughter told me when I cried on her shoulder, the best thing usually is to “shake it off.” This is what we tell my little granddaughters when they get a minor injury or feel hurt by one of their friends. At this moment I am still trying to shake it off, and it seems to be a bit sticky, so I just have to keep shaking until I finally get it to let go of my spirit where it’s been stuck. Like those slapstick routines where a guy is trying to throw away a piece of gummed paper. My friends, beloved community of faith, we all sometimes have to shake it off so that we do not miss out on all the good that is in our lives now and all the good that is yet to come. There are too many blessings in the redeeming power of each new day to allow pain and self-pity to dominate our lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson that philosopher theologian, and one time Unitarian minister, who trusted people to find their religion outside of tradition, and whose theology has most written itself upon my mind, said of trust: Self-trust is the first secret of success. And, Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. We can not learn to trust others again until we trust ourselves. We may have to live with the imperfect nature of trusting our brothers and sisters in the world, but how much more imperfect not to do so. How much worse for us to miss the holiness amidst the pain. ***
September 7, 2008 –Ingathering Sunday Life Lessons I always love Ingathering Sunday. It is for me like that first day of school was when I was little girl; with all the unknown and hopeful possibilities that lay before me, and which on this day lie before this congregation. I begin today wondering, what will happen this year, who will join us, who will leave, who will be born and who will die? What changes might we make? Will I like them? Will they be good whether I like them or not? So many questions and so much is possible. But I feel in my bones that this is going to be a remarkable year. Good things have begun happening already, and having learned over the years to trust my intuition, to trust it over my anxiety about all that might not go well. My feeling is that this will be a special year, perhaps even a benchmark year, for this church. We will turn twenty-years-old this February, an important anniversary in the life of any person or institution. We are still very young in institutional terms, but surviving twenty years means we have become rooted, deeply rooted, and it only takes the nourishing of this community to truly blossom into all that we hope and dream. Hopes and dreams, though, do not come without effort, without serious thought, planning, and plain old work. This we know is one of life’s basic lessons: you get what you give; you reap what you sow. But what matters most about this community we all create together, is how we treat one another, what we do to make each life in this community better, what we do that makes life beyond this community better as well. Church, after all, is just six-letter word that means a certain kind of commonality; congregation, is just a twelve-letter word that means a gathering of people, even our not quite mellifluous Unitarian Universalist Society of Mill Creek, is just a thirty-nine letter phrase that means this gathering here with our joint vision. These are all just words; they mean little or they can mean a great deal, it all rests on whether we the people of Mill Creek congregation lift up the vision of what might be and then do the leg work to carry it forward. A member reminded me recently that congregation is here for the members and friends, but unless the members and friends are here for the congregation, little of substance can happen. But what a beautiful experience to see that mutuality in action when it does happen. To see people living their beliefs, putting them in action. For, what we do for ourselves, or others, or for this community of faith comes out of who we are, and what we believe, which means we are either being part of the acts of creation, or de facto part of some level of destruction. Still, we know that ome things grow and thrive, others die on the vine, this is all part of the nature of things; some things should thrive, and others should pass away. Yet another of life’s lessons. Maya Angelou, American poet of renown, wrote of life’s lessons:
Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented. So, to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise. I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. We have been a congregation for almost twenty years, but we have not been the same congregation all that time. We have been learning life’s lessons about being an unfolding congregation. We have been growing and changing, not just in numbers and location, but in the essence of who we are, reinventing ourselves with each new year, with each new member who comes into our fold, and with each member who passes away or through. We must reinvent ourselves, and if we don’t do it actively, according to some thought or plan, then as Angelou says, it will be done for us or despite us. Robert Fulghum, a Unitarian minister and writer who gave us that wonderful book, I learned all I Needed to Know in Kindergarten, stated as you heard in the reading, that despite the reality of the life lessons we grow up learning, or simply accept; there are also lessons that seem to defeat logic and planning, like: [T]hat imagination is stronger than knowledge— So besides the reality of the work that always needs to be done to create a real and rewarding life, there are these bits of mystical truth that draw us to do such audacious things as to get married, have a child, take a new job, build a church—and get active in election campaigns regardless of the party affiliation. Or do any of the things we do or would like to do that may feel scary, uncertain, or even unwise. My son decided in May to move out to Portland, Oregon, to find a new job in a place where he knew no one, had no friends or family, but then further to leave his car behind, to live “green” in the city, so he must walk, ride his bike, or use the public transportation system (which is outstanding). Several changes all at once that felt very scary; after all, what if he failed. I told him that I would rather see him fail making the effort, than to avoiding making the effort at all. You learn from trying, I said, the status quo is just existing, besides, all kinds of good things might happen because of making this change. What has happened in each of our lives that we value highly probably happened because we learned many of life’s lessons, even the lesson that sometimes you just take a leap of faith and believe that you will somehow find a foothold on the other side. Of all the lessons I have learned as a minister, the most important is that love is the strongest force on earth, that belief in ourselves and others makes great things happen, and that community is important beyond our knowing. Beloved, we have many lessons yet to learn, let us each lift up and reach out from our own deep spiritual longing, to touch that in same one another. From this lifting up and reaching out we will find the blessings of our hearts’ desire. ***
September 14,2008 Tangled Webs We Weave Sir Walter Scott some two hundred years ago wrote in a poem: Oh what a tangled web we weave,/When first we practise to deceive! Nothing has changed about that bit of truth and meaning which we as Unitarians hold up in the fourth of our Seven Principles as a goal. Tangled webs indeed, and chances are good that we will never untangle the webs of deceit we most experience; but above all kinds of experience of tangled webs, few are so tangled as those involved in politics, those that come from the mouths and writings of those connected with politicians, and especially from politicians themselves. You have heard me say before that as far as I can tell politician and liar are synonymous terms; and I say this with a sad heart. Yet, as one close to me said, no one would get elected if s/he told the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which I acknowledge as an unfortunate piece of truth. Here we are on the cusp of electing the forty-fifth president of the United States, and this part of politics has only gotten worse; primarily due not to the people of these times but to the technology of these times. I say gotten worse for there are no glory days in American politics when truth stood unadulterated. Benjamin Franklin said the first mistake in politics is going into it, because it can be such a dirty business. But I like best what the humor writer P.J. O’Rourke said about politics: Common sense is not an issue in politics; it's an affliction. Neither is honesty an issue in politics. It's a miracle. What a predicament we poor voters find ourselves in when election years roll around, which may be why people depend less and less on facts, and more and more on personal enthusiasm for one party or one politician versus another. You don’t, though, have to read very much history, not even past the last fifty years, to learn that all parties develop levels of corruption, and all politicians get hoisted on a few of their own petards. Like lipstick on pigs, politics can be an ugly sight to behold. And, like a pig with lipstick, politics can be a fascinating sight to behold. How high and deep run our native political feelings, and they run no higher or deeper than during the run up to a presidential election. Despite the fact that many preachers have laid down the law to their congregants about whom they should vote for—by the way, that includes some Unitarian preachers—this UU preacher is not interested in telling you for whom to cast your ballot. Indeed, I have tried very hard over the years to keep it before us that our congregations are not politically linked with any party; that members come from all party stripes and no stripe at all. That this Sunday morning is a time to come for spiritual renewal and growth that transcends the realm of our political concerns. My desire is to keep to the issues, the ethical values, the frustrations, the moral failings with which we all must contend—especially our politicians. Part of the reason I try to walk this fine line between passion for our values and political passion is that we are here to win friends and influence people more broadly than just the political. Remember the old adage about avoiding politics and religion in polite conversation? That is because they are such inflammatory subjects. Clearly we here are not bound to the avoidance of religion, as a religion, though as UUs we try to be wary of expressing too emphatically what should or should not be a part of our faith outside our Seven Principles, since this is not a religion with a doctrine or creed. That effort is tough enough work right there; so to think we can walk down that rocky path of politics, and not get tripped up, is asking too much of mere UU mortals. Besides, as that most wise of Oklahoma cowboys, Will Rogers adjured us to keep in mind: The more you read about politics, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. During the past couple of years, I’ve been collecting some interesting material on politics, politicians, and lying. The best bit came from the Supreme Court of the state of Washington, last October. Political reporter Chris McGann wrote in the Washington Post-Intelligencer regarding the decision: You just can't keep a politician from lying. In a 5-4 ruling Thursday, the state Supreme Court struck down a 1999 law that banned political candidates from intentionally lying about their opponents. The high court majority said the law was an affront to free speech. McGann went on further: The dissent called the decision "an invitation to lie with impunity." That temptation was already in place, said Travis Ridout, a political science professor at Washington State University. Candidates have long felt free to say their opponent had voted to raise taxes 50 times the previous year, hated children or was soft on crime -- regardless of the facts. "The lies about your opponent's record, we've almost come to expect them from politicians, so voters don't spend much time trying to arbitrate," Ridout said. "We are quite cynical about the motives of politicians." Well, if you were not cynical before, you probably will be before this election season is over. Perhaps that is the real tragedy, that people like us, who truly believe in the democratic process, who believe in working to support candidates, and all that is wrapped up in the grand American dream of democracy, so often do become, if not cynical, very disillusioned. I put myself in that camp. What worries me the most is how many people won’t turn out to vote at all because they think the process is so corrupted. I have heard this from enough people in my wider circle to know that such frustration and cynicism runs deep in our nation. Many people believe that you could vote for a poodle and get about as much benefit, as I heard from one person. This feeling is not helped when states run into election problems like the infamous hanging chads fiasco in Florida a couple elections back, or the issues of states losing delegates due to party violations. Apparently there are many people, as we approach this election, who are very worried about either poorly functioning or downright rigged voting machines, or other election problems, or outright fraud. Where is any comfort to be found? How do we participate if we feel in our hearts and minds that the process is corrupted beyond hope? Further, why do politicians think lying is acceptable? Our ancient Greek progenitors of democracy understood that it was all about power. As the reading from David Appelbaum states: the gods[before they were gods] first invented deceit in order to succeed in becoming gods. [To gain] victory over . . [their creators] the Titans. Plato and others of that early era of democracy, understood lying, or deceit, as a lens for the mortal condition. Here below, humankind is drunk with inventiveness while the great need is for sobriety. I take this to mean that we allow ourselves to be ensnared in the tangled webs because of the passions politics engenders. The passions are stirred up so that we become, as it were, drunk on them and can no longer think or look beyond them. I am a big fan of the website Factcheck.org, for they try to stay above the fray and report even-handedly on where the various politicians go a bubble off center with the truth, or hit a home-run lying. Of course, the problem remains that, as I see it, most people do not want the sobriety check of seeing how we are manipulated by party politics. Too many would rather wave the banner than point to the possibility that the process may be corrupted for us all. There is an old folk tale about a successful man, who had a loving family, who was honored for his upstanding nature in the community, and so on, but he was unhappy because he wanted to know the Truth (capital T, Truth). His wife encouraged him to seek her out, so off he went; he searched here, there, everywhere, to villages and cities, through forests, to the coasts, to all the corners of the world. This went on for weeks then months, and finally he found her—Truth--in a cave on a high mountain. (Did you ever notice in these tales of wisdom, even in the Bible, truth or wisdom always seems to reside atop a mountain (usually in a cave? An apt metaphor no doubt for the difficulty in finding them.) So, this man, having found Truth, sees that she is not what he imagined, indeed not pleasant to look upon at all; rather, she was old, snaggle-toothed, with lank and stringy hair, her skin spotted and wrinkled, repugnant in her visage. She invited him to stay, and he found her voice appealing for it was low and lyrical and pure and it was then that he knew he had found Truth. After his year of learning from Truth, he prepared to leave, and asked if there was something he could do for her. She responded after some thought: When you speak of me, she said, tell them I am young and beautiful. As the story teaches, the truth is rarely the beautiful thing we imagine. The truth is that our politics and our politicians are induced to manipulate the truth or lie because there is a distinct advantage in doing so. Because we the people are inclined to be influenced by these pretty deceits. Some wit once wrote: They're getting pretty vicious in politics nowadays. The oath of office ends with a denial of all the charges. The larger issue of deceit is that most people resort to some levels of lying or not telling the whole truth—a sin of omission as I was taught—because it works to their advantage. There have been a few studies done on how often people lie, or whether people see what they say is a lie, and the fact is that most people lie every day, if no more than saying, I’m fine, when asked how they are, when they may be feeling terrible. Degree and content are important here. In the matter of politics, it is refreshing to know that politicians are also being caught in their lies more now than ever in days past, precisely because their every word is being captured by the digital media. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show gets a lot of comedic mileage out of showing how politicians say one thing one day and another the next. So flip-flopping will be noted; stretching the truth will be noted, and outright lying will also be noted. The Rev. Fred Muir wrote in a UU publication entitled With Principle and Purpose (as you heard in the reading): A free and responsible search for truth and meaning requires focused attention. Muir quotes Margot Adler, the NPR correspondent and UU: To be truthful about it, not everything comes from personal experience and revelation. There are times when gut and heart and intuition are not enough [and] it’s important to have a reality check, people who will bring us down to earth . . . . Muir reminds us the what is important in our UU congregations is that we support each other in our individual journeys, both support and context, it gives each one of us reason to keep our search free and responsible. Would that we could call upon our politicians, and our political parties, to do the same. But I fear that in the effort to bring down--the popular term nowadays is swift-boating-- another candidate is just too great a temptation, and it will rest with those of us who are not in the front lines of politics to remind them that there is Truth, and there is beauty to be had in upholding it. It may take the lens of history to show what is true, but that does not mean we should ignore the noble qualities which make it an important moral value in all cultures. One of the famous Ten Commandments, no less, teaches that it is wrong to lie. Why then do so many who would use religion for political ends seem to ignore this law of human conduct? Perhaps as Prof. Ridout said, it is too great a temptation for politicians not to play fast and loose with the truth, but it is not too great a work for we the people who will live, work, play, and die in the aftermath of what they do. Let us, then, lift up not the person or party, but the issues that count in our lives. Does it matter what the party stands for (that is the moral stance of the party), do the politicians themselves live by them, and does your life seem better or worse? Do you understand how you have to deal with the outcome of the policies as they relate to your daily life? Will your family and grandchildren, and their children be victims of what we do now? These questions are there to be asked, but it is up to us to do the asking. We do what is needed by asking, and by writing, calling, emailing our political leaders to let them know we are paying attention. This is what we can do that can truly make a difference. I was so saddened, but not surprised to learn, that when President Bush offered up a comprehensive immigration policy, it was shot down before fully launched by the these hate-mongers of talk radio calling on their listeners to write, call, email to voice their displeasure about illegal immigrants. So don’t for a minute think your few minutes of effort don’t count, for they do. We of this community of faith, in our search for truth and meaning, may find the Truth far from the beauty we imagine, but we can know that there is much she has to offer and not to turn our back on her. The spiritual virtues of our ethics, of our moral actions, are what can carry us to that proverbial mountain top; and no less so carry our nation there, as well. Our nation is not just one party, one version of truth, one politician; our country is us; you and me, acting in accord to our better natures, and helping to steer the ship of state instead of abandoning it to the Capt. Ahabs of politics. Tangled webs of deceit may unavoidable, but let our ethics, our moral values, be the broom to sweep them away. *** September 21, 2008 What are You Doing with Your Life?
Originally I posed this sermon topic in another mental landscape, but the past week has been of earthquake proportions, shifting all that we believed about the safety and security of our great indeed for generations the greatest free economy to ever exist. Therefore, my sermon has shifted with my own sense of the dangers of the rocky cliff to which we all have been herded. As has been repeatedly stated in all the media, this past week has been the rockiest financially since the Great Depression; so say many of the most respected economists, and no less than Alan Greenspan who headed the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006, though many put much of the blame at his feet. Suddenly, all the years of removing regulations from business and financial interests to allow for a free-wheeling business environment are—even as I speak--reversing on a dime, in favor of the Government (i.e., us) nationalizing several of these large companies, taking control and bailing out those we thought were working to make America (i.e., us) strong through the virtues of capitalism. Capitalism does have its virtues, but we cannot necessarily say the same for those who exercise it with abandon. So the question I posed for this sermon some months back, has taken on a particular twist. The main thrust of which is for us to ask ourselves, what we are doing for our lives, but also, what is government and business doing for our lives? I heard an economist a few years ago say in regard to government, especially “big” government that we are all supposed to fear and loathe, that the federal government is nothing more or less than a big insurance agency with an army. That is, government is by definition meant to oversee and provide for the welfare and safety and security of the people, and as we have grown into such a large number of people, over a large expanse of land, big government is a relative concept. For my part, I am in favor of government that protects the public interests, that makes sure we have safe financial institutions, and in all matters a safe country to live in. Just think of all those thousands of babies in China that were made deathly ill because of a lack of the kind of government protections we take for granted when we go into the pharmacy or supermarket. Which is not to say that all the ways government grows is good. Government requires oversight, too; by you and me, and organizations we support to see that government is not out having wild sex and drug parties at our expense. Oh-wait: Didn’t we just hear this week also that there were members the Dept. of the Interior who were being wined, dined, etc, etc, by the oil lobbyists. Exposed fortunately by just such media and watchdog interests, so we know that to watch and be wary is always important in our personal and governmental affairs; from home to neightborhood to state to nation and beyond. Like all of you, my family members are worried about what this rocky economic time will mean for our futures. My husband and I worry about our finances that we planned to live on as we approach our retirement; my daughter worries as she copes with rearing two young children and for their futures; and my twenty-six-year-old son worries about keeping his job and what his career prospects may be. In other words, we are worrying about all the things you are worrying about. These are legitimate worries. Still, I believe most of us know that the fundamentals of our lives are not going to change because of the economic conditions we are dealing with now or will yet have to contend. For what is rooted in us of substance is not dependent upon our financial condition so much as we may believe, but is far deeper, truly rooted into character of our being. Which is not to say we that won’t get anxious, or have to deal with changing circumstances, or feel the afflictions of uncertainty, since these are unavoidable. Even the rich must worry about the vicissitudes of changing or, as we face now, collapsing financial markets. Indeed, it is because the rich are so worried that we are seeing such a change in attitude on the part of many self-described conservatives. What we learn from these scary times is that we can survive them, and perhaps in the surviving learn more about what matters most in our lives. I know my husband and I had a couple of intense discussions this week about our retirement future, the upshot of which was we know we will manage somehow. The Rev. Chris Buice talks about what we can learn in a story he calls “The Cashier is my Guru.” A guru is a teacher, and in Buice’s story the lesson his cashier guru teaches him is patience. In this brief story, while trying to get his order at a restaurant Buice had to repeat the choices no less than three times, then the computer cash-register was not working, so he had to help the young fellow with the math to get the amount owed correct, then help him make the correct change. This could have been a cause for upset, but Buice states that he learned patience from this experience, and left the place with a sincere thank you to the young man. I think he also learned how far respect, kindness, helpfulness really go to smoothing out difficult situations. And the young man learned these lessons equally well. Coincidentally, I was in a store twice this week witnessing, both times as the customer next in line, people being very unkind, rude, and intentionally disrespectful to a young clerk who had made a mistake. And, both times, these people tried to co-opt me into the situation, perhaps to some how mitigate their own rudeness or, more likely, to justify it, I’m not sure, but both times I refused to go along. I thought of Buice’s story and what a difference it makes when we meet a challenge with grace and dignity instead of outrage and a determination to get what we think we are due. In the story Buice also relates a teaching of Tibetan Buddhist monks who say that you cannot learn patience by meditating in solitude on a mountain top, or merely in contemplation, or even studying with the great masters; rather, you learn patience by living in the world, and dealing with the real people in real situations. We learn by our direct experience, beloved, and we learn by observation, as well. I’m reminded of this bit of humor:
Edna and her husband Mel came into sudden wealth as the result of their investments in the stock market. Edna loved surprises, and Mel was rich enough now to indulge her every whim. So, for a birthday present he found her a parrot that spoke eleven languages and that cost him exactly one thousand dollars for each language. When he got home, he asked, "What did ya think of that wonderful bird I sent you?" "It was elegant," she answered. "It's in the oven right now." The Mel's face turned purple. "In the oven?" he shouted. "Why, that bird could speak eleven languages!" Edna responded, "Then why didn't it say something?"
With all the money, agencies, oversight that we expected to be in place, we might well ask: Why didn’t they say something? Well, it turns out several economists, financial reporters, and even investors like Carl Icahn did say something, but no one at the top wanted to stop the snowball rolling, despite the fact that it was rolling toward a cliff, and picking us up in the process. This current financial fiasco, frightening as it is, will teach us a lesson about patience. About patience in how much and how fast we earn from investments, about the dangers of the get-rich-quick mentality, and about not reacting too quickly or too dramatically out of fear. Some will also learn about similarly being patient in all realms of our lives. A bit like the story of the tortoise and the hare. That a rushing, thoughtless surge to power, wealth, or whatever it may be, is far less reliable or safe than the more proven, less exciting, plodding of healthy business and personal practices. While most of us are not high-powered financial executives, we still have many of the similar tendencies our unwise hares of business have now demonstrated as weaknesses. We have in recent generations been inculcated to quick results, high returns for little effort, grand visions that rationally can never be as widely spread in real capitalism as the late night real estate gurus would have us believe. Now I realize some of you do not interest yourselves in the stock market, but just listen to the following, and you will see where I am leading you. This comes from the Los Angeles Times as reported by Tom Petruno: The Dow Jones industrial average surged and closed above the historic 4,000 level for the first time Thursday, in a rally fueled by Wall Street's increasing conviction that interest rates have peaked and that the economy is headed for slower - but still positive - growth. The United States' most widely watched stock index jumped 30.28 points to 4,003.33 . . . The rally, the latest stage of a stock market advance that began in mid-December, followed Federal Reserve Board [Chairman’s] most upbeat comments to date on the central bank's outlook for interest rates, inflation and U.S. economic growth.
How long ago do you think that was? Just to give you a hint, our big fall in the market this past week took the Dow Jones Average from an all time high last year, at one point hitting just over 14,000, to Thursday when the market took a big plunge down to 10,460, but moved up after proposed government bailouts came into play and settled Friday at 11,388. Tom Petruno’s article lifting up this historic high in the Dow Jones averages was not back in the 1960s, or 70s, or 80s, it was February 1995. So in just thirteen short years (considering the decades the market never even hit above the 2000 mark, the market has inflated to these incredible highs not witnessed since prior to the fall of the stock market in 1929, and the subsequent introduction of regulations to keep the stock market ship afloat and steady. Certainly, there are several factors that have led to these large numbers, but the recent cycle of “bubbles” we have all witnessed, when internet stocks, housing, and crop and oil futures have gone through the roof, show us that there has been an unchecked environment of greed. I am not a financial guru of any stripe, but you don’t have to financial wizard like Warren Buffet to know that greed sometimes gets in the way of healthy growth and progress. Buffet has long been questioning the insanity; but, as the Bible teaches, a prophet is not honored in his own land. The big questions batted about the news media this past week were: How could this have happened? What went wrong? Why were we not being protected from such blatant mismanagement? Repeatedly, the answers were either evasive or disingenuous, and occasionally honest in stating that the people who were supposed to be holding the reins of oversight were asleep, hamstrung, or incompetent. None of the answers was satisfying, yet all of them remind us who have our pension funds, retirement portfolios, and/or investments tied up in the financial markets that the reason for government is to protect the people, to advance our needs, to save us from the unscrupulous who, like the poor, have always been and always will be with us. I also agree with this bit of political humor: If ignorance is bliss, Congress must be paradise. These are the larger questions of how finances affect our lives broadly, by affecting whether businesses can stay in business, jobs will be cut (think of the thousands of jobs lost as result of the failure of Lehman Brothers alone—one financial company that did not get a bailout), the whole trickle down effect of financial losses we will all feel. The more pointed, direct issues that are highlighted by this massive morass of mismanagement, is how and what you and I will learn from it all. Like Rev. Buice and the cashier, the management of our corporate, financial, agricultural interests, and government, are also related issues of respect, worth, dignity, and who honors whom. Believing as I do that what we see in our larger national life is mirrored in our own individual lives, we might ask of ourselves, and I ask of you: How do you deal with difficult questions in your life? To what or to whom do you go when the perplexing, challenging, or frightening stuff of life comes your way? For individuals often seem to have one thing great corporate-financial-government entities do not, which is humility enough to know when they need help. All of us at some time or another, over something difficult in our lives, have asked ourselves: What am I to do? What should I do? How do I handle this? What is going to happen to me? How do I get out of this mess? And so on. Questions that indicate our frustration, or our lack of confidence, or indeed our lack of hope. What do you do when your life seems unsettled, even coming apart at the seams? To what or to whom do we turn? How do we find some of the answers to the great and often fearful questions of our lives? My belief is that we all have a deep well of inner wisdom within us. A well that has been filling since birth. That we have most of what we need to deal with the difficult situations of living. In general, we know what we need to do, to whom we can turn, what ultimately will probably be the outcome. The problem is usually not what we know, but whether we are willing to pay attention. All too often, we, like our wizards of industry or Wall Street, simply don’t want to look into that well of inner wisdom. We want to avoid facing the fact that our credit cards are maxed out and not getting paid off at the end of each month. We want to avoid the facing the fact that we and our children need discipline that means not getting everything we want when we want it, which is always now. We do not want to accept that there will be a day of accounting in all the things we do, financial, spiritual, and otherwise. Occasionally, our failures are due to a lack of understanding, but more often it is a case of putting on blinders and hoping that somehow we will never have to face the facts. Some years ago, when the soft drink company Pepsi launched a new ad campaign, the slogan "Come alive with Pepsi!" had to be translated into other languages. This was not always a success. For instance, the slogan was rendered too literally in the Taiwan market. In Chinese, it read, not “Come alive with Pepsi” but "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave." Obviously not what Pepsi had in mind. Sometimes, we too mistranslate the times, the economic environment, the realities because of the information that we are receiving from the larger world. I remain astonished, for example, that credit cards often are issued willy-nilly to college kids who have no independent means of support. This is such a problem that the average college student is leaving school with an average of $3000 in credit card debt alone; not to mention around $30,000 in student loans. The average college kid has no idea how long it will take to pay off such an incredible sum. There is no way that even a working adult in my youth, would have been permitted to accumulate such a debt. The banks knew the inherent dangers. Clearly, we have abandoned wisdom from the top down. Meaning, our government (i.e., us) is now taking on debt that will bring our national debt to an all time high, somewhere in the ten trillion dollar range—a number I cannot comprehend. Where, my friends, is the wisdom? Wisdom, which we all have, means asking ourselves the tough questions. Like: Should I? Can I afford? Do I need or just want? What will be the short and the long term consequences? We need to ask ourselves often: What am I doing with my life? And to ask those we care about and love: What are you doing with your life? This is what the wisdom of the ages teaches us: the spiritual, mental, social, financial wisdom that has been accruing for millennia. What are you doing with your life? Is acquiring stuff all that matters? Or are the things of the spirit that are not subject to bankruptcy getting the attention they deserve? Clearly, no one can answer these questions for us. We alone must be willing to face up to the corruption that creeps into our souls, and into the soul of the nation. Only we, you and I, can face the truth about our weaknesses, and then do that beautiful thing of looking deep into the well of inner wisdom, talking through our fears with those who can help us, and face up to the reality that there is no free lunch. Someone always has to pay. May it be that we together have the courage to ask the hard questions, and may we together be willing to keep filling that well of inner wisdom. *** September 28, 2008 The Changing Religious Landscape
There are phrases we no longer can use without error, though we hear them frequently. Like man a booth or team, when we mean staff a booth or team, but the phrase that most comes to my mind is separation of church and state; for we are no longer concerned solely with churches as we were for much of western and American history. Nowadays we mean separation of synagogue, mosque, temple, society, church, and state; all these religious bodies make up the religious landscape in this country that our early American forebears would have never believed possible, or desirable. The religious landscape indeed has changed dramatically in the nearly four-hundred years since the first pilgrims landed on these shores in 1630 C.E. While there are many things that can be troubling about modern religious times, the one thing that is heartening, is that so many religions are willing to live in a climate of ecumenicalism or even pluralism. Ecumenicalism, that is, Christians of different sects working together, is a far newer notion than you might think; and pluralism, meaning recognizing the right of different religions to live and work in peace, is relatively recent. It was not at all uncommon in my childhood in the 1950s to hear other religions degraded as heretical, or even evil; or in some other way wrong. I never could understand how the fundamental Christianity of my upbringing could be so adamant about the evils of Catholics and Jews in particular; and the Mormons, which were plentiful in rural Idaho, were discussed as beyond the pale; a made up religion, an evil satanic sect. It is amazing that groups can live in proximity and hate each other so actively. Of course, the proximity is ultimately the undoing of such division; for when we live, work, go to school, and play with people of different beliefs for long enough we find it harder and harder to see them as the evil other in the ways of the past when groups were more distinct with fewer opportunities to interact. Port cities around the world have always been the most tolerant and cosmopolitan for precisely this reason. The sailors, merchants, traders eventually came to see each other as human beings, more than products of their various religious and cultural heritages. Many historians of religion have written on this subject of the changing religious landscape, for it has ever been changing. There is no religion existing today that looks like it did even fifty years ago, and certainly not like it would have one hundred and fifty years ago. The maxim is that religion must change, for if it does not, or does not change enough to meet the changing times, then the religion will cease to have meaning for the people. This was precisely the state of affairs in ancient Rome at the time of the early Christian cults. (Cult is not a bad word in theological terms. It means merely a group.) There were several Christian cults, not all in agreement, with each claiming a certain truth about Jesus, a religion still in its infancy, for in Rome, the old religion still had the power, but that power was beginning to fade. For a number of reasons, not the least of which was emerging knowledge, the religion was getting progressively more corrupt, to the point that the Caesars were declaring themselves gods, which did not sit well with much of the populi. That, plus the fact that people are always looking for something that is satisfying, both spiritually and intellectually. Many of us here are a testament to that need. While religion does have a strong cultural component, eventually as we find there are other options, we are likely to exercise some choice in the matter of religion, as in the matter of many things that would have been strange or simply not done in a former time. For instance, not only did many of us make major changes in our religious beliefs and practices, we have done similarly in many other areas of our lives that are far less controversial. Food is just one example: you and I eat foods many of our grandparents or great-grandparents would have never considered trying, perhaps never had as an option—like fast foods or kiwi fruit. There are multiple factors for such changes. Factors such as travel, exposure to different people and cultures; as to food, refrigerated transport as made it possible to enjoy strawberries in winter, when, not so long ago you had them only in the early summer. Media and the worldwide web are also making the world far smaller. I can with a few key strokes learn about almost anything within a few minutes; information that would have taken me to a library and perhaps an hour or more of research. (Thanks be to the Spirits of the intellect for the world wide web!) As someone with a curious mind, who needs to find out things, like what that actor’s name was who played on some program I saw years ago, that I saw on last night’s program; I was able to find out before I went to bed. Mystery solved. Of course, I find out much more important information, but I am amazed by how often it is something trivial that in my pre-computer days would have driven me crazy for several days until I could track it down. But most of the time, I find out things that matter to me, things that also matter to you. All of this access to information makes us able to find people and groups that are of our mindsets; people we might prefer to associate with more than those we may have been reared to see as our natural associates. In other words, we have more information, which aids us as we discover that we have more choices. Further, because we don’t live in the same little towns where we are expected to conform to our family traditions, we don’t deal with the same stigma people did in generations past. All of this has helped to advance the changes in religions; changes that are both good and bad. We know for instance, that recruiting for many of the terrorist groups, and for all manner of anti-social networks, has increased with the advent of the Internet. This is clearly and example of my favorite adage from Lao Tse, founder of Taoism that: Every front has a back. Religions change because the cultural environment changes; and the changes began to happen faster as more literacy and the media advanced. This process has been speeding up each century since the 1500s and with amazing speed. I cannot imagine what the next century will look like in this regard. It is difficult for me to imagine that information could get any faster or more accessible; but, then, my grandparents would have said the same of radio, telephones, print media, and libraries. Our own Unitarian Universalism also changes. Prior to 1961, we were two separate religions: Unitarians and Universalists. We have gone through phases of increasing liberalism, to the current reawakening of a need for a broader spirituality in our services than just a stout humanistic framework. We have added and subtracted as the people dictated through our General Assembly process, where our associated congregations have decide over a multi-year process to make changes; like the addition of the Principles in 1984--a rather long and drawn out process of change in this instance. I could mention others, but the principle point is that religions do not stay the same where society, culture changes. In Toby Lester’s writing, he points out that there has been a myth of secularization in this country, primarily by religious conservatives, but the data simply don’t support this contention. There are more religions in this country now that at any time prior; over five-hundred sects of Protestantism alone. Any hope that some people may have for the end of organized religion is folly. People want, people need religion; what they don’t need is to be told that there is only one way to be religious. Religion is one need that I don’t think will go away; but I believe the need will continue to evolve. One reason I don’t think religion is likely to go away, is that people need to have a way, a mechanism, a process for lifting up the great events of our lives, a way to have community with like-minded folk, a way to do that important seeking for truth and meaning in our lives. I often get calls from people outside our membership to do weddings, funerals, memorials, and such; people who say they have no connection with any religion. Now why would you seek out a minister for a wedding or funeral since you absolutely don’t have to have one for either event. You can go to the county clerk and get married; you can have the funeral home provide the place and have a secular service. Yet, overwhelmingly, people want religious services because we want to lift up their importance to us; importance that goes to the heart of how we find meaning in life, and attempt to find meaning in death. We need each other to do these things, as Rev. Keith Goheen of this congregation has said: we need one another, radically so. The current religious landscape has all the factors already mentioned, but none is more important to us in this country than the many religions that live cheek-by-jowl in most communities across the land. Even small towns that once may have been dominated by one religion, now have some options readily available. One option is to opt out. Many people simply opt out of religious membership, though they will seek out clergy and houses of worship when they want us; and this often does lead people back to some kind of membership. In our area there is just about everything represented in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic-Hindu-Buddhist-non-denominational strains, with some varieties of each offered. Then there are the media options, TV and Internet ministries, Church of the Larger Fellowship, which is our UU at home version for people with no UU congregation available, or those at home religionists. However, lest we assume that more religions make people more religious, as Sam Levenson, a humor writer once said: Getting inoculated with small doses of religion prevents people from catching the real thing. We cannot dismiss the all important fact of the massive increase in worldwide population, which affects all things in the world. We have currently over six and three-quarters billion people, with an anticipated nine billion by 2042 and many environmental scientists believe that is probably the peak the world can manage without dramatic changes in the way we use the world’s resources. Keep in mind that for most of human history there were less than one billion; indeed the population did not exceed one billion until around 1830. So that often ignored trickster called geometric progression is certainly being felt. And the chief surprise is that of that almost seven billion people on the earth, over half are under the age of fifteen. So there can be little doubt that far more changed in all things, including religion, is on the near horizon. One of the most oft quoted statistics among clergy is that around 30% of young people are leaving their birth religions, so the shift is well underway. For faithful Jews, we are now in the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah, from Sept.29-Oct.1 the ten Days of Awe culminating in Yom Kippur; the Jewish New Year. According to the Jewish calendar this is year 5769. Of course, the religion is undoubtedly older, but this date represents the years of counting, just as 2008 represents one other way of counting first in the Christian calendar, which eventually has become the universal calendar. One’s as good as another, as long as were all on the same day/date. Still, to think how long the religion of Judaism has been in formation, and all the changes that it has experienced. Today there are several different forms of Judaism, and those forms are also a bit different depending on what part of the world they are in. Though, some within Judaism are concerned with their diminishing population. Difference within a religion is true of all religions. Unitarianism which has continued for over five hundred years in the central European area of Transylvania (medieval crossroads of Europe), now the countries of Romania and Hungary, but it remains an older world Unitarianism, with a much more Christian look than in most of America. But with recent years of interactions, the partnering with American churches, Unitarianism there is changing to look more as it does here. Yet, more reminders that religion changes as the people change. What stays the same is the human need for spiritual expression. Further, I believe that the more turmoil the world undergoes the more that need for meaning and expression increases. We know this is true, for religion thrives in troubled times. Sadly, the more fundamental and contentious forms of religion tend to thrive even more in such times. After all, it is hard to stir people to rage unless we feel fear; fear of the fundamental kinds: fear of losing jobs, homes, identity, links to our history and tradition. We Unitarian Universalists are about as reasonable a group of people you can find in a congregational setting; we believe in diplomacy, peace, tolerance and acceptance, but in general we are not a war-minded group. Having said that, if we UUs feel that the things we hold dear are being threatened, we too can become less rational, less tolerant, and less willing to abide by the ethics of our faith. Abandoning of ethics happens when survival is felt to be in jeopardy; regardless of whether it is in fact; hence, the almost seven hundred years of warring in the Balkans. Martin Marty, famed religious historian and professor emeritus from the University of Chicago, has written a great deal about the changing religious landscape in this country. Among all the changes, he has identified some that are key, stating (Speaking of Faith, Nov 2006): The biggest single event that hit this country happened in Rome, and that's the Second Vatican Council. That is, Protestantism always knew what it was because it knew what Catholicism was, and it was over against that. Suddenly, Catholicism is friendly. It moves out into the public sector. The GI Bill puts Catholic young people into universities. They soon became the most educated group in the country, and Protestants were thrown off balance by that. We now take Catholics as a mainstream part of America, but this was certainly not true until well into the 19th Century; earlier Americans viewed Catholics as dangerous, which was one of the reasons for the hatred of the Irish immigrants who arrived in such numbers in the mid-1800s. For the independent, Protestants, with our congregational polity, our freedom was seen in jeopardy from the heavy hand of the Pope’s absolute authority. John F. Kennedy had to go to great pains to distance himself from his religion back in late 1950s and in the 1960 election; contrast that with what has happened in the forty years since then, when we practically have a national faith test in order to get to be president. I fully expect this to reverse itself in the next forty years. When Martin Marty was asked what had surprised him among all these changes religious environment, he said: [I] didn't foresee three huge things: One, the explosion of evangelicalisms; number two, the highly individualized spirituality [which developed], the people who are on a spiritual search but they're doing it at the coffee shop, at the mega bookstore, or they're doing it in a little chanting group, and they're not doing it in the churches. That's certainly a force I hadn't foreseen. And then I think the vitality that has come with the new pluralism, and that's because I did a lot of writing before 1965 when the immigration laws changed. We should not be surprised ourselves with these rapid changes when even those scholars like Martin Marty who have studied the subject for decades find themselves equally surprised. The world is in flux. This is true, and undoubtedly a more rapidly felt period of flux with the expansion of the 24/7 media outlets from cable news to the Internet. Additionally, not just news and information are more available, but you can get the any flavor you want. So, if a person is disgruntled, unhappy, mentally ill, or just seeking, the options are wider (and often shallower) than ever. All of this makes it increasingly importance that there are more balanced, rational, loving religions available, speaking out against the intolerance and injustice in the world. We UUs are more important now that at any time before in history, for we do make the effort towards fair and balanced views. For each of us, too, we need the comfort and security of knowing that while the world is ever changing, that one thing lives that does not change, and that is love. Love keeps us sane, able to work together, willing to try other ways of solving life’s perpetual problems, a love which is not to be undervalued. For, it is only this love of self and others that sets us on a course to peace and justice in the world. Only love makes that which is good and wholesome in the world; love, in all its manifold forms, from basic politeness through great passion to respect, which is the highest form of love does indeed make the world go ‘round, and keep going forward into that unknown future which we hope and pray will be ever more civilized, ever more peaceful, ever more open to all that is meaningful of the spirit and the mind.
October 5, 2008 AA: The Value of a Higher Power Today’s sermon is brought to you by the generosity of Matt Nolan who bought a sermon topic at our last service auction. The winner of the bid gets to have me do the research, writing, and preach on the subject of his or her choice. So keep in mind that you can also have your own personal researcher/writer when this is offered at our next auction in February. I must say that of all the sermons I have prepared, I found this one the most challenging. To read the extraordinarily powerful witnessing of the men and women, young and old, who have struggled with addiction brought tears to my eyes several times. In part, no doubt, because members of my larger family have also been touched by what many see as the “demon” of alcohol and drugs. I do separate alcohol and drugs; for, like most who write about addiction, I too am wont to talk about this larger realm of substance abuse separating illegal drugs and legal alcohol. This is in fact an important distinction in terms of legal consequences, but as those who are in prison for driving while under the influence of alcohol can tell you, alcohol does meet the law all too often. These days there are few who are not familiar with the wonderful work of Alcoholics Anonymous, begun back in 1934 when a businessman and a doctor, both of whom struggled with alcohol addiction, met, offered support to one another, and together founded this anonymous support system that has grown to be a worldwide organization. But it was, according to Bill Wilson the principle in founding and promoting AA, the article written in 1941, by Jack Alexander, a well known journalist, who wrote the piece for the Saturday Evening Post, a popular magazine that graced millions of American homes for several decades; it was this article that put AA into the hearts and minds of millions who were desperate for help. As Alexander related, he had heard about the young movement and began some intense research to learn more about it. He was skeptical at first, but over the course of his weeks of research, he was educated to the reality of the serious problems of alcohol addiction. Keep in mind, that this was not long after the repeal of Prohibition; alcohol was flowing freely. This was the era of Nick and Nora Charles (of the Thin Man movies), martini glasses always in hand. The beginning of the three-martini-lunch, that was still prevalent when I was coming of age in the 1960s. Many people viewed alcoholism as a merely a spiritual/psychological weakness not the physical disease we understand it to be today. Alexander, having seen the power of this support organization (again something that had not existed before),wrote this article which generated so much interest that over six-thousand letters deluged the Post within the following weeks. Letters from alcoholic men and women and family members of alcoholics, hoping beyond hope to find a meeting they might attend. This landmark article, the founders credited with really spreading the word of Alcoholics Anonymous movement began as follows: Three men sat around the bed of an alcoholic patient in the psychopathic ward of Philadelphia General Hospital one afternoon a few weeks ago. The man in the bed, who was a complete stranger to them, had the drawn and slightly stupid look the inebriates get while being defogged after a bender. The only thing that was noteworthy about the callers, except for the obvious contrast between their well-groomed appearances and that of the patient, was the fact that each had been through the defogging process many times himself. They were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, a band of ex-problem drinkers who make an avocation of helping other alcoholics to beat the liquor habit.
In these days of support groups for virtually every kind of condition or disease, we tend to forget that back in the 1930s-40s, any such admission of need was, if not dangerous, unwise. The ability to go for support without having to say who you were, where you came from, what you did (like Dr. Bob, the surgeon), where you could stand up and share your story, and find support with all who knew you on the level of alcoholism was then a rare gift. From that beginning, AA has been responsible for saving literally hundreds of thousands of lives. And equally important, AA has made it acceptable to own the disease, to reach out to help those who need help, and over the years to reach out with related groups like Al-Anon for families of alcoholics. A classic proof that information, support, a place to turn to, are far superior to the silence, shame, and ignorance of generations past. Religion initially condemned people for addictions, some still do. But, it was not long before the proof of AA's methods made group support believers out of religious believers. Nowadays, many, if not most, AA groups meet in religious facilities. The key to the success of AA for many is the now famous 12-Step plan, the central feature of which is to recognize that one is powerless when it comes to drinking, and to turn to a higher power in order to find strength. This “higher power” was not defined, which made it accessible to millions more than if it had been delineated within a Protestant Christian context, as it might have been. With great insight, the founders moved from the word God, to God as we understand him, or Higher Power, so that those who had different religious beliefs, or no religious beliefs, could define that higher power for themselves. Higher power could mean love, source, strength of community, anything that a person could relate to that was larger than oneself. Now AA does not work for everyone, sometimes it has to do with this issue of a higher power, sometimes it is the religious feel that some take from some AA meetings; it is hard to generalize about AA, for like UUism, groups tend to take on their own character. Matt also wanted me to address the impact AA has had on our Unitarian Universalism, which I believe is important. In the early days, it was true that occasionally a Unitarian church was welcoming to an AA group, but not always, especially during the rise of humanism/atheism in our congregations in the 50s and 60s, since AA seemed too theistic for many Unitarians. Despite the fact that we have been at the forefront of promoting healthy mind-body thoughts and behaviors, talking openly about addictions has not come easily for many in our wider Unitarian Universalist congregations. Even today, not all UUs or all UU communities are welcoming to the AA philosophy or AA groups. But this has been changing in the past couple of decades. One Unitarian, the popular writer Kurt Vonnegut, certainly helped in promoting AA, for he stated (I think this was in the late 60s), that there were three great American inventions: the Bill of Rights, Robert's Rules of Order (often referred to as the UU holy book), and Alcoholics Anonymous. In more recent years, we have seen a growing move towards addiction ministries, not surprisingly, a UU minister who is (remember there is not was) an alcoholic, has been central in this move. The Rev. Dennis Meacham was featured in a UU World articles in 2000, 2004, and again in this fall’s issue. Prior to Meacham’s midlife entry into the ministry, as writer Michelle Deakins wrote: [Meacham] was a successful man of business, founder of his own publishing company. He was a college professor with degrees from Princeton and Harvard. And he was an alcoholic, struggling with a compulsion to drink around the clock. He couldn't leave his house without a drink. He was plagued by night sweats. He found himself in bars at 8:30 in the morning to fortify himself for the day's work. After an emergency stay in a detox center, Meacham turned to AA, and to his UU faith, hoping to bring the two closer; to help UU communities appreciate the ministry of helping those who struggle with addictions. Meacham wrote a book that most of us in the UU ministry have a copy of, entitled, The Addiction Ministry Handbook: A Guide for Faith Communities, published by our UUA's Skinner House Books. The movement towards greater work both in-house and for outreach, has been expanding since. Meacham, who at the time was a member of the First Unitarian Church in West Newton, MA, where I did my two year internship, found that the church did not offer him what he was able to find in AA, despite the fact that churches see addictions of all kinds as having spiritual implications. Nevertheless, Meacham went on to become a UU minister and has been central in lifting up the need for our UU congregations to off addiction ministry. For Meacham, another insight about addictions had to do with medical doctors’ perceptions. He stated, in the article by Deakin: When I checked into detox, the doctor told me, “I hate people like you coming in here with all your education,” recalls Meacham, with a wry smile that hides a bit of embarrassment that still lingers despite his openness about his recovery. ‘He told me I had to get off my high horse and listen.’
According to one article I read, doctors most dislike dealing with alcoholics. In part because it seems so intractable, in part because they are biased to see it as deliberately self-destructive without seeing the genetic and sociological links that have been steadily surfacing in research on addictions. Perhaps, it is because there is really very little medicine can do, which lifts up again the issue of alcoholism as a chronic and progressive disease that requires abstinence first and foremost. The strength to abstain comes for most people through the support of groups like AA. Partly because of the Unitarians and others who did not like the perceived religiousness of Alcoholics Anonymous, other groups developed to offer support from the rationalist perspective, but none have achieved the widespread reach of AA. Groups like Rational Recovery, begun in 1986; Quad-A (AA for Atheists and Agnostics) started in 1974; Secular Sobriety established in southern California in the mid 1980s; SoberRecovery, established in 2000 out of Albert Ellis’s earlier work with SMART recovery. Other related groups also exist, and new programs continue to develop in response to those who have particular needs. As for UUs, we have in more recent years embraced the need to offer spiritual comfort, group support, and honesty in talking, indeed preaching, about the need to be open with this very real and growing problem of alcohol and drug addiction. We want to be welcoming to all who come into our UU congregations, and to be understanding of the particular challenges some of our members face. There are congregations that have chosen to not have alcoholic beverages as social gatherings, although I have heard from some alcoholics that they do not feel this should be the case, believing as they do that they must learn to live in this society where alcohol is part of the social milieu. So opinions do indeed vary. As one UU who found us from her AA experience said, the most important thing she needed was for her UU community to understand her need for God, for a higher power, to help give her the strength she needed to face each day, to stay sober each new day. This for me was one of the most powerful messages, that we remember that spiritual needs are not uniform; that we do not have just one way of believing or of practice. Even in our UU congregations, the need for some to supersede others, to have just one acceptable way of being UUs, politically and religiously, remains an ever present concern; one we UU clergy should do all in our power to prevent. Sadly, it is sometimes UU clergy who are the problem, and certainly this was true in that growing period of the humanist movement from the 30s through the 60s. I believe that today most UU clergy feel as I do, that we must be open, honest, and above all willing to listen to the different needs that exist within our communities; the spiritual, the rational, the emotional, are all part of who we are as individuals and who we are as a faith community. We have beauty, but we also have plenty of blemishes. More than ever, we need to help address and support alcoholics, as well as those suffering from other addictions. According to Dr. G. Douglas Talbott, a physician and recovering alcoholic who now heads a drug and alcohol program he began in 1988 (as related by Stanton Peele):
The old figure was 10,000,000 alcoholics. I was interested in where that figure came from and found out it was thought up one night in Washington when the first alcohol support bill was presented to Congress... and that figure got frozen into literature. It is way beyond that now, and, as far as we are concerned, 22 million people have an alcohol problem related to the disease of alcoholism.
Twenty-two millions people in this country, with millions more around the world. Iceland and Russia are two countries with the highest rates of alcoholism, with the problem spreading to developing countries. Prohibition is not the answer. We learned that back in the 1930s, for all we got from that period was the rise of gangland, Mafia groups who made a big business out of providing illegal booze, energies which are now directed to illegal drugs. Our country spends billions of dollars on drug interdiction, and while it raises millions of dollars through taxation of alcohol and cigarettes, we spend a paltry amount for the treatment of substance abuse. I have heard from families on several occasions during my years in ministry that they were desperate to find programs they could afford. So little is available, and very little is paid for by insurance. We would be so much better off if we put most of that money into rehabilitation. I believe this wholeheartedly. We know that for many reasons, genetics being a major part, that many people will get addicted to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, food, and even sex, to name the main culprits; but we, as a nation, spend almost nothing to help people who suffer with these addictions. As a nation we still have a strong Puritan, moralist streak that says, “It’s all your own fault.” Or “Just pull yourself together.” Or “Just say no.” This last is the silliest of all. Addictions relate to our basic biology of survival; a system that developed in the limbic system which drives people to feed that part of the brain. All addictions feed the same part of the brain, that feel-good center that relates to our survival. A part of the brain that developed over millions of years, and until the last few hundred years did not contend with plenty of anything. Now, plenty is with us in the west, and in great abundance; and, for a small percentage of people, that once advantageous limbic response creates great suffering. Addictions are not psychological weakness; they are first and foremost a former biological strength. In fact, milk has addictive qualities developed by nature to insure that infants would nurse. Prior to modern bottle feeding, many children died because they could not nurse adequately. One of my granddaughters had problems with nursing, and had to be bottle fed; so, she too would have died just a few short centuries ago. But it is still hard to sell our upright and righteous populace with the fact that biology is the cause, that secrecy and shame are not the best methods of dealing with the problems, or that the law is the best way to prevent addictions. The truth is often neither palatable, nor desired. Yet, accepting this reality is the first and only path to healing for those who struggle with addictions: information, honesty, and support are the keys. Alcoholics Anonymous addressed that group support was central to overcoming the terrible cravings for alcohol. To be able to call a friend who understood could make the difference between getting through the night, or caving into the desire for just one drink, which of course becomes just one more and yet another until inebriation. The Rev. Roger Fritts wrote of talking to some members about addiction: I think for example of the man who told me that "AA was a group of drunks who got religion." He died four years later, at the age of 42 of alcohol abuse. I think of the couple in that church who regularly smoked marijuana. They resisted my suggestion that they might want to look into a twelve-step program. Too much fundamentalist religion they told me. Ten years later their teenage son died in an auto accident while high on drugs. Probably everyone in this congregation is close enough to a story of addiction to know that resistance to the reality of addiction is futile; ignoring the problem does not make it go away. UU congregations are slowly but surely moving towards a greater ministry for those with addictions. There are now around 128 churches with such addiction ministries, according to the current UU World, with others in the works. More and more people like the Rev. Meacham, clergy and laity alike, are trying to get the word out that we have a mission that includes helping those who daily face the challenges of addictions, those who exist in every single church, fellowship, society, meeting of UUs. Our Principles are our guide; to treat others with respect and dignity, no matter that sometimes we all lose our dignity to something that, like a higher power, can feel greater than ourselves. I have a colleague who is a Army Reserve chaplain who gave up alcohol for a year to experience the impact that was all around him. He was not, is not, an alcoholic, but he wanted to understand, for as you may know soldiers are particularly vulnerable to addictions as they often self-medicate their stress from the conditions of war. The struggle for him as a non-alcoholic, indeed a relatively light drinker, were surprising. His found his empathy was greatly increased. I felt moved by this experiment and have decided I will also take the pledge to stay away from all alcohol for the next year. Who doesn’t need an extra dose of empathy? We all can learn to love more and better. This is what we can do for those who must face this for themselves or someone they love. We all can learn to love more, and to love better. To that end can we all say, Amen. *** October 12, 2007
Real and Emotional Discovery
This past week truly has been a week of frightening changes in the financial market here in the U.S.; leading to further reactions throughout the business world, which now is undeniably an economy that is connected around the world. We saw that a domino effect occurred creating what every major institution now recognizes as the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s so named Great Depression. There can be little doubt after this past weeks of reactions to the steep drop in the stock market that we are in fact an interconnected and interdependent global economy. What happens in one major market affects everyone around the world. How far the world has come since the year 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. A time when few people even knew that the world was round, a time when few were impacted much beyond their own small villages. I don’t know if children still learn this date with its helpful memory aid, but for my generation, all of us know: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Millions of children learned this phrase, this mnemonic devise, but in fact there is good archeological and literary-historical evidence that while in itself its is true, it does not signal as it did for many generations of Americans that Columbus discovered America. In fact, he didn’t set foot on the mainland of this country. As is now known, in the late 10th Century the Viking Leif Erickson landed somewhere in the region of Labrador and went down the coast to Nova Scotia. There is also reference in the ancient record to a Norwegian Viking by the name of Bjarni Herjolfsson who was in area of modern Nova Scotia in 986; perhaps at the same time as Leif Erickson. Of course, what is just as often forgotten is that there were already people here; nations of tribal peoples, some with very sophisticated systems of agriculture, religion, and governance, comparable with those found in Europe. Historian-writer Tony Horowitz, who has a new book out titled A Journey Long and Strange, states that some of the Spanish conquerors like Coronado, Desoto and others, who traveled to this new world, found cities like Mexico City, where there was as much “civilization” as to be found in most of Europe. And, as to who was here first, the historical record shows that Spanish conquistadors traveled as far inland as modern Kansas well before the Puritan Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. Indeed, even the non-puritan English got to Jamestown in 1606; so there were many people who had been to these shores before Columbus and the Puritans who tend to get all the credit. The tradition of people getting credit for discoveries that they did not make is a long one. Like the operating system we now know as Windows was not invented by Bill Gates, rather it was Douglas Engelbart and Tim Paterson who wrote the first versions of it, but it was Gates who made into the most used, best known, computer operating system. Further, Douglas Engelbart had been on the trail as early as 1964; he also invented and named the computer mouse we so take for granted. But how many people know of Doug Engelbart or Tim Paterson? Similarly, Galileo gets credit for inventing the telescope, invented by Dutchman Hans Lippershey. Sir Alexander Fleming is credited for discovering penicillin in the 192os, though he really rediscovered the substance; for it was known in 1896, that a French medical student named Ernest Duchesne originally discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillium, but he did not report the connection between the fungus and a substance that had antibacterial properties, so penicillium was forgotten in the scientific community until Fleming’s rediscovery. More surprising is that Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone, rather it was the Italian inventor Antonio Meucci, who developed at least thirty different models of telephone between 1850-1862. Sadly, he was too poor to pay for the patent which would have cost him on the order of $250 in modern dollars. Similarly, Thomas Edison didn’t discover the light bulb, invented by German Heinrich Gobel, though he made it better; and Edison also got credit for a number of inventions by Serbian inventor NikolaTesla. So who gets credit is sometimes more important than who actually was first on the mark, or at least that used to be the case; modern access to records and modern methods of documentation have made it far more likely that credit will go where credit is due. Though the money may not necessarily go to the same direction. Part of the difference between this notion of the real versus known discoverers, has to do variously with simple finance, circumstances of the times, luck of the draw, serendipity. What is interesting to me is the truth of that the old adage: History is told by the winners. But let us consider why this is so. The Puritan pilgrims who landed at Plymouth many decades after other Europeans first found these shores--even if they had known of these discoverers, which is unlikely, even if they had know of the English settlers at Jamestown which is also very likely--were focused on their own journey of discovery. The writers of that epic journey to the new world, like Governors Bradford and Winthrop, were focused on their own challenges and struggles and successes. They were not concerned with any other groups; just their own great new world of religious nation building. They talked about this new land to which they came as the shining city on a hill, a Biblical reference from Matthew in the Christian New Testament, a reference to a new Jerusalem; they saw themselves creating a puritan ideal of religious community; a theocracy based on Calvinist principles. That was their focus, their concern, their interest. Our modernist notions of historical accuracy would have made no sense to people of that era. Each nation, each country, writes the history that best serves it, which reflects that nation’s ideals, intentions, and of course and always; that nation’s desire for strength, wealth, and power. Both Emerson and William James have reflected for me that the larger world is merely the self enlarged. That is, what we see in the individual, we see in the family, we see in the community, we see in the world. The macro reflects the micro. Consider how families function to tell the history and accomplishments of the family: what gets lifted up and enlarged, what gets put aside, ignored, not discussed until it is no longer remembered? I know I have seen in my family this tendency to made events both better and worse than they were. For instance, if someone has some success it rubs off on the rest of the family, and we tell those stories, often placing ourselves closer to the action than is warranted by fact. Or, if we experienced a great tragedy, like the Great Blizzard of ’54, it grows darker and deeper, and our salvation all the greater in the process. No doubt this happens as a way of carrying the important stories forward so that we learn from them. In the ancient days which constitute most of our human history, this was the only way to learn. So the best storytelling cultures did better, they learned from past mistakes, figured out how to avoid certain kinds of disasters, and so on. So our ability to tell stories, to create great sagas and myths of our family journeys, enabled peoples of the world to survive and thrive. We have not lost that mythmaking ability. I grew up hearing about the Great Depression as did most of my generation; which made our parents as a group tend to be frugal and not so trusting of banks and government as my generation would become. Yet, many people of that time did not suffer unduly. I remember asking one my relatives about her experience of the Depression, and she said that she didn’t feel her family, our larger family, truly did suffer much. Not like the people who lived in the East, in cities of the Industrial areas, for as farmers, fruit-growers, dairymen, our family did not go hungry. True there was not a lot of money going around, but then there hadn’t been before either. Or take the 1918 Spanish Influenza Epidemic, in fact a pandemic, that killed 50-100 millions of people worldwide. A woman was being interviewed on a public radio program a few weeks ago who is 102 year-old, and still very active in the New York City Academy of Lifelong Learning where she still teaches occasionally. The interviewer asked her about the 1918 flu epidemic, and she said she did not recall it impacting her family or the people she knew. What was not said was that such epidemics don’t touch all people equally. This woman was from a very well-to-do family, living in the prosperous 5th Avenue neighborhood area. Such epidemics always impact the poorer people far more who live cheek-by-jowl in overcrowded conditions. Yet, when people of that time talked about 1918, it was as if every single person had suffered some direct impact. This is the same for 9/11/01, for those in the Gulf coast regions where Hurricane Katrina struck, and so on. What we lift up is the greatest impact of fortune, fame, and tragedy. As we look to our own individual stories we may find a similar pattern, that we look back to the good times and give them greater merit, and to the tragic as having been more, as well. I believe that this has nothing to do with human honesty but more to do with human survival. But the way we come to emotional or spiritual discovery has a lot to do with how much we are willing to look within to learn from what we have been able to survive; to learn how we have grown, prospered, developed into stronger, happier, and better people. Right now many people are feeling a great deal of fear as the economy slides closer to deep recession and possibly another depression. Some are staying calm, even as they lose jobs, see their retirement accounts losing ground, for they believe that with the government interventions that are being put in place around the globe that we will begin to emerge from this dark place and once again see a healthy economy. Indeed, many believe that the economy will be far healthier for this much needed readjustment. On the other hand, many are panicking, fearful of losing all they have. My daughter who was down visiting for the weekend, said that one of her husband’s elderly relatives called her stockbroker this past week and told him to sell everything, despite the fact that all the best financial advice is to do nothing for the time being. It is this fearful reaction that has caused the markets to keep falling. Confidence in the markets is shaken, and for many, it is get-what-you-can-now, and not worry about the future. Yet, the market will not improve until people do have faith that the future will be better. At the personal level, we witness the same kind of thinking. Some people have faith in the future, that our capitalist system goes through these periods of readjustment fairly regularly, and keeps bouncing back even stronger; and will again this time. As a student of history, I am firmly of this camp. Roosevelt was absolutely correct in telling the people, as he took office during the Great Depression, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear is the only thing we have to fear, for fear takes away our common sense; takes away our ability to reason. It’s been said over and over and by many wise people that fear makes idiots of us all. We define as chief among the characteristics of a good leader, the ability to keep a clear head while others are panicking. Most of us have felt panic at some point, have felt fear to the degree we had trouble functioning in the moment, and most times we look back to see that moment as not nearly as fearful as it seemed at the time. I remember once, not long after we were married, when my husband Tom and I were flying in his small plane. We had just taken off from the Charleston airport, and the door next to me popped open. I immediately panicked. I had very little experience of small aircraft; and probably from too many movies, but I was afraid I’d get sucked out of the plane. Tom told me to just push out the door and then pull it shut; but I couldn’t do it. He got very impatient with me which made me get more fearful, finally totally exasperated, he called the tower got permission to land, landed, shut the door and was off again in two minutes. As he explained, the force of the wind pushes on the door, and there was no way I would get sucked out the airplane. But in that moment I could not see that, feel that, or know that; all the laws of physic notwithstanding. Only afterwards, with my reason functioning again, could I see how foolish I was. One of the marks of wisdom is that we have learned to trust the lessons of science and history and faith; age helps with this too. When I was a child I was terrified of the dark, and believe me rural Idaho can be very dark on a moonless night. My father had little patience with my fear, trying to tell me that I was in fact safer when any creature could not see me as easily, but I didn’t care. I thought then that I would always be afraid of the dark, but nowadays I stay late in this church, often walk around it in the dark late or very early as on Sunday mornings, and feel completely safe. My experience has taught me that my father was right. Emotional discovery usually comes to us in bits and pieces, and sometimes in larger bits as we go through difficult times. This can happen incidentally; that is, as a result of our experiences. But emotional discovery can happen faster, I believe with greater results or impact when we are deliberate in exploring why we do what we do. That is part of what makes our Sunday religion experience so valuable; that we, you and I, lift up what there is to learn from the great richness of life’s experiences. Especially the ones we would never wish for, never ask to experience on purpose. But as I have heard from, by now hundreds of people, the greatest periods of personal growth and learning do come from the greatest periods of stress, anxiety, even fear. Beloved, we are certainly in a time that tests men’s and women’s souls; we have reasons aplenty for anxiety. Jobs are being lost, homes foreclosed, resources diminished; these are all fearful experiences. Yet, I know if we can remain calm, if we can have faith in ourselves, talk to our leaders in the ways open to us, and in general remain thoughtful; that this too shall pass. The worst that can happen to us is rarely related to our financial well-being. The worst thing is to lose those we love; and to lose our sense of self. We can always deal with the material, but it is only with emotional discovery of our inner strength and wealth, that we deal with the real losses we all must experience. No amount of money or position could ameliorate suffering or replace our loved ones, and it is this understanding that is the greatest discovery in the emotional landscape. Bill Gates said at a last year’s Harvard commencement address (lest anyone has forgotten, Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue his computer dreams), that discovery does have its place, then said:
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
What we do with what we discover, for ourselves and others, is what really matters. In these fearful economic times, let us remain calm and caring; and, as always, let us love one another. Once we understand this as what is most important, who gets the blame or who credit for our difficulties and discoveries becomes far less important to us; because we understand that the real wealth of our lives exists in those we love who love us. *** October 19, 2008
Bogeys and Boogeymen: Real and Otherwise
The story of Jacob in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament tells of two events. One is that Jacob effectively steals his brother Esau’s birthright with the help of his mother, by tricking his nearly blind, aged father into giving him Esau's blessing. The blessing translates into the rights of property of the first born son. The brother Esau leaves to make his way elsewhere, but some fourteen years later is returning. Jacob naturally fears meeting his brother, who was the big, strong, hairy man as we are told. So it is before this event, this meeting, that we read the more famous story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. (From which we get the song Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.) This wrestling with an angel is an interesting interpretation, reflecting more the work of later translators, for the Hebrew does not say he is wrestling with an angel; indeed Jacob is wrestling with God. A more modern interpretation might be that Jacob was wrestling with himself, his own conscience. Jack Miles, in his book God, a Biography, writes:
The identity of Jacob's opponent has been inferred from the fact that at the end of their wrestling, Jacob's opponent blesses him: "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men [or gods and men] and have prevailed" (Genesis 32:28). Who but God could give such a blessing?
Some theologians and philosophers, such as Mircea Eliade, interpret this scene as the intrusion of the sacred into the profane world. Jacob sees in his dream a ladder reaching up into heaven, and sees angels on the ladder, but God is standing beside him, saying to him that he will be blessed in establishing his claim on the land he took from his brother. The upshot is that Jacob sends gifts to his brother, they reconcile, and Jacob, now named Israel, and Esau both prosper. The other story I offered you in the reading was from the ancient Celtic religion which was dominant from the northwestern shores of modern France, in Brittany, through England and Ireland, all the land of the ancient Britons. This was the source of the Druid religion that gave us Stonehenge, among other religious sites. From this religion we have similar stories of dreams and encounters with another world, space, time; these are all potent in this religion and parallel the ancient Hebrew religion, though divided by thousands of miles. For theologians, the significance is less in the actual tales, and more in the root of these stories, myths, and legends. All of these stories touch on movement between two worlds, that of the dream world, which was in those days considered indeed another world, and the so-called real world. Real being always in question. As pointed out in ancient Chinese philosophy, from the Chuang Tzu story Am I:
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
All of which brings me to this season of holidays that begins with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that ends with Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, but for most people in the west begins with Halloween, and runs into the western New Year. Halloween, a contraction of All Hallows Evening (e’en), is the evening before All Saints Day in the Christian calendar; though Halloween actually came from the Celtic time before the Christians. This period, a transitional time in the seasons between the autumn and winter, was a time traditionally when it was believed that the evil spirits were abroad in the land. The tradition held that the evil spirits where somehow kept in check in the other or netherworld until the darkness extended into the real world as days got shorter, so that this period of the autumnal equinox created a kind of portal during this one night when the spirits might intrude into the real world. Halloween, then, can be understood as having that deep spirit/soul level meaning that is about confronting fears of the unknown; a way of showing that fear which has a deep spiritual purpose we often are not able to appreciate, even with the intellect or reason. The origin of our modern dressing up in costumes, of mask-making, was about tricking the evil spirits, making them think you were one of them, and getting them to pass over you to go look for another poor innocent to harass. That tricking of the spirits evolved into our modern trick-or-treat candy explosion. When I taught elementary school, children got much more into the spirit of Halloween that any other holiday. Halloween also used to be one holiday that was deemed so secular as to feel safe to most schools always wary of the religion problem. But in recent years, some among the Christian fundamentalists have decided Halloween is about devil worship, so it too has been retooled for the times. I guess we can see this as just another step in the same process that took the early All Hallows Evening to Halloween. The spiritual and the real worlds are increasing more distinct to modern people, for we understand far better that the dream world resides inside our heads and not in some heaven above or hell below. Modern medicine, science, in fact all that seems to constitute our world, has made the world far less mysterious than it was even a couple hundred years ago. So imagine the world, if you can, as it was five thousand years ago. The world at night, especially a moonless night, was far darker than we experience. We have so much ambient light that to get free of it astronomers have had observatories built in the most remote places like in the mountains of New Mexico or the Peruvian Andes. Even rural Idaho of my youth had far less of this extraneous light than here; it was very dark on winter’s night. And, by comparison, the moons of September through December appear the brightest. It takes very little imagination to see how the world could look and feel much spookier (a term that indicates that older age), far scarier than the world seems today. In those days, especially in the areas of the Celts, there was lots of wet marshy land, that had firm land interspersed with peat bogs that can be like quick-sand in spots. People did get sucked into these occasionally, and drown. In recent years we have heard much of the finding of bodies of two or three such people, and, in at least one case, it is believed that the man was a sacrifice. Perhaps an offering to the Bogeyman. So, couple the frightening nature of these bogs with the will ‘o the wisp, a kind of ghostly light that is seen in marshes and bogs, and we can understand their fear. Today we know that these lights come from escaping methane gas. (Peat was used for fuel in much of the northern world until fairly recently; it was still much in use in rural Scotland until about fifty years ago.)But none of that was understood in those ancient of days. We humans always try to find meaning; it is truly our human nature, and we apparently have been doing so since our earliest days. People have been trying to make sense of the world by creating stories which eventually became legends and myths over time, and also by creating rituals to give thanks or propitiate or acknowledge all that comes of fear, joy, and thankfulness. The idea that bogeys, or bogeyman, which was transliterated to the Boogeyman, was not such a stretch. In general, around the world, there were beliefs (by no means gone today) that such mischievous or even evil spirits existed in that dark spell between the seasons of warmth and plenty and the seasons of cold and want. There were also many human physical, mental, medical conditions that needed explaining. How did you explain disease, sudden death, or disappearance? How to explain men who seemed more like women, as the Irish tale might be attempting to do? There was so much that was not understood. And around the world, people have created different stories that attempt to explain such events. Always, there is the element of fear in common in these stories. How do you explain to small children that the marshy bogs are dangerous? Certainly, you could just say they are dangerous, but how much more vividly understood to describe and give shape to that amorphous being that could grab you and drag you into its home in the bog; to give it a name: the Boogieman. While this takes any number of forms in different cultures, the essence is the same: The Boogeyman is that which will get you if you don’t watch out. Naturally, the best stories are the ones that survive. Lest you think we have left behind all the old ways, we are still doing this same kind of meaning-making, mythmaking, story telling today. We may understand peat bogs now, but we don’t understand many other things. Like what might happen to our planet if global warming continues. I just watched a film, The Happening, that deals with the fearful mystery of this unknown. Or consider the veritable plethora, over the past fifty years and more, of science fiction stories dealing with radiation, meteors hitting the earth, or the worlds that may lie beyond this world. The ancients didn’t think so much about outer space; they did see the heavens, the stars, and moon as having some sort of godlike powers of light, but they did not understand them as galaxies with stars and planets that may hold worlds like our own. As we have explored space via telescope, and space craft flights to the moon and mars, we have learned that there are probably billions of planets; and, it has not escaped our thinking that perhaps one or many of those planets might have life, maybe like our own, or worse still something weird and fearful very much not like ourselves. Perhaps there are planets that have life far more advanced that could easily subjugate our own. We are still telling stories to explain what we don’t know or don’t understand. This is who we are, what we do. Humans need to understand our place in time and the world. What we don’t understand, we tend to fear, and, as I mentioned last week, it has been well said that fear makes fools of us all. We easily let fear erode our reason. Many of you probably heard about a student ten or so years ago, who had a display at the school science fair, with a display about a chemical that read:
• It can cause excessive sweating and vomiting. • It is a major component in acid rain. • It can cause severe burns in its gaseous state. • Accidental inhalation can kill you. • It contributes to erosion. • It decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes. • It has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients.
The student asked fifty people if they would support a ban of the chemical. Forty-three said yes, six were undecided, but only one knew that the chemical was water. The title (not displayed one assumes) of his prize winning project was "How Gullible Are We?" Gullible might be less accurate than careful. We are naturally wary of what we do not know, and tend to operate out of our experience, or more importantly out of our biology. Our fight-or-flight fear response is always far more reliable than our reason, at least initially. Even today, as our election gallops down the home stretch, people are using fear to motivate us to vote for one candidate or the other. We are afraid with good reason. The money market is in a big mess, we have costs going ever higher for food, fuel, and interest on our mortgages. People are asking themselves: Which of these two men is most likely to help us climb up out of this pit? Are we thinking or will we react? Will we be like Joe the Plumber, or Josephine the Office Administrator, or Joey the college freshman, or Joseph the banker? Reason tells those in the know, the experts, that in fact the changes won’t come solely because of Obama or McCain, but in spite of them; the facts are that the two will have more impact on how we behave in the future, what will or won’t be done as we go forward that allowed us to get in this mess in the first place. What will make the difference as much, perhaps more, will be how afraid we, the people, are and for how long. The real Boogeyman/woman is the one that lives inside our own heads and hearts. What we will or won’t believe in; how we will or won’t behave in the circumstances. What is reasonable to expect is that the efforts must come not from one person, not even from a few, but from the many. Jacob stole from his brother, and Jacob met God—we would say himself, his conscience—in his dream; and he was led to accept what he had done was ultimately for the good of the people. He was also led to seek his brother’s forgiveness, and out of both of those actions they both prospered. This is hardly a story of right overcoming might; more, it is a story of how a smart brother outwitted and cheated a more slow-witted brother; but they remained brothers still. In fact they probably did do better as a result, not of the original acts, but of that coupled with forgiveness. This is not the great story of goodness as it is often masked, but a story of how humans do indeed function with one another. A story of how the human conscience and sub-conscious work. A bogey of its own kind, is the human conscience. We now have many people metaphorically wrestling with the angel of God, as did Jacob, and deciding that forgiveness is the better course; though we may call it a bailout, or socialism, or adjustment. Perhaps here, we understand God as the Government. You and I, each of us, also copes with various bogeys in our own spirits-souls-minds. The best we can do is to recognize them, to remove their masks, to deal with them. Whatever fears we have need less the stories of fear-mongers, and more the warm light of truth, or recognition, or acceptance, or forgiveness—whatever it is that will alleviate the fear and allow us to function at our best. To that end, then, may we look within and without; lift up the bogeys real and imagined, let us share with one another those fears, and in so doing, may we support, encourage, and love one another. *** November 2, 2008 Voting Your Life, Voting for Life Tuesday is Election Day. And, it’s about time! Can I get an amen to that? Never has an election been so long, so expensive, and so fraught with fear. Billions of dollars spent for a position that pays $400,000--clearly, the race is not about the salary. It has been a tough race, amidst very tough economic times. I was reminded of a letter President Harry Truman wrote to his sister in 1947, a couple years after becoming president, wherein he described his job as follows: All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway. Perhaps things have changed since the 1940s-50s, but there is no doubt that we of this time feel a sense of the great power that has become the President of the United States of America. This is probably not a good week to try to steer clear of partisan politics; since most people are so ramped up for their choice of candidate that they are thinking and seeing more singularly than usual, especially now when we are in the last heat of the race. I, myself, will be an election judge up in Pennsylvania where I now live, and I feel an additional sense that it is indeed the process that counts as much as the candidates. I have been deeply impressed by the levels of security, the efforts that are made to insure a fair and secure process for the American voters. No doubt there will be problems if the voter turnout is as large as predicted, and no doubt there will be some glitches; but in the main, I think the process will be good in most places despite the fears that people have left over from the “hanging chad” days. We of this faith believe in the democratic process. We are often reminded that Unitarian Universalists are people of liberal faith. Meaning that we are open to questioning, that we view faith and spiritual practice as personal, not something to be dictated by the minister or religion. We prefer that your beliefs come out of your felt experience, your knowledge, your connections with the world around you. We say, expound even, that we value diversity, and value the individual as well as the group. We believe that we ought to interact with others out of respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Further, our Seven Principles go even go to a higher level for they begin with the words that we affirm and promote the principle that every person does have inherent worth and deserves respect. That this is where we begin in our interactions with others. None of which ignores that some people must be removed from society for the protection of the people; but, even so, most people find abuse, torture, demeaning or humiliating treatment unacceptable to a civilized people, to a civilized nation. Certainly we believe that we are to be respectful of religious differences. UUs will not disagree on the substance of this proposition of what it means to be liberally religious, to be tolerant, even accepting, of difference. But when it comes to politics, we sometimes forget this first among principles. To be liberal in religion, to be progressive and open in matters of faith, is all too often construed as liberal in all things; a misunderstanding that can be hurtful to members of our congregations. In this, and in most UU congregations, we have people who fall into a spectrum of both religious and political beliefs. Not so wide as is represented in the wider population or in the wider electorate, but a spectrum nonetheless. We do not all see the world exactly the same way. Spiritually, there are people in this congregation with a deep sense of God, the holy, who believe that God works in their lives; they sit next to people who have no sense of this, but perhaps have a deep reverence for nature and holiness in the workings of the universe; and that person sits next to someone who sees spirituality as a word that comes out the mouths of ministers and people who like to dance around the Yule fire at the winter solstice, a spirituality that is not for them. We seem quite happy to live with and respect this religious diversity of belief and practice. We are also warmly open to people of different sexual orientations, different colors, and different abilities. Though I would say also that we have a spectrum of tolerance with some people more open to some things than others; still, in the main, this and most Unitarian Universalist congregations are blessed with open, friendly, accepting members who are trying sincerely to live good lives. A beautiful state of being indeed. But when it comes to politics, we can develop a blind side. We tend to believe that liberal religion automatically means liberal politics. But I know and hope you know that this is simply not true. Not true here, not true most of the time. People are far more varied in their being, varied in who they are, than can be characterized by the labels we attach to others or even to ourselves. For example, I say that I am a religious liberal, but there are rites and rituals with which I would personally not be comfortable; I say that I am politically liberal, but I am not as liberal on some things as I am on others. In fact, I am conservative about some things, like the health and welfare of children. See, even the use of terms like liberal and conservative give us problems. I know people in this congregation who are card-carrying Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Greens; we are, if you will, a rainbow of political beliefs. Most of us are more moderate than exclusively liberal or conservative, which mirrors the nation. Study after study for the last fifty years shows that most people are centrists; not so polarized as we are often be led to believe. The fact is that people can and do differ about politics, even as we differ about matters of faith. People of good will, good heart, with a sincere desire to choose the best for this country can see the problems of our nation through different lenses. To say that a person of a different political party is less patriotic, or less American, or less proud or hopeful or caring, is simply wrong. And such allegations are a disservice to our national unity. We all love our country, and hope for the best for the people of this nation. The Rev. Forrest Church of All Souls UU Church in Manhattan, is the son of the beloved Senator Frank Church of my home state of Idaho; Senator Church was a Democrat who served an overwhelmingly Republican state for decades. No doubt Rev. Forrest Church understands the political realm better than most clergy, and has written a couple of books on religion and American history. Sadly he is dying of cancer. He wrote regarding the challenges of this 2008 election, stating: Only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln faced as great a challenge. The former met it by making the founders’ dreams come true, the later, over four long years, by ending slavery. Our next president will face a challenge less great perhaps than these, but greater than any we have faced in recent decades. He must rise to the occasion and we must rise with him. If he fails to rise, it is our responsibility to present not a partisan but a patriotic demand that he and the congress put aside their base-pleasing talking points and act on behalf of all the American people, first, by making the hard decisions that will right our economy. And second, by conducting our foreign policy in a way that will make our nation and our allies once again proud of America at its best. Voting, beloved, is about how we view our responsibility as moral people. The issues of morality have everything to do with why people chose one party or candidate over another. For we vote who we are, we are always, as it were, voting our lives; voting for the people, the propositions, the referenda that reflect our lives, or our view of the world. You and I are always encouraged and even challenged to vote for what we think will make for the best life for ourselves and for others. We are then, in practice, voting for |