revndean

Sermons 2007-08

Rev. Nancy Dean Sermons

Sermons 2006-07

Sermons prior to 2006 at www.uusmc.org

Sermons 2007-2008

September 2, 2007

To Whom do You Owe Your Soul?

Here we are at Labor Day, generally considered the last big holiday of summer. Comic Bill Dodds said: Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day. It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.

Labor Day, was established as a legal holiday in 1894, to celebrate the social and economic achievement of America’s worker, and was the result of the efforts of the early labor union movement for worker recognition. Further, Labor Day is celebrated in most countries of the world, most often on May 1^st, May Day.

The song “Sixteen Tons” tells a great deal about the attitude of many miners toward their work, and certainly they some of the hardest laboring people in the world. A verse in the song first recorded in the early 40s by Merle Travis, says in a famous line: I owe my soul to the company store. Mining is a dirty dangerous job that, until the labor union movement forced the hand of the big mining companies, was poorly paid, with few miners who lived long lives as a result of the cave-ins in the mines, or the various ailments from airborne pollutants like coal dust. Recall that, only this past month, on August 7^th, six miners were trapped in a mine cave-in Utah, then another three died in a failed rescue attempt. There were apparently no further options for drilling, and all six original miners are presumed dead. So, mining and mining disasters are still with us, with death happening daily around the world from mining accidents.

I heard on public radio recently that in China about four hundred miners die each month, on average, due to poor conditions. According to the State Work Safety Supervision Administration [in 2006], 4,746 Chinese coal miners were killed in thousands of blasts, floods, and other accidents.

We still have our own labor concerns here in the 21^st Century, and it is easy for us to forget, or be unaware, that until the 1930-40s, people routinely worked for low pay, few if any benefits, rarely got overtime, and in general were employed at the will of the companies who had almost all the legal, governmental, and social power over workers. The laboring class had been simply that, with few expectations of any consideration. Then the burgeoning labor movement, that had its strongest roots in the mining industry at the turn of the 20^th Century, began to fight for common decency in employment conditions, primarily meaning safety and a fair wage. This correlated with the full blown force of the great industrial machine that America was in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.

Strikes became the mode of choice to force the company owners to give the laborers decent wages, to free them from the company stores, to provide for workers injured and disabled on the job, to provide for families left destitute when workers were killed on the job.

Some of the greatest American folk music comes from this turn-of-the-century struggle for economic and social justice. The labor unions were a great blessing to the common worker of this country and those in Great Britain and Europe. This is the reason that laborers of the World War II generation became much more prosperous, notably those that worked for the steel mills, and all kinds of factories, especially on the eastern seaboard and across the northern Midwest. Certainly not all laborers across the country benefited, but a model was set in place that many other organized workers would go on to employ to receive fair wages, decent working conditions, and compensation for injuries due to company negligence.

Labor unions used the music to rally the people, and that use of music to forward protest continued into the Civil Rights Movement, on to the Farm Worker Movement. That union model of non-violent protest, along with the power of folk music (including gospel), helped to lift up the plight of the working and disenfranchised people.

When employers have all the leverage, the employees suffer most of the time. Just take the example of the company store. This was an ingenious piece of capitalism. Back in the 19^th-through the first of 20^th Century, people often lived in isolated communities, with no ready transportation, the life of the workers centered around the mining town, the steel town, the textile mills, and so on. The company would set up a store to provide for the needs of their workers, and some did this fairly altruistically, but more often, they would charge high prices giving the employees no choice, and would often pay the workers in scrip that was only good at the company store. Also, credit at the store was easy, so a worker’s family could get the needed food or supplies before the worker got paid, and literally be constantly in debt to the store. So what little the company paid in wages, came right back to them through the store. Like the song says, a worker could easily feel that he owed his soul to the company store.

The closest corollary in recent times was Enron, noted for giving pension benefits in the form of Enron stock, and using the money for other things, which effectively bankrupted the pension plan, and then eventually the company which was being poorly managed. People who had worked for Enron for years, and were retired or expecting to retire within a few years, saw their retirement hopes and plans wiped away. All the direct result of dishonest, greedy, and disreputable people, who had little concern for their employees; to me a gross violation of trust and a moral failure in the company.

Compared to centuries past, few people physically labor as was common before the modern era. I put in long hours, but compared to the farming folk from which I come, I have it easy. My father, and his before him, were fruit growers; most of my wider family were either dairy farmers, fruit growers, on worked in timber. People who year around worked six or seven days a week--cows do not recognize Sunday as a day of rest--from before 6:00AM to after 6:00PM, and often many hours besides. In my wildest dreams I could never claim to work as hard as my mother who made most of our clothes, washed and ironed masses of everything including the bed linen; grew a huge garden and preserved hundreds of jars of fruits and vegetables; cooked three real meals from scratch every day, did all her own house cleaning, and still put in many hours of work for the church and community. She did not watch much television, rarely had time to herself, yet I never heard her complain about her lot. So while many of us men and women do work, and some very hard, we also have many conveniences, can buy many services, and are, in several ways that have been measured in studies, able to enjoy far more leisure than any generation before us.

I recall a story about John F. Kennedy when he was campaigning for President in 1960. As related:

Kennedy visited a West Virginia Coal mine. One of the workers there confronted him and said, "I hear you're the son of one of the wealthiest men in the country. Is that right?"

Kennedy said it was.

The miner said, "I heard you got everything you ever wanted. Is that true?"

Kennedy said, "Pretty much so."

The miner asked, "Is it true you've never done a day's work with your hands in your entire life?"

Kennedy said it was true.

The miner shook his head, saying: "Well, let me tell you this, you haven't missed a thing."

Yes, we put in long hours, we have kinds of stress that former generations did not, but most of us don’t have our entire economic well being dependent on the vagaries of the weather, with everything dependent on each year’s crop, or the whims of an employer who might or might not care about your health and safety.

By the middle of the 1900s, the condition of America’s laboring people had improved dramatically, with job security, Social Security, many social programs that were meant to ease the burdens of working people. But this security did happen without the efforts of people who cared enough to fight for their basic human rights.

Over the last thirty years, sad to say, we have been seeing a progressively worsening situation for the poor up through and now impacting dramatically the lower to middle class. The concerns of many around the immigration issue, for example, reflect a growing uncertainty about job security, fair wages, and the widening of gap between rich and poor. This is something we, as religious people, should worry about. This is a deeply spiritual problem.

Every economic treatise since Adam Smith has pointed out the need for a healthy middle class. There has never been a healthy democracy, or healthy nation, that did not have a strong middle class. There are clear warning signs that we are in danger of another worldwide Great Depression if the condition of the middle class and working poor continues to deteriorate at the current rate. This historically has happened when most of the wealth is in the hands of only a small percentage of the population. If we look at this sub-prime loan debacle, the people most seriously hurt are those on the bottom rung who were talked into adjustable rate loans they could not possibly afford when the rates change. I know a family to whom this has happened. After paying into the home for three years, the rates changed, and they lost their home.

The threat of further job losses, fewer opportunities for our college graduates, increasing numbers in the poverty range, all of this is of great concern to religions devoted to the well being of all our people. It is not just a matter of free market, or capitalism, or global politics; it is a matter for all people to be concerned with and to share that concern with our political leaders. After all, what is the purpose of government? I heard someone say a couple years ago, that government is basically a great insurance company (and service provider) with a military. That is the point of government. To care for and protect the people. People like those in New Orleans two years ago, a city still suffering the results of hurricane Katrina, and from incredibly inept government both state and federal.

Hear what Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reported this past week about the war in Iraq: A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week -- nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year. . . . And the costs are expected to increase in the coming years.

Two billion dollars a week! Let’s give that a context most of us can relate to: if you made $20,000 a week (; you would make $1,040,000 a year, and if you lived long enough to have worked for forty years, you would have made $41,600,000. In order to have made a billion dollars, you would have to work 961 years.

At the average American salary of about $40,000 a year, it would take 50,000 years to get the two billion dollars our nation is spending each week on the war in Iraq.

And according to the report in the Boston Globe, the government’s own estimates indicate the war could easily cost over a trillion dollars, double what it has cost to date.

Somehow, I don’t think most of us feel this is the best use of our hard-earned dollars paid in taxes; especially when there is real concern that we might not even get back what we paid into the Social Security system.

This is for us a deeply ethical/spiritual issue. A billion dollars a week buys a lot of health care, a lot of social services for the poor and aged, a lot of improvement to schools stagnating in many areas of the country, a lot of farm aid, a lot of environmental programs, a lot of research dollars for scientific programs, aging bridges, infrastructure at every level-- a whole lot of just about everything we need a whole lot more than we need war. In fact a billion dollars a week would pay for education, health care, basic infrastructure.

In many needy countries of the world, with great need for jobs and security, a fraction of that money would help dramatically, for it is the lack of these that causes fanaticism to rear its ugly head in the first place.

I am not sanguine that all the problems of the world can be solved by diplomacy and well-executed foreign aid programs, but I am quite sure that we would be in a much better place having spent all those billions in constructive rather than destructive ways.

My friends, tax dollars are our dollars, and we have every right to be concerned about how our money is being spent.

Your soul/spirit/heart/mind, is vested in the way you spend your life. You and I work hard not only for our own security and comfort, but for other’s, too. We are a charitable people, a charitable nation. It seems a worthy question to ask: To whom do I owe my soul? To whom do you owe your soul? Do we owe our souls, our lives, to work, to war, to corporate profiteering? Or do we owe our souls to something greater, like family, faith, and community?

There has been, and can be again, a place of moderation between all the competing interests of our modern life. But if the much lauded bottom line is not a better life for all our citizens who work and strive for a good life, then our souls may be spent poorly. Spent poorly to a company store of misplaced values and ethics; and I believe working people deserve better than that. And so our Unitarian Universalist faith teaches, and so it challenges us toward a greater moral vision for us all.

*****

September 9, 2007

Celebrating Our UU Faith

There is a poem I read this summer, called Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet, by Anne Caston, that seems to touch on the spirit of gathered community:

Here is a genial congregation,

well fed and rosy with health and appetite,

robust children in tow. They have come

and all the generations of them, to be fed,

their old ones too who are eligible now

for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age.

Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one,

heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.

Here there is good will; here peace

on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits

of the gardens of America's heartland. Here is abundance,

here is the promised

land of milk and honey, out of which

a flank of the fatted calf, thick still

on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction

over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.

Here indeed is a genial congregation, some of you do have children in tow, some are here now in multiple generations, who have gathered back to the fold of the religious life after a summer of non-or spotty attendance, but never in doubt that come the Ingathering Sunday, we would be here together, remembering our past, celebrating this moment, hoping for the future of our lives and families, and our faith.

The reasons we gather is both about our own individual spiritual journeys, but also that there is here in this place goodwill, peace, abundance, a place for blessing and being blessed, and the possibility of continuity that we all secretly hope for in our heart of hearts.

We are in many ways like all the peoples of the earth who gather in their places of worship or celebration, hoping to find a special connection, hoping also to ward off the various evils of loneliness: fear, anger, the gamut of the seven deadly, and, as someone once said, the additional eleven injurious, sins. Hoping, too, to find appreciation for shared values, but also hoping for connection in the joys and trials that touch each of our lives. Hoping also to be able to learn and grow together in an atmosphere of acceptance, where our differences of spiritual expression are not rejected or forced artificially into a box of doctrinal conformity. Expecting that everything is open to questioning, that no one has all the answers, and that we are more likely to find some semblance of truth in our seeking together, than in any fashion apart.

In the Rev. Jack Mendelsohn’s words: We are in keeping with an expanding, spiritualized universe . . . .[and we] are trying to grow an awareness of [our] true sufficiencies . . . .

Our true sufficiencies means, I think, that we recognize that the power of the spirit is not outside of us, it is in us, it is us; all of which reminds us that we need not divorce our minds from our hearts. We need both; ever more we need both, which is why I am a Unitarian Universalist. I needed a religion that allowed me to lift up my doubts, but showed me that I did not have to dismiss, demean, or deride any other person’s beliefs, or spiritual expression of belief, in order to live in a happy communion.

We have many people who grew up with UU ideals, some actually grew up UU; we also have many who grew up in a wide variety of religious traditions, but found this liberal religion more amenable to their way of being in the world.

Like most religious association ours is voluntary; no one makes us come here; further, here no one has to pretend to believe things s/he really does not. This is a place to grow spiritually, and no one is expected to come fully formed, or to grow at the same rate or in the same fashion as any other person here.

To create and sustain this congregation is a choice freely made, but sometimes we are inclined to take it for granted. To assume the congregation is all right, and that we can excuse our lack of participation. It can be easy to assume that “Someone Else” will take care of greeting newcomers, renting the building, changing the lightbulbs, washing the windows, making the newsletter or Order of Service, provide the religious education, etc, etc, etc; but that is not how it works. Further, because this is a voluntary association, we need even more to understand our role within it, that we need to take some piece as our own contribution to the well-being of UUSMC, however small or large, even down to just reasonable attendance.

A colleague from Vermont told me about this guy, Charlie, who took an active part in just about everything that was going on in his small home town, except church services. Try as she might, his wife just couldn't talk him into attending services on Sunday morning.

One Sunday, however, she broke down his resistance, and even persuaded him to greet people at the door. He hailed almost everybody by their first name, until the church was filled and the service about to begin. At the last moment a straggler appeared. Charlie shook his hand, told him how glad he was to see him in church, and expressed the hope he'd be back the following Sunday.

"I'll be back all right," the straggler assured him cheerfully, then walked down the aisle and up into the pulpit to start the services.

We put a lot of effort here into creating good programs, but we could always do more and do it all better if more people took part.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith is something very special, a gem among religions, for we are not in the business of trying to own religious truth, indeed we happily decline that position. There is no absolute truth about God, ultimate reality, faith, spirituality, worship, or anything in this universe derived by humankind.

We are always a species in transition. No doubt, for some people, religious dogmatism may simply be a way to ward of the inevitability of change, but most people of goodwill regardless of religion, or of no religion, in this era, are coming to believe, starting to see, that religion should be about love and the stuff of the human condition, not about growing holy empires.

While I certainly want to see our faith spread and grow and be available to all who want it (which in this internet age is now possible); while I care deeply for this UU faith I claimed for my life twenty-three years ago, I would not ever want us to sacrifice our foundation of religious and spiritual freedom in order to do so. For me our UU faith is parallel to our democracy; if we are wise we cannot give up the freedom of spiritual expression in order to gain some security for the movement. Remember what Benjamin Franklin said of our nascent democracy; in effect: Anyone who gives up freedom for the sake of security, deserves neither--and ultimately winds up with losing both. I might claim the New Hampshire state slogan as a worthy UU slogan: Live free or die.

As we set out upon another new congregational year together, with all the plans we have for this Unitarian Universalist Society of Mill Creek-- plans that include every one of us if they are to happen--we celebrate the strength and the glory of this voluntary association of faith. Reminded by our forebears that we do not all have to believe alike to care alike, let us work together to provide the kind of religious home we would want for our own child selves, for the children who are here, the children who will come, and for all of us.

How good it is to be together. Welcome to you all. Welcome back to members and friends returning. Welcome to the life of the spirit made visible in this place, blessed by your devotion.

*****

September 16, 2007

Optimists and Pessimists

We are now in the midst of the Jewish high holy days. Like Easter, and most Islamic holy days, Rosh Hashanah, is an event in Judaism that occurs on the lunar calendar. So this year these high holy days begin with Rosh Hashanah on Sept. 13 & 14, and end after ten days with Yom Kippur.

Like most holy days there is essentially something either positive or negative attached the origin or meaning. This seems to indicate that those responsible for the formation of most holy days (or holidays as the term in now conflated) were essentially optimists or pessimists. Which is not to say that any person, any one of us, cannot have our moments of being optimistic or pessimistic; but, as a general way of being, people tend to fall in one or the other camp. And the degree to which one might be an optimist or pessimist can vary considerably. Few of us would consider it good or healthy to be either a cock-eyed optimist, a Pollyanna who can see no down side, or the doom and gloom, Scrooge-type for whom all the world is a dark and miserable place.

Consider the Jewish high holy days as a case in point of my contention that our western world holidays show this essential positivism or negativism. For faithful Jews Rosh Hashanah begins the time of personal examination of the soul, and Jews are expected to look back and decide whom or what they may have offended or otherwise sinned against, and make an effort to redeem those wrongs. All this spiritual housecleaning is symbolized in ritual housecleaning. The ritual of blowing the ram’s horn, the shofar, signals this time of prayer and penitence. The age old belief or tradition is that this is the time when God’s Book of Life is opened, and if the good Jew has done the prayer and penitence, his or her name will be inscribed in the Book of Life for yet another year. This then is also the New Year in Judaism, for this time is about personal reflection on the past year, what wrongs or failures that a person might correct, prior to the New Year beginning in which one hopes to do better.

I see this as a very balanced understanding of human strengths and weaknesses. Note that it is one year at a time, so it has what most of us would call a realistic view of the human capacity to do what they promise themselves or God. In the main, these High Holy Days feel optimistic to me, for you know the boundaries, the expectations, and there is a sense that God is looking for the best in his people.

There is, by way of contrast, in one variety of Christian Protestantism, a theology of once-saved-always-saved, which for me seems highly unrealistic, and goes through some religious mind-bending to account for people who appear to be saved but back-slide for some reason or some period of time. Once- saved-always-saved seems entirely too optimistic a view of humankind’s ability to always resist wrongdoing.

Christmas, is highly optimistic, and despite the circumstances, theologically Easter is even more optimistic. Again, these both are about renewal, redemption, the possibility for salvation.

There are holidays that may celebrate some aspect of human success over great hardship and trial, like Hanukkah, Lent, or Thanksgiving, but it doesn’t take much time for these to lean more towards their positive aspects, often leaving out entirely the negative. However, sometimes those elements are reclaimed.

Thanksgiving is a good example. Most of us reared in this country, certainly from the 1960s and prior, learned a rather precious view of the Pilgrims feasting with the Indians, how the Indian Squanto helped the Pilgrims plant corn, and all was saved. Of course, the true story was much uglier; half of the original colony died of cold and hunger, and while they feared the Indians, they had little choice but to rely on them, and did act with kindness in that first feast, but within three years had with no compunction participated in or aided the killing of many Indians in order to claim the land. As a result of this part of the story, many native tribal people do not consider Thanksgiving a time to thank God, instead they see it as a day of mourning.

Or consider All Hallows E’en, or Halloween, the evening before All Saints Day, a time traditionally when the evil spirits were believed to be abroad in the land. The origin of mask-making was to trick the evil spirits, and get them to pass you over, and go look for another poor innocent to harass. The tricking of the spirits evolved into our trick-or-treat candy explosion which is by far most children’s favorite holiday (after any of the gift-giving ones). When I taught elementary school, children got much more into the spirit of Halloween that any other holiday. Of course, now it is one of few than is so secular as to feel safe to most schools always wary of the religion problem. Unlike my rural childhood where every year we had a full blown Christmas pageant, which is far better confined to the church these days when we acknowledge our growing pluralism.

Most traditions tend to the positive, and we are now in the high season of holidays for this country and much of the western world when we seem to gallop from holiday to holiday. And as we get further into this holiday season we begin to sense which people look at them as positivists and those who are generally irritated by all the rigmarole.

I do want distinguish my focus on optimists and pessimists from those people suffer with seasonal affective depression or those who are grieving the loss of loved ones, both of which can make for sadness during the holiday. My focus is on temperament that survives year around, and may only be exaggerated by the holiday season.

I own to an optimistic temperament, so there is no way I can talk about this subject without my own bias coloring my thinking; which is true for all of us. Further, I own to living a significant portion of my life with two self-professed pessimists, which will make an optimist far more sensitive to the issues for both optimists and pessimists.

As I always do, I turn to the experts, and here is what I find in the Handbook of Positive Psychology, I’ve taken selected passages:

Optimists are people who expect good things to happen to them; pessimists are people who expect bad things to happen to them. [and] . . . they differ in several ways that have a big impact on their lives.

The text makes clear that like virtually everything in the world, there is a range from extreme pessimists to extreme optimists, with most people falling somewhere in the middle range. Now we could have guessed that without benefit of all the research that is in this book to back up their assertions, but what we are less likely to guess, is how much pessimism affects not just mental well-being, but the physical body. There is a great deal of research that tells us that the more negatively a person approaches a problem, be it a test in school, a crises in marriage, or an illness, the less well that person will do, the poorer the outcome.

That seems clear cut for those who are on the pessimistic side of the continuum, but how an optimist learns about or experiences the negative in their lives can also be a problem, if they are not shown the positive possibilities. In other word, while pessimists seem to more readily gravitate to the negative, they might be influenced to the positive; while those who gravitate to the positive may be left in a negative place if they are given few options, or give news only in the worst-case-scenario method.

As a purely spiritual issue, as this often is for us, my experience is that being around pessimistic people can make optimists very unhappy. While pessimists may not change us optimists into pessimists--since people are not apt to change their basis psychological predisposition--living in a negative environment can definitely lower your spirits. Can make you feel out of sorts. Like those sun-loving people feel when forced to endure long, cold winters. One’s spirit becomes sluggish when faced with a constant dark cloud of negativism.

Further, not much ever happens of any forward movement by pessimists. They are convinced from the beginning that whatever is suggested will be a failure, so why bother. They are not in the main terribly creative. Again, one must be careful to distinguish those people who tend toward depression, who in fact occasionally do creative work—I think of painting, writing, music as three such areas where depressives have used the darkness of their depression creatively; and while I have no proof of this, I would expect that the creative phase in not happening during the depression, but when the depression lifts.

I do know that the good work of our faith happens out of a realistic view of the world that is not about ignoring the plight of the peoples of the world, but tackling such problems with hope, with a belief that we can do something to change our lives and the lives of others. That is certainly an optimistic world view, and optimist attitude.

Having fun is also something that seems to require a positive or optimistic outlook. If you begin with the assumption that anything you do will go wrong, then outcomes often live up to expectations.

A few weeks ago, at the end of August, we had an all-church canoe trip planned, only a handful of us showed up, since light rain showers were forecast—which says something about those of us who gathered at the canoe place in Fairfax Shopping Center for our two-hour trip down the Brandywine. Kim Anderson and I shared a canoe, and the trip started with slightly overcast, but quite pleasant weather otherwise. But about a half hour into our trip down the lovely river, it began to mist. Kim and I were hopeful it would let up, but before long the mist became rain. Not a deluge, but just a steady rain. We had planned to find a grassy bank to have our picnic lunches, and instead found shelter in some overhanging trees that kept us fairly dry, and ate our rather soggy meal in our canoes. The rain did not let up for the rest of the trip, or the rest of the day, but those of us who canoed that day had a good time. And I suspect we all will always remember that trip simply because it challenged us to look on the bright side. For me the brightest side was that the rain was warm, and we laughed together despite conditions.

Would we have had more fun if the day had been bright and sunny; probably yes, but none of us were willing to bemoan the fact that it had not. That is optimism at work.

As parents optimism is also a big asset, for raising children is a challenge, and being able to look at our children for what is good in them, always makes the experience better. I knew a woman some years ago whose child had been a very rebellious teenager, and dropped out of a couple colleges, and was not particularly motivated to get on with his life. She said to me one day, “You know, at some point you quit thinking about your child becoming some successful lawyer or scientist, and are simply grateful if they stay our jail.”

There are a few good quips about optimists and pessimists, such as comic writer Don Marquis stated: Pessimist: A person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

Another comic one-liner-- An Optimist: The guy who mails a postcard marked "Personal."

Then there is the realist comic, H. Aaron Cohl, so said: An optimist is a parent who'll let his kid borrow the new car for a date. A pessimist is one who won't. A cynic is one who did.

I don’t know that there is much we can do about basic temperament. The perceived wisdom these days is pretty much that nature and nurture are about 50% each.

Here is what I do believe we can do, which is help someone who begins to go down a negative path to see that negativism has a kind of contagion to it. Sometimes worry will cause a normally positive person to begin to look at the world fearfully and negatively. Sometime we can help the person to realize that negative thinking feeds on itself, and if we are to make good changes we need to see the good that’s possible.

Also, if you are surrounded by negative people, be aware of the contagion of the negative into your own life, even if you are an optimist. We all can quickly be brought to a level of fear that we saw all too clearly following the 9/11 tragedy in 2001.

The spirit must acknowledge the negative, but it is through a belief in the possible, the positive that we find our hope, our joy, our love, all that is good in our lives. There for I am pledged to looking for the good, thinking optimistically, and hope we all will find our path in the lifting up of others and not in the bringing down.

*****

September 23, 2007

Fear, Faith, and Fanaticism

Writer Mark Lilla in an August 19^th article in the New York Times Magazine wrote that up through the middle of the 1900s the issues that divided people were: War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national . . . .

However, as he goes on to write:

Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

If I were to begin listing the number of acts of terrorism that you and I have heard about in just the last twenty years it would take several pages of sermon text to do so. Literally, around the world, there have been many, many acts of war, terrorism and/or genocide all in an effort to control the land in question, and often using religion as a supporting motivation to enrage people to acts of truly terrible violence. Israel and Palestine, of course, are always at the top the list, but there are many others: Rwanda, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Northern Ireland, Congo, the Balkans, Liberia, Burma/Myanmar (where at this moment thousand of Buddhist monk are staging the largest protest movement in twenty years), the attack on the USS Cole, the two attacks on the World Trade Center, genocide in the Sudan, Somali Civil War, Kurdish uprisings in Iraq and Turkey, the Basque Separatists in Spain, the Tokyo subway chemical poisoning, and that is by no means more than mere highlights of long held grievances, wars, acts of terror that are often hard for us here in this western democracy to understand.

In the Christian New Testament, in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, is the saying that harkens back to the Hebrew Scriptures that says: You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.

Some thousands of years later, this is at least one Biblical bit of wisdom that has been proven true—repeatedly. Further, the reasons for all these wars have changed not one iota.

Regardless of the reasons stated by any particular group (almost always the reason stated is to establish something thought better, be it Islamic religious rule, equality, or democracy); but, religious or otherwise, war is what it was about ever since there were enough people to start getting in each other’s way. Wars, and all the heinous acts of war, are a direct result of a desire to control resources, usually meaning the land or territory. For land means power; land means wealth; land means security; land means control.

Until recently no one was fighting over either the north or south poles, because as frozen solid masses of inhospitable ice, there was not perceived to be any wealth that did not have too high a cost to obtain. Now that the polar ice-caps are melting, and oil is likely obtainable, suddenly Russia, Canada, China, and the U.S. are busy establishing their claims to that long neglected area.

In these times it seems like fanatics are coming from all directions, including from within our own borders. Lest we forget Jim Jones, David Koresh, Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, and various others who would have loved to exercise the control that Moktada al-Sadr does in Iraq.

The question arises then what is it about faith that allows for such fanaticism? My answer, borrowed from many far smarter than I, is that fear and a sense of powerlessness is what drives the fanatic.

Eric Hoffer, who wrote widely in the 1930s-40s, responding at that time to the fanatics called Nazis, and Hitler, who while an atheist borrowed openly from the tactics of religion:

The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. "God wishes," said Calvin, "that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory."

The irony in this phrase quoted from John Calvin for us, as Unitarians, is that Calvin had our own founding source, Michael Servetus, burned at the stake for heresy. As someone once said, the distance from being a saint-like leader to a single-minded fanatic, is often a very small step.

Hoffer also made on particularly important point about all this when he said: The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. Hoffer’s point is well-taken, for it often easier for most of us who don’t think that religious zealotry is an issue for us personally or us as a nation, to ignore fanaticism, and therein lies the danger. For us as religious liberals, religious free-thinkers, for us as people of a democracy with over a two-hundred year tradition of separation of church and state—for us the tendency is towards complacency. This was true also for the established Jewish population of Europe during the gradual rise of racial-religious fanaticism for the Nazis.

Martin Marty, a great theologian of our era, writes in his book When Faiths Collide, that while power and control are foundational in religious conflicts and fanatical behavior, a central feature of such is the fear of the stranger--the other. Fear of the unknown. For generally people believe, no doubt out of some evolved tribal behavior, that in effect: like-me-good, not-like-me-bad. No doubt, a way we have of protecting our own people and lands that rose up in primitive hunger-gatherer times.

I was telling someone recently that even in my 1950s childhood, I remember that people in my rural area tended to be suspicious of “those people” meaning the people in Boise--just five miles away. And I have seen similar behavior in every state I have lived with eastern suspicious of western, northern superior to southern, upper better than lower, and so on. We have no end of ways to separate ourselves from others out of our suspicions. We are, each and every one of us, susceptible to this kind of thinking.

What counteracts this fear of the stranger or foreigner is contact with them. What always set Jesus high in my estimation was not the miracles I was taught he did, but the story of the Samaritan woman; the demeaned stranger-outsider, which was meant to teach the followers the love of God which does not look down on any other person, race, nation, or people.

This morning I carefully considered whether to use the story from Mexico, The Woman Who Outshone the Sun. For my fear was, will my teaching the children that strangers can be good people undo the great efforts parents make toward protecting their children from strangers? I remember well teaching my son Adam not to talk to strangers, for shortly after his birth a little boy had been an attempted abduction from our area mall. One day when he was three, I was paying a bill, and he was next to me; an elderly woman said something pleasant to him like, How are you? And he scowled at her and said: “I don’t speak to strangers.” (A pure non sequitor if ever there was one.) Of course, I immediately apologized to this elderly lady, and probably undid all I had hoped to do in protecting him. But you see my point, I’m sure. That for good reasons we do teach our children to be wary if not downright afraid of strangers, but hoping that as they grow older they will learn the difference between the stranger who might harm us and the stranger who is simply someone we do not know.

This latter is by far the dominant group. Most people are strangers only because we have not had the opportunity to learn more about them. To get acquainted. For in learning about our neighbors, learning something of different people, different cultures, we open ourselves to learning so much more about ourselves and widening our grasp of the world.

Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian who became a British citizen, was a writer who dealt with this transition, was one who had to face that fear of strangers focused on himself during those post-WW11 years. He said:

The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.

We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

For me this absolutely sums up the human condition, as it has been, and as we now experience it.

Part of the problem is that we often cannot see our fears in relation to the “other”; be they our next door neighbors, or those of different religions, nations, races.

Our problem is rather like what the comic Brad Stine said about his phobias. He said: I suffer from two phobias: (1) Phobia-phobia-the fear you're unable to get scared, and (2) Xylophataquieopiaphobia-the fear of not pronouncing words correctly.

Many, many people have Xylophataquieopiaphobia (zilo' fatta-key'-ah-phobia); and avoid words that might tangle their tongues, for fear, mainly, of looking or sounding foolish. As you can tell, I have overcome this fear—but, I still have plenty of other fears which I may or may not ever overcome. Like a fear of heights. This is the conundrum of fears: that they both protect our lives, but can interfere with our lives, too. There is often a fine line between healthy and unhealthy fear. Hence the term phobia, which means an excessive fear.

At the present time in this country we have people who are very fearful of immigrants, Islam, liberals or conservatives, or gays. In general it probably makes more sense to be afraid of dentists. Most of the pain I’ve endured in the last five or six years has come at the hands of my dentist, not any of the aforementioned. Do I have some fear of terrorists? Yes, indeed, but that fear is not out of proportion to my fear of other disasters than can and do befall humankind. I was afraid when my son was in the Air Force following 9/11; I was afraid when my nephew’s vehicle was hit and seriously injured in Iraq; I was afraid when my good friend’s granddaughter was killed in an explosion in Baghdad last year. But not afraid I would die; I was more afraid of injuries and death as a result of irrational fears that took us into the Iraq war without the kind of questioning that should always be present before we act in such an irredeemable manner.

I am afraid of radicals regardless of religious or political stripe. I read when I took my first government class in college, the words of H.L. Mencken (that brave and brilliant editor of the Baltimore Sun of two generations ago), who said it so well: The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Fanatics are not just people from someplace else, some other religion, some other race, some other nationality, some other creed. Fanatics are people with no compunction about using any of these—religion-race-nationality-creed--for their own ends. And it always behooves us, is always in our best interest, to be suspicious of those who would use our concerns and fears to motivate us to do things without thought.

Unitarian Universalist are religious progressives in the main, and are usually proponents of pluralism, meaning learning to live with others who are different, and even learning to value the difference. This is what we mean by diversity. Difference is most often just that; neither good nor bad. To be different is something we all are, but often have not experienced. A very few times I have found myself the lone American in a group, or the lone woman, or the lone Idahoan. Sometimes this has felt uncomfortable. But for most of us, these kinds of differences are not reasons for separating ourselves permanently, which religion or nationality would have us do in many cases.

Yet, while free-thinkers--liberals-independents-progressives (chose preferred your term) think pluralism in not only good, but unavoidable now in the world economy, there are many conservative-to-fundamental thinking groups who want nothing to do with it. For, as Martin Marty writes, it is all or nothing with such groups. Our-way-or-the-highway, the you-are-with-me-or-against-me kind of thinking. Yet, this seems odd to us liberals, for all main bodies of religions teach some version of “love one another.” So for us, to be tolerant means breaking down barriers, and acts out the Golden Rule of loving others as ourselves.

Change is always uncomfortable, and for many it is a major source of fear. People fear that what they value will be lost or subsumed into something less desirable than what has been known and loved. This is why to some degree we always fear the rebellion of even our own youth, for try as we might, they will throw over much of what we have loved. And this is what will happen as our world changes, too. This is the path of civilization, that what we fear most is the loss of what is dearest to us; yet, none of us would want only the world of the 8^th or 14^th or even 20^th centuries for ours today.

Our hope rests in the process of time, the process of civilization that is ever evolving, and ultimately with the youth who generation to generation become more tolerant than the generations before. To this end we love, educate, and support the spiritual growth of ourselves, and especially of our young ones, who may yet save the world.

*****

September 30

How to Get What You Need

Psychologist David Lieberman in wrote:

The way people gamble and how they live their lives often parallel one another. Because, really, life is a series of decisions and gambles, and what we decide to risk, and the outcome that follows, often determines the kind of life that we have.

Lieberman goes on to point out that casinos operate on a percentage of between 2-5%, but depending on the game and skill of the gamblers, can have a margin of as much as 20% or more. Yet, on a typical day 80% of the people will lose money. He also points out that the stock market has two ways to go, up or down, which would indicate a 50-50 chance, but studies show that 90% of day-traders who work independently will over time lose. The reason for these well demonstrated losses is not about odds, according to Lieberman, but strategy. Gamblers by and large do not know when to stop. They stop when forced to stop by losing all they have; and the fear that precedes this final point becomes the biggest problem.

Lieberman’s point is that many people do not understand the difference between taking a calculated risk, meaning you realize you may lose, versus operating out of emotional place that rarely very logical. The issue becomes not one of just caring, but confidence, or as he puts it, there is a saying in the gambling world that the one who cares less wins! That is, people who are operating from a centered, non-fearful, logical place, are apt to have their wits about them.

The difference from a spiritual point of view is one of understanding what you want and what you need.

The Indian-American physician who has become a spiritual guru to millions, Deepak Chopra, wrote: In some form or another every desire reaches its goal.

Now this would seem to run against what Lieberman tells us about how many gamblers live their lives, for certainly most gamblers lose. So how are their desires reaching their goals? Or, on the other side, should one never take risks, since some risk takers fail?

Chopra seems to uphold the notion that most of us have in the western world, which is that what we really, truly, most deeply want, and put our energies toward we will probably get. Yet we all know that even the hardest, smartest worker sometimes gets laid off. It would seem a paradox, then, if we did not recognize that these issues are also related to degree; that is, how much we understand about ourselves and how much we understand about what is most important.

Again, I believe the difference between point of view and reality has to do with understanding the distinction between what we want and what we need.

There is a story about a minister who illustrated a point in his sermon by saying that a beneficent wisdom knows what we need; knows which of us grows best in sunlight and which of us must have shade. "You know you plant roses in the sunlight," he said. "But if you want your fuchsias to grow, they must be kept in a shady nook."

Afterward a woman came up to him, her face radiant. "Rev. Smith," she said clasping his hand. "I'm so grateful for your splendid sermon, it was such a help to me." His heart glowed for a moment. But then she went on fervently, "I never knew before just what was the matter with my fuchsias!"

This bit of humor points out another feature of wants and needs, and that is what or how much we actually know; you cannot grow plants well without some knowledge of their particular wants and needs.

As some of you know, my father was a fruit-grower; we had apple and plum orchards, and after the harvest comes in, the work begins on preparing for the next year’s crop. For orchardists, this means tending the tree. During the fruit season, the fruit gets most of the attention, but once the fruit has been picked, the trees and soil must be cared for, nurtured, though most people think of this as the time when not much is happening. By the standards of the other fruit growers in our immediate area, many of them family members, my dad was a heavy pruner. The trees would get whacked back pretty severely, and once in a while someone would declare he would surely have poor crop the next year, but it did not happen that way. Dad steadily produced outstanding yields of high quality fruit by all the measures from grange to the state agriculture bureau. His knowledge was not derived from books, yet it was a deeply held wisdom handed down by several generations about how to tend the land, the trees, and the crop He saw the orchard holistically, as we would say now; he understood how all the parts worked together. He did not overly focus on one part, which is often the failure of farmers, and of many of us in life. When we focus on only one part of our lives, and do now think more holistically, we usually are not operating out of wisdom, but desire.

Buddhism teaches that desire is the source of our pain in life, and the key to a better life is detachment. This does not mean quitting, or ceasing to care about one’s life; rather, it means, as Lieberman states, that we understand the scope of the problems, issues, or crises that confront our lives. And, that we avoid operating out of fear, since fear clouds our thinking and decision-making ability.

I had a very personal experience of learning the difference between desire and attachment, and this idea of being detached from outcomes. When I was a young woman, had become a wife and mother, I had great dreams for my life, for my family, all fairly typical of the dreams of most young women of this culture. I had not sat down and written them out, but I had them nonetheless. As a baby-boomer, one who, though I came of age in the 60s, was a bit old-fashioned, and while most of my friends were going through divorces in the years after college, I was determined that my marriage would not fail. I would face the ups and downs, do whatever was necessary. However, after a very long marriage, in my second year here as your minister, that marriage did in fact fail. When it was decided that my husband and I would divorce I was deeply shaken, hurting to the core of my being; after all, I was not going to be in this position. I believed I could always find a way to overcome any problems we might have, but that was simply not logical. For a marriage is not one person doing all he or she might be willing to do, but two.

During the long process of divorce, with the aid of a counselor, I came to see that much of my pain was that I had confused what I wanted with what I needed. Further, I was stunned by the truth, that I could not see before, which was that I was not suffering because I would be losing my husband, but because of my commitment to commitment. I had long since realized that my husband, who was and is a very good man--that he and I had simply ceased to know each other. We had grown too far apart. Yet my desire to be one who did have a long marriage was so great that I stayed in the marriage for that reason alone; then the decision was taken out of my hands.

I share this with you, a rather uncomfortable revelation, because since then I have appreciated more and more how many times I am, how all of us, are attached to things we do not recognize we are in fact attached to. The things we want that are deeper than just having a good job, a happy family, a neat house, a successful child. We are frequently attached to unacknowledged or unstated desires, those things we want that can get in our way when we need to make decisions.

This is what Lieberman was getting at in saying that many people conduct their lives the way gamblers gamble. We often have underlying drives and fears that cause us to do things that are not in our best interests.

Sophie Tucker, the famous singer and comedian of the first part of the 20^th Century said once about the needs of females:

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents; from eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks; from thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality; and from fifty-five on, she needs cash.

What Sophie Tucker did not include in this list, explicitly, is that she also needs love. We all need love, not romantic love necessarily, which most of us may want, but we all need caring, kindness, and compassion which are the foundation of all love.

The way to get what we need is to recognize the difference between what we may want, those attachments the Buddhists teach us cause our suffering, and what we need in reality.

All too often we think money is the answer to all our problems. Money certainly can help in many ways, there is no question, but beyond the level of basic comfort, large amounts of money tend to create more problems than it solves. I always remember the study done back in the early 80s and since repeated, of several people who had won great sums of money through the lottery or Publisher’s Clearinghouse, or some unexpected windfall, which showed that after ten years 90% of the people studied had little more than they started with. The wisdom gleaned from this study is that if a person cannot manage a small amount, they are not likely to manage a large amount either.

So our lives are not about whether we take risks or not, for most of us do. As in the Nadine Stair poem, many of us as we age would actually risk more because we do learn more clearly the differences between what we want and what we need. What we want can in fact sometimes, as in my case, be an impediment to a full and happy life. My life has been far happier since I was forced to let go of that desire.

I would say one of the biggest risks is to have children; yet with over six billion people on the planet, it is clear we do it anyway. The issue is not that we will take risks, but that we understand ourselves, know ourselves, our fears, our wants versus our needs, and see the risk from that perspective.

When great disasters happen, it is reliable that people see the difference; generally the crisis will force an acknowledgement of what is needed versus what is simply wanted. That does not mean they cease to want things, for most people immediately set to re-establishing the life as they had it before the disaster, but they understand what you can live without and what you cannot. They see what is most important.

Sometimes we can be so focused on getting what we want that we wind up losing what we need. Jesus said in the Christian scripture: What will it profit a man to gain the world, if he loses his soul? There are lots of books, and television salesmen, who will tell you how to get what you want. These are almost solely focused on material gains, but being overly focused on the material is a fast track to losing one’s spiritual wholeness.

The wisdom of the ages, of our families and friends, is far more likely to teach us how to get what we need. We do need money, but we do not need it to the extent that we put it before our spirit’s needs.

One of the things I was taught from an early age in the public school of my generation was that learning was valuable because no one could take it from you. No matter what happened, I could be rich, I could lose it all, but no body could take away the knowledge I had acquired. That understanding of the preciousness of education was always and still is important to me. But I know now, with the wisdom of several decades, that even that is not true; for one can develop Alzheimer’s disease or have a brain injury. Still, all other things being equal, for me love and learning are the two things that will see you through even the worst of times.

How to get what you need begins with asking yourself the question of what it is you do need and comparing that to what you want. This process is invaluable for enabling a person to have the best life possible.

There’s a 1978 Kenny Rogers song called The Gambler, that says: You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run. That is a tremendous amount of wisdom in a few short words--a good bit of wisdom to learn. We learn from each other, that is the beauty of human community; that we share what we have learned, what has worked, and what has not.

I often get concerned about what I hope for this congregation, what I want to see happen, yet I know that I am only one chain in the link that makes a faith community strong. In many ways the congregation is like a human being (a point made in the Bible), in this instance we are still in our earliest stages; you might think of UUSMC as having reached the toddler stage. After eighteen years we are beginning to stand, still a bit wobbly at times, but learning to move under our own steam most of the time. The founding members cared and nurtured this congregation with all the love and attention that a baby deserves, and as we are reaching out in the world, we know we still need the hands-on caring of the membership lest we fall and hurt ourselves. Just because our toddlers have achieved mobility is not a sign to cease our care and nurture. A parent never ceases to care about the child, and only changes the ways and means of helping that child along, even if the child is fifty years old or older.

What we want for this congregation is spiritual growth, wonderful programs, a lovely facility, and the joy of community; but what this Mill Creek congregation needs is that the membership remembers our role, that we are yet the parents of this toddler congregation. This is no time to go off and leave the kid home alone while we go do other things.

How to get what we need begins with understanding the difference between what we want and what we truly need. They are sometimes the same, but often miles apart. But getting either begins with the spiritual exercise of simply asking. Learning, growing in our lives always entails trial and error, and learning from our elders, sometimes thinking outside the box: these are all part of how we learn and grow. Asking means we are seeking, which we UUs think is a very good thing to do, for seeking means we will go beyond the likely places into the realm of the unknown and the uncomfortable. The responses we get back will help us develop the level of wisdom that will hopefully see us through both the good times and the bad. Further, in the process, we learn strength of the human spirit; that amidst all the rushing there lies a place of peace deep in the heart to which we can turn, a place of healing and a place of contentment, and occasionally find joy in some surprising place we could never have imagined.

***

October 7, 2007

Young at Heart

Lately I have been recalling old songs, perhaps I am hearing them in that ubiquitous elevator music, or perhaps it is just one more sign that I am on the downhill slope of middle age, but whatever the reason, old songs keep popping into my head. During August, when I was preparing my sermon folders for this year, this happened to me frequently. Like all of the arts, music connects with emotions, memories, stuff that is deep within us. Songs of our youth often cement in the deepest held values of our being, the tendencies of our personalities, and often speak for our generation in very special ways. Like the songs of World War II, or the protest-folk music of the late fifties-early sixties, rap music of the 80s-90s for urban youth, and so on.

The song that stimulated my sermon today was a big hit for Frank Sinatra, entitled “Young at Heart”; it begins with these words:

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you
If you’re young at heart.

For it’s hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind
If you’re young at heart
You can go to extremes with impossible schemes
You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams
And life gets more exciting with each passing day
And love is either in your heart or on its way

I suppose the reason that I like this song, that it for some reason had hold of mind on a day I was doing my sermon planning, is that this song captures for me the essence of what I believe is important about how to age well or gracefully.

Like all of you, I have seen people old before their time; I had a cousin people in our family would say was an old man when he was born. Or just this week I heard a woman as I was standing in the checkout line at a store (a place of amazing information for people like me--and comedians!), that her daughter was is a high school senior and didn’t want to do anything but sit at home and read, complaining that the daughter didn’t seem to be like other teenagers who want to go out and have fun, and this was bothering the mom.

On the other side, we all know some people who remain perennially joyful, and youthful in their outlook. Jane Frelick of this congregation is my hero, and a good case in point; at 87 she rarely misses an opportunity to do something good, or to tell a joke. Jane is young at heart.

If I am to live to a ripe old age I want to be like Jane, and between now and then I want to see life as worth living, but more than that, I want to have joy, lots of joy in my life. To be young at heart is really about wanting to claim the joy.

We probably need to define our terms here; after all what does it really mean to be young. It is certainly not all fun and games. To be young is clearly not all fun; in fact much of being young is about making mistakes, for it is through trial and error, making an effort and making mistakes that we learn. To be young, then, is to be a learner, an optimistic learner; for when we are young we believe, in the main, that we will figure out all the stuff we need to know in order to have good lives. We are willing in our youth to keep trying to solve the problems of addition and subtraction, to wade through the miasma that is long division when we first encounter it, and figure out what it takes to have friends, or discover new talents latent within us, and much, much more.

In general, most people would say that youthfulness is forward looking, while often agedness is backward looking. That youthfulness is being willing to try new things, and agedness often considers it isn’t worth the effort. While we know exceptions do exist, this tends to be the popular understanding.

For me, to be young at heart means a willing to try new things, as well as to be hopeful, to be open to new experiences, and to believe in the redeeming possibilities of each new day, as I once wrote for a benediction. That life is ever an open book with more pages to turn, indeed, a book so filled with pages there is never any possibility of getting them all turned. And I am here to advocate for learning to be young at heart, regardless of age.

Now most people want to stay young in body, we of the baby-boomer generation are reputed to be obsessed with hanging on to youthful looks, keeping youthful through exercise, diet, and plastic surgery. But keeping the outside looking young won’t do much good if it is the inside that really needs it. Some years ago I talked with an acquaintance who is a plastic surgeon, and he said that people often go to plastic surgeons for a nose job, a breast augmentation (boob job colloquially), face lift, etc, with underlying delusions that looking better will automatically make their lives better. So one of the jobs of a good plastic surgeon is to spot the people who also need a good therapist.

I think the actress-comedienne Lucille Ball was on to something when she said: The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

Age, of course, is the worst marker for youth. And, we can get pigeon-holed by age. I hate it when someone asks me my age. What does it matter? I want to say. What I usually say is what I heard from my Grandma Dean--which I’ve learned since is a famous Dorothy Parker quote--but she said: Any woman who will tell her age will tell anything. You don’t want a minister who will blab anything, do you?

Or how about this story:

There was a serious young Rabbi who finally summoned courage to complain to an elderly man, who was also the richest member of his congregation, "I hesitate to bring this up, but do you always have to fall asleep while I'm preaching?"

"Look," was the reassuring reply, "would I sleep if I didn't trust you?"

I think we know which of these two was truly young at heart. By the way, I do not mind in the least if you sleep through my sermons—at least I know I am doing you some good. I always felt the same about my first-graders who would occasionally conk out after lunch time.

To be youthful in our outlook is not to be unrealistic, or Pollyanna, or have a cockeyed optimism. Youthfulness does not imply idiocy; nor does it imply a lack of awareness of danger or reality, or any of the things we are encouraged to be aware of for our safety and well-being. Yes, there can be a certain boldness in youth that is not always wise, but far less than we often imagine. It is the angst of parents that makes youth seem so dangerous; our own memories of youthful indiscretions, carelessness, foolishness. The mindset of what-might-have-happened often makes parents sure of what-will-happen for their own youth. It is all a part of nature’s plan; and our own evolution as social beings.

Most people I know who are no longer young in body would not really want to be young again, not unless they had the wisdom of the years between. We worked for that wisdom, we all have to do that work; this is the gift of life, of living, and not just old age.

Young people know that they are in the high-learning phase of their lives, where we often go wrong in our thinking is to believe that at age 21 or 45 or 65 we will no longer be learning any more, or that we know all we need to know. The old saying tells us that the wise person is the one who knows how little s/he really knows.

But to be young means you have time to learn, if some disaster does not befall. Yet, even at age 90 you still have time to learn. You have time to learn as long as you have time. You also have something to learn as long has you have human interactions. None of us can ever know all that is to be known about another person.

Occasionally I will counsel with someone who has been married a long time, and has only recently learned something about the spouse that is upsetting. But most times what has really caused the upset is not the thing they learned, but the fact that they learned it at all; they assumed they knew everything to be known about the partner. Don’t you believe it. No matter how much we love someone, how long we have lived with them, there are always some things we do not know. Human beings are in each case, a wonderful study.

The world is always changing, and we are changing too. We each have a limited scope of time on this earth, indeed the earth itself also has a lifetime in the scope of infinity. What matters is not where we came from or if we will have another life beyond this, what matters is the life we have here. It’s like worrying about what you are going to eat tomorrow while forgetting to prepare food for today.

Perhaps because I see more death than most, I feel keenly the need to enjoy the life that is now. To be here now. To feel the joy in the life that is in this moment.

One of our members, Esther Steffens, who sends me wonderful jokes and stories from time-to-time, sent one just this weekend ( I love serendipity!); a piece written by some unknown woman I take to be in Esther’s and my age-range, who was asked about getting old, and she said in part:

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things.
Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.
I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.

What this woman touches upon for me is that we never cease to need perspective, to look at life both for what it is, and what it could be--and what it is not. Even young children need to be encouraged in this path. It is no big deal to fail, no big deal to have sadness, no big deal to grow old, but it is a very big deal not to value any of life’s experiences for what they have to give us and to teach us.

Gandhi, whose birthday was this past week, taught that we should live the life we value; live peace, live learning, live joy. We cannot hope for a better life or a better world if we are not willing to model the life we claim would be good. How any religion can preach war is beyond my ken. Religion is supposed to be about ethics, principles, virtues, and against the evils of selfishness, greed, anger, war, and all the bad stuff. Yes, I can preach defense, but never offense; I can never advocate for war when there is any chance of peace.

In our own lives it is the same. Fundamentally, we will live out our values, which, is why politicians and would-be models for family values have a way of exposing themselves, both literally and figuratively.

To be young at heart means that we are about living our principles, trying to find new ways of doing what has not worked well before, looking to experience people in all their wonderful and not-so-wonderful diversity, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Shakespeare put it so well, and still believe in life. Still believe that life is good, that living is worthwhile.

If we want the youth of today to work toward a better tomorrow, we must remember that they are looking to us and how we live our lives. To be young at heart means I can look at the future from the eyes of youth. If I were 10 or 20-years-old, I would not want some geezer telling me how the best of life was in the past and the future was going to hell in a hand basket faster than a speeding locomotive. Terms which the young don’t even need to know. What I would want to know is that I have reasons to hope, an expectation of time to learn and grow and perhaps improve upon the life the elders have left me.

Best beloved, the world is ever turning, seasons cycle in response, people are born, grow, and die, and still the life of planet earth improves; albeit slowly, and with a maddening inequality that we as a people of ethical faith believe we can help to change. Change we hope and trust will benefit those who are infants now and those yet to be born. Let it be that we remain ever young at heart as we strive to these ends.

October 10, 2007