Purple Haired Priestess

Who is Jesus? Part Four: When He is Reincarnated as the Black Messiah?

2012-01-16T09:54:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the 2008 controversy surrounding PresidentObama before he was elected that had to do with his then minister the Rev.Jeremiah Wright? It seemed somereporters had gotten copies of Rev. Wright’s sermons and from those they pulledout a few choice quotes. They knew itwould be quite a story if mainstream Americans were to associate Obama withwhat his preacher had said.

Seems the Rev. Wright was fond of occasionally preaching froma "we've been done wrong" perspective. Many were to later accuse him of being black andangry first, and Christian a distant 2nd. When his more militant comments came to theears of mainstream America many were shocked! There was a fear that if the potential next president also subscribed toa point of view that could express such disdain for a whole race of people (…justbecause they were white and in charge) that person would never be elected, orif he was he would be really dangerous (for those white and in charge!)

You may also remember that Obama managed in a speech titled A More Perfect Union to quickly andeffectively assure the public that hisChristian faith was way more middle-of-the-road than Rev. Wright’s. Obama made it clear that his faith was aboutlove and progressive reform and conformed to the quintessential American idealof equality for all... And, that eventhough he understood the anger that the person who would soon become his former preacher felt, he was not bitteror vindictive, nor did he primarily identify as a marginalized person.

Obama’s ability to elucidate a familiar and comfortable Americanversion of Christianity that was reconciliatory and hopeful was impressive. It worked to assure the public that he wasn’ta member of some far out minority with an axe to grind. It worked for the same reason that mainstreamAmerica likes to think of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as ultimatelyfull of love and patience and on everybody’s side.

Rev. Wright eventually faded from view. And mostof the America was convinced that the President’s religion was mainline enoughto be relatively non-threatening.

Over the next several months as I continue sharing with you my“Who is Jesus?” sermon series I am going to be talking about the variousalternative ways that Jesus has been reincarnated on America’s margins. If you look along the edges of the Americanculture, some of which are rapidly becoming the middle, you will find Jesus asa Yogi, as a Mormon, as a modern day Rabbi…and certainly as a BlackMessiah…sometimes as a black, female messiah. These alternative manifestations mightbe thought of as dangerous, or at least odd, when compared to the center’sAmerican Jesus.

Each of these alternative ways of understanding Jesus arisefrom the particular contexts or experiences of some Americans. They are allnot only possible because of the cut and paste tendencies of American religion,but these more edgy versions of Jesus all potentially supply new ingredientsfor the ongoing blend of America's melting pot religion over which the iconic Jesusstill reigns. It is the American way fordistinctively different religions to exist side by side, often using the verysame words, seemingly making reference to the very same God, but with verydifferent meanings.

I am going to share some of these different meanings beforethey loss their uniqueness.

Jesus became the American Superstar because our culturekeeps gobbling up the distinctive differences and incorporating them all into thefigure of one hero.

Be reminded that this sermon series is based on Stephen Prothero’s 2003 work entitled AmericanJesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. I also remind you that my overall intent forthis series is not to help you to discover who Jesus “really” was in his owntime and place per contemporary biblical scholarship, but rather to see howJesus as Superstar has and does function within our culture. My reason for this series is to give you alittle knowledge about the changing nature of how our culture has and doesunderstand Jesus. I hope something inwhat I share serves to give you enough distance from however it is that Jesusappears in your own history, so that you might be free to find him again.

This series is about religious/cultural icons and how they canbe very useful, how they point the way to what is really important. Yet, they can also get in the way, obscuring theineffable phenomena we need symbols for. Icons become so elevated they can seemingly force us to look throughonly one lens. And it might not be, or nolonger be the one that helps us see!

In the first part of this series, I invited you to thequestion of what Jesus looks like. Ishowed you the most popular image of Jesus ever created. Thatimage is fading away, replaced by many others…many others…

In the second sermon, I suggested that everybody seems to thinksthey know what Jesus said. And almost anybody,whether they are part of a worshipping/studying Christian community or not, alsothinks they are free to use the “magic” power of quoting Jesus whenever theyreally need to, (except, of course, if what they are saying is treasonous!)

The same as the most popular image of Jesus ever created attemptedneutrality in the sense that it showed only his head and was divorced from anyparticular context, (except that of course that it portrayed a white, male, CaucasianJesus), for the most part the words we think he said have also been effectivelyremoved from their “original” context, too….which makes them all the moreiconic, pithy and powerful. The geniusof this is that His words are heard as provocative, authoritative—showstopping—in most any context.

I shared with you that one of Prothero’s themes is that “when the person or the people callingfor change unmoors/disengages Jesus from the beliefs, practices andinstitutions of ….traditional Christian faith, Jesus is then free to be whoeverthe change agent needs him to be.”

That’s what makesJesus as American cultural superstar iconic.

In the third sermon, I asked you to think about what sort ofperson Jesus is. I suggested that oneway to answer that is by looking at what mix of traditionally defined male andfemale characteristics our culture has assigned to Jesus over time. The blend of feminine and masculine assignedto him has changed as we’ve changed. Someof you heard me say that in the late 19^th century Victorian womenwanted a sweet savior, a secret companion, a gentle homebody who would make allof society more like the perfect middle class home…peaceful, clean, everybodyfed, chores over, lessons learned…

That blended gender image of Jesus, with perhaps a little moremuscle, was who would become “the Superstar” in the American imagination by themid 20^th century. He would comeout of the home and go to war. He wouldgo to work and to school, he had favorite sports teams. He was everywhere the American middle class was. He was accessible and present to mostanyone, understood to be on our side, no matter who we were, no matter what sportsteam we rooted for! He became an icon ofeverything that was right about us as Americans and a gentle, but persuasive spokespersonfor everything that needed to be reformed.

This image of Jesus had functioned so well within the Americanmainstream cultural imagination for so long it was a shock for the general publicto hear a protestant minister of the Christian gospel way past the uproar ofthe Civil Rights movement, preach that Jesus is a really angry, black man, whomight rise up and overthrow the forces of oppression, and lead “his” people outof the wilderness and into the promised land!

What!!! That’s theJesus you preach? We (white and incharge folk) thought we elevated MLK, Jr to national sainthood, instead ofMalcolm X to settle down all that militant anger! Many worried that black Christians like Obamawere secretly Marxist, at least more edgy than we want from our man in charge.

The image of Jesus reincarnated as the black Moses who woulddo whatever was necessary to free his people wasn’t created by Rev. Wright. And the black moses/jesus found in blackchurch culture wasn’t even always a man. He as just as easily merged with woman like Harriet Tubman, crying inthe wilderness about the promised land, issuing “secret” messages telling hisor her chosen people how to escape the masters.

God on our side, not everybody’s side…

The Moses/Jesus figure was there in the black churchsuffering with his people long before Rev. Wright had his few moments of fame. It was just that mainstream America had almostas little familiarity with this edge as they have with Mormonism, and certainlyas little comfort.

We UU's who have been, at least on paper, the specialists insocial justice- margin focused religion shouldn’t have been so shocked! We ought to have been as familiar with theBlack Messiah, as we have become with Jesus the yogi! I will say to you that we ought to also knowthat it is a racist error to assume that all black people are familiar andcomfortable with Jesus as the militant black messiah. That is just not the case.

It has been dangerous to go too far out on that edge.

Whether we go all the way out there or not, at the least itwould serve us-those of us who are white and privileged and claim to beeducated, to know who this Jesus is, this black messiah that speaks ofrevolution.

Some of us have refused to learn or listen….to hear wheneverthe “J” word is spoken.

It is time to let go of that. We need to know who this Jesus is thatempowers the powerless.

We [mostly still very white, mostly still very educated, ofstill some privilege, mostly middle class UU’s] need to get a clue why in theworld our hymnal would be full of spirituals. Why we'd sing about a balm in gilead for the sin sick soul??

MLK’s favorite hymn…wasn’t about original sin and the godwho saves each individual who professes from personal transgressions…

It IS about the systemic evil of racism and moving on to theplace where that is in the past.

Dr. Jan Garrett in paper entitled "Black Christianity and the Prophetic Church" says; “We should know that whenAfrican slaves became Christians and were exposed to the Bible, they naturallygravitated to certain parts of it, such as the liberation of the Israelitesfrom captivity in Egypt, the theme of the Promised Land, and the hoped-forredemption at the end of a period of suffering. From the New Testament they drew sustenance from a doctrine that UU’shave often regarded as intellectually absurd; namely, the idea that God orGod’s son Jesus …so identified with the suffering people, the victims ofinjustice, that he became one of them and suffered a terrible death as aresult.”

It is imperative for us to understand this Jesus, thismessiah, to be able to see through someone else’s eyes, to hear through theirears.

Long before Rev. Wright, long before academia began toinclude a few brilliant black theologians during the heyday of Black Pride inthe late 60’s and 70's …there was a powerful Jesus/Moses/Messiah who could andwould lead the enslaved to freedom. Artists,preachers and other free spirits on the margins had long put a black face onJesus, reincarnating the jew from nazereth into the messiah they needed him tobe.

This Jesus, full of persuasive/emotional power, rather thanthe reasonable, peaceful, out of context milk toast jc that would never offendthe slave master, would never take on the face of “the enemy”. He was black, not the color of the master,but of his people.

Bishop Henry M. Turner of the AME church once claimed that“We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negroas you white people have to believe that God is a fine-looking, symmetrical andornamental white man.”

There is dangerous anger in that statement.

And HOPE

Militant views that see an enemy in every white face are aswrong as the kind of racism that sees the enemy in every black face.

There are forces at work that would like to keep us from usinganger to live fearlessly, lovingly, always on the side of justice.

We are a faith within which there are many differences; ofexperience, of views….What may be able to unite us and transform us ….is ourwillingness, even our passion, to seek each other out….to know what and who moves us towards a better tomorrow...

Can I get an Amen?

The Season of Hope

2011-12-18T13:23:00.001-05:00

Whatever holiday you are celebrating this time of the year, Hanukah,Chalica, Yule, Kwanza, Buddha’s birthday, Diwali, Christmas, even Agnostica or Festivus…it’s all about hope.

That’s something we all need, whatever form it comesin.

We need hope…especially when it is dark or cold outside…maybeeven more so, when it is dark or cold inside.

Whether lack of light and warmth is a result of less daylightin winter, or derived from an emotional, political or theological state ofbeing, the human spirit needs to believe that something brighter and warmer willsoon arrive.

It is no wonder, really, that the winter holidays and holydays are designed by rule or by accident to bring cheer and good tidings to all. Ancient and modern party planners know: weneed the power of hope to lift the dreary world…

Isn’t it a shame that we quarrel like siblings over which “holiday”is the “real” or the better one? Whatdifference does it make, if whatever we are celebrating makes us…helps us tobe… hopeful, joyful, at peace?

As far as I can see every one of the winter holy days is a blendedfamily kind of affair. Every celebrationtakes a little of that and a little of this, and tries to come up with whatmight delight the mind and lift the spirit this season, prodding us to turnwith radiant anticipation, to focus on the coming of something better.

Whatever works! Weneed to feel hope! Every human beingneeds to know that they can rest… merry with anticipation that something is onthe horizon, just around the corner….

I used to think just having hope was enough. Just waking up with hope…that this morning,or the next, or the next, will be themorning that something so fine and perfect will just be there “under the tree”and all will be well…

Now I know; it just doesn’t work like that. The delivery truck isn’t likely to stop at myhouse, unless I ordered something! Giftsaren’t going to just appear under the tree unless I go out and get them…

What comes is what we are willing to work for, pay for, takea risk for…

It not just wishing and praying that makes something worthhoping for come. It is what we do to stepinto the future, to make the future present.

A few weeks ago, I got a message that I had somehow been puton a list of people to be interviewed by the Brody School of Medicine. Seems the school is doing an appreciativeinquiry type of survey to determine what their next long range plan willbe. Appreciative inquiry is a method where onestarts conversations by asking about what has worked well. Instead of trying to solve problems, or addressdeficiencies, you focus on understanding why things really clicked when theydid and how that might be duplicated.

So, I was interviewed last week and I was asked to describean experience I had been through that felt like one where my hopes and dreamsfor what could be had been fulfilled. Ithought of a lot of examples, but I started by sharing what I found so greatabout the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service.

It felt really great to see and to hear persons from verydifferent faith communities who often have good reason to be afraid of other’sjudgment, even hostility, bring their most precious spiritual practices into a“public” gathering. For me it was like witnessinga truth telling, a coming out, where folks brought what they usually do “inprivate” or at least with those who they feel safe with, to a more openspace. This year, it was the Pagans whoseemed to especially appreciate havingbeen invited and then accepted as equals on the interfaith thanksgiving“stage”. It felt good to have been apart of helping that happen. It felt evenbetter during the fellowship time that followed to see and hear so manydifferent kinds of people in the room together sharing… It felt new and exciting to witness and be apart of so many different kinds of people together in Greenville; at ease,grateful and delighted with each other.

So when the interviewer asked me what I would advise theSchool of Medicine to do in light of what I had described, I said “celebratedifferences”. Create an atmosphere andopportunities where no one need be afraid to share what is precious for them. Besure there is an atmosphere of reward…for vulnerability and truth telling…

I know that the more times one takes a risk to liveauthentically in the light of what could be, the easier it will be to keepdoing that over and over until that one day is every day.

Whatever holiday or combo platter of holidays you arecelebrating this season, it is my hope that you know that the most importantgift you can give is not necessarily any “thing”, but an open door to a futurebright and warm…especially when you offer that on a cold, bleak winter day.

My colleague, the UU minister, Victoria Safford said in anarticle she wrote for The Nation, called “The Gates of Hope” that “onceyou have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it’s going tobe…., it is impossible to live anymore compliant and complacent in the world asit is.”

Give the gift of restlessness with what is...

I hear a lot about how Christmas in particular, out of all thewinter holidays, ought to be about remembering the so-called perfect momentsfrom the past.

Bah, humbug!

What I hope we dois go about creating the perfect moments so the future is present now.

To be a hopeful people on a mission, we must live not in thepast, but keep moving towards the future…

And that my friends, involves learning to resist not onlythe past, but living without compliance or complacency with the world as it is…

The ancient and modern winter holiday party planners weren’tdreaming up celebrations hoping for just enough light to balance the darkness, fora brief touch that would temporarily warm a cold heart; they wanted to create abig fire that would light up our passion for living towards tomorrow.

In order to go there…we cannot turn a blind eye to what iswrong. How could we be so deaf, soblind, so hard-hearted anyway that anyone of us would dare to think everythingis alright? It’s not. It is already a hard winter, with cold anddesperate situations, with haters everywhere… greed and lies and false hopedelivered at our doorsteps every day.

And horrifying proof of terrible realities …abound.

I just heard a day or two ago that more soldiers died ofsuicide last year that died in the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

There are so many gifts the world needs from us.

Victoria Safford goes on to say; "Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope—notthe …gates of Optimism, which are …narrower; nor the … boring gates of shrilland angry hinges (people cannot hear us there: they cannot pass through); northe cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is Gonna Be All Right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, oftruth-telling about your own soul and the place of resistance and defiance,from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be;the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but you in the struggle.”

During the School of Medicine interview, I shared anotherexample of what it means to me to be there when things are clicking…

I started by saying I have been very privileged to have hadothers open a door for me, when I was hopeless, angry, alone… I have felt suicidal. I have had dear friends who succeeded inhating themselves to death.

A person called me last week wanting to know if I could helpthem with their struggle to find peace with their spirituality, with God. They came to my office. I heard their story of struggle and ofdiscovery. I heard everything they wouldrisk losing to be free to be who they had finally realized they reallywere. I heard what a huge risk theywould be taking to make that next step into the future.

Was it my role to push them off the cliff, not knowing forsure if they would, could fly?

Yes, I think it was. Itwas the gift I think they came for…

I told this story to the interviewer. I asked him to write down for the School ofMedicine to read…that healing is about helping that which is struggling to be bornlive…

That’s the gift we celebrate. That is what the party is for.

It’s not for the new toy under the tree. It is for the shining, bright, embrace of a lifebeing born. The welcome you extend, the “being with” you practice,could be bringing in the future, could be the gift that makes all the differencebetween life and death.

That’s what the mid-winter party is for, to light a fire bigenough to show the way to the gifts that make all the difference….

The shiny, bright, the warm embrace you give could save alife, could save all our lives.

Who is Jesus? Part 3: What Sort of Person was He?

2011-11-13T19:46:00.001-05:00

Do you remember the “Promise Keepers”? It was a hyper-masculine evangelical movementin the 1990’s. For a few glorious years thePK’s attracted lots of media attention. That’s because they often brought in well over 50,000 people at a time totheir events, which were held all over the country. These revivals were usually in big cities, infootball stadiums and it was men only! Theirmessage was for men, delivered by the “ultimate- man” heroes from the sportsworld. Males who had lost their place insociety, in the family, in the neighborhood came to these events to find outhow to be real men again. They weregiven a muscular Jesus who liked getting together with other men, who wantedloud rock music playing, who liked hanging out in the ultimate man cave…thefootball stadium. Their model was JC, a sober,serious, and loyal fighter for the team.

They could be that kind of man, too, if they just kept theirpromise, realized their potential, to be real men on the right team. They could be warriors just like Jesus whofought the good and manly fight.

By the late ‘90’s the Promise Keeper movement would fadeaway.

Maybe these mega events stopped being so popular because as somehave suggested, our American culture has Attention Deficit Disorder! Nothing lasts for very long, ‘cause we keepmoving on to the next thing! Maybe, thePromise Keeper movement faded because the hyper masculine Jesus was just toomuch of a reactive projection. It was,after all, in the 90’s when women really started to enjoy a measure of equality,like never before in human history.

The hyper masculine Jesus was perhaps an over the topreaction. Maybe it didn’t capture forlong the personality that most Americans perceive that Jesus the Super Star wholives in our national pantheon really has.

This is the third installment in my “who is Jesus” sermonseries for this church year. I explored withyou what Americans have imagined he looked like. I helped you hear what Americans really wantJesus to have said.

This morning I am going to share with you another piece ofthe story of the Jesus who is a fixture in the American pantheon.

Everybody knows what he’s like; what his personality is.

He’s always on the side of your favorite sports team; or whenat war your preferred nation. And he roots for the underdog every time. You know he loves to hang with the guys and he’s every stay-at-home mother’sbest friend. He’s maternal, gentle withyoung children, loyal, meek; even sweet. And, he’s the big, beefy fellow you had better watch for when he getsangry. He’s been known to kick overtables at the NY stock exchange or at the First National Bank of Too Much Greed. He’s the head of the church, the head of theparty. He’s loyal to your favorite brands. But everybody knows you don’t have to go tochurch or follow any of his endorsements to call him your best friend. He wears a dress, and although his hair isstyled by “Lady Clairol”, and we don’t talk about his sexuality, he isthoroughly a man, unless you need him to be something else… and then he bends.

Are we confused, or what?

As I shared with you before, in the early centuries of whatsome call the American experiment, there was little to no confusion about whoJesus was. He was the Son of God. His father was in charge; mighty, powerfuland sovereign. His father was just like allreal fathers, [well those who were white with land and the ability to makethings happen!] Fathers were on the topof command chain as far as home and farm life, enterprise, government, church,the military, education…well, everything.

Jesus was just the Son who did the Father’s bidding.

Until, he was the brother, who made all men free

When he became the one on our team, he was on his way tobecoming an American super hero. But before he became a super hero, with a personality every body knows another transformation would take place.

Part of the story of how the Jesus we all know came to be,has to do with WOMEN, with what women want. Maybe women wanted a hyper-masculine JC. But we got over it!

For centuries, women have not been in control! Yet, in America during the Victorian age theycame to dominate home life, and church life. They came to be seen not only as domestic goddesses, but took on, orwere projected to have taken on …all moral virtue.

They wanted a Jesus that was a different kind of brother, onewho didn’t go marching away with other brothers.

Their efforts to transform Jesus led to what some call thefeminization of Christianity.

What women wanted in Victorian America deeply influencedwhat we think of as Jesus’ personality to this day.

Before that, the 2^nd Great Awakening, the revivalmovement that swept across this nation from roughly the 1820’s – 1860’s, had alreadylargely redefined Christianity as a religion led not by the remote, mighty anddistant God, but by the Son of Man.

Predestination, and with it FEAR of God, would go out offavor. Instead the theologies of freewill and free choice made for dramatic/emotional conversions that turned heartsover to Jesus, the Sweet Savior. Religionbecame not so much a matter of enlightened reason, but of emotional fervor.

And emotions were women’s territory!

Even within Unitarianism there was a shift from the heady,intellectual, reasonable faith of the Boston fathers to the subjective,experience based religious “freedom” like that found in the good news/joyfulexpression of Universalism, or the nature loving, poetry speaking, equalitybetween the sexes, radical proponents of Transcendentalism.

It was no longer the American Christian desire to move inlock step with God’s will. American religionbecame overwhelmed with the flow of emotions. The faithful wanted to commune with Jesus their brother and friend. Male children grew up taught the faith by motherswho valued an emotional, gentle, companion… These boys grew up to be theliberal clergy who helped fashion the Jesus women wanted.

For the revivalists, the whole point of conversion was togain close personal relationship with Jesus. The sons of the women who loved the sweet savior, the companion, the friend,the gentle one who would make all of society more like home…peaceful, clean,everybody fed, chores over, lessons learned…preached what their mothers wantedto hear.

In the late 1800’s men who had once been the guardians ofvirtue, increasingly came to be associated with aggression, competitiveness andguile—virtues in the business world but vices in the home. The home became the center of Christian lifeand mother became the high priestess of domestic piety. Her influence would spread to society…all throughthe Christian efforts to clean up and make things right, more like Jesuswanted… far beyond home life. Thetemperance movement, the settlement houses, the abolitionists, the SundaySchool societies, the proliferation of tracts, all came from the so-called“feminization” of Christianity.

Women were seen as morally and spiritually superior tomen. Jesus was their model, gentle, humble, patient more of a “feeler”than a “thinker”.

In many ways, Jesus became the perfect woman in a man’s body,or at least the perfect advocate for women, in a body appealing to women.

In a time when there were rigidly distinct roles for womenand for men, the personality of Jesus bridged the divide. Liberal Christians had already soft pedaledthe sharp dualism “between the sacred and the secular, divinity and humanity,the supernatural and the natural, the world and the church….” Jesus, the brother became a woman’s best friend…

Prothero says “antebellum Protestants made him over in thelight of Victorian ideals of the feminine. …they described Jesus as pious and pure, loving and merciful, meek andhumble.”

Here is what one author of a popular series of books for boyssaid:

“Jesus Christ was, in some respects, the most bold,energetic, decided and courageous man that ever lived; but in others he was themost flexible, submissive and yielding; and in the conceptions which manypersons form of his character there is a degree of indistinctness andconfusion, from want of clear ideas of the mode in which these seeminglyopposite qualities come together.”

This was a book for boys…with an adult saying we don’t quiteget it, how you can be both male and female in one body, but model yourselfafter this man Jesus anyway!

Prothero calls this a “delicious quotation”…for itsarticulation of the confusion…especially during the heyday of separate-spheresideology…"it simply did not make sense tofind the masculine and the feminine cohabiting in one body."

It did not make sense to Victorians, but we’ve been working onit, so that it does make sense, ever since their time!

When the 20^th world wars came, it was importantto lift up the bloody Jesus who made the ultimate sacrifice. There have been all sorts of movements likethe Promise Keepers to try to make the feminized Jesus more masculine, moreappealing to men.

But everybody knows the churches were and are full ofwomen. They always have been and theystill are.

Maybe they weren’t in the pulpit, but they were and are incontrol in one way or another. They wereat home teaching their children about Jesus, and they were in the church doingthe same.

Perhaps the Promise Keepers movement was the last attempt tobalance out the century old feminized Jesus, with a more masculine one.

Or maybe now we are ok with the gender blending….or with an allpurpose God that everybody knows is on their side no matter what…

It is not so much about being a “real” man or a “real” womananymore. It’s about being the in one bodythe best blend of male and female.

Maybe the reason the promise keepers really declined wasbecause there were no women!

No women to organize, to clean up, to make good decisions, helpmen be more in touch with their female characteristics without going over board one way or the other!

It is no surprise to me that in UUism today when there aremore women, in power, in control, in the pulpit; that there are also moreUU-Christians. It is no surprise. We womenmake Jesus over into what we want our husbands, our sons, our colleagues tobe.

Here’s a quote about Jesus from a (now deceased) well known female,African-American woman UU minister:

“I am profoundly move by the message of Jesus as I understandit; liberation and freedom from oppression, love and compassion, service to others,and radical inclusiveness. His life and ministrycontinue to inspire me. Here was a man whochallenged the laws, customs, and social expectation of his time. He affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of everyperson, even of the most marginalized in his day: women, prostitutes, the sick,and those who were scorned because they were not part of the dominant religiouscommunity. And he affirmed peace—not passivepeace but a peace in which we work proactively to bring about justice.”

[MarjorieBowens-Wheatley, “To Keep One’s Soul”, from Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism.]

That’s her idea of this man Jesus.

It is no surprise. Age after age, we make him over into who we need him to be. So that we can keep him in the Americanpantheon, as our hero…

Occupy Your Life

2011-11-06T14:49:00.000-05:00

Have you been following the “occupy” movement? After a few weeks without any mediaattention, it’s hard not to hearabout it now.

I just can’t seem to get enough of it. It is more interesting to me than who’s goingto accuse Herman Cain of what next. (That’sinteresting, too, but not in a good way!)

I see a lot of good in the Occupy movement.

You know I grew up during the push for civil rights and the peacemovement. So, I just can’t help it;fascination with revolution is in my bones. Even as an adult, I called in sick to watch the 1989 Tiananmen Squareprotests unfold. It’s hard to believe that was 22 yearsago.

It seems to me that what is going on now is very much insync with the Unitarian Universalist principles, especially the desire for“justice, equity and compassion” and “the use of the democratic process” parts!

I remember, just fouryears ago, when so many people were so hoping a new day was dawning. Many wanted to believe that because we werevoting for a different kind of President, he would lead us to the “promisedland”. A majority went to the polls believing,“Yes, We Can.” I was one of those voters,with really high hopes.

As so many of you are aware, too much of what so many expectedhasn’t happened. The debt crisis gotworse. And, if we are to believe whatsome are now saying, the American middle class “dream” is all but disappearing. Maybe, that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

But, it is scary. Toomany families losing their savings, their jobs, their homes… Too many young people incurring huge studentdebt, with little prospect for gainful employment... The future does not lookvery good, for my people…the American middle class…

Many people are struggling, frustrated, and if not worn downby depression, they are angry! Especiallyin big cities, where the contrast between the super rich and everybody else is reallystriking… People who have recentlyexperienced economic suffering are looking around and seeing that the wealthierare getting more so, while the poor are getting poorer…

Something is wrong with this picture!

Voting didn’t help us move towards the future we imagined…

Rather than put up with the distance between the dream ofwhat was supposed to be and the reality of what is, some have taken it to the streets! If you can’t make a difference with yourvote, or you are disenfranchised; use your voice, use whatever power you have…topress harder for change…

Stand in the way of normal until normal changes…

Social protest is always dramatic, because it is “streettheatre”. It’s a fight between good andevil! It is a battle with winners andlosers. At least, that’s how we think ofit from a distance, and how the media often portrays it, making it even moredramatic and compelling, making some of us that love drama want to watch allthe more…

Even though I am one of those who thinks good drama makes for agreat story, I also think that most of the time significant social change comesabout through evolution more than through revolution.

When enough people begin to act differently… little bylittle, incrementally… then things change. Change is often so slow it takes decades, centuries, to even realizesomething monumental has taken place.

There are those of us, of a certain age, who thankfully havelived long enough to see the immense changes that have come about because of thewomen’s movement, the push for civil rights, the greening of our collective conscience. It took generations, many generationsevolving…to make huge changes…that now seem “normal”.

(Obviously we are still evolving when it comes to sexualharassment in the workplace! But, thatis a different sermon!)

Slow evolutionary change is not very sexy or dramatic. It doesn’t give us much of a story about “good”over coming “evil”. The drama of revolutionis appealing partly because there is always an enemy over there, who is not us,that we can blame for what’s wrong.

We hear the Occupy movement suggesting that “the enemy” is the1%. An identified enemy provides a convenientrallying point. It’s just human nature. It is just easier to think that if we canjust force change on the 1%, everything will be better.

In the long run, it’snot going to be about what is forced upon the 1%. It is going to be how the 99% evolve overtime!

That’s because the real enemy is our own ignorance, our ownnot paying attention, our own going along blindly with the “way things are”. The problem is our own short sightedness…evenselfishness…

We, regular folk, enlightened about the collective power wehold, will eventually over time change the way we spend and invest what money/whatresources we have in ways that make for the differences we want to see….

Don’t like what Bank of Big Money is doing? Move your money to a local credit union.

Too much gap between the super rich and everybody else? Stop working for them, stop putting money intheir banks, stop buying their products. One person, one small group can make a difference, when enough other peoplealso change their behavior…and their values…over time…

Consumers demanded that corporations produce greenerproducts. They have. The same evolution can and will happeneventually in regards to a more equitable and compassionate sharing of theworld’s resources. It is a matter of theevolution of belief, of what we the 99% value.

What does the occupy movement want? More democracy, more equality, more treatingeach other as if we are all worthy…a more equitable, just and compassionate world.

Isn’t that what we say we want? What we already hold as part of ourPrinciples?

Did you read the article in last Sunday’s local paper about the three new books that use statistics to prove that our world is more peacefulnow that it has ever been?

It is hard to believe. Hard to believe, but statistically true.

Hard to believe, especially if you only focus your attentionon the violence that happened yesterday in our world, or the violence that ishappening today in your world…then it is impossible to see that there is less,much less overall armed, bloody conflict that ever before in human history

These books use statistics to prove that this is so, thatthis is true. Education is likethat. It surprises us with the facts;takes our subjective reality and alters it just enough to make a difference inwhat we value, what we believe...

One of these three books is by Steven Pinker, a Harvardpsychologist. He writes that “thedecline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciateddevelopment in the history of our species.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” he saysthe main reason for the decline of violence is the higher IQ’s that have come witheach succeeding generation.

It is pretty simple. Smarterpeople try harder to find peaceful ways to negotiate conflict…

I see intelligence in the Occupy movement. Here are people deciding what to do in the“leaderless” consensual, participatory democracy style that is the hallmark ofnon-violent, share the power, “youthful” kinds of social protests…

Here are intelligent people doing their best to not useviolence…trying to censure those within the protest who do… They are operating from a different set ofvalues than the generations that came before them…a more intelligent sense how to deal with conflict…

Will there be more “justice, equity and compassion” becauseof the Occupy Movement?

I don’t know, but if ignorance is the real “enemy”, that which slows the movement towards a morepeaceful way of solving our many problems…not capitalism, not greed, not “evil”people, but IGNORANCE, then teaching ought to be where we put ourbest efforts…

Intelligent people have already figured out how to avertecological disaster and end economic disparity. It is their students, our students who will build the “promised land” …

That doesn’t mean there won’t be any blood or teargas. What it does mean is that there won’t be nearlyas many dying to make change come as was the case in past centuries.

The good news that violence has declined over the long haulis reassuring, at least to me. It bringsme hope, even “proof” that the arc of the universe maybe does bend towardjustice, or at least peace…as long as we keep getting smarter…

We need education and we need courage.

The youth of today are educated, connected, used- toexpressing themselves… And thankfully youth don’t know yet how risky it is to dream that the world be different than it is.

Young people and frustrated people, people with time andenergy, with dreams of making things different from how they are, and angrypeople and people who have been there in the streets, in the theatre of changetheir whole lives are all part of the Occupy movement.

Then there is me and maybe you, at home watching the drama unfold from afar. Even though, I believe that we will get theresomeday, I am afraid of the violence. Even though I know that statistically, less will die. I am not ready to risk that, yet. I don't want to die or go to jail.

That’s been my excuse for years…

Maybe because I am oldernow and I know now how short live is…or because I am tired of it taking so long. Whatever the reason, something has changed.

I’m connected. I ampowerful. I am part of the 99%.

Maybe, I am depressed enough to believe that nomatter what progress we’ve made through the ages, is it too little and too late,so what’s the risk? …what’s left tolose? Or maybe I anticipating a tippingpoint, that if just a few more of us push, we’ll all be moved to a new place,the one we have hoped for, for so long.

I don’t know why...

But I know I will be there this coming Friday on the cornerof Charles and Greenville Blvd’s, at 11 am. I hope you will join me.

There will be Occupy demonstrations all over the world on 11/11/11 at 11 am.

I don’t want to watch on TV or hear about it on social media.

When I was younger and in training for the ministry, it was acommon teaching technique to ask ministerial students to present an experience ora situation, and then to ask them to say or to explore; “where is God in this picture?” I am not sure where God is, or who God is, anymore.

But, it is clear, clear as it can be, where the energy of “justice,equity and compassion” is…

and I plan to be there, will you?

Who is Jesus? Part 2: What Did He Say?

2011-10-16T15:45:00.001-04:00

Have you been following the Occupy movement?

I have been reading online articles and Facebook posts and have been especially struck by how many times and how manypeople have made reference to the words of Jesus.

Did you read the article in The Huffington Post written by thenow retired the UU minister, the Rev. Marilyn Sewell? She ended the article which she entitled “TheChurch and Occupy Wall Street” quoting Jesus…reminding her readers what he said.

I am just guessing, but I bet a lot of the folks who are sharingposts that quote Jesus don’t ordinarily define themselves as traditional Christians. They are probably not active, signed up membersof a Christian church. And, like Rev. Sewell, they probably stand far outsidewhat might be even broadly defined as the Christian faith.

But does that really matter?

In our world, when you go quoting the greatest teacher whoever lived, it doesn’t make any difference what part of Christianity you belongto, or even if you do! You’ve simplyappealed to a higher authority, an authority whose face, words and deeds are recognizedby almost everyone.

Everybody knows that Jesus and what he said carries way moreweight than Christianity does!

Well, everybody might know that now.

What I would like you to realize is that Americans haven’talways been so keenly tuned in to Jesus and what he looks like, what he said,what he did. Americans haven’t always understoodhim to be the greatest sage of alltime. Americans haven’t always lifted upthe words of Jesus as the best there are when it comes to teachings aboutjustice, equity and compassion

Last month I showed you what Jesus looks like!

Well you saw what an ad man, named Sallman, thought Jesuslooked like. You may have heard me say,or you knew already, that millions in the 20^th century agreed that Sallman,the portrait artist, got it right. Hecaptured what Jesus really looks like, at least in the minds of so many. He created a portrait. The American peopleturned that portrait into an icon.

This month, I am going to enlighten you as to why Americans grant somuch “authority” to what Jesus has to say.

We know what he looks like. Andwe all think we know what he said.

Well,sometimes we need to be reminded. Butwhenever we do remind ourselves or each other what he said; when we quote Jesus... whatever we are trying to say is given more weight, authority, power, propheticvoice…..

In our culture Jesus functions as a familiar personality muchbigger than any one church, or even any one religion can hold. His is a personality with superstar status thatalmost everyone not only recognizes, but respects.

Jesus says…we listen.

The process that made Jesus the cultural hero that everyonestops and listens to was brought about by the same kind of “cut and paste” operationthat severed Jesus’ head from his body, from any particular context, like theSallman portrait did. The one I showedyou last month.

It was in the 19^th century, when Jesus’ words weresevered from Christianity, by guess who?

After this Presidentwas done, Jesus would no longer belong exclusively to the faith movement thathis life and death brought about.

Before I tell you about how that happened, it is important foryou to know that in the earliest century of the American experience, the 17^th,the figure of Jesus was not central even for Christians. The Puritans, who in so many ways personifiedthe quintessential American religion, who dreamed of building the City on theHill, who banded together with each other to be in a new covenantalrelationship with God the Almighty didn’t have much use for Jesus.

For them, Jesus was only important in a sacrificial way, hisdeath having brought about a new relationship between a new people and an old god.The son’s role was minor compared to big daddy. For the Puritans, worship was not about 'Jesus my savior', or 'Jesus my friend', or even 'Jesus the wise teacher'. It was about getting and staying in rightrelationship with God the Father.

We UU’s often claim to be heirs to the Puritan form ofchurch governance, the “we-are-all-in-this-together” part. But we make no claim to have inherited the “fear-of-God-Almighty” piece! Sometimes we forgetabout how BIG and Important God used to be!

Getting from the Puritans tothe third President of the United States is a long and complex tale. But the short version is: Alongwith the Puritans, many others came to the new promised land with all sorts of religion and noreligion. What they mostly had in commonwas a growing disdain for the real or the imagined power of any King, almightyor not. All of the left wing of theReformation including the Puritans rejected popes, Kings, Lords and all the reigningbishops in the Anglican Church as far as spiritual matters went. It would only be a matter of time, before theidea that all (white) men are equals before God would influenceeverything.

Along with the idea andpractice of democratic society, came the elevation of Jesus into the Super Man among men. The radical notion that everyone is capable of deciding andacting for themselves, would bring education and enterprise, and deeply affectnot just forms of governance, but change who was imagined to be in charge of spiritualand moral and ethical matters.

One could make the case that the passage of the firstamendment not only guaranteed religious freedom, it also had the effect ofdemoting God- the Lord it Over-You to be feared Father. In his place rose Jesus, the perfect teacherof how to live together in brotherly love in a just society of equals. (It was as if Americans left God behind, whenthey began to worship Jesus…)

It was Thomas Jefferson the creator and passionate promoterof the separation of church and state, who was the major player in separatingJesus from Christianity. Jefferson pavedthe way for Jesus to be the super sage every one listens to, everyone respects.

While Jefferson was the third president of the United State,in office, he found the time to take a razor to the Bible, cutting out theparts he agreed with- that he found to be reasonable-pasted them together and producedwhat would become known as The Jefferson Bible.

What motivated him to do such a thing on “our” time? Was he just trying to produce what he neededJesus to say, in order to make an appeal for his agenda by making reference toa much Higher Authority?

Maybe. That might behow we interpret his actions now…

At the time it was more likely that he was motivated by whatmoved most educated, passionate leaders, who wanted America to begreat. He used reason to look for the reasonable things Jesus likely said. He threw on the floor the parts of thegospels that were, in his mind, unbelievable, silly or inconsistent. The result was the clear undeniable messageof justice, equity and compassion. (Thesame message that would later cause UU’s to disavow their relationship with Jefferson,the slave holder.)

Nearly a quarter century later, another “cut and paste” operationwould bring about The Woman’s Bible. Elizabeth Cady Stanton one of the early leaders of the long movement tosecure women’s right to vote, was censored by most of the other suffragists becauseshe wouldn’t give up her efforts to produce a Bible that eliminated, orexplained the offending sexist passages. Yes, of course the vote was important to her, but getting the Bible tosay the essential message of justice, equity and compassion that she knew mustbe there beneath the misogynist details was more important.

Unlike, Jefferson, she at least had a committee of 26 tohelp her.

Yet, neither Jefferson, nor Stanton, relied on Biblicalscholars.

So what!

Contemporary Biblical scholars endlessly debate what theBible really says about what Jesus really said.

We don’t know for sure. We only sort of know what people much later said he said.

When the Jesus Seminar, comprised of academics at work inpublic and private universities all over the US from the late 1980’s forward, votedto determine what the great teacher “really” said…it ought to come as no surprise to learn that the academicsdrawing straws produced nearly the same set of words that Jefferson had put inJesus’ mouth two centuries before.

I shared with you last month that this sermon series “Who isJesus” comes from my having read Stephen Prothero’s book American Jesus: Howthe Son of God Became a National Icon. Prothero again and again calls America the “jesus nation”, becausewhenever there is something we need to fix, that brings us back into alignmentwith justice, equity and compassion, who do we call on to have the last word?

In America, it does not matter whether one is on the right orthe left…or in the middle, or whether one is Christian or not….ALL Americans haveinherited a strategy for effecting cultural change, especially change which asks/demands that people to be transformed.

It is the cut and paste… strategy that goes like this:

First, refuse to equate Jesus with the Christiantradition. Say something equal to: “Thereligion of Jesus…is not the same asthe religion about Jesus; and whatreally matters is what Jesus did and taught.”

Secondly, use the cultural authority of Jesus to denouncewhatever it is you as change agent deem to be contrary to “true” Christianity. Or, press on and use the authority of Jesusagainst the whole of Christianity…like our own Theodore Parker did.

For when the person or the people calling for change unmoors/disengagesJesus from the beliefs, practices and institutions of the traditional Christianfaith, Jesus is then free to be whoever the change agent needs him to be. Jesus is already a cultural icon amongChristian so he loses no authority there. AND when separated from Christianity, he gains authority among those whowant change.

What did Jesus say?

The Jesus who stands separate from the beliefs, practicesand traditions of the ever – evolving and incredibly diverse Christianchurch…can say whatever our culture or the various sub-cultures within our broaderculture need him to say.

He can say whatever we hope will bring about the change wewant to see, as long as we believe what he says carries the potential to changeour nation and our world…as long as Jesus, our Super Hero, gives voice to thefrustrations and fears of ordinary people who know something is wrong, as long as we-Americans give him this power, we-Americanswill continue to believe in Him and hismessage.

Rev. Sewell ended her article by reminding us that Jesus didnot say; “I have come that you might be comfortable”. But rather, “I have come that you might havelife”

How we interpret “might have life” has everything to do withwho we are and where we stand, where our hurts and fears are…

There is no denying the super hero weight, power, authority thatthe words of Jesus have, especially when severed from any historical or traditionallyChristian context…

…especially when everybody knows what Jesus says and only needsto be reminded…

What did Jesus say?

I am guessing you know already...

Laughter is Good for You!

2011-10-10T09:18:00.002-04:00

In 1979, Norman Cousins, the writer and editor, publishedAnatomy of an Illness. He had been suffering from an auto-immunedisease which came upon him in the form of a debilitating arthritis. Doctors had told him that his condition wasterminal. His book started a revolution in patient care,because it told a story of how powerful the results can be when a personparticipates in their own healing. Thatone could alter the course of a terminal diagnosis was a brand new idea in thelate 70’s.

Cousins used many different techniques beyond themedicines he was prescribed to deal with his illness. The book walks the reader through his journeyto find health again. One of the thingshe discovers along the way, is that if he watches the Marx Brothers orreruns of Candid Camera, and laughs hard, it is good… really good!

He shared that he was able to enjoyup to two hours of pain free sleep from just 10 minutes of deep belly laughing! No sedative or pain medicine was able to do thatfor him. There was a point in theprogression of his disease when laughter really was the best medicine!

He reminded us of something we humans have alwaysknown. Laughter can save our lives!

Cousins didn’t die from his auto-immune disease,like the doctors said he would. After herecovered, he wrote more books, and he became, among other things, a Professorof Medical Ethics at UCLA. It was therethat he participated in doing research on the biochemistry of humanemotions.

Back in the late seventies, scientists were justbeginning to prove what we take for granted these days, … one’s emotional state is important for how one’sbody deals with disease. We’ve come tobelieve that optimistic, hopeful, trusting folk are more resilient; recoverfaster. Negative, paranoid, cranky folkdon’t do so well…

It’s really not that either/or!

Yet laughing is critical for our mental, physicaland spiritual well-being.

We can’t laugh our way out of the humancondition! But we can cope better. We can by laughing relieve stress, findcommonality with each other, and give ourselves some needed distance from thepain and the downright absurdity of life. It is good to let in some comic relief!

Being able to laugh, just laughing on a regularbasis, often and long and loud… is maybe way more important than we might thinkit is!

Have you heard about Laughter Yoga?

Its proponents claim that there really is no needfor reruns, comedians, sarcasm, clever humor, poking fun! …your body just needs to laugh!

Started by an Indian physician named Dr. MadanKataria from Mumbai, Laughter Yoga Clubs now number over 6000 across the worldand are in nearly 60 countries. Dr.Kataria started the first club with a few friends in a public park in 1995. They simply came together to laugh for 20minutes….as hard and as deep as they could. Then they did it again the next day and the next… That began the Laughter Yoga Clubs that arenow all over the world.

It doesn’t cost anything to join. There are no forms to fill out. The clubs are non-political, non-religiousand non-profit. They are run by trainedvolunteers. The training they go throughhelps the leaders teach the others how to breathe! Breathing is important when your goal is tolaugh for 20 minutes!

The ultimate goal of laughter yoga is nothing tolaugh about! It is no less than worldpeace!

Actually the theory behind laughter yoga is thatit doesn’t rely on humor, or sarcasm, jokes or comedians! There are studies that have been done that provethat the body cannot tell the difference between faked or real laughter. One will receive the same physiological andpsychological benefits either way.

Watch this!

The proponents of laughter yoga hope that theseclubs will spread to more businesses, schools, prisons, long-term care, orcancer centers, and/or wherever there are physically or mentally challengedfolk.

I think it would be great if instead of openingprayer, congressional sessions or city council meetings, police briefings, ormilitary operations could start with 15 minutes of belly laughing! Now that would be revolutionary!

Perhaps it would change the world if we laughedmore, more often and for longer periods of time!

…especially before we engage in seriousconcerns

We really don’t need science to tell us thatlaughing is good for us. Perhaps we needscience to prove how laughter works, but we’ve known that its good medicine fora long time.

They say that healthy children laugh up to 400times a day, but adults only 17 times a day, on average.

From a religious or theological perspective,laughter can honor the essential absurdity or paradox of the humancondition. Comedy is sacred art. It can keep us from thinking too much,worrying too much about the ultimate questions that essentially have noanswers…like why did this happen to me? …or why do we live, just to die? …or what happens when we die?

Laughter can bring people together and dissolvedifferences and hatreds, and pain.

Laughter can enlighten our everyday existence sothat we see with new eyes, so that the world of joy and possibility becomesreal. It helps us not to take ourselvesso seriously…

Or perhaps what I ought to say is that laughtermight help us to be and to do the very serious task of changing the course theworld is on, or altering the progression of disease.

Laughing is good for you!

Who is Jesus? What Does He Look Like?

2011-09-19T08:56:00.001-04:00

How many of you know who this painting depicts?

With over 500 million copies of this portrait produced by the beginning of this century, it has often been claimed that this is the most common religious image in the world. For decades, especially in this country, this image was everywhere.

It hung in nearly every Christian church, in nearly every Christian child’s bedroom, it was in the pockets of almost every soldier going off to war... This Jesus was familiar to the American public, like Jesus had ever been before. Like an image of the statue of liberty, this image was instantly recognizable by almost anyone. This portrait, and the person it represented, become one and the same. Never before has Jesus been such a popular figure, a Super Star.

Why did this happen and what does it mean?

Our 20^th century fascination with Jesus, and the elevation of what some call “Jesus-only-religion” was an American creation. And, Unitarians had a part in its creation! Jesus as cultural icon / Jesus alone (separate from God, separate from doctrine) was new on the stage of human history.

Since the 1960’s there has been some movement away from the predominance of just one image and of a singular idea about “who Jesus is” as we have become a more multi-cultural and diverse society. Yet, even though he may have been cloned into many diverse superhero manifestations, his personhood continues to be iconic in our cultural imagination.

I probably don’t need to say, that the American view of Jesus is often far removed from any “truth” we might think we know about the historical Jesus. And it is rare that the contemporary Superstar Jesuses, have much if anything to do with any of the many understandings of who he was for his first century followers….

But, I am not going to go there in this sermon series. I am more interested in helping you understand how Jesus became such a popular personality, a Star in the American religious imagination. Why did Jesus (with the last name Christ!) move from a relatively minor actor in God’s long history with humankind, to take central stage? Why in America?

I will share some of what I have learned …in progressive sermons, delivered about once a month.

A lot of what I will be sharing comes from Stephen Prothero’s 2003 work entitled American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon.

I won’t be spending much time telling you about what those who study the historical Jesus can tell us about what he was really like…back then. If you want to know what modern scholarship says about that, the ECU Dept of Religion has just begun a public lecture series to share what academia has to say about who Jesus “really” was.

But, I’ve got pictures!

What I am interested in is trying to help you to see how the images and ideas about Jesus have changed over time…how those images and ideas have addressed differing needs and desires within American culture.

I am hoping to enlighten you by showing you that the way things are or have been in our lifetimes, is not the way things have always been, and certainly not the way they will be.

I am trying to give you some space…. some space for your intellect to stand in for just a little while, to get perhaps a little distance from where you are or may have been, in order to take a fresh look at where you might be going…

My goal in this sermon series is to give your religious imagination some freedom…freedom to move. I am doing what liberal religionists have always done…and that is “smashing idols”!

Icons can obscure the movement of the holy. Icons, created by humans to point to the sacred, after awhile can become the sacred.

I think we do holy work on Sundays. Part of that work is to free ourselves from what keeps us stuck in place. Sometimes, we get stuck in the business of rejecting what doesn’t sound right or feel logical. That’s important work. But so is moving into the place where we are free to creatively imagine what symbols or images best channel our spiritual yearnings, to understand why certain images work and how they work.

I am hoping that if we can begin to understand what made the Jesus- so appealingly captured in this image- so popular, we can also understand why it is sometimes so difficult to wrest this image of Jesus out of our imagination and try to see again.

Perhaps you will hear how important and powerful religious symbols are, even if you decide for yourself that you don’t need the props. And perhaps you will hear and have a new appreciation for how, like all art, religious images not only display what we imagine; they also play a role in determining what we can imagine.

Next month, I will back up a bit share how the nominally unitarian Thomas Jefferson and genuinely Unitarian, Theodore Parker played significant roles in the cultural forces that led to the popularity of this image. Perhaps, UU’s are now playing a role in bringing to the world religious imagination, images that move us forward.

For today, let me share the story of the artist that created this portrait.

Warner Sallman was born in 1892, as the eldest of three children, to immigrant parents from Finland and Sweden. As a young man, he was trained at the Chicago Art Institute. And, his mentor was a well known newspaper illustrator.

This image was originally rendered as a charcoal sketch which Sallman entitled The Son of Man. That version first appeared on the cover of the denominational magazine for the Evangelical Covenant Church in 1924. The ECC is an American Christian denomination begun by Swedish immigrants. The ECC includes about 800 congregations now and, like us, they don’t ask their members to subscribe to any particular creed. In 1935, Sallman used oil to create the work that appeared at the 50^th anniversary celebration of the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Eventually, the Baptist Bookstore, serving the much larger Southern Baptist Convention, had a huge hand in popularizing the painting, distributing various sized images for sale throughout the Southern US. The Salvation Army and the USO handed out pocket-sized versions to servicemen and women heading overseas during WWII. After the war, groups of evangelicals conducted campaigns to distribute the image in private and public spaces in order for there to be card-carrying Christians who countered ‘card-carrying Communists’.

Prothero tells readers of his book who might be too young to remember that the “Head of Christ by Warner Sallman went on to be reproduced in almost every “imaginable form—on prints, plaques, bookmarks, funeral cards, church bulletins, buttons, calendars, clocks, lamps, coffee mugs, stickers, billboards, and key chains”. Sallman’s image was an advertiser’s dream, far out performing any that had come before.

His was also - originally and only - a portrait of Jesus. The images that were used by Christians before Sallman’s where those lifted from works of art that showed Jesus in the context of a Biblical narrative.

During the 1920’s and 30’s this one also entitled Head of Christ by Heinrich Hofmann was likely what was in the Protestant public’s imagination when they envisioned their Lord and Savior.

But, this Heinrich Hoffman portrait was actually a “cut and paste” from his larger painting.

You’ll hear more about the American “cut and paste” tendencies when it came to popularizing Jesus “only” religion next month!

The Sallman Head of Christ portrait was unique in that it made no reference to any story about Jesus. It was not set into any context. It did not rely on any particular doctrine.

The Jesus he rendered stood alone. It was easy for the American public to project whatever they wanted to see or feel … upon it.

Sallman’s image was brilliant! It was brilliant in the sense that it allowed Jesus to stand in the American imagination completely divorced from doctrine, from any particular theology or denomination.

Just Jesus.

It was Jesus as friend.

Prothero says; “His skin is movie-star perfect. His hair is flowing. And the light that bathes his beautiful face begs to be described as dreamy. While the subject is clearly male, he is not self-evidently masculine. …Different Americans could read different Jesuses into it.”

This image served as a shortcut for the American relationship with Jesus.

Jesus on my side. Jesus who walks with me and talks with me.

This Jesus “worked” because this image captured what the American public imagined, or wanted to imagine….

Yet, images that become icons also determine what we can imagine.

Straight nose, light skin, chestnut hair…???? Is this what the real Jesus looked like???

Sallman's Jesus was what the American public wanted Jesus to look like. And once the American public thought this is what Jesus looked like, it was not easy to imagine he might look different.

For an image to become an icon means that for most people the image is instantly recognizable. It also means that the image becomes the single and narrow lens that channels our vision, limiting how we think of the thing or the idea or the phenomena that the image represents.

This year, my hope is to help you to understand more about American religious history. I want you to know that Jesus the Christ wasn’t always the Super Star he became around the mid-twentieth century in this country and still is…

This is probably the most popular image of Jesus right now within contemporary Christianity.

Still a head and shoulders view, but this Jesus is not gazing dreamily away. There is a image captured in this portrait that says something about what Americans want and need now.

Can you see it?

A Reflection on Hands

2011-09-05T09:59:00.000-04:00

As achild I often held my grandmother’s hands. I held them for studying. Theywere so different from mine. Loose skin. Lots of little/fragile bones. So many blue colored veins visible just underthe surface pulsing with her life… Alifetime of cooking, cleaning, gardening; a lifetime of connecting with those scarredand lovely, fragile and powerful… hands …connecting with family and friends, withthe soil, with food, with dirty dishes and laundry, with babies andgrandchildren… the story of her life was there in her hands…

When Ibecame a teen, I remember my mother taking my hands in hers and studying them…sheseemed especially focused my fingernails…deciding, I guess, that it was time toteach me how to use an emery board. Shetaught me how to shape my nails, so my hands would be more “lady-like”? After that my hands stopped looking like achild’s and began to look like hers.

As Igrew older, I saw… when I took my mother’s hands into mine, that hers where aging,beginning to look like her mother’s… Loose skin. Lots of little/fragile bones. Blue veins visible just under the surface pulsingwith life…the story of her life there in her hands. My grandmother’s hands and my mother’s hands weren’texactly the same, but there was no doubt daughter came from mother…and that Icame from both of them. (And, all of uswith nicely shaped fingernails!)

I lookat my own hands now and I see my father’s hands, too.

Hiswere thick with muscles, short fingers …often dirty, rough…. He used his hands like tools; hammering,bending things into shape, reaching into greasy tight places to fix what was broken. When he left this life, I mourned that hewould no longer show me how to turn a wrench, or tie a knot in a fishing line, orwhere to smack the TV so the picture would be good again.

I’verenewed my appreciation for all working hands this past week…

After “MeanIrene” came calling, many of us here in Eastern North Carolina have been dealing with theaftermath of her fury. Many have been laboringto deal with all that needs to be done just to clean up. Our hands have been busy.

Mopping,wiping, sawing, raking, hauling branches into piles.

Someof us may have even been busy using our hands to pray that our families, ourloved ones, our neighbors remained safe and unharmed by nature’s violence… Someof us have used our well shaped [or not!] finger tips to call our insuranceagents, or type out our e-mails, or post our status on social media!

I knowsome of our coastal neighbors have had to deal with too much water, as havemany inland and too many North of us. Inmy neighborhood and I know in many of yours, it was the trees crashing…some ontop of, or through homes causing damage to property that will take a lot ofwork by a lot of skilled hands to repair.

Many,many of us were lucky that most trees came down rather gently when the soggyground let go of them, or the wind snapped them in two and what fell just missed lives and homes….

Somefamilies lost loved ones because of this hurricane. Precious human lives, animals and so many trees,are gone. Our working hands, havefolded in prayer to say goodbye, to honor those whose lives are no more…

Withall the violent wind and rain, some of us were reminded of other losses, oflong ago pain… of times in the past whenwe were frightened…by violence, by change that came too fast and too sudden… may our fears be stilled now… may we be comforted and know that it is OKnow… that we are alright…there are hands that will take care of us…

Manyof us looked out at our neighborhoods, our property, our homes, our familiar places, and saw the destruction and thedisarray and were frustrated that we had to wait, wait for help to come, forpower to return. We waited.

Whenthe storm was over and it was “safe” again, we got to work, clearing thedebris, checking on friends and family…working with our hands…

LastSunday, I cancelled our service. Notonly was it not safe to drive, I have studied you and I know you/we are doersand that everyone who could, would be out straightening and cleaning up andtrying to make things right again. Assoon as I could I hurried to clean my front yard of all the downed branches. I knew that my next door neighbor who often mowsmy front yard when he mows his….would find comfort in mowing. He did!

Althougha little damp, a little less shingles on the roof than before, this building isOK. We haven’t lost any “things” thatcan’t be set right again. I hope and Ihave prayed that is true for all of you…that you have not lost any “things”that can’t be set right again…

It is serendipitousthat tomorrow is Labor Day. It is fittingthat this is time to celebrate ‘hands on’ workers…all those who make thingsright again with their hands. A nationalholiday since the late 1800’s, the first Monday in September was made Labor Daybecause we are a nation that knows that the work done by the hands of ourancestors, all who have come before us whether joined with us by blood or byspirit, made us who we are today, a nation that builds and re-builds…

So,let us be thankful for with our hands. Letus be thankful for all those who work with a chainsaw! …or a hammer, or a rake,or just cover their hands in work gloves and set about the task of setting thingsright again.

That’swhat we do here, too, time and time again. We set things right again!

Wemake meaning out of chaos. We make musicand beauty out of ugliness. We bringlove and hope where there is despair and pain.

It isnot so much about well-groomed yards, or well-shaped fingernails …

And, itdoesn’t matter what color or size or shape our hands are. They hold the power to heal and comfort, tobuild and re-build, to reach out to another in need, to tell a story, tocommunicate, to reach in and fix whatever is broken, to reach up and givegratitude for all that makes life full…

I onceheard a Rabbi say that God has no hands. She made us with hands, to do her work….

Thinkabout it: human hands as well as thehands of all primates are our chief organs for physically manipulating theenvironment, from the roughest to the finest motor skills, from wielding a clubto threading a needle, we interact with our hands. Our fingertips contain some of the densestareas of nerve endings on the body. Theyare our richest source of tactile feedback from our environment. Our sense of touch is intimately associatedwith our hands.

Religioustradition from Judaism to Pagan, recognizes the importance and uniqueness ofthese organs we call hands. Religions ofall kinds recognize that our hands symbolize our connection to each other, ourmost basic way to touch and to know each other. Of all the living beings, only primates can “hold hands”.

Eachof us has hands that are unique and individual, particular only to us,revealing our life and how we each have lived. They are also, at the same time, for almost all of us, [excepting thosewho have lost their hands or fingers through injury or deformity], a body partwe all share, that we all have in common.

From areligious perspective, the hands are symbols for how we carry out our work, ourvocations; our particular ministries. Our hands reveal how we have answered the religious question, “how thenshall we live?”

Howhave your hands worked for justice, for peace-making, for bringing more love tothis hurting world? What image of handsspeaks to your deepest sense of purpose? Praying hands, hands raised in exhilaration, palms up and cupped,clenched fists, fingers held in a peace sign, hands holding other’s hands?

Let usbless the hands of our parents, of all those who came before us, who gave us thesehands of ours that reveal who we come from; that remind us what sort of peoplewe are, that show us what our lifetimes have been spent doing.

Let usbless hands of our children…Let us care about what they touch and how theytouch…who they touch…

Wehave within each of us the capacity to create who and what we want to be. We have with each other the power totransform what is… into what can be. Iinvite you to deepen your relationship with this community of faith. Imagine that you holding each other’s handsyou have what sustains life; you have what you need to feed yourself and to feedeach other.

Let usbe resolved to take our hands out of our pockets, and reach out to give and toreceive…

Hand Blessingby the Rev.Amy Freedman

Become aware of the hands thatyou are holding.

Their warmth, texture, weight.

As an infant these same handsreached out for the nourishment of milk.

As a child these hands shakilywrote a name on paper for the first time.

These hands have wiped awaytears, clenched in anger, waved hello and good-bye countless times and embracedloved ones.

And now these hands are thetangible link that connects us to one another.

These are hands that haveworked, are working, and will work to make the world a better place.

I invite you to look around andsee those around you who have experienced so much that is life.

May the circle be open butnever broken.

The Home That Gives

2011-04-18T07:39:00.000-04:00

Ten years ago, I served as an Associate Minister for the UU congregation in Jacksonville, Florida. The buildings that house that congregation were designed by a student of the great architect and Unitarian Frank Lloyd Wright. There are walls of glass, unpainted concrete block and ceilings of stained wood. Covered decks and outdoor walkways are everywhere. Like many Florida campuses, one has to go outside to move from one room to another. Inside or out, nature is always was present…

http://www.uujax.org/where/PhotoTour.html

Even though this congregation’s buildings are very close to a busy main thoroughfare, they are on a little oasis of North Florida wilderness. There is a small pond, a larger wetland area, and a wooden path through the wetlands. The large windows behind the pulpit look out over the water and trees, out over the western sky where one often may see a large bird or two wading in the water or floating through the sky. If the sermon gets boring there is always a wonderful view of nature to look at.

One wall of the office I used while I was there was very large sliding glass door. I positioned my desk to face that glass so that I looked out over one of the wooden decks and the pond below. That deck outside my glass wall was also the main walkway between the sanctuary doors, the bathrooms and the parking lot. That deck and several others had been built around the old, huge moss-covered live oak trees that filled the property with shade.

One afternoon I was sitting at my computer trying to get my thoughts together while writing a sermon. It was a Tuesday or Thursday. It had to be one of those days, because it was on those days when the local Tai Chi Society rented the sanctuary and moved the chairs aside to do their meditative body movement. On those afternoons people I didn’t know would pass by the glass wall of my office.

So, I am sitting there looking out, working on what I was going to say on Sunday. I am watching as a woman I don’t know walks up to the oak tree just outside my window. She stretches her arms as far as they will go around the tree and embraces it like you might embrace a family member or a close friend.

I am watching. I’m thinking…I have heard of people doing that.

I like trees. I have even occasionally admired activists who have planted themselves in trees for weeks trying to keep old growth forests from being cut down.

But, I felt a little voyeuristic just sitting there watching her hug Mr. Live Oak…

Her embrace seemed so… romantic.

As much as I love nature, and as obvious as it is that that UU “campus” was designed to intentionally include the natural world in its sacred space, I had never thought to hug a tree and I had never seen any of the members there hug a tree!

As I watched her, I realized I was watching exactly what ought to happen in sacred space…”an embrace”…

Or, to say it another way, when we find we are embracing whatever it is we are connected with we are in sacred space…

As Earth Day comes round again, I want to encourage all of us to find our own ways to connect with nature, to embrace the “sacred space” that we are in….our home/the earth that gives us life….

And, as we are made aware, again, after last night’s wild weather, the home we live in can also take our life…

I was going to invite you to hug a tree, at least metaphorically, this morning….

I was going to talk with you about how as a culture we are making our relationship with nature too hard, too much work…I was going to mention how we use Earth Day as just another opportunity to beat ourselves up about all that we aren’t doing, or have yet to do enough of, or fast enough to “save the planet” from destruction. ….about how we have let Earth Day become a shopping frenzy for every product that claims to be “green”. Or as a way to count ourselves as more enlightened than everyone else who we need to get on the ecological bandwagon…

I was going to remind you to just relax and give Mother Earth a big kiss and a hug!

But, I don’t know ….after last night, she seems a little scary!

http://www.reflector.com/crimerescue/area-assessing-damage-445270

I know there is a lot wrong in our relationship with nature, and there is plenty that needs fixing.

But, I was going to remind you of all that is so right about nature.

I was going to say there is so much beauty and so much “healing” power for what ails the human spirit, so much joy that comes from all that is the non-human world…I was going to ask… can’t we just enjoy it and celebrate it?

…without thinking of a million more things we have to do or all the ways we must persuade others to do a million things to save us all from destruction.

I was going to say; let’s just embrace what’s so easy about the “wonderful web of creation.”

And then look what happens. She had a fit! And, we have to clean up!

Is she mad at us? Does Mother Nature target some of us for elimination, for destruction? Or do we just happen to be in the way…when she slams a tree down?

I am not sure this is the time for a hug…

We have been reminded once again, that we humans are in an equal relationship with a big tree or the wind. We certainly are not gods; not the masters of creation.

We are fragile, vulnerable to forces way more powerful than we can ever really imagine. We have been reminded again that our lives can be over in an instant.

I still want to say to you, this Earth Day season; “live while you are alive.” Enjoy the beauty of what you can see, what you can hear, what you can taste and smell, as you move through all that this earthly home gives us. It is our home. …and it can be comforting to believe that it gives us all we need… and yet nature is not our servant…and at times, not our friend!....and what we need to live can be gone…in a flash…with the rise of the sea, with the roar of the wind, by fire, by mountains falling, ice melting….trees crashing.

Our Christian neighbors are getting ready for their high holy days this week. Many will be retelling the story of the God who became a man sent here to die so we might be saved from this earthly existence ….to go somewhere else….where there is no fear, no suffering, no pain…and perhaps none of nature’s fury….no wildness, no wilderness…

I am frightened when the wind blows hard and the trees bend and crack and the water rises and nature threatens to destroy my home, but on this earth is where I want to be.

I don’t want to leave this world, or to be saved from it.

My home is here.

And I know that “my home” can kill me…

We can only control so much. It is easy to embrace beauty…azaleas, green grass, tall shade trees….lakes, ponds, birds….It is much more difficult to embrace wildness…the part of nature that kills what we love….those we love…us…

I don’t need to be made to feel guilty or that it is my fault or our fault that nature is wild and mostly beyond my control, that life comes and life goes in ways that give me pain. I know that there is so much I cannot fix… I can grieve and I am sad about the loss of life, human life, animal lives, homes and places that once were and are no more….

It is easy to embrace beauty and joy and trees that hold still or just gently sway in a soft breeze. It is a whole different thing to “embrace” what has the power to kill you….at random.

All of life on this earth is precious. My life and yours is short. We are vulnerable to forces beyond our control, forces that have no awareness of the details our existence.

One day while I was alone in the Jacksonville UU congregation’s buildings, I went for a walk on the wooden deck that meandered through the wetlands. The water was high that day, because of the tide or rain. I hadn’t gotten very far when I heard something in the water. I looked and for about 5 seconds, the amount of time one could count say 1000 five times, I locked eyes with a river otter. This was not pristine water. It was full of polluted inner city sludge. But there I was face to face with a creature that I had only previously seen in a zoo or an aquarium.

Later I had to ask myself, did I really see that otter wiggling itself up out of the water to look at me? That was a “god-moment” for me…

I don’t hug trees. But, I have locked eyes with a river otter in sacred UU space…

It gives me hope to know that we can and are doing so much to clean up what has gotten messed up. We see the incredibly beautiful and horrific videos of vast ice fields melting into the seas, the images of stranded polar bears and the Amazon forest burning and tsunami’s rolling over homes and fields and people. We care and we make choices based on empathy for all of creation.

We will never be equal to the forces of nature. What we can do is embrace the sound of birds and the beauty of forests...appreciate the precious gift of this earth, walk quietly in the woods, allow our pain and sorrow and confusion to be healed by the glory of creation, that keeps on living and dying and living…. Feeding our souls and spirits with both the simple and the complex splendor which can tell us what our place in the universe is.

May we learn to live our lives in harmony with the energies and rhythms embedded in the earth, that we may appreciate the glory of creation forever.

May it be so.

What is Prayer

2011-04-03T17:26:00.001-04:00

Words for the Chalice Lighting

The Religious Humanist’s 23rd Psalm
by The Reverend Charles Donald Saleska

Life itself is my guide
I shall not be denied its sustaining power.
The green earth provides me with lavish nourishment;
Cool still pools of water refresh my spirit.
A deep intuition leads me along a path that is true
for the sake of existence itself.

Even though I walk through a valley where dark shadows
prevent me from knowing where life
finally leads in death,
ultimately I will not fear,
For the energy of the universe is within me.

The tools by which I am kept from wandering
off into despair,
They are a comfort to me.

Even in the face of threats to my well-being
and my very life,
The spirit of life nourishes me,
honors me with its presence,
and reminds me that I really
have more than I need.

Surely goodness and kindness
radiate upon me constantly,
and I shall dwell within this universe
with its transforming processes, forever.

The Sermon:

How many of you think prayer is the way we ask God, or the universe, or whatever/whomever our Higher Power is, to do something for us? Many of us were told or have heard that if you want something then go and pray about it…

How often do you do that? How often do you ask your Higher Power to fulfill a need or a desire that you have?

Do you pray every day? ….several times a day? …or do you only use prayer when nothing else is working? …when you’ve tried everything else?

How often do you get what you pray for?

Has the “rate of return” been good? Or has it been poor, but you keep on trying?

A dozen years ago, when I was learning to be a generic chaplain in a large hospital with a busy trauma center, part of what I did was pray with patients and families and sometimes the staff. A lot of praying goes on in a trauma center, in an emergency room, in a hospital…

I am sure a lot of praying happens wherever and whenever human beings feel that things have gotten out of control and they need some “outside” help to get back to normal.

It took some getting used to for me to pray as often as I did in that chaplaincy program a dozen years ago.

Long before that, probably when I was a teenager, I had concluded that there wasn’t much relationship between praying and actually receiving what I was asking for. So, way before this chaplaincy year, I had stopped asking God to do this or do that… because the magic of that kind of prayer wasn’t working for me.

I found what I thought was a good reason not to pray.

Eventually, I realized that prayer was not always about asking…

Sometimes I would find myself just saying thanks, or expressing gratitude, to the universe. “Thank you for all that I have been given….all that I have received that I didn’t ask for, that I maybe don’t even deserve, yet I have!”

Sometimes when we get what we didn’t ask for, didn’t expect (and it’s a good thing), it we have received grace. And we say grace! We say thank you. That’s a prayer.

It was the prayers of gratitude, the acknowledgements of grace; that I heard from others and sometimes from my lips, in that trauma center, in that hospital, that helped me to learn to appreciate prayer…

There have been times though, when I have received what has felt to me like grace, when I have also been keenly aware that others have not received such privilege. I can feel really uncomfortable expressing my gratitude for having been spared from some disaster that has befallen others. My mind starts to wonder about what kind of God would “save” me from an untimely death or terrible suffering but not the person that seems to have been just as worthy of saving.

Yet, I say thank you, anyway.

I can and I have found reasons not to pray…. But I do anyway…

As I have gotten older, as I have become more and more aware that hate, disasters and suffering, my own and others have not stopped, and I am more and more aware of what a privileged life I live….I find myself praying more and more… a combo platter of thanks and "please do more." And, I care less and less about to whom or to what I am praying.

When I feel despair, or loneliness, or helplessness, or when I feel joy, or gratitude or awe, when beauty or a sense of solidarity with others moving towards the same vision of the beloved community as I am overwhelms me…when I think those I care about would want me to, I pray….

Sometimes, especially in private, my prayer is just a big “why?”

Why has this or that happened? Why me? Why that person? Why us? Why now? How could you? Why is life so painful sometimes? Why haven’t centuries of prayer made a difference? Where are you?

In those times, when I pray "why", I am NOT really looking for an answer. I don’t want my prayer silenced by an answer. There is no answer that would satisfy me. (Some might call this prayer a whine. It is more dignified to call it a "lament"!)

I don’t want anyone to quiet my lament, before I can say it…get it all out.

I want and I need to express my protest, my whine, my lament…. That is my prayer….

My lament gives voice to the human predicament. Shaking my fist at that Higher Power that is supposed to be in charge… Protesting the infliction of all the wounds and injuries that tear at the fabric of peace and love…that we try so hard to keep stitched together… just saying out loud my sadness that life is so short…

I also, in prayer, ask for forgiveness; for the hard hearted indifference I sometimes feel, for the wounds I inflict, for the ways I have not done my best, not fulfilled the promise of who I could be…not brought all I am to every present moment to be forgiven...

I find it cleansing to pray…to ask why, to say I am sorry, to express gratitude, to ask for what I need without holding on to the expectation that I will receive exactly what I pray for.

Prayer can be a starting over place…

For me prayer is not about appeasement or supplication or loyalty….to a particular god…it is certainly not about blind faith…

It is about finding that posture of authenticity…where I am most myself; that particular bend that matches what is really going on in my soul.

For me, I have to let what I think go and move more towards what I feel. I am not saying this is what prayer should be or is for everyone. I am saying that for me, when I can move out of my head and into my gut, then my soul seems to open up. Then there is room inside of me for the sacred…to be present….or just to be aware of the sacred that is always present!

When that happens, then I am praying…

As a “minister”, I am expected to pray in public. (As a Unitiarian Universalist minister, not so much!) I've had to learn how. When I am called upon, expected to pray, even when it is only with one other person, what I try to do is to say out loud what I have heard… both the words others have said and what I sense they want to hear, to offer back and lift up what I hope helps others to feel affirmed and comforted, to somehow acknowledge that we aren’t alone.

Prayer is about attempting to make a connection, finding the channel to what is sacred with the least amount of static.

When I pray in private, I am trying first to just give voice to the yearning that is within me… whatever it is…without censure.

Sometimes my yearning is an asking, sometimes it is a lament in the form of why, sometimes it is thank you, sometimes it is a promise to do better, be better…make better…

Sometimes the yearning recedes and I can just sit and be silent and listen…

Mary Oliver says in one of her poems named “Praying”…

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Prayer is for me a posture that allows the life giving spirit within me to speak... or to just make its movement known in the silence as I listen, as I am moved….

When I was a chaplaincy student it was my job to be present with patients and family members. I would enter waiting rooms where traumatized family members sat, often anxious, to hear how their loved ones where doing. I would introduce myself as the chaplain, knowing that identifying myself that way I would be expected to pray! Often the expectation was that I pray right way!

I learned to wait; to listen for what words or images might bring comfort to a particular person or family, to hear how I might echo a language of connection that was familiar to them.

One day, I introduced myself as the chaplain to a family member whose loved one was in the trauma center…. Her son had been shot and he wasn’t doing very well. When I approached her and said; “I am the chaplain”, she said back; “I am all prayed up”!

Uhm! I didn’t take offense! I wanted to know what she meant, what it was like for her to be “all prayed up”; so later, I asked.

Prayer for her, she said, was not a quick fix for an emergency! It was a lifetime, life long, ongoing conversation. It didn’t remove doubt, or fear, or anger, or grief… it wasn’t a band aid… For her, prayer was a constant colorful conversation. She was always “on line”…

One day, I would like to be able to say; I am all prayed up!

But I am not there yet.

I still let too much get in the way. Too much logic, too much focus on the rate of return, too much worry about who is or is not listening…too much awareness of the unfairness of privilege…too much of my head trying to figure out this or that, instead of just praying....

When I need words to help me I often go to these:

They are The Lord’s Prayer, as translated to English from Aramaic. (Which was the language that Jesus spoke. Rather than the usual translated which came by way of Aramaic, then Greek, then Latin, then English...)

O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration!

Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us

where your Presence can abide.

Fill us with your creativity

so that we may be empowered to bear the fruit of your mission.

Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with our desire.

Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share

what each being needs to grow and flourish.

Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us,

as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.

Do not let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose,

but illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.

For you are the ground and the fruitful vision, the birth power and fulfillment,

as all is gathered and made whole once again.

Ending Words:

from Barbara Gibson's book, Psalms for Troubled Times: Prayers of Hope and Challenge, the 23^rd Psalm.

Creation takes care of me

And gives me what I need.

I lie down on the green grass,

I swim in the clear river.

My heart is whole.

I do what is right for the earth.

Even when I walk in a dark valley,

the shadow of death behind me,

I am not afraid

because creation is with me:

the trees and the mountains comfort me.

Earth's table is set for us

even when we doubt.

Earth's plenty flows over us like balm,

more than enough for everyone.

Surely goodness and mercy

are here for us every day of our lives.

We dwell in the house of earth forever.

Preach the Kindness

2011-01-24T11:13:00.000-05:00

One day during the mid-seventies, the members of this congregation received a phone call from an attorney representing the City of Greenville. He was offering to pay $3,000 for a small lot which he said they owned.

When member Carroll Webber described their reaction in his manuscript; “The History of UUCG”; he reported they said; “What? We own what?”

The City of Greenville wanted to develop public housing, near Dickinson Avenue, 10^th Street and Grand. Doing research, the attorney had come across a will that deeded a small parcel of land just west of the train tracks to the Universalist Church of Greenville. The representatives from the city figured that the then Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greenville was the rightful owner. So they called making an offer to buy “our” land.

There weren’t many folks left in Greenville who had any memory that there had been a Universalist church near the corner of Dickinson and Grand. Although a number of educators and scientists, who moved here the early 50’s, had formed the Emerson Study group; they were Unitarians. By 1953 they had organized themselves as the Unitarian Fellowship of Greenville. It wouldn’t be until 1961 that the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations would merge on the national level. The Greenville group didn’t add the second U to their name until 1963.

All during the first half of the 20^th century Universalist congregations scattered throughout this nation were closing their doors and losing their buildings. By the second half of the century some Universalists still remained in Eastern North Carolina; but not in Greenville…

Yet their spirit and their legacy was still here…

In the ECU library you can find articles from The Daily Reflector that report the July, 1906 dedication of the “Delphia Moye Chapel” by the Universalist Church of Greenville. Later records show that this congregation occupied their building until 1922, until a primitive Baptist congregation moved in. In 1931 the building was donated to the Salvation Army. And, in 1950 the Delphia Moye Chapel was demolished…just 3 years before the Unitarian Fellowship of Greenville would be founded.

Carroll indicates that the parcel of land that the city valued at $3,000 in the mid 70’s was across the street from where the Moye Chapel, home of the Greenville Universalists stood.

It was named for Delphia King Moye, who was the second wife of Elbert Alfred Moye. Dr. E.A. Moye was a well known figure in Greenville, who owned a pharmacy, and was involved in several other successful businesses. He was 64 years old when the chapel was dedicated. Delphia was only 48 when she died, just nine months before the Universalist Church of Greenville was dedicated in her memory. She was the daughter of the long time Greenville sheriff, Colonel William May King and his wife Almeta. We know from the journals kept by visiting preachers that Delphia’s parents, the King’s, were lifelong Universalists.

Delphia King Moye and Dr. EA Moye had been married just a little short of ten years when she died. He went on to marry a third time, and it is not likely that he remained a Universalist. I’d like to know more about the Kings…as it is still a mystery to me, when and why they became Universalists.

It is no mystery that the $3,000 earned from the sale of the Universalist land was put into a CD which for a time was jointly held by UUCG and UCONCI (the Universalist Convention of North Carolina, INC). The investment grew and when UUCG was ready to buy land and a building on Arlington Street in 1990, UCONCI agreed that UUCG could use the CD (which had grown to more than $10,000) for the down payment. Only 3 years later the city, then ready to widen Arlington, bought that piece of land, too.

It was the money earned on that sale, plus a mortgage loan from the denomination that made it possible for UUCG to purchase this home in 1993.

So, you could say, that with the city’s help, the legacy created by Greenville Universalists long ago is still alive…and thriving.

If you subtract the years of dormancy we UU’s can legitimately claim to have been present in Greenville for at least 75 years.

I like to think, we are just getting started here!

If you know the history of Universalism in America, you know it goes back nearly 250 years, when John Murray arrived on the shores of New Jersey in 1770.

I have no idea how the King’s of Greenville came to be Universalist, or if their daughter grew up a Universalist. That piece of the story might be lost!

What we do know is that John Murray was not the first person in what would soon become these United States to believe in a God that is kind and merciful. There were already folks in America, who had come to believe in the good news of universal salvation, who understood that God had through Jesus made sure that all his children would be with him after death.

John Murray, often called the Father of Universalism, was like many others, tireless in traveling this new country to bring the good news, to “preach the kindness and the everlasting love of God.”

Many - about to be citizens of a new nation - were eager to hear that “all” are equally embraced by the One who is Love. It was a radical new message that fit a new nation composed of equals…(or those who were eager to be counted as equals !)

Preaching “not hell, but hope and courage” John Murray and many others who rode the “good news” circuits helped make Universalism the fifth largest denomination in the United States in America by the mid 1800’s.

Everywhere he went, John Murray and all the other Universalists who came after him proclaimed “God is Love!” The phrase was carved on Universalist pulpits, painted on their churches, quoted on the mastheads of their publications.

For the Universalists, the message was simple and straightforward. In response to a God who loves all equally, we are to do the same.

Somewhere, somehow the Kings heard this message. Their daughter Delphia King Moye heard it. Being a second wife, I have to wonder if she knew about John Murray’s second wife?

John Murray eventually settled in Gloucester, MA. Even before he arrived there were people there, including one Winthrop Sargent, a prominent sea merchant who had already come to believe in universal salvation. He and others left the “official” parish church and began what they named the Independent Church of Christ. They called John Murray as their minister, and in so doing in 1779, their congregation became the first Universalist Church in America.

John Murray’s first wife had died in England before he set sail. When John decided to settle in Gloucester, he not only met Winthrop Sargent, but also met his daughter. Nine years later, after she was widowed as well they married. (At the time they were married he was 47 and she was 37.)

Eventually, Judith would move with John when he was called to the First Universalist Church in Boston. She was his ardent supporter, his biographer later after he died, and his advocate when the Boston church had difficulty paying his salary on time! Before she even met John Murray, she had been a prolific writer, often publishing her works under a male name….because in the late 1700’s women were not taken seriously in public!

By the time they moved to Boston she had come out of hiding!

Judith Sargent Murray was the first published advocate for women’s equality. The Massachusetts Magazine carried her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” in the March and April 1790 editions. Yet her essay was foreshadowed by the much more well known one by Mary Wollstonecraft; “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, which was published in England 2 years later.

Judith, because she was a Universalist, believed that every woman should be educated and should be raised with the same sense of self worth as boys. If the world could be made over to give girls the same education as boys and the same self esteem, she knew that eventually women would themselves believe they were and to be seen by others as equal to men.

John Murray was a fully supportive partner of his wife’s advocacy. She was a playwright, an essayist and a poet. She was well known in her day for a three volume book of essays and plays titled “The Gleaner” published in 1798. Records show that her works were purchased by George Washington, John Adams and Henry Knox and other well known leaders. In her three set volumes she championed the new republic, discussed Universalism, advocated for women’s equality, and covered lots of other subjects that would be familiar one’s to any of today’s UU’s.

She was the first to write a “curriculum” for the education of Universalist children.

Yet for a long time after John Murray’s death and then her own, her life and works were lost to history. It wasn’t until 1974, with the publication of Alice Rossi’s book “The Feminist Papers” that Judith Sargent Murray’s place in the struggle for women’s rights would reemerge. In that seminal work that sparked the Second Wave of Feminism, Judith Sargent Murray’s essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” was first among the first wave documents.

It was Judith religion that made the difference in her politics, in her “public” self!

In their heyday, Universalists were among the leaders of almost every effort for social reform in this nation, they worked to end slavery, to promote women’s suffrage, to reform public education and health care, to end poverty and to change how the mentally challenged were treated. John Murray and Judith Sargent Murray both left a legacy…of what it means to “preach the kindness”, not just so we are all happy in a heavenly home, but fulfilled on earth, as well.

After John Murray died, Judith went to live out her last years with their only daughter and son in law in Natchez, Mississippi. She took with her and likely completed there what she called her “letter books”, 20 volumes that she had begun at the age of 23 in which she had transcribed every piece of correspondence she had ever engaged in (almost 2500 letters). In these volumes she documented for future generations what her time is history was like.

These volumes were considered lost until 1984, when they were discovered in Natchez by a Unitarian Universalist minister!

She left a legacy, as did her husband, as did the King’s of Greenville, and as did Delphia King Moye, and as will we!

It’s in our genes, as Universalists, as Unitarians, to make a mark on history, to make a difference….to preach the kindness, to promote the equality of all …

May our “steeple” rise again over this city, metaphorically and for real!

Peace in the Heart

2010-12-06T12:04:00.000-05:00

A young CNN reporter heard about an old Jewish man in Jerusalem who had been going to the Western Wall to pray twice a day every day for a very long time. She decided to interview him, and when she found him, standing at the wall praying, she introduced herself and asked, “How long have you been coming here twice a day to pray?” The man answered, “About 60 years.”

“That’s amazing!” said the journalist. “What do you pray for?”

“Peace,” replied the old man. “I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims. I pray for all the hatred to stop and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship.”

“And how do you feel after doing this for 60 years?” asked the young woman.

“Like I’m talking to a damn wall!” said the man.

We have all had that feeling at one time or another, haven’t we? Deeply frustrated that what we have been asking for, often over and over again, has not come to be…. Or, even worse, we’ve made a heartfelt request, over and over, and our prayer appears to not have been heard at all… It is not that we’ve gotten a “no” answer. We haven’t gotten any answer…

It is so frustrating to ask for what you know would make life better not only for you, but for all, to ask again and again and nothing changes…

When I read this story the first time, my question was “Why, would the old Jewish man keep doing what was not working?”

That, of course, is not so much a question, as it is a judgment. Why would one be so stupid as to keep doing what’s not working?

It is a judgment my inner critic throws at me in the form of a question over and over…Why do you (meaning me), I ask myself… keep doing the same ole thing day after day, year after year, when you obviously are not getting what you seem to want from that behavior?

Reminds me of Dr. Phil saying; “is that working for ya?”

Yet, I know from studying myself and you that whatever we do does “work” for us in some way. We may not be getting what we are consciously asking for, but we are getting some need met. The old Jewish man wasn’t getting through to God, but he did respect from the young reporter for his long time regular and consistent prayer life.

Maybe it was just in that moment, when she asked what he had been praying for… for so long, that it dawned on him… how frustrated he was….there was no more peace in this world than there had been 60 years before, and on the day she asked….it was clear there was no peace in his heart either…

Have you seen those bumper stickers? “No God, No Peace”.

I don’t know if an all powerful “God” who answers our prayers is required for there to be peace in the world. I am not even sure if God is required for there to be peace in our hearts. But I suspect that peace in the heart is required for there to be peace in the world…

There has to be something more (or less!) than our prayers of petition…prayers asking for something….there has to be something more (or less) than our chattering minds that gives us peace, serenity, calmness …even when we realize how frustrated we are!

If it is God we pray to and God doesn’t answer, doesn’t even seem to hear, it’s only natural to be frustrated.

Where are you? Why aren’t you listening? Some of us good people have been doing our part, praying for the good of the world, regularly, consistently for years.

Why aren’t you doing anything?

Sometimes I imagine God expressing his (or her) frustration with us in the same way…

For centuries, I have called out to you. Why aren’t you listening, why can’t you hear me?

Maybe we (human beings and God) need couples counseling….the kind that gets us to move past the chattering, the praying without listening, past the illusions and delusions of the perfect relationship, past the frustration, past the stand offs… and the break ups

John Welwood in his book Journey of the Heart tells a story about getting into an argument with his wife. They are still really angry with each other and have retreated to separate places in their house to stew. A bit later, they encounter each other in the hallway. Welwood describes how they are eying each other warily wondering what’s going to happen next. He talks about how one part of him wants to drop the whole thing and embrace his wife, yet he knows that his embrace would be false and too soon. Another part of him wants to start the argument all over again, but that would be like pouring concrete on any hope of reconciliation.

He does neither. They both just stand there in the hallway holding onto the “I love you” and the “I am angry with you” space that so real, poignant and paradoxical… Slowly they find a new entrance into conversation and before long they are laughing. They start to playfully call each other names, expressing anger and affection simultaneously.

To make peace, in the world, with each other, with God, we have to learn to stand in that place of not knowing what comes next. We have to learn to stand in that place of faith, that all will be well even when it isn’t!

I believe we need to feel our feelings, all of them… anger, sadness, joy, fear, frustration…and that we need to use our feelings and our intellect to solve problems in this world…especially those problems that have to do with hostilities and hatreds between religions, nations, people, all the competitors for the world’s limited resources… We need to acknowledge what’s not working, so that maybe we can move on to what will…

But we also need to have the experience, particularly as religious people, of standing calmly in the luminous space of not knowing….no answer…no God…no other who is going to fix the world/our world…no way we can fix it…and yet it’s OK…

I don’t know what your prayer is. I don’t know what you ask for again and again…

What I hope for you is that over your lifetime you have received enough calmness when life was chaotic to have learned to be calm, that you have received enough serenity to be at peace with yourself when every false idol demands your loyalty, that someone has but enough faith in you so that you know that you have the resources to move through life’s frustrations with peace in your heart….that it will be OK…

Once upon a time, a king had a boulder placed in the middle of a busy road and bag full of gold placed under it.   Then the king hid and watched to see what would happen.

The first traveler to come down the road was a wealthy merchant who went around the rock and cursed the king for not keeping the road clear.

The second traveler to come down the road was in a great hurry, and, all the while muttering about her plans and complaining about this nuisance, climbed up one side of the bolder and down the other and continued on her way.

Next down the path came a tired peasant pulling a vegetable cart. Approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and putting his shoulder to the task moved the stone to the side of the road. As the peasant picked up his load of vegetables, he suddenly noticed the pouch lying in the road where the boulder had been. Inside the pouch was a note from the king indicating that the gold was for the person who removed the obstacle from the roadway.

We all have been in all three of those places in our lives; cursing the king for not keeping the road clear, muttering our annoyance at the boulder being in the road… And just doing what was necessary to move the obstacle out of the way..

Sometimes our role is to answer a prayer that wasn’t directed at us….to move a boulder out of the way to clear someone else’s path, to clear the path for all the travelers coming afterwards..

A young man stood up from a bench, straightened his Army uniform, and studied the crowd of people making their way through Grand Central Station. He looked for the girl whose heart he knew, but whose face he didn’t, the girl with a rose. His interest in her had begun thirteen months before in the Santa Barbara public library. Taking a book off the shelf he found himself intrigued, not with the words of the book, but with the notes penciled in the margin. The soft handwriting reflected a thoughtful soul and insightful mind.

In the front of the book, he discovered the previous owner’s name. With time and effort he located her address. She now lived in New York City. He wrote her a letter introducing himself and inviting her to correspond. The next day he was shipped overseas for military service.

During the next year and one month the two grew to know each other through the mail. Each letter was a seed falling on a fertile heart. A romance was budding. He requested a photograph, but she refused. She felt that if he really cared, it wouldn’t matter what she looked like.

When the day finally came for him to return from overseas, they scheduled their first meeting – 7:00 PM at Grand Central Station in New York. “You’ll recognize me,” she wrote, “by the red rose I’ll be wearing on my lapel.” So at 7:00 he was in the station looking for a girl whose heart he loved, but whose face he’d never seen. I’ll let him tell you what happened:

A young woman was coming toward me, her figure long and slim. Her blonde hair lay back in curls from her delicate ears; her eyes were blue as flowers. Her lips and chin had a gentle firmness, and in her pale green suit she was like springtime come alive. I started toward her, entirely forgetting to notice that she was not wearing a rose.

As I moved, a small, provocative smile curved her lips. “Going my way, sailor?” she murmured. Almost uncontrollably I made one step closer to her, and then I saw the woman with the rose. She was standing almost directly behind the girl. A woman well past 40, she had graying hair tucked under a worn hat. She was more than plump, her thick-ankled feet thrust into low-heeled shoes. The girl in the green suit was walking quickly away. I felt as though I was split in two, so keen was my desire to follow her, and yet so deep was my longing for the woman whose spirit had truly companioned me and upheld my own.

And there she stood. Her pale, plump face was gentle and sensible, her gray eyes had a warm and kindly twinkle. I did not hesitate. My fingers gripped the small worn blue leather copy of the book that was to identify me to her. This would not be romance, but it would be something precious, something perhaps even better than love, a friendship for which I had been and must ever be grateful. I squared my shoulders and saluted and held out the book to the woman, even though while I spoke I felt choked by the bitterness of my disappointment.

I said; “I’m the person you have been writing to, and you must be the person who has been writing to me. I am so glad you could meet me; may I take you to dinner?”

Simultaneously disappointed and thrilled.. Frustration! A prayer answered in a way we didn’t expect.

We all have our obstacles and frustrations. Sometimes we shape our own stumbling blocks. Still, we can... with peace in our hearts... put our shoulders to the task of clearing what is in the way, not knowing what comes next yet ….clearing a path not only for ourselves, but for others.

Back to the end of the story: When the soldier asked if he could take the plump, gray haired women to dinner, her face broadened into a tolerant smile. “I don’t know what this is about, son,” she answered, “but the young lady in the green suit who just went by, she begged me to wear this rose on my coat! And she said if you were to ask me out to dinner, I should tell you that she is waiting for you in the big restaurant across the street!”

I almost didn’t want to tell that ending! That’s like a happy ending to a movie!

And life isn’t always like that! Life doesn’t always have a “happy ending”.   Life doesn’t always work out the way we might want it to. Sometimes the very best part is just standing still in the not knowing, real, poignant, luminous places...

I was reading a book the other day about how to deal with difficult people in congregational life! The author made the point again and again that the way to deal with difficult behavior in congregational life, or in life in general, was to cultivate that calm spot in yourself. To not label, or exorcise your own frustrations on other people, or let them exercise their frustrations on you….but just find and stand in that calm, non-anxious spot in yourself.

At the very end of the book, the author said something that really struck me. He said that “as a pastor, I am supposed to be an expert in God’s love: proclaiming it to others and knowing it in my own life.”   He admitted that he’d gone through a time when he didn’t know God’s love and was proclaiming it falsely, yet he'd returned to a space where peace was again in his heart.

I thought about that, I wondered how to understand that for myself. I don’t think of myself as an expert in God’s love. I don’t think I am an expert in how to be in relationship with God. And, I often wonder if God is any kind of expert about me!

At the very same time, when I can be so frustrated about, even in denial about, the necessity of relationship with God, or God with me….At the very same time, I can stand in the yard and watch the snow come down and know that everything is OK, will be OK…

It is in that place that I stand…not knowing what comes next, but OK, so OK with what is, even if no one seems to be listening, I've heard the calm sound of it's going to be, it is OK.

Standing on the Side of Love, a sermon delivered on Oct 24, 2010 at the Raleigh UU Fellowship

2010-10-30T12:38:00.000-04:00

Standing on the Side of Love

Raleigh Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Oct 24, 2010

Rev. Ann Marie Alderman

I became a minister, a UU minister just 9 years ago. I “came out” as a lesbian to myself, my family, and publicly over a period of about six years, from the time I was a senior in high school, through college, and into divinity school; a period that began nearly 40 years ago. I could probably list a number of reasons why I didn't go into the ministry after earning a seminary education in 1978; my theology had become too liberal, I wasn't well known by my mentors and peers in the denomination I was in at the time, I was young, I was naïve, I am female....yet none of those factors kept out many of my peers...

The single most important reason why my becoming a minister was delayed for over two decades was my sexual preference. Even though those who were judging whether or not I was a good “fit” didn’t ask and I sure didn't tell! It didn’t matter…

What I want to share with you this morning is how my experience as a member of a particular historically marginalized “community” has influenced my spirituality, has deeply informed my spiritual journey. Even though my personal story is unique in many ways and I am not here to speak for all GLBTQ persons, there are three points I want to make that I believe are universal about gay spirituality.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a briefer version of this talk during the monthly discussion portion of the Interfaith Alliance of Eastern Carolina gathering.

I know most of the folks who come and they know me… to a certain degree. UUCG regularly hosts the Interfaith Prayers for Peace and the interfaith panels and presentations that follow that are meant to help us understand each other. Even when another congregation hosts the gatherings in their building, I am almost always present.

After three years of being with this group, I have become fairly comfortable with them and I picked the topic of gay spirituality.

Even though I have been “out” for nearly 40 years, the closer the time came to do my presentation the more afraid I became.

Even though, I have been welcomed into Unitarian Universalist congregations for a dozen years, I am afraid this morning as well.

I am afraid of your judgment, of retribution, of violence, of being thought of as only gay... It isn't a given for a gay person to feel OK, safe, whole...acceptable… Fear and dread is always a factor in the spiritual journey of gay folk.

So, my first point is that being Gay is to be at risk. To be at risk, to live with ever present danger, is a factor in the life of every historically marginalized person or group.

Here's the deal though: for the most part, people who are marginalized because of their skin color; black, Asian, Hispanic...can't choose to hide what makes them different...I can and I have...

Choosing to hide or choosing to come out, either one, or any of the many variations in between, presents a dilemma for a gay person that has to be addressed again and again, whatever one’s choice is carries immense consequences. One has to always consider the price. If I choose to be “out”, I am in danger. If I choose not to be, I’m in danger, too.

There is a price to pay for hiding, for choosing to deny such a central part of who or what one is. The highest price is what is called “internalized homophobia”, hating oneself because of one's gayness. That can cripple or even kill the spirit.

Choosing to be “out” can mean death as well.

My first point about gay spirituality is about how cosmically frightening it is to know that you are gay.

So, my second point is that a major part of the spiritual journey of gay people is to find the source of one’s worth, not just in society or in one's family or in church...but on a more intimate and ultimate scale...

You might think that “gay spirituality” is just one part of a political movement for equal rights, a movement my life has paralleled in so many ways. From the outside looking in, one might assume that gay spirituality is about gay people, gay couples, GLBT individuals just wanting to be treated as equal to heterosexuals, to be granted the right to marry, to answer any vocational call they might feel such as to serve in the military, to be parents, to be included in the mainstream of society, to be counted as full members inside whatever faith community one might be born into or choose to be a member of...

I was actually surprised by how many of my interfaith allies, those sympathetic to gay folk having equal rights in their faith communities and in society, assumed that my talk about gay spirituality was going to focus on gay marriage.

What I wanted to communicate to them and to you is that gayness informs one’s spiritual journey in a way that goes much deeper than securing equal rights or equal protection under the law. There is much more going on than a desire to be just treated just like anybody else.

Gayness marginalizes one's sense of ultimate worth in a way that every gay person has to come to terms with regardless of their particular faith expression, or place in society.

Another way to say this… is that every gay person in some way has to ask the question why did god make me this way? Or what kind of God made me in a way that assures my marginalization from religious community?

Every gay person in one way or another is faced with integrating both the curse and the blessing of gayness and of using the lens of one's gayness to understand and/or to be in relationship with the divine.

Gay people are faced with this dilemma; “Is the “truth” held by religious communities wrong?”...or am I a mistake? Moving towards a sense of ultimate worth, takes a lot more than marching in a pride parade, or changing the law! There is a deeply spiritual dimension to being gay.

Many gay people don’t make it through the struggle to find their way to a sense of wholeness, to accept themselves, to think of their gayness as a reflection of the divine, or as a gift from the creator. Suicide, many forms of self hate, acts of violence by gay people against themselves and others are the results of this spiritual dilemma unaddressed, unresolved.

Yet many gay people, especially in my lifetime, have found their way to a place of wholeness... There has been a flourishing of all sorts of creative new expressions of gay spirituality, such as MCC, Radical Faeries, Dignity and Interweave and all the other gay subgroups within all the major Christian denominations. There are Gay Jews, Gay Muslims, Gay Buddhists, gay pagans, gay atheists...all with their own way to be spiritually at ease with themselves…and with their God.

Some kind of entry and affiliation with a “gay” group, some place and time separate and distinct from the mainstream, has been and is still an integral part of the journey of a gay soul. I believe that when the lonely gay person finds other gay people and forms community based on sameness, the theological question changes from who am I, to what am I to do, how am I to live?

When I was a senior in high school, at the very same time I was discovering my lesbian sexuality, a single woman that the Baptists called a Home Missionary, who we might now call a Community Minister, came to town. Her job was to work with several large churches in their relationships with some of the government and social agencies in town doing social justice work. She was based at my home church and started a group for the female teens. I wanted to grow up and be her, to do the kind of meaningful “religious” work I thought she was doing. She was on the surface “single”. (Although later I would realize that her long time roommate, the co-owner of her home in Atlanta, was probably more than her roommate.)

I asked how she had been trained to do what she did. When I heard she had a degree in social work, I made that my major the next year when I began college. I also took some religion survey courses to fulfill some of the basis study requirements. Those classes thrilled me to the core. All those questions I had asked for so many years in Sunday school classes that overwhelmed the teachers and were often brushed aside, were welcomed! Social work was boring in comparison and I soon changed my major. I couldn't take enough religion classes. Everything was fascinating; biblical studies, sociology and psychology of religion, world religions, church history. I loved it all.

In the meantime, I continued to slowly find myself as a sexual and socio-political being. It was the heyday of the womens movement. I read everything I could find, attended every feminist lecture and gathering. Robin Morgan and Mary Daly came to campus and I was thrilled intellectually, politically and spiritually.

My Baptist Sunday school teachers had warned me that if I studied too much religion I would lose my faith! There were a lot of factors causing my faith journey to “progress”!

I lost my innocent faith for sure, in more ways than one.

When I was a junior I went to the career counseling center on campus to find some help figuring out what one did with a major in religion. Teaching humanities in junior college seemed to be the only option and that career path was very crowded at the time with so many other liberal arts majors. I was hoping for alternative suggestions. After all the testing, the male career counselor called me into his office to say that what I should do was “get married and teach Sunday school”. I was furious and disappointed.

I had enough sense to turn to the only woman professor in the religion department. She suggested that I look into non-denominational divinity schools. That's how I found myself at Vanderbilt Divinity School, the year that the first woman was dean of a major theological school was appointed. It was exciting times. I changed my denominational affiliation from Southern Baptist to United Methodist. At least they were ordaining women. I knew I had to hide my sexual preference in order to go into the ministry.

I was getting a great education to become a parish minister and I was being taught that one primarily ministers with the core of one's being. VDS taught that self awareness, self reflection, one's own sense and ownership of one's spirituality were the core of what made for a great minister. How could I go into the ministry and hide my sexual preference, something that was becoming so central to my sense of self and my “world view”?

These were questions I didn't have answers to. In preparation for candidacy to become a Methodist minister, I had to go through an intense psychological profile. The psychologist, who back then only needed to share his “findings” of my psychological fitness with the candidacy board and not with me, told me he told them that he suspected some sort of sexual deviance was going on with me!

I applied. I was turned down. I spent the next 20 years being angry and retreating into deviant separatism! Shocked that I wasn’t “acceptable”, angry that I was not fit to represent God, I found solace in the safe sanctuary of sameness. Slowly and progressively the God of my youth receded…

My third point, is that eventually a maturing gay spirituality might arrive for some, given the right circumstances, when and as they are able to ask what might I have in common with other marginalized folk? What are the common bonds between what marginalizes me and what marginalizes others?

Moving from desperate alone-ness, to the safety of separatism, to a kind of universality where one’s sense of community opens up to include all who are marginalized can be the gay spiritual journey.

During the Aids Crisis in the early 80’s, many lesbians came out of their all- lesbian worlds, to be in relationship with gay men. In the last decade, many gay men and women have moved into an understanding that the gay community includes those who are transgendered and transsexual.

One’s sense of community influences how one sees the self… and how one understands and is in relationship to the divine. The god, who didn’t want me at all, became the god who was loved lesbians, then all gay folk, then everyone who is marginalized.

After years of anger and sadness, alternative careers, I found my way back to the ministry. Twelve years ago, while visiting a very small UU congregation in South Georgia, accompanying a friend from VDS who was their once a month speaker….I was asked why I didn’t go into the ministry….

I answered, with a huge chip on my shoulder; “because I am queer!”

They answered; “So what!...that doesn’t matter here” They had no idea how very much it mattered for me to hear those healing words…to find and be found by those who stand on the side of love… It matters here who and what you are. It really matters and paradoxically it doesn’t matter at all.

Each and every one of us has a personal story and struggles. Each and every one of us comes with some sense of our own community or "culture" where we are reflected in the face and the story of others. Each and every one of us has found some way to open ourselves to a sense of connection to all those who stand on the side of love, and in so doing we are intimately and ultimately set off on a spiritual journey to be whole.

Nameste!

One day it won’t matter at all…who you are, what you are…there will be no danger…no risk in standing on the side of love…

This I Believe

2010-04-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

I remember about a dozen years ago, sitting in a counselor’s office, feeling lost and confused. I know now that I was in the middle of what might be called a mid-life crisis. Who I thought I was, and what I thought I was supposed be doing with my life, just wasn’t working anymore. I had learned to say “no” to so much, I was at a loss as to how to hear or live from a “yes”!

The therapist encouraged me to describe how I was feeling with dream like images. The first image that came to my mind was of escaping that room. I saw my spirit rushing out the 2 inch space where the one window in the room was cracked open! I told her that.

She got up and closed the window.

Somehow for the next hour she kept me in that room. And, I kept going back for what I now think of as a sacred, healing hour, for weeks. Encouraged to use my imagination to embody what I was feeling in waking dreams, during one of those hours I had an image of drowning. Using up the last bit of air left in my lungs, underwater I could see below me a box at the bottom of the ocean-of-my-despair resting on the floor. I could see it, I could even dive down to it, but I could not open it. Yet, I knew that inside that box was treasure.

I believe that there is a box of treasure inside each one of us. Sometimes the lid is open and the treasures are easy to see, they float to the surface, giving our world strength and hope. Other times, even though the treasure box is always there, the lid is heavy and locked and we need help to open it.

When I was young, my family and I attended and fully participated in church “every time the door was open” as they say. I was baptized in a conservative, evangelical Southern Baptist church when I was eight. Every Sunday, the minister’s ended his preaching with pleading for the one unsaved soul that he just knew was in the room to come forward. I have joked in the past that I walked down that aisle because I was hungry for the meal I knew was waiting for us at my Grandmother’s house! I had been attending Sunday Services long enough to know that if someone didn’t respond we would be there all day! I thought I had to do what was necessary to get us all out of a jam and move things along!

Yet, deep inside, I also knew, even at that young age; that I had done other’s wrong, that I was guilty of un-loving behavior (especially towards my brother). I wanted to be “perfect”, perfectly loving. I thought I could be, if I was somehow saved from my meanness, by the God that was calling me forward through the pleading words of the pastor!

I was baptized, dunked head to toe in the water of the baptismal pool on a Sunday morning a few weeks later.
But nothing spectacular happened! I didn’t see doves and I didn’t become perfect.

It was a disappointment.

Life went on. What I learned was that perfect loving behavior on my part wasn’t going to come about all at once. I didn’t doubt, as a child that I was loved. Yet, it was rarely clear that I was capable of perfect loving behavior!

I believe in the “yet, but not yet”. I believe there are moments when the ideal “whatever”, be it love or something else, breaks through and we know what utopia feels like. Yet, these are fleeting moments...rarely strung together one after another...

Unlike what the Baptist church taught me, healing is not a once and done thing. We circle back to it, again and again.

For a long, long adolescence I asked who am I ... where do I fit? What am I supposed to do with my life?

When I was a teen, my mother answered me again and again...I was meant to be me! (What in the world did that mean?)

There have been many other mentors, teachers, counselors and friends who have given me glimpses of who I am, who I could be, what it is I have to give.

In my teen years, my family moved away from the “we are going to stay here until somebody is saved” church! It was in this more liberal, yet still Baptist congregation on the other side of town, with a little more to offer than just being saved over and over again every Sunday; that I met a woman who would now be called an urban minister. She was single and did community ministry working with marginalized groups throughout the city, turning the ideal of love into acts of social justice.

I already knew by then that I was different from my peers, that I had no deep yearning for marriage or children. Seeing that it was possible to be a grown up single woman with a career in the church world doing good was important to me.

When I entered college, I decided to major in social work, because that is what she had done. But I soon changed my major. Social work was just too “dry” for me. I was fascinated with the religion courses I was taking. I had always asked a million questions. So many that I regularly exhausted my mother and my Sunday School teachers!

I had always been told at home and in church that whatever you were good at was what you were meant to do. I was really good at reading about religion and asking questions! Yet, I knew my questions were more than academic. My father had died when I was a senior in high school. I wanted to know how to live without a father... I wanted to know how to live and do “good” without reference to the Father God...

One of the summers during my college years, I worked as a “summer missionary” in Washington, DC. My job was to be the youth director helping a dying inner city, previously all white Southern Baptist church, grow again. The plan was to get the surrounding neighborhood kids involved in programs so that, hopefully, their parents would follow. Instead of “white-flight” resulting in erecting a for sale sign, this congregation hoped to transfer building ownership to a multi-racial congregation that lived where the church building was.

These visionaries hoped that the denomination would send them a tall, young, male pied piper that would attract youth to the basketball court and their parents into the church! Those leaders were pretty surprised, that I was the person the Home Mission Board sent!

It wasn’t all that hard to form good relationships with the youth of the neighborhood who were so eager and hungry for attention and something to do. It was a gift to find out what I (a short, round, female, that was not very athletic) could do!

The next two college summers I worked as union relief at a large paper mill in Jacksonville, where I encountered lots of blatant sexism. My job was to fill in for union members who were on vacation. I was assigned a position one summer as a “roll handler”. This involved being the only woman on the crew that loaded huge rolls of paper into train boxcars. It was hard, dirty work that paid well. I learned a lot about working class men and what they expected! I enjoyed carving out a place for myself by proving on more than one occasion that I could do the work. I was able to befriend the macho guys as “an equal” in the work world.

Back in school, I couldn’t read enough about religion. For a long time, I didn’t give much thought to how to turn this interest into a career. When I attempted to pursue answers, I had a counselor tell me that he thought I should just get married and teach Sunday School! I was getting more and more involved in feminism, and my sensitivity to the limitations imposed on women was heightened enough that his comment was more than irritating!

When I was a senior, a woman professor was hired in the religion department and I sought her advice. She told me that she had heard that Vanderbilt would have the first woman dean of a major theological school the next year and maybe there I would find what I was searching for.

In 1975, I entered Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, and found great role models and women like me everywhere. The education was expansive and I quickly found a comfortable peer group. I worked at field placements in small, struggling churches, full of old ladies and underpaid male ministers. I worked at a displaced homemaker agency, where so many women were in their own mid-life crisis, struggling to re-form their identities and make a living on their own without husbands.

I volunteered for the Rape Crisis phone lines and tried to understand violence and how to comfort and strengthen those who had experienced the ultimate betrayal.

I returned home to do a basic training as a hospital chaplain, exploring my “call” and learning what it meant to be “ordained” by those in need. I realized that I wanted to do ministry as a career and I went shopping for a church where what I was learning and who I was becoming would be welcomed. I joined a United Methodist Church and hoped I would be ordained.

During my senior year in Divinity School, I went before the UMC Board of Ministry. I was turned down for ordination. It was suggested that I had not been a Methodist long enough. I felt pressure to hide my sexual orientation. After graduation from Vanderbilt, I entered another “minister wanna be” program in a hospital in Winter Haven, FL. This was to have been a yearlong residency, which included my being a student minister at a large United Methodist church and a student chaplain at the hospital. The program abruptly ended when the director took a job elsewhere. I chose not to go before the Board of Ministry to seek ordination a second time and, instead, returned to Nashville disappointed and disillusioned, feeling unwelcome.

I began managing a small women’s bookstore. We had lots of women come through there looking for more than books. It seemed they had several needs that weren’t being addressed, one of which was someone honest who could fix cars! Some of my friends and I were trying to dream up a business that would cater to the women’s community and maybe make a profit. At that time, bookstores didn’t. We came up with the idea of a woman owned garage. None of us were mechanics and it fell to me to acquire a new skill. I attended Nashville Auto Diesel College at night for nine months. After graduating I found a job at a Peugeot dealership, where I worked for about a year as a mechanic. During that time I was teaching women about their cars at workshops held at the YWCA. One of the local newspapers featured me as the mechanic who could “lay on hands” since I had graduated from Vanderbilt Divinity School. This led to job offers from other dealerships. I was hired to be a service advisor at the Mercedes Benz dealer that was just a block from Vandy. It was the perfect job, crisis counseling and mechanics with Vandy grads as customers.

I have many great stories from this period in my life that I have often thought would make a great book! Talk about being on the front-edge of social change! It was exciting to blow people’s preconceptions.

While working in Nashville, I was very involved with the women’s community. I made no effort to hide my sexual identity. Community organization took the place of church involvement for me. Going to church had left me angry and lonely. I couldn’t get past the sexist language and the sexist theology that excluded my reality. I continued to develop a strong identity as a feminist. I had many friends. My life felt full and fun for a while. Nearing my late twenties, though, I longed for family.

I moved back to Jacksonville in 1981, because I wanted to be near my brother’s two daughters while they were young and growing up and because I wanted to be near my grandmother. I spent a lot of time with my nieces and a great deal of time with my grandmother. Before my grandmother died, she asked if I would say the eulogy at her funeral. I have rarely felt so right about my place and my calling as I did when I was writing her eulogy and when I gave it. That was one of the most emotionally difficult things I have ever done, and one of the most powerfully eloquent times I have experienced, as I was able to give voice to what it meant to have been loved by her. Judging from the response I received, I must have also given voice to those in that room that day also loved by her.

For almost two decades, while I was in my thirties and early forties, managing my family’s service business, I still did not get involved in a church. And I didn’t find time to be involved in any kind of community organization either. Instead, when I wasn’t working, I spent my time and energy accumulating nice toys and going on great vacations. I have always enjoyed good health, and became an avid bicyclist and hiker. I bought two houses. I learned computers. I gardened. Always a reader, after a few years of too much work and some play and not enough reflection, I began to explore spirituality and personal growth topics. When I read “recovery movement” inspired writings, I saw how many “issues” I had that were blocking my growth on every page.

What had happened to me?

I was an excellent manager, constantly maintaining and improving my family’s reputation for reliability and efficiency. I was told by customers and by consultants over and over, that I was the one primarily responsible for maintaining our comfortable profit margin. But, I became more and more dissatisfied with who I had become. I was an angry person, quick to lose my temper. I treated co-workers with little care. Several years ago, after one of my close friends from my Vanderbilt days shot and killed herself, the need to attend to what was missing from my life became urgent. The details of service management were no longer enough to satisfy me. I was bored and restless and I didn’t want my life to end too soon, not having done whatever it was I was meant to do.

During this time, I became reacquainted with another friend from Divinity School who had been ordained after our graduation and had spent her career in pastoral education. Our renewed friendship led me to resign from my family’s business, sell my house, and move to a much smaller community where I became involved again with church and community organizations. I felt like the door was beginning to open to a whole part of myself that had been closed off for far too long.

I managed a small bookstore and read to my heart’s content. I stood in place while the fascinating, eclectic community in that town came to me, searching for meaning and something to read. I immersed myself in the larger community and in working for social change. When the bookstore could no longer afford me, I found a job in property management in the historic district, and used my crisis management skills to solve problems.

I thought I had made enough changes in my life that where I was going next would be clear and easy. Yet, after another in a succession of intimate relationships fell apart, I spent time in therapy. I learned that underneath the anger that I had defined me and protected me, was a vast sea of sadness and despair.

I was in trouble. I had learned too well how to say no. I needed help to say yes...to hear yes...

In the midst of this despair, a friend who was the minister of a tiny, tiny all gay congregation in Savannah asked me to preach on a Sunday she had to be away. It was right after Princess Diana died. The “congregation” of 15 was mostly middle aged and older gay men. It was a strange place to find myself, since I felt they lived on another planet from the one I lived on!

I don’t remember why but I based my sermon on the story from Mark’s gospel about Jesus encountering the Syrophoenician woman. Perhaps that I felt some sympathy for his attempt to retreat from the crowds that always wanted something more from him.

This story is an unusual one in Mark’s gospel. It starts with Jesus trying to find a place to hide, a bit of respite from the crowds. A Syrophoenician woman finds him in his place of retreat and clearly wants something from him. She falls down at his feet and begs him to heal her daughter. Maybe he is tired, but his reaction is uncharacteristically stingy. He basically calls her a dog!

This is very different picture of Jesus from those found in many other passages in Mark, for this gospel is known for presenting the Jesus who came not just to fulfill the messianic hopes of the Israelites, but who came for all, Jew and Gentile, even the lowly Syrophoencians.

It is jarring to read that Jesus wasn’t always ready to help those who needed him. Instead we see a man who lashes out: “Leave me alone! I am not on the clock! It’s my time off!” “I am not here for you, anyway! You aren’t among the chosen.”

The Syrophoenician woman isn’t put off. She did not return the insult with an insult.

She simply stated the facts: “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”

I think what she means is “Ok, I am not a Jew, I haven’t got an appointment, but I believe if I can just get a little crumb from you, it will be enough”.

One can almost see Jesus look up and for the first time, and really see her….really hear her.

We are told that in that moment, she and her daughter are healed.

When the time came for me to move away from that small town where that therapist closed the window and showed me how to be present with my despair, I did not yet know what direction my career path would take....or how I would live out the “yes, you are worthy” that I was just beginning to hear.

In South Georgia I had also found a Unitarian Universalist congregation that wanted to know me fully, that loved me and supported me. I found a place to be myself, where others helped me open the lid to the treasures of my experiences, where we helped each other lift the heavy lids to see what our treasures are.

Eventually, I moved away from those twenty or so years where I had learned to say no to what had said no to me. I let go of the negatives, the shame, the guilt, the violence, the despair and emptiness that had defined me. I learned to claim my talents and skills and to stand with others, both my brothers and my sisters, to see that we, too, had within us treasures that could be unlocked....

I am still learning that I don’t need to be perfect... and that I don’t need you to be perfect...

I believe in the power, the healing power of authenticity, of diving deep into the self, the power of hearing our own stories, the power and faith found in our imagination, the shape our hope takes...at each new turn...

I believe that what, a Divinity School professor called “belly-button gazing”, is not all there is. My story is not your story and my story means nothing if it does not help you hear your story. My healing won’t happen and won’t matter unless it also results in your healing, your wholeness, your affirmation, your “yes”.

I believe that when I fail or forget to ask for help, or to offer help, fail to be vulnerable and open to transformation; when I hide behind anger, strike out with violence, think only of myself, that I am unfaithful to the power of life.

I trust that “yes” comes after “no”!

Last week during a Southeastern UU minister’s retreat, we all heard (most of us baby-boomers) again and again about all the latest things we need to learn. It took me, and most of us at that retreat, a long time to learn, really learn what we now know. Sitting there listening to how much more there is to learn and what all we need to un-learn to get to it, I had an overwhelming feeling of being old and tired! A big part of the message I heard was move over and get out of the way, make way for the younger generation!

It took me so long to get where I am now. I know I got here because others got out of the way, made way for me. It is hard to hear that it’s my turn to move on! I just got here!

Yet, it is OK to feel sad and then to keep on saying “yes, yes, yes!”

Set Me Free: An Easter Sermon

2010-04-20T10:45:00.000-04:00

I could talk to you, with you this morning, this beautiful morning, about eggs and bunnies, about flowers and spring and laughing children. I could tell you what you already know...this is the time of the year to celebrate new life!

I could tell you that here we don’t have to talk about, or sing about the death and resurrection of Jesus who became the Christ, just because that’s what “they” are celebrating this Easter Sunday. We don’t have to go there to lift up the theme of hope over despair, of good over evil, of the power of life over death...

All we need do is open our eyes, our ears...to the natural world...springing forth with beauty and life all around us!

I could use the symbol of the circle to tell you that death and birth, fall-winter- spring and summer, is like a wheel turning again and again and that all we need do is accept where we are in the cycle of the seasons...

I love and am moved by the splendor of nature renewing itself...

Yet, I want more! Especially this time of year!

I want more than cycling, circling, spinning...! I want change! I want to be changed! I want to clean house and throw open the doors! I want the warm wind to blow through every nook and cranny and clean out all the dust.

I want to move the furniture. I want to re-model the house, dig up the yard and plant seeds. I want to change. I want to change myself!

Yes, spring is the season, is the “right” time to watch the flowers bloom, to hear the birds sing, to let the joy that comes from being warm again move me.

I want to move/ to be moved!

Maybe I need to go to the beach, or the mountains!

I have been trying to tell myself that just because it is Easter Sunday, I don’t need to hear or tell the sad story about the death of Jesus. I really don’t need to hear the part about Mary and her companions....going to the tomb where the body of Jesus was supposed to be... to find that it was empty...and hearing the angel say; “he’s not here.”

....nothing to touch, to see... just one more time...

Nothing there in that tomb but emptiness and shadows...

The man who was alive, vibrant, powerful, breathing; warm, tender and provocative ...was gone. Not even his body remained...

You see, for years Easter Sunday has felt like that to me. No one there...no dead Jesus...no living Christ for me to celebrate...like “they” do...

So, let’s just call off Easter and go to the beach and decorate eggs!

I know what it must have felt like when Mary and her companions looked in and found an empty space ...

I know what it feels like for someone I have loved, have been loved by to have died. They’re gone. There’s nothing to see, nothing to touch...just an empty space where a friend, a companion, a teacher, a warm body, a living presence used to be...

Long, so long ago...I celebrated the Jesus who became the Christ...on Easter Sunday. I believed that he rose from the dead to free me from sin and death.

That was a long, long time ago.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I don’t need an angel in an empty tomb where that belief used to be...to tell me; “Can’t you see, he’s not here!”

I know that Jesus the Christ is not there in some locked up room in my soul. I’ve heard it. ...I have felt it for years...that emptiness where Christian faith used to live...

It been like losing someone I loved and was loved by.

When that happens we try to soothe ourselves with the message that the one who has died will live on in our memories, in our deeds, in the genes of their children and their children’s children, in the pantheon of heroes and heroines that inspire our lives. I know those messages bring comfort!

But they don’t make the empty spaces go away. Those spaces can stay empty for a long, long time... for a long time Easter just reminds me of that empty space...

The tomb inside my soul where the Christ used to be...

It is as if for years if I have been stuck standing looking into that tomb, seeing only what is no more... who is no more... staring at the emptiness...

Sometimes, I think I see a ghost, or a shadow... I think I hear a faint and a far off voice. “It’s not real” I say. It is just my longing for what used to be, that is no more...

Most of the time, I don’t want to think about it and I don’t. I find a big boulder and close up that space. Until spring comes...until Easter comes... and “they” are celebrating, and I have this overwhelming urge to go to the beach!

Or stay here and re-model the house; let the wind blow in.

So this year I’m rolling back the stones, taking a look again.

I heard tell that God is always there, never leaves us...even when we leave him.

Maybe you know that God, but I don’t...

I know about the Jesus who died.

Just like other human beings whom I have loved, who have loved me...somewhere along the way in my spiritual journey the God I knew as Jesus the Christ died, and I moved on.

Where a warm presence used to be, there is nothing now....

Most of the time, I don’t go there to that space. I’ve got plenty of rocks and stones piled up to keep me from dealing with that emptiness...

But it is Easter again and I’m digging through the dirt...

Over and over for years I have come to this spot, this DAY and tried to convince myself that because “they”, those Christians who say they believe in the risen Christ, because so many of them have failed and failed terribly to hear or to live his message, why should I celebrate Easter...

Why should I celebrate? Maybe there is answer in these words from Victoria Weinstein:

"The stone has got to be rolled back from the tomb again and again every year.
Roll up your sleeves.
He is not coming back, you know.

He is not coming back unless it is we who rise for him
We who lay healing hands on the reviled and rejected like he did
on his behalf --

We who rage for righteousness in his insistent voice
We who love the sinner, even knowing that "the sinner" is no farther off than our own heartbeat

He will not be back to join us at the table
To share God's extravagant banquet
God's love feast, all are invited, come as you are

And so it is you and I who must feast for him
Must say the grace and break the bread and pass it to the left
and dish up the broiled fish (or pour the wine) and pass it to the right.

And treat each one so tenderly
as though just this morning she or he made the personal effort
to make it back from heaven, or from hell
but certainly from death
to be by our side.

Because if by some miracle (and why not a miracle?)
He did come back
Wouldn't he want to see us like this?
Wouldn't it be a miracle to live for just one day
So that if he did, by some amazing feat
come riding into town
He could take a look around and say

"This is what I meant!"

And we could say
it took us a long time...
but we finally figured it out.

Oh, let us live to make it so.

You are the resurrection and the life."

I have been, maybe you have been to, waiting for “them” to get it right.

I am tired of waiting! It is up to you and to me to RISE up, to see that the dead are gone and we remain. It is up to us now to go tell, to fill the world with tender, provocative, breathing love...

We are alive and not yet dead. We are living, loving, breathing, tender and provocative. We are the good news.

We are the resurrection and the life.

It doesn’t matter what they do. It matters what we do, what I do, what you do.

The Love of Money/The Money of Love

2010-03-07T15:21:00.000-05:00

The Love of Money / The Money of Love

Rev. Ann Marie Alderman, March 7, 2010

I Timothy 6:6-10, 17-19 NRSV

“...for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.”....17-19 “As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncertain riches .... They are to do good, to be rich in good deeds, liberal and generous, thus laying up for themselves a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life which is life indeed.”

Have you heard about the new trend in pre-marital counseling courses? These courses are usually multi-session events. During the session when this new requirement is introduced it has been reported that the happy couples suddenly become very solemn, or they giggle excessively, or they start rolling their eyes. Later, some individuals have reported that they found it very difficult to suppress an overwhelming desire to get up and run. Those who lead these courses are saying that they often hear participants turn to each other and say; “You REALLY love me, don’t you?”

So what is this new requirement that’s causing all this anxious behavior?

The couples are being asked to share their credit reports!

Scary!

You know what they say! It is the lack of communication, honest communication about money that is the number one reason that relationships fail.

Perhaps these couples have believed the popular misquote that “money is the root of all evil” and their initial response to is to “hear no evil”, “see no evil”...

I don’t have access to your individual credit reports! But I do know your history with money and I can promise you there are no scary surprises that should cause you to run!

I don’t need to see your credit report to see the facts about what your financial history reveals about you and money.

It’s clear that the love of money has not pierced your hearts with many pangs! You are rich! Yet, you have not been haughty nor have you set your hopes on uncertainties. You have done good deeds, have been liberal and generous, you have laid up for yourselves a good foundation for the future. You have been faithful to the money of love.

So relax!

Since the early 1950’s you have provided for the “food and clothing” that first Unitarian, then Unitarian Universalism needed to exist here in Eastern North Carolina. You decided what it would take to finance a presence in this community. You spent the money you raised wisely for that “food and clothing” for many, many years. In the late 1990’s you had a big dream to add an adequate shelter. You contributed enough cash and you took on a mortgage to buy this building and make that dream come true. And you paid off that mortgage in less than a decade.

You decided five years ago, that you wanted a full-time minister. That was another big dream for a small congregation. You made that decision and you made a promise about what you would contribute to make the decision to finance that dream come true.

When it was clear, that your income from pledges and from other gifts, wouldn’t fully support the first couple of years of searching for and securing a full time minister, you decided to use some of your reserves (your savings) to help make your dream come true. For two years you used your savings to help finance that big decision.

Since that time, your savings have only used to pay for those things that protect your investment in this building, which you now own outright. If and when this building is sold, all the investment that has been made should come back to you in full. You’ve invested wisely and you have protected that investment.

For the past two years, you’ve passed and you have funded balanced budgets, figuring out just what could be paid out according to what was promised to come in and what was expected to come in over and above the “promises”. All regular, expected yearly expenses are and have been paid with regular, expected income for the past two years. Just like you’ve always done, you don’t spend what you don’t have.

About 80% of your yearly income comes from promises (from pledged contributions). You promise to fulfill your pledges and you have. You have promised to raise other monies from fundraisers and rentals and you have. You have guessed what amount might be put in the collection basket and you have guessed accurately.

The kind of partner that’s willing to do what it takes to get what they want, and then continues to make it happen with planning and caring and careful stewardship is the kind of partner I want to be with!

There is not much money left in that saving account. You chose to turn to that reserve to pay for those things that you decided had to be done to maintain the value of this shelter, to protect the investment you have made in this building. In the past two years, a new air conditioning unit was needed, wood rot and failing windows meant the exterior western wall had to be repaired and new windows installed. The accessibility improvements out front were paid for from monies in the savings account.

Based on what I can see of your financial history, I trust that you will do what you need to do to build up the funds in that reserve account again for future needs. The same as when you as an individual or a family have to take funds from your 401k or your life insurance, or your savings or a credit account, to pay for something that had to be paid for that was too much at one time for your annual salary to support, you know you need to pay that back over time, so that there will be something there for the roof, for the parking lot re-surfacing, for the other air conditioning unit!

Except for the mortgage, you have wisely avoided paying interest. You pay cash. If there is no cash in reserve or no promise of cash contributions, there’s no promise to pay. That’s the kind of partner I want to be with!

You balance your dreams with reality. When your dream is big, you find a way to make the reality match the dream.

And, sometimes when it works the other way around, when reality tells you, you have to pull back, you do. When it was clear that the economy was going to affect you, you agreed to a budget for this year that was less than last year. You agreed to spend less. Because you wisely anticipated that the economy was going to impact everyone’s ability to contribute, you agreed to a budget for this year (meaning July 2009 – June 2010) that was less than the 2008/9 year and that included more fundraising efforts.

I agreed to less in compensation. You found other ways to also spend less, less on the phone bill, less on paper, less on insurance. Because of the new air conditioner and new windows, and setting the thermostat so you are not heating or cooling an empty building utilities costs have been less. You agreed to and you have raised more income from fundraising and from rentals.

Even in difficult times, you found a way to make what you say you want happen. You have been paying a full time minister fairly for three years. You are paying a Director of Youth Education. You are paying a Choir Director. You are paying for a safe, comfortable, insured building. You are paying your fair share to continue to be in association with other UU congregations.

What you have clearly and consistently said for the last four years is that you want a professional minister, excellent worship services, youth and adult religious education programs, a clean, safe, insured, accessible, decent building, caring and spiritual growth, to be a part of the wider body of Unitarian Universalists, to be communicated with, to be a place that potential UU’s can find and will hear about, to be a force for good in this community.

What you have clearly and consistently said is that you want this to be a congregation where anyone who wants to can belong.

The reality is, and always has been, that every single member or family cannot make a financial contribution. Yet, you find a way to make the dream of fairness and equitability real. The reality is that there is a wide variance in what each of you actually contributes or can contribute in terms of dollars.

To say what is fair, to help each other understand what equitability means, you suggest that a pledge be about 3% of adjusted, gross income... You say that’s what “fair” is!

I haven’t seen your credit report! I have only the vaguest idea what your individual or family adjusted gross income is. Yet, I know that many of you give a fair share amount, and some of you give more than a fair amount year after year. Thank you!

I also know that that some of you have very little or no “adjusted” income, that the income you do have is more than used up paying for food, clothing, shelter and the debt that comes from not having enough income to cover your expenses year after year.

3% of nothing is nothing.

There are about 15% of you who cannot, or it would be irresponsible for you to make a pledge to contribute money. Some of you give what you can week to week in the collection basket. Thank you!

I know that sometimes the best any one of us can do in lean times is look in our pockets and figure what we can give that day, that week and making a promise to contribute more than that would be irresponsible.

Did you know that there are almost as many who folks as there are members who do not make a financial pledge, who are not “members” of this congregation, yet who pledge their money? These non-members make and fulfill a financial contribution. You call these non-members who pledge “friends”. For many different reasons they have chosen not to join, yet they make a financial pledge and they faithfully fulfill those pledges. Thank you!

For whatever reason, they haven’t signed the membership book. They may not be members, yet again and again their opinions are heard and valued and are considered every time there is a major congregation decision. This reality is another example of how you respect the diversity of this community.

In the next month or so, if you are a member or a friend, you will be receiving a pledge form, a way for you to say to each other what you will contribute during the July 2010 –June 2011 year. Many of you will take out your calculators, look at your income tax form, find the adjusted gross income line and multiply by 3%, then divide that amount by twelve, figuring out what amount goes from your monthly budget to support the budget of this congregation to which you belong. Many of you will look at what you promised for this year and adjust the amount for next year up or down depending on what your financial reality is or what you expect it to be July - June.

Some of you will get a pledge form and giggle, roll your eyes, feel an urge to run away.

I hope that this “report” that I have shared with you about your money makes it easier for you to communicate, to talk about your money.

There is no reason here for you to feel anxious or to run away...If your personal financial situation is unstable, unpredictable, or difficult ....it would be irresponsible for you to promise money. You can make ....make a pledge to regularly perform a service that is the same, is equal to money! Time spent in service doing things that will offset what might ordinarily be an expense, or time spent doing what will bring in more income from other sources can be your pledge.

A fair “service” pledge would be 3% of 40 hours a week x 50 weeks a year, which is about 4 hours a month....

You can make a pledge to clean the floors, clean the bathrooms, supply the bathrooms with paper goods, clean the windows, do plumbing or electrical work or painting, or mowing, or childcare...any of the tasks that if you promised to contribute other folk’s financial contributions would not have to go to pay for someone to do these services.

The reality is you don’t yet have the financial means for a janitor, or a sexton, or a pest control service, or a lawn maintenance service, a plumber, painter, electrician, a paid administrator, or a paid pianist... you do these tasks now...

You could think of your in service as making this building more attractive for rentals, thus your time is in effect contributing income.

Time spent in performing services that would ordinarily have to be paid for, or that brings in more income is money.

I see you, all of you, consistently and over time, making what you say you want happen. You say you want to do good, to be rich in good deeds, to be liberal and generous, to lay up for yourselves a good foundation for the future, so that you make take hold of the life which is life indeed.

There are three steps simple steps in the money of love relationship that you have with each other.

1) You say what you want. 2) You say what you will give. 3) Together you decide what can happen.

These three simple steps have made your dreams come true, over and over again.

You have faithfully taken hold of the life which is life indeed, again and again.

Do you REALLY love each other? YES, YES, YES you do!

A New Creation Story

2010-02-24T11:22:00.000-05:00

A New Creation Story, (a sermon delivered to the UU Congregation of Greenville, NC, 2/21/2010, by the Reverend Ann Marie Alderman)

When I was 12 or so, I asked my mother why are we here? She took a deep breath and started to tell me about how babies are created. I stopped her. How we got here was not my question! What I wanted to know was why are we here...why do we exist, why do humans exist?

I wanted to know not how we were created, but “why?”...

At church, (for me a liberal, protestant church), I was being taught that how we and the rest of the world was created, was by God in seven days. At school I was learning about evolution, about how it took thousands of years for the simplest of life forms to evolve into what is now, including humans, and that many life forms are still evolving.

I don’t remember if my question of ‘why do we exist’ was provoked by an urge to reconcile the differences between the creation story I heard at church and the one from evolutionary science. What I do remember is that my Sunday school teachers were clear that religion’s job was to explain why we are here, more than how we got here. The science teachers seemed sure that they were just elaborating on the “how” details that couldn’t possibly have been known when the Biblical story (or any other religion’s creation stories) was first told.

In my formative years, there seemed to be a kind of easy “truce” between religion and science. The Seven days creation story in Genesis was true, yet metaphorical. A day for God was way longer than a day for us! The main point of both science and religion (at least in my 12 year old mind) was that human beings were the pinnacle of God’s creation regardless of how long it took for us to actually become human. The answer I heard from religion about why humans exist was because God created us to be in relationship with Him.

(When my mother understood what my question was, her answer was that we were created because God was lonely.)

I think it is religion’s job is to give us an answer to the question; to give each one of us not just a story of how we came to be, but why.... At 12, there was no glaring discrepancy, at least in my mind, between what science and religion had to say about why human beings were created. Science supplied the details of how. Religion supplied the “why” and the “what for!”

Since my formative years, science has kept on giving us more and more details about how we came to be, about how everything ‘that is’ came to be. Both contemporary science and Unitarian Universalism seem to agree that there is within this marvelous universe both a unity and an immense, interconnected, interdependent diversity, a web of being, in which all that is exists. That answers “what”!

I still want to know why?

As I grew into adulthood, I found it harder and harder to believe that there was a god just dying to be in relationship with me! If humans were the pinnacle of this God’s creation, there was a glaringly obvious pecking order making some humans more special than others! As I grew older, I seemed to me that “religion” was intent on convincing me (a girl and an ardent questioner) that I wasn’t as qualified to be in relationship with this god as were some other humans.

Science, when I paid attention to it, seemed to be making nearly the same point, on a much grander scale! My life, all of human life was a tiny, tiny dot, a blink for much less than a micro-second, in terms of the vast universe.

As science continued to supply more and more details about creation and ongoing evolution, it seemed to me that there was less and less of any kind of easy truce between those religions based on the old biblical story of creation and the story emerging from modern science.

The ‘how the universe came to be’ story that science was supplying (often called “the common creation story”) was saying that from one infinitely hot, infinitely condensed bit of matter (a millionth of a gram) some fifteen billion years ago, there evolved one hundred billion galaxies, each with billions of stars and planets. Everything that exists has as its beginning this tiny particle of star dust that exploded or somehow expanded. Stars created atoms and atoms created all the basic elements that would create the immense diversity of life forms. Everything “that is” evolved from that one tiny bit of matter.

If all of creation came from star dust and evolved into an immensely diverse, intricately complicated, interdependent web of being that we are but just a tiny part of, I have to ask how much does human life really matter, especially my human life?

Where is that lonely God that once wanted nothing more than to be in relationship with me?

Maybe, this god set all of creation into motion. Maybe god is the energy of creation, all of creation.

Maybe God is just whatever helps any one of us feel important.

I can understand why some religions hold on tightly to the story of the parent God who plunked us down in the Garden of Eden, fully formed because that God wanted human companions. (...and, why they believe that God will yank us back into the place where we it will be just us and God, again in harmonious, blissful relationship.)

I can understand how that creation story is comforting if you feel lonely, powerless, without much control over your existence in this world. I can understand how letting go of that story would make individuals or whole groups of people incredibly anxious about asking the question....why are we here?

The “common creation story” popular within contemporary science tells us that the basic elements that make up our bodies—carbon, calcium, iron—were forged inside supernovas, dying stars, and are billions of years old. Yes, we were created from dust, star dust! The explosion of light that created the universe is within our very bodies. We are composed of and related to everything that is and ever has been. We are as important as every other part of creation! One among many....

It is not a new story, really. It is meta-narrative as old as many, many religions, just not the ones based on the Bible with its parent god, longing for special relationship with us. Perhaps, this common creation story, where everything “that is” is intricately and interdependently related to everything else, was forgotten with the rise of protestant enlightenment religion which put so much emphasis on the independent individual and evolved to triumph the individual’s private relationship with God.

Or maybe we forgot this common creation story while we humans were trying so hard to eat every bit of fruit from the tree of knowledge, intent on evolving into gods, who no longer needed a parent God!

Some say that science is giving us more knowledge than ever before and soon we will have the all the knowledge and technology necessary to create and control life. Is science becoming religion?

Others say that religion is undergoing an evolution. They say that, culturally, we are between one creation story and the next, and that soon the common creation story will be the one that tells us who we are and where we are.

Maybe there is an emerging convergence between science and religion, a merging of scientific understanding with a reverence for the universe, a reverence for all life...a knowing that we exist within the web of all being.

In the meantime, I still ask, why do we exist? The common creation story does not yet tell me why I exist, why we exist... It tells me how, but it doesn’t answer why!

I still want to know!

I think the answer, or answers, are important. But I also think the answers are not nearly as important as asking the question!

Why do we exist?

To explore this further topic click on The Clergy Letter Project

Or read this UU World article “Welcome to the Ecozoic Era”

Or visit Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow’s webpage.

The Season of Hope

2009-12-21T09:04:00.000-05:00

There was a report in the newspaper this past week about a study that seems to show that people in the US who live where there is more sunshine are happier than those who live where there is less. That was the headline, yet if you read the article, you found that climate wasn’t the only factor that affected whether or not folks reported that they were happy. Being “happy” or satisfied with their life also had to do with low crime rates, short commutes, low taxes, good air quality, good schools, etc. It wasn’t just about climate. There was a long list of external factors that people say cause them to feel happy.

Along with the article was a chart called a “snapshot of national cheer”, listing where all the 50 states and DC ranked in terms of people reporting that they were happy. New York was at the bottom of the list, while Hawaii and Florida were at the top, along with Louisiana. (The authors admitted that some of the data had been collected before Katrina!)

North Carolina was in the top third of the list, number 13 out of the 51.

So, how would you rate your happiness living in Eastern Carolina compared to other states you may have lived in? How much difference does warm, sunny weather make to your 'state' of happiness?

How important is it to you to be happy?

Another study on happiness that was in the papers last December showed that happiness is contagious. The authors of that study 'mapped' the effect of one person’s happiness on other person’s in that person’s social network. They were able to show that happiness for one person causes a measurable chain reaction of at least 3 degrees of increased good feelings among friends and friends’ of friends. The ripple effects of one person’s happiness on other’s, no matter how remotely connected to the one happy person they are, is far greater in degree than any ripple effects caused by one person’s sadness.

Sadness is apparently not as contagious as happiness, (unless you live in New York!)

So, if you look at these studies, or if you are reading any of the many popular books on what makes for happiness, you might conclude that a sunny climate, along with other favorable external factors, including a social network that contains at least some happy friends, will increase your feelings of satisfaction with life.

I suggested two Sunday’s ago, that living the good life might also mean learning to be patient (meaning calm and centered) while waiting through what you cannot control, like bad weather, or a long winter, or whatever is a tough time for you...until change comes... in its own time.

Last week, I talked about how one way to understand the celebration of Hanukkah is to hear that its message is about seeing the light of hope that keeps burning on, no matter how impossible one’s circumstances seem to be. There is always a miracle happening if we would just open our eyes and see it.

This is the season of hope, of seeing and hearing the stories about those miracles that are born in winter. It is the season for celebrating the gift of new life that is birthed in the most unlikely of circumstances, when lights shine brightly during the darkest of nights leading the way to the fulfillment of the good life we hope for.

It is the season of hope.

Yet, I assure you there are unhappy people in the midst of this season, even where the sun is shining (and there are likely some happy people in New York!)

Religion, philosophy, great literature have been offering wisdom about what brings happiness for centuries.

In our time, happiness has been fascinating the social scientists.

There is another report that I want to tell you about. It started at Harvard in the late 1930’s. Social scientists there began what would become a 70+ year study following the lives of 268 male sophomores. Their hope was that they could use this study to investigate, measure, analyze and finally determine with scientific accuracy what factors make for the happy life. Called the Grant Study, it is perhaps the most comprehensive, longitudinal study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted.

A man named George Vaillant has been the director of that study for the last 42 years. He dedicated his career to keeping up with and studying the lives of those men. What he found was that there are seven basics factors that predict healthy aging. What he called 'mature adaptations' was number one, then there’s education, stable marriages, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise and healthy weight.

In explaining what he meant by the number one determiner of a good life, he said that the study found that the “central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble.”

All of us are born into families and periods of history not of our choosing. Over the long term, our lives are all going to be full of differing seasons and periods. What he found by looking at the whole picture of each of these lives, instead of just one slice in one period, was that even though how one responds to circumstances can seem to be pre-determined by our personal histories, by our addictions, by where we happen to be caught in history, there is always the possibility for creative response to circumstance. We have at least some degree of control over how we adapt to what happens to us.

We can move from place to place. Many of us have and will. Yet, happiness/living a “good life” doesn’t necessarily mean living in a state where the sun burns brightest, nor is it directly correlated to how many happy friends we might have at a given time. And, most importantly perhaps, living what one might term a “good life” is not necessarily about living a life of ease.

More money, past what it takes to meet one’s basic needs, more privilege, more education, more health, does not necessarily mean that one will be happy.

Vaillant is a psychoanalyst, so a lot of his interpretive work was focused on what defensive psychological mechanisms these 268 individuals used to cope with their particular circumstances. He found that their responses ranged not only one from another, but within each of their lives over the long view. From the psychotic through all the common varieties of neurosis, to what he called the more mature adaptations, their responses ranged from those that brought about extreme isolation from others to profound interconnectivity. For many of the men, who called their lives good the “mature adaptations” didn’t occur until they were older in age.

These adaptations were altruism, humor, anticipation (the ability to look ahead and plan for future discomfort), suppression (the conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, which one plans to address at some future time) and sublimation (which means finding appropriate outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport). The presence of these ways of responding made the most difference in whether or not these men reported and or appeared to the researchers to have led a “good life”.

When Vaillant was asked what he had most learned from the study he said; “that the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

In other words, being “happy” has to do with what psychologists call social aptitude, how we love and how we allow ourselves to be loved.

It was the ability to express the positive emotions related to relationships (those of awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope and trust) with and for oneself, with or for someone else or something beyond the self... that caused the subjects of the study to define their lives as having been “good”.

Valliant is reported to have frequently told this Christmas tale:

On Christmas Eve a father puts in one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can find it!”

What the Grant study most taught Vaillant was that how happy we are has to do with how we respond to circumstances, not the circumstances themselves. This study “proved” that it is “loving and being loved” that brings us joy.

Yet, Vaillant always managed to add the caution, the caveat, that the findings of the Grant study, like religion and all great storytelling remains in the realm of paradox, mystery and miracle. He reminds his readers and his audiences whenever he speaks that the expression of positive emotions always makes us more vulnerable to rejection and heartbreak.

Living full, meaningful “good” lives doesn’t mean we are going to be “happy” 24 hours a day, throughout our lives. The sun is not always going to shine outside, or even inside.

Although expressing gratitude and joy will over time yield better health and deeper connections, in the short term expressing positive emotions exposes us to more risk (those who risk what it takes to feel the positive emotions are going to feel really unhappy sometimes), yet they will define themselves as having lived good lives over the long term.

Those who primarily express negative emotions over the course of their lives will be protected from both the highs and the lows of emotions, and they will be isolated from others.

Long term happiness is all about how willing we are to risk loving one another despite the risk of heartbreak and pain.

I’d like to suggest to you this Sunday, that one way to hear the story of Christmas, the birth of Jesus, is to see it as a metaphor, a reminder that hope and joy and good cheer are born when we are the most vulnerable.

Christmas is the story of a god who becomes a baby.

James Luther Adams, the great Unitarian theologian, said that one of the hallmarks that most defines liberal religion is that it holds ultimate optimism. We trust that in the end everything will be good. We believe that we have to and we can do the work needed to make the world a better place. We trust that the light will ultimately shine on, showing the way to the good life.

We are realistic about day to day human life. We don’t necessarily view every present circumstance with optimism, even as we believe that love will triumph in the end.

So many times we think of our task as the liberal religious community as one of ending suffering in this world. We are called to do that, yet we are also called to create joy. Perhaps we need to see that the place where gods make themselves as vulnerable as babies might be just the place we need to move to; the place where hope and good cheer lives.

May you be blessed this holiday season with light and love!

What's Your Bliss?

2009-12-14T09:20:00.000-05:00

The Eight Day Festival of Hanukkah, often misunderstood as the way Jewish people celebrate Christmas, has just begun. I have heard many a practicing religious Jew and quite a few Rabbis say that is not one of their faith’s major holy times.

It is popular, nevertheless. Occurring near Christmas and the Winter Solstice, and involving lights, gifts, a miracle and lots of wonderful food, it blends in with all the other pick and choose themes we have available to us as multi-culturalists who want everybody to be happy and hopeful this time of year.

A little over 100 years before Jesus was born, a small band of Jews took on the ruling powers and won. The Greeks had long been in control of a vast empire that included Palestine. They were in charge of the capital city of Jerusalem, the spiritual home of the Jews and the sight of their magnificently rebuilt Temple. The Greeks weren’t the first outsiders to take over the Promised Land, and they wouldn’t be the last. By this time in their history, the Jews were used to foreign rulers. Some even expressed appreciation that the Greeks had freed them from the last empire that had harshly controlled their civic and religious lives.

Under Greek rule, things were fine for a while. The Jews enjoyed a measure of religious freedom for a time. But, as usually happens, tensions rose, some things tightened up and some things relaxed, all at the same time.

The Greeks needed more and more income to finance their empire building and Jews felt the pressure of rising taxes and growing restrictions. And more and more Jews, became enamored of Greek culture, and began to leave behind their traditional ways behind. Some relaxed their observance of the Jewish religious laws to better fit in with Greek culture.

Those in power made a deal with the some of the Jews who were becoming assimilated and suddenly the “wrong party” was in charge of the Temple. Eating barbeque pork and worshipping Zeus in the space meant for the Holy of Holies was just too much for those who still followed the traditional ways! Something had to be done!

So, a young man nicknamed “The Hammer” (Judah of Maccabee) and his band of brothers rushed in when the Greeks were distracted by some unrest somewhere else in their vast empire and took back the Temple. It was a great moment! The few overcoming the mighty! A revolt in the name of true religion!

The Temple was rededicated to its “real” purpose, by the “real” priests, and it remained undefiled by the foreigners and those who would merge their identity with interlopers for a while. It was a victory to be celebrated!

It wasn’t until centuries later, after the Temple was completely destroyed by the Roman empire (except for what is now known as the Wailing Wall), the Hebrew priests gone forever, Jews dispersed all over the world, that the focus of the story of Hanukkah shifted away from the mighty band of zealots to the miracle of a small amount of oil that lasted for eight days and nights.

Over time, it wasn’t the forceful retaking of the Temple that mattered so much. It was what happened when the warriors left for other pursuits and the building and grounds folks came in to cleanse and rededicate the holy space.

They wanted to re-light the sacred lamp. For whatever reason, there was only enough fuel for one day and one night.

They lit the lamp anyway and, miracle of miracles, it burned on for eight days and eight nights.

Perhaps this version of the story of Hanukkah, after there was no Temple to take back and no likelihood of rebuilding it, no likelihood of winning a military battle that would restore a Jewish nation in the Promised Land, this story of a lamp that is portable, that travels with the Jews wherever they found themselves, burning on ...carried the brighter hope.

No longer a win/lose depiction of a small band of zealots throwing off the force of an empire that would have made them all Greek, the festival of lights was understood as a way of saying that holy space can be anywhere hope lives on... anywhere that people come together to clear away distractions, and re-commit themselves to be who they really are. Wherever people remember and continue to struggle to be who they are; the lights of Hanukkah will burn on.

It really doesn’t matter if one holy space exists. Any space can be cleansed of “defilements” and distractions....when those who gather go through the motions of re-member-ing who they are and to whom (or to what) they belong. Whenever and whatever the resources that are at hand are used, and the lamp is lit, it will keep burning...

Some say that Hanukkah is not one of the major religious observances on the yearly Jewish calendar because the rules of how one is to observe those times are relaxed during Hanukkah. It is a popular, accessible, portable celebration that all Jews, no matter how assimilated into whatever cultures or nation they find themselves, can participate in.

It is carries a theme that is accessible to anyone. A theme that anyone, who is in a process of remembering who they really are and to what or to whom they belong, can hear.

Despite the threat of outright extinction many times, in many places...Judaism lives on as one of the world’s great religions. The hope of Hanukkah lights the way!

Joseph Campbell, the great interpreter of the world’s religious myths and famous for what he called the “hero’s journey” said; “follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there is only walls.”

Clear the holy space within your home, within your heart, of distractions...light the lamp of hope, with whatever resources are available and hope will burn on...

Campbell began using the word “bliss” after studying the Upanishads, the Hindu Holy Scriptures. He explained that to follow one’s bliss was to “put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

Later, when it was clear that his counsel to follow one’s “bliss” was misinterpreted as encouraging hedonism...seeking only pleasure... Campbell grumbled; “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.”

The human journey from birth to death is full of blisters.

In this season of many stories, the question from this story is .."where are your blisters?”..."what is your bliss?” Are you using what resources you have to light the lamp of hope? Or are you despairing that there is only enough fuel for one more day?

Last week, I used the season of advent to talk about patience. This week, I have used the story of Hanukkah to talk about hope that is portable, the kind of hope that will see you through the journey of your life, whatever your circumstances may be.

Our stories are different, one from another. What has wounded us, what we have grown to be relaxed about, and what rules we continue to observe no matter what are different for each one of us.

What gives you hope? What’s your bliss? What lights your way?

During Hanukkah, young Jewish children are taught to play the dreidel game. The game is based on spinning a toy that has four sides. Some say that each side represents the four empires that ruled over the Promised Land; Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman.

Some say that as the Jews became scattered, in exile all over the world, they used the children’s game of chance, as they had done in Palestine, to fool the minions of ruling empires wherever they happened to live. If they were caught breaking the law, just for being Jewish, they would pull out the dreidel and say we were just playing a game. We’re just old men, playing a child’s game...

On the occasions when they escaped arrest, they repeated what the Hebrew letters spelled out on the dreidel... “a miracle happened here!”...

Not long ago, when some Jews were able to re-enter the Promised Land and build the nation of Israel, they changed what was written on the dreidel, so it said... “a miracle happened here”.

Sometimes we can win battles, against all odds, and it feels like a miracle.

More often our lives are subject to chance and the laws of probability. We can’t, as we were reminded last Sunday, control everything. Things happen to us, and sometimes all we can choose is how we will wait. We can wait expectantly, with patience for what we hope will be, journeying through the fullness of the moment that is... Or we can wait badly, complaining... Kvetching!

Sometimes, it will be very clear that we are nearly out of resources. Metaphorically, or for real, there is only enough fuel to light the lamp one more day. We will lay our heads down exhausted, depleted, going into the darkest of nights, into long, long periods of exile from our “homeland”, from the promise we believed in, making do the best we can with what we have left...

What calls us to keep on moving through the journey that is this life, despite our blisters, despite the rule of forces beyond our control, is sometimes just a memory of what we once were able to do; what battle we won long ago.

Yet, ultimately hope is not based on what we do. It is based on what we find, still present after the long night, that which is still burning. It may be just an ember, only a tiny spark, only light for another night, then another and another.

Bliss is not about happiness with the way things are. It is about staying true to the lamp of hope, that shows the way, not to victory over others, but to peace with the space we are in, cleared of distractions, that becomes holy space lit with the fire that won’t go out.

May we be a peaceful, patient and hopeful people.

Patience: the Gift of Expectant Waiting

2009-12-07T15:17:00.001-05:00

Following the Christian calendar, this is Advent season. It is the time of anticipation, of waiting expectantly for something hoped-for to be born. That which is coming can’t be rushed. It will arrive in its own time. Like an expectant mother awaiting the due date of her child, the faithful must wait.

Patience, the ability to endure through this season of growing darkness, until the light returns, has long been viewed as a virtue of those with strong character who persevere through what-is to what-will-be.

Although there are various definitions of patience, they all their roots in the Greek and the Latin word for suffering. To be patient is to bear provocation, annoyance, misfortune, delay, hardship, pain...with fortitude and calm, without complaint, anger or anxiety.

Believers are instructed to wait patiently for what will be...

All the world’s religions lift up the value of patience. To be patient is be spiritually mature.

The Dalai Lama urges his followers to turn aside anger and complaint, to learn to re-act to whatever delays or frustrates their path to enlightenment with gentleness...

Both modern medicine and psychology lift up the value of patience as a way to cope with the stresses of everyday life. Learn to use patience to calm high blood pressure, to slow the hunger of addiction, to slow down the propensity towards the violence that we do to ourselves and each other...to live longer and happier.

How patient are you?

The person in front of you in the check-out line is taking too long fumbling with their coupons, or trying to decide which credit card to use, what do you do?

1. Sigh loudly

2. Move to another line and blame yourself for getting in the wrong on in the first place!

3. Wait your turn and on your way out tell store management that there aren’t enough check-out lines open.

4. Breathe deeply and wait.

You’re late getting to Grandma’s for the holiday feast. The car in front of you is going 45 on the one lane road where the speed limit is 55, and you know you need to go 70 to get there on time. What do you do?

1. Make sure the windows are rolled up before you scream as loud as you can.

2. Flash your lights, step on the gas, passing the slow poke and texting Grandma to tell her you’re almost there, all at the same time.

3. Make a mental note to take the interstate home.

4. Think of how blessed you are to have these few moments to slow down and center yourself, to really look at what you are driving past.

You and your niece are at the toy store and she’s throwing a tantrum because you won’t buy her the toy she really wants.

1. You scream and whine just as loudly as she is

2. You pick her up and tell her to knock it off.

3. Instead of that toy, you purchase a volume on raising patient children to give to her parent.

4. You say again calmly that she’ll have to wait to see what Santa will bring.

For me, the hardest part in practicing patience is the “not complaining”!

Aren’t we supposed to be in touch with our feelings?

When some one says to me; “patience is a virtue”, what I hear is “suffer without complaint”.

That makes me angry! And it confuses me!

Isn’t it supposed to be healthy to acknowledge one’s feelings? ...to scream, or cry, or express frustration? (Maybe it is best to roll up the windows first!)

Isn’t it our feelings of frustration or anger or sadness with the way things are that tell us what needs to be changed and that give us the energy to work to change what can be changed?

Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who set things right! How can we know what needs to be changed if we deny our feelings, silence our frustration with the way things are?

Isn’t it a sign of mental health, to be aware of our feelings?

There isn’t enough time to be patient!

Shouldn’t we be responsible for noticing what isn’t working and be the ones who do something about it, (not just to clear away what delays or frustrates my way forward, but clearing the way for all those whose path to a better future could be less frustrating if someone spoke up...)

Hearing that it is a virtue to suffer without complaint.... just doesn’t sit well with me.

I am suspicious that some “higher” power wants to maintain a system of injustice; wants me to shut up and be pleasant, just suffer in silence.

I have a hard time with that!

Let your voice be heard! Complain and complain loudly! Twitter your dissatisfaction. Write letters...

Don’t let “them” get away with it!

Wait a minute!

As much as I believe that it is important to feel one’s feelings and to carefully aim the energy of our feelings of anger and frustration at systems that cause suffering, I know I can’t and we can’t sustain protest 24 hours a day. There has to be a time of rest...there has to be a season of calm...

It’s exhausting to complain all the time!

Give it a break!

If cultivating patience does not mean just shut up and be pleasant, what does it mean?

Kathleen McTigue in a sermon entitled “Virtues: The Path of Patience” says:

“A hundred years ago, virtually everybody in our culture knew how to read the seasons and the weather, knew how long it would be before the crop would go in and how long after that before there could be any harvest. They knew how long it took to make a loaf of bread. Patience was built into the rhythm of human life because there was little separation between our own seasons and pace and the seasons and pace of the earth on which we depend.”

It is different now. We don’t live in our great Grandparents world anymore. We want instant gratification and we are used to getting it! We want what we want and we are used to getting what we want right now.

It is hard for us to view patience as a virtue. Whatever we are complaining about, we can blog, we can find an online support group full of others expressing the same complaint... We’ve made it easy to express frustration, to tweet our anger, to fill the world with our protests...(and some things have even changed, because of what we’ve complained about!)

Yet, the constant complaining has not brought about an end to too much unemployment, to unrest in the world, to the rapid destruction of the environment. Complaining has not brought an instant fix for disease, for cancer, for all gets in the way of our plans for the future. Things happen to us that we cannot control...we aren’t gods! So many times, all we can do is wait... and let the future unfold...in its own time.

McTigue reminds us; “We will find ourselves in those times of our life when there is no way to fix it, move it, change it or hurry it up. All we can do is wait: our only choice is “how”. We can wait badly, tying ourselves up into knots of anxiety, spitting out urgency, angst and anger wherever we go. Or we can wait well, by turning ourselves to the difficult, essential virtue of patience.”

There will be times when we have no choice, but to just wait, learning to live with what is in each moment.

I can’t call it suffering. I can believe that learning to live calmly and with patience is how we can respect that we are human. We cannot control everything. Our lives are short and we travel through them ultimately interconnected with all other beings. To be patient is to respect ourselves, our neighbors and what is, and our selves.

No one is perfect. Not us, not our neighbor, not our life, nor will it ever be.

Accepting what is with calm patience, doesn’t mean we deny our feelings, or our dreams for what can be, but it does mean that we can receive what is in every new moment with acceptance. Letting go of our expectations based on yesterday. Letting go of our mental gyrations about what we are planning for tomorrow.

Patience is the practice of focusing on what is right now as if there is no other moment, but this moment, this me in this universe, with these folks in line with me, on this road with this person in front of me, in this place with this child.

We can choose to breathe, to wait, to be grateful, to let go of yesterday and tomorrow, to relax into this very moment.

Like writers and artists and all those who are creative know everyone needs a season and will be given a time for waiting. This is the time, the season to practice patience.

You can practice patience in the car, you can practice patience with a child, with your family...waiting for the gift of each next moment to unfold.

It is how we prepare the soul for the peace that is to come...

A Rumour of Angels: The Challenge of Interfaith Work

2009-11-16T09:19:00.000-05:00

Next Sunday at 3 pm in the afternoon, people will gather at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church downtown for the Annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service. I hope to see you there.

It is a unique event that brings a wide range of faith groups in greater Greenville together! That, in and of itself, is quite an achievement!

Along with Bob Hudak, the Rector of St. Paul’s and Deb Habiba Niswander, a Sufi and the coordinator of the Interfaith Alliance of Eastern Carolina, I have once again helped to make this event happen. I do it, because I see this work as one way to fulfill the part of our mission statement that says: “we embrace those whose spiritual path has been isolated”. In the same way that individuals need each other to be whole, I believe that no faith group need be isolated from full participation within the inclusive community we are trying to build in Eastern Carolina.

On the surface, it would seem that Unitarian Universalists are particularly predisposed to engage in interfaith work!

Some of you regularly participate in the monthly Interfaith “prayers for peace”, which we often host here in our building on fourth Monday evenings.

For the last couple of years the “prayers” have been followed by an open discussion around different themes all of which are meant to help everyone who comes to better understand our various faith traditions and perspectives. I appreciate and enjoy those discussions. Those of us who go have a unique opportunity to learn not only what others think and value, but to continue the process of understanding what we think and what we value amidst others who are often profoundly different from us.

On the other hand, as much as I appreciate the opportunities for interfaith dialogue, I find it quite challenging to participate in the first part of the monthly gatherings to “pray for peace”. Not that I have any issue with peace!

My discomfort comes from what I perceive as the assumption that is pervasive in all interfaith work, especially in interfaith worship services. That is that we are all (no matter how different) addressing our prayers to, “worshipping” a common higher being, and that the work we do together for peace and justice is grounded by this assumption. It is often assumed in interfaith gatherings that even though we may have differing paths, we are essentially all going up the same mountain.

I am not so sure about that!

I have to wonder if the rarely spoken, but commonly held assumption that we are all worshipping the same God keeps some of you from participating in interfaith gatherings...

I keep going, I am not always sure why.

Sometimes, I am able to just let that gnawing sense that I am one infidel among all the various believers go. Just let it go. More often than not, what I then do is slip into using my academic training to “observe religious behavior”. I take on a social scientist perspective, seeing that we are all just human beings engaged in projecting or participating in whatever structures of meaning make us ultimately comfortable with the struggles and suffering in our lives.

The problem is, when I let go of the certainty of my uncertainty about the existence of God, and take on the role of a social scientist observing the natives practice their indigenous religions, I am still removed.... thinking how quaint, or how interesting.... shielding myself from relationship...with those who seem so different from me.

Both my own form of fundamentalism, certainty about uncertainty, and my observing from a disengaged social scientist perspective, isolate me from engaging in relationship with others who I assume are so different from me I can’t possibly leave myself open for relationship...

That’s a problem.

When I am the one so sure there is not a God to direct a prayer to, I am letting my beliefs get in the way of relationship with others as much as anyone else who lets their beliefs (whatever they happen to be) get in the way of relationship with others who believe differently.

It is challenging to be certain of one’s uncertainty about the existence of a higher power and at the same time, do interfaith work. It’s probably not unlike how challenging it must be to be very certain about one’s beliefs and do interfaith work!

It’s hard enough to self-define one’s particular beliefs or disbeliefs in the midst of other UU’s who value uncertainty! It is way more challenging to be authentically agnostic in the midst of those who seem to assume that everyone in the room is sure there is a God to hold some certainty about.

I ask myself all the time if agnostics or disbelievers have a place in the interfaith community. I don’t know!

I do know that all of us live in a pluralistic society and that just tolerating difference is not enough. We must learn to respect the dignity of others who are different from us if we are to survive.

I do know that fundamentalism in any form is dangerous. I know that far from becoming the secular society devoid of religion that many predicted some decades ago, we are instead experiencing a post modern society filled with religious diversification that is so pervasive we had better learn to engage each other with love and respect, if we are to thrive.

As aware as I am of how much energy I expend trying to keep myself isolated from building relationships with those who are different from me.... I keep going...

You may be surprised to hear what touched me the most during last year’s Interfaith Thanksgiving Service.

Last year, the service was held a First Presbyterian. A young Muslim began the service with a traditional Islamic call to prayer. Thankfully, I was not looking at the English translation that was printed in the order of service at the time, which I later read.

The young man had positioned himself way above and behind the gathering up in the balcony. Without any introduction, he began chanting/singing in Arabic. The sound of his voice floated over us, as if coming from on high.

It was the most beautiful, moving sound of yearning I think I have ever heard. I didn’t need to know the literal translation. What I heard was enough. It was the sound of longing, yearning for the presence of God that my ears and my soul heard.

Please be with us! Surely you will come. We need you!

Interfaith work does not mean religious groups merging into a kind of simple religion. Nor does it mean holding hands in a “kumbaya” moment that ignores differences.

Perhaps the very best it can mean for now, for greater Greenville, is the coming together of different religious traditions/faith communities offering their own unique perspectives, one after another, in a shared public space, allowing each other to remain who they are, amidst others who do the same.

Despite the profound differences that challenge my ability to stay present and open to others, I have heard the sound of longing, yearning for this world to be different.

That’s enough for me to keep going...

Ten years ago, UU’s at General Assembly crafted a Statement of Conscience entitled: Beyond Religious Tolerance: the challenges of Interfaith Cooperation...

That statement begins with these words: “We live in a global village that brings people of diverse economic, cultural, and religious backgrounds into close and interdependent contact. The resulting challenges are immense....While we hear the plea for a more just society in the teaching of many faiths, intolerance towards people of other faiths inhibits cooperative efforts.....Interfaith cooperation sets a high standard of thought, feeling, and action for each individual and for each community that by its nature goes beyond the boundaries of the self. ....It ...invites us to reach deep within ourselves to assess our own prejudices.”

Dare I say that if we can let go of our own form of certainty and not slip into observing from afar....if we can be present to relationship with other human beings who long for this world to be a better world...we will, we can meet the challenges of this multi-faith world, where we so need to learn to welcome each other with respect and compassion, with love that gives life...

I hope to see you next Sunday afternoon at 3 pm.

Celebrating All Souls

2009-11-02T10:09:00.000-05:00

I got a call a few weeks ago from a young man who wanted to know more about UUism. I remember saying to him several times that we don’t spend much time worrying about or even talking about what happens after death. We are focused on living this life.

After, I hung up, I got to thinking about what I said to him and I began to wonder if we might benefit from spending more energy than we usually do thinking about what happens after we die.

Historically the Universalist answer was we’re all going to heaven, yippee, no worries, nothing to think about!

The Unitarians were, for the most part, pretty convinced that when you died, you were dead. What lived on was the legacy you left behind and the impact it had on the living. Focus on living today, the tomorrows of the living will depend on it.

Perhaps you’ve heard this summation; “The Universalists believed that God was too good to damn people, while the Unitarians believed that they were too good to be damned!”

Maybe, for conversational purposes, you’ve adopted some version of either or both of these answers.

What I would like to invite you to do on this day (when Pagans believe that the world of the living and the world of the dead are the most intertwined of the year), is to spend at least a little energy reflecting on your tomorrow...what do you think will happen to you after YOU die?

Do you believe you will live on as a ghost, haunting the people and places you left behind? Will you be walking the golden streets of heaven, bathed in the light? Will your body return to the earth, and your soul merged with the Source? Will you live on through your genetic impact on your children, through your legacy of good deeds and strong character? Will you return again in another form?

Will you go straight to heaven, as Catholics believe the saints do, ready to be called upon to intervene on behalf of those who are stuck somewhere between heaven and earth after they die?

Those of you who experienced Catholicism, (I know that is a lot of you) probably know that today, November 1st, is All Saints Day. Perhaps, you noticed that the title of my sermon is Celebrating All Souls Day.

According to Catholic tradition, since the Saints go to heaven first they are celebrated first. All Souls Day isn’t until tomorrow.

That’s Ok! It is “tomorrow” that I want you to think about.

I suspect that most of the time, when we conceive of “tomorrow”, it is the future that is ever before us- without end...

Today, I want you to think about the day after, (or two days after, or three days after) your life on earth-in the flesh, ends. Your tomorrow!

There are lots of ready-made answers for what happens after you die floating around. All the world’s religions offer some kind of answer. Some religions give the question way more energy than others do. Some have very elaborate answers, some are vague or simplistic.

Maybe at some point you’ve thought about the question long enough to pick out an answer that made sense to you. Or you let someone else give you an answer and that was fine. Perhaps at some point in the past when death was “theoretical”, you answered the BIG question...and that answer, whatever it was, sits in the back of your mind...but you don’t think about it very much...

Then someone dear to you dies, or is near death. Or you grow old or sick and the question comes up again, this time with more urgency and specificity. The answer you might have been OK with before, in theory, may not work anymore. The question comes up again. This time it’s not theoretical, it’s about you and your tomorrow. What happens to me, after I die?

The question comes round again with more urgency and poignancy when the fact that you will die is inescapable. What’s your answer then?

I regret not saying to that young man how important it is for us to be the place where with courage and with love we can just sit with the big questions...like...Why are we here? Why am I here? Who is in charge? To whom or to what do I belong? How shall I live? What happens when I die? ...without rushing to ready-made answers...

Too often, I hear us, I hear myself, describe our religious community as the one that offers a smorgasbord of answers to all the big religious questions. Pick one, pick any, pick a combo platter. Whatever works for you is OK. (...well, within certain limits!)

Yet, it is not that simple, is it?

First of all, appearing to offer even a buffet of ready- made answers, which in my view is preferable to only offering only ONE answer, doesn’t relay how important it is to be that place where we can just sit with the questions.

Just sit with the question.

That’s what we are asked, called to do, to live an authentic, faithful life. To be present to ourselves, present to whatever our current reality is, with enough courage and love to risk really asking the big questions... present to and for each other without rushing to the answers....

It is not about picking and choosing from a buffet full of processed foods!

It is about going for the whole grain!

What I mean is, the most loving and courageous thing we can do with our collective energy is create that safe place, where each of us trusts that we can find the answer that is ours...because we are really and fully present with the question...

When death is imminent, ours or a loved one, we want to comfort ourselves. We want to know that death is not final, or that it won’t hurt. We want answers that will make us feel better about the life we have lived, that is ending...

And there isn’t just one big question about life after death. There’s all the details....Will I be judged? Will I be welcomed? Will I exist? Will I know anything? ...feel anything? Will I know all the answers? Will I know God? Was my short time on earth all there is? Will I know what I have known, who I have known, anymore? Will I be remembered?

Each of us has some kind of answer or answers, already. Maybe we’ve adopted a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Or maybe a whole lot of this, and none of that. Maybe we are sort of hard wired to come up with some kind of answer to what happens to us after we die.

I promise you that the question, what happens to me after I die, grows in importance the closer one comes to recognizing and acknowledging, accepting...that one’s tomorrows on this earth in this body are limited.

You won’t know if the answer you’ve been carrying around with you in your back pocket is your answer, until you really ask the question...sit with the question...feel your feelings, feel your fear, let your natural (survival instinct) denial and your ways of evading the question go...let your group answer go...get out of the buffet line and with courage and love...ask the question again...

Theoretically, we accept that human life is bracketed by birth and death. We focus on what’s in between those brackets most of the time.

And most of the time we know we have roots that go deeper than our own lives, and tomorrow’s that extend far beyond our own individual lives...

Yet the question is still there...What happens to me after I die? What is on my horizon?

Tomorrow is All Souls Day.

I hope you celebrate whatever allows hope and grace and peace to be on your horizon.

Blessed Be!

6

The Greeting of Peace

2009-10-19T15:28:00.002-04:00

Story for all ages:

Once upon a time there was a child who lived in Nepal at the top of the world, where the tallest mountain on earth, Mount Everest is. Mount Everest towers above the clouds. This child had promised her father, who was a mountain guide (called a Sherpa), that she would find a way to help make the world a better place.

Every day, she walked through her village to go to school. She met people on their way to the market with things to sell. She met people who had come to her village to hike up the great mountain. She met monks on their way to the monastery. After school, she would see people going home with the things they had purchased. She would see people who had come down from the mountain top, tired, hungry and exhilarated. She would see monks going home after praying and studying all day.

Whenever she saw someone, she would bring her hands together with her fingers almost touching her chin, slightly bowing her head, and say "Namaste". Her mother had told her that “Namaste” means “the light in me greets the light in you”. Her mother had also told her, "When you say “Namaste”, try to see the special spark that shines within every person's heart."

So, she did that.

She learned to see with her heart the special spark of light that was within everyone she greeted. When she said her greeting, she could feel that special light inside her own heart. Seeing and feeling that light made the world brighter for everyone.

She helped to make the world a better and brighter place.

Let’s try it. [end of children's story]

What can you do to make the world a better place? ...a brighter, more just and peaceful place?

You can write letters to politicians and editors. You can march, make speeches and make phone calls, advocate for change. You can support worthy causes with donations of time and money. You can do the work of justice. You can feed the hungry. There are so many things that need to be done to make the world a better place. We do so many of those things...

Yet, there is always the question; will what we do to create justice make a difference?

We certainly hope so. Yet, all of the world’s religions teach that nothing really changes until our hearts change.

All the world’s religions teach that the essence of making the world a better is found in practicing compassion, mercy and gentleness ...loving your neighbor as yourself.

Making the world a better place is not about right thinking or correct dogma, not about “belonging” to the right religion. It is certainly not about what you own or what you control. It is not about the causes you support. It is about being in compassionate, merciful, gentle relationship with yourself and with your neighbor.

“Sikhism teaches that compassion, mercy and religion are the support of the entire world.”

“Gandhi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Buddhism teaches that the essence of Buddhahood is the great compassionate heart.

Jesus said “blessed are the peace makers, the merciful and the gentle”

The Yoruba of Nigeria say that gentle character enables the rope of life to stay unbroken in one’s hand.

The Prophet Mohammed when asked what was the best thing in Islam, responded, “It is to feed the hungry and to give the greeting of peace both to those one knows and to those one does not know.”

Every time we pass another person, we have another opportunity to “brighten” the world.

Too often, we let that opportunity to make peace, to gently touch the spark of light within the other, slip by....

During Sunday Services many congregations familiar with the teachings of the world’s religions set aside time to greet each other, as do we. In some traditions this part of a service is called “passing the peace”. Whatever it is called it is a time when movement or gestures (hand holding, hugging, moving around the space, even kissing) are used to acknowledge that “we” are one, at peace with each other, joined by a common spirit that touches us all.

Almost every Sunday morning, for a while now, we have taken a few moments to greet each other. I hear you say; “hello, good morning, glad to see you”. I see some of you reach out to someone you don’t know, to welcome them here. I see some of you walk across the room to greet each other. Sometimes, I see what I interpret as body language that says that some of you are uncomfortable! Crossing your arms in front of your chest, you say; “don’t touch me!” And, sometimes, I hear some of you express more than greetings! .....whole conversations about church or personal “business” go on!

Rather than a time to simply honor the Spirit of Life that is in us and among us, a time to practice “radical inclusiveness”, our greeting time to define or re-define an exclusive circle. Some are in, some are out. Some touch or welcome touch. Some don’t. Some are “honored” with conversation, some aren’t. This exclusivity happens all the time!

Perhaps, we can practice more intentionality in recognizing and honoring the Spirit of Life... that still small voice...that is within EVERYONE!

So much of all of our daily lives are spent struggling to be heard, competing with our colleagues or co-workers, even our family members. We spend so much time soothing our own hurts, justifying and defending ourselves and our actions. So much time separate, alone.... Our precious time is spent, as one UU minister puts it, “dwelling together in irritation, annoyance, fatigue, frustration, intimidation, and resentment.”

Every week we come here to be set right again, to be reminded of who we really want to be... we promise in our affirmation...

“to dwell together in peace”

What do we need to change to make it so?

Maybe we can use the gesture and word “Namaste”, to say to each other “the light within me (the still, small voice within me) honors the light within you.”

Bringing both palms of the hands before the heart, and lightly bowing the head, it is a humble, simple greeting. It origins are from the two Sanskrit words, nama and te. Te means you. Nama means to bend or to bow, or to honor the other. The word "nama" has parallels in many ancient languages, in Greek, Latin, Saxon, German.

Na signifies negation and ma represents mine, put together they mean 'not mine'. The significance is that one is not honoring another ego with one’s own ego, or bestowing something one has on another, but rather that one is bowing to the Spirit of Life that resides in the other and in the self, that neither one own, but rather both participate in, that is within, between, among....

Simply put, Namaste means; “the God in me greets the God in you” or “the Spirit in me meets the same Spirit in you”. “Peace be with you....and with you”

In other words, Namaste acknowledges and recognizes the equality of all, and pays honor to the sacredness of all. It is a gesture that moves our focus from the head to the heart, from the self...to the universe.

Joining the five fingers of the left hand with the five fingers of the right hand signifies harmony and balance.

Hindu’s say Namaste is like chanting a mantra, the sacred sound is believed to have magical value because the sound aligns with the vibration of the cosmos.

Even though in many parts of the world, Namaste is like saying “hi, glad to see you”, a signal of recognition and an expression of happiness at the sight of the other...many also know it is much more than that.

Putting the hands together is understood to be like a knife, so that people may cut through all differences that may exist, and immediately get to the shared ground that is common to all peoples of all cultures.

Try it!

How would it change your outlook, your heart, if you greeted everyone you pass from your heart?

Standing on the Side of Love

2009-08-24T08:57:00.004-04:00

Next Sunday you’re going to hear from four members who all attended General Assembly late June in Salt Lake City. I am sure they will share their impressions and what they learned.

We had a great time together and we learned a lot.

I traveled to my first General Assembly in 1998. Going to Salt Lake City this year, was the ninth time in the past 12 years that I have attended. I go looking for information, education, and to make new connections or to renew old ones. But mostly I go to get fired up! Just the numbers of UU’s all together thrills me.

I go for the inspiration! For me that comes from the sermons and lectures, from the stories of what other congregations are doing, from the singing, from the energy that just radiates from so much passion from so many...

By late June, when another “congregational” year is winding down, I need an infusion of passion. I need to hear the stories from other ministers and from congregational leaders. I love the energy I get from renewing connections with all kinds of UU’s from all over... I was thrilled to see and spend time with two of my favorite folks from the first UU congregation I ever joined.

By the end of a congregational year (which is the way most religious professionals mark time!) near the end of May/beginning of June, I have often found that I am overwhelmed by the details, dazed and confused by the plethora of personalities and opinions...I am tired, and then it is time to head to GA.

Maybe it’s a strange thing that I always find myself exhilarated by 30 to 40 times more UU’s than “normal”!

It’s exhilarating and exhausting! Maybe it is a good thing that GA comes just before vacation and a summer break, when there is time to rest and reflect and see what stays fresh!

This past year has been year especially exhilarating and exhausting. (And I don’t mean because of you!)

So much change has occurred since around this time last year. The economy has changed, our national leadership has changed, the ocean is hotter than ever, California denied marriage equality to gays and lesbians and Iowa granted it!, the push for health care reform is full of exhausting details and heated emotions....

We should all be tired!

YET, I sense a new level of enthusiasm... of determination among us... to make a difference in this world, in this community...

Every GA I’ve been to has included some kind of theme. This year the Standing on the Side of Love campaign was introduced. It’s a public advocacy effort inspired by the courage and the love shown by the East Tennessee UU’s who because of their liberal view and their acceptance of GLBT people were attacked by a gunman on July 27, 2008. They responded with shock, sadness and grief and an incredible resolve to continue to continue to stand on the side of love.

The campaign calls us to out to be advocates for every person who is dehumanized through acts of exclusion, oppression or violence because of their identity.

This campaign is very broad, highlighting that the reason we work for immigration reform, for marriage equality, for hate crime legislation, for health care reform, against racial stereotyping is so that all will have a place at the table.

It fits with what we have done as a people of liberal faith for centuries, tirelessly working against racism, for women’s rights, for civil rights, ...tirelessly working so that the worth and dignity of every person is respected by the whole of society.

This campaign is meant to be broad based, uniting all who recognize that everyone deserves love no matter what.

My colleague, Rev. Thom Belote in a sermon given to his congregation after returning from GA, shared his feelings about the Standing on the Side of Love campaign:

“My friends, let me tell you, I think we may have finally got it as a religious movement. This inspires me. Big blue billboards and bumper stickers calling us the “Uncommon Denomination” are nice. But, I feel it is sign of growth and maturity for us to turn our main public voice from an attempt to explain who we are to one that focuses on what we do in and for the world.”

We do a lot. We always have.

Last week I talked about what a blessing it is that UU’s value education, how we have historically understood that it is education that allows us to “possess our own souls”, freeing us from ignorance and falsehoods, teaching us to think for ourselves, to search for truth...to grow free minds...

We have learned well the art of critical inquiry!

Last year’s UnCommon Denomination campaign sought to tell a broad audience through whole page ads in Newsweek how different we are...how reasonable we are, what we don’t believe...

Standing on the Side of Love is about what we do.

Without free minds, capable and practiced in critical thinking, intelligent debate....“love” can be just so much sentimentality. By uniting free minds capable of questioning the status quo with fierce and courageous love we can bend the arc of the universe towards justice for all.

Instead of telling you. Let me show you! Click on this !

Here’s the music and lyrics to “Stand”, by Amy Carol Webb.

A Geography of Faith

2009-07-20T11:54:00.003-04:00

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Every week when it is my turn to bring you 18 minutes, 6 pages, of words that I hope will be helpful or inspirational, I spend hours in my home office reading, trying to pull my thoughts together by studying other people’s thoughts.

All that time spent studying hardly ever helps me know what I will say.

I find again and again that I have to move away from all the chattering conversations going on in my head, before a message that I judge might be worthy of your time on a Sunday morning ever begins to jell.

After a time in study, I often go outside and mow the yard, or go for a swim, or clean the floors. After I have gotten up and moved around, then I can return to the blank page...the chattering in my head will have calmed down enough for a message to find me, a message I can offer to you.

This week, after reading and reading, I just sat there gazing through the one window in my 2nd floor study at the giant Southern Magnolia that grows in my backyard. Its glossy green leaves were upturned and reaching for the sky. It looks happy with all the rain, different from last summer when the weather was so dry...

I started to get up and go outside in the heat and rake up the dried fruits and leaves that that tree constantly sheds in my backyard. If I can’t get the sermon to start writing itself, at least I can straighten up something!

Instead of launching into another project, I chose to just sit there watching the magnolia move in the breeze.

That’s what summer is for, isn’t it?

Most of us arrange our lives to spend some part of summer giving ourselves the gift of leisure, of just sitting and staring at the ocean or a mountain vista, or a tree in the backyard moving in the breeze, slowing down, changing, the “normal” pace of our lives...

I needed to just sit and stare at something beyond myself.

Perhaps, we all need what some religious traditions call Sabbath, a period of rest, when the chores and normal routine is suspended, when the chattering stops... and we look beyond ourselves...

After I just sat and watched the tree move in the breeze, I returned to my task of preparing a message for you.

It was then that Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, found me.

She begins with a question “who made the world?”

Maybe she is trying to tell us that a summer day is not the time to dig through the library for an answer suitable for a classroom debate.

Maybe a message suitable for worship on this summer day is about more than “intellectual stimulation”.

Maybe we can sit together and pay attention to what exists beyond ourselves, what lies beyond our busy minds...

Maybe, on this summer day, we can just look and listen, letting the existence of what is beyond ourselves speak to us.

Letting go of the endless variety of answers and come round again to the questions...

Sit with the ocean. Look out at the mountains, the streams, the trees, the birds and grasshoppers. Just sit and pay close attention.

Perhaps the “questions” that might arise in your spirit are not questions at all...

As I gazed at that magnolia tree in my backyard I realized that it does not care what I have read lately. It doesn’t care if I am sad, or angry, or frustrated. It doesn’t care about the details of my life... It does not need me or my answers....

I am completely insignificant to that tree.

As I sat and observed that tree, I remembered other summer days...walking on the beach, through the fields, in the mountains....observing what is not me, what does not need me.

That tree doesn’t need me.

But I need that tree...

I need to feel the wonder and the awe that comes over me when I observe that which has no need for me and or my answers...

Last night at Dinners for Eight, some of us got to talking about our summer adventures over the years. Moving through the fields, driving in the mountains, strolling down the beach ....struck by the beauty of the natural world....one person said out loud that that these kind of trips give her new perspective, because she feels so small, so absolutely insignificant in comparison.

I need that sense of “transcendence”, of experiencing firsthand what is not the back of my own eyelids! I need to be reminded, to remember, to experience again what is far beyond my little world, my concerns, my tasks...

“Who made this world?”

It is not so much a question, as it is an affirmation. It’s a statement of praise, of awe and of gratitude...Something far greater than me exists. Just to put myself in the place where this question arises in my spirit, rights my relationship with myself, stills my striving and ego...stills my sense of failure and struggle. A sense of wonder and gratitude floods my very being. I am filled with what he language of the spirit calls grace...glad to be alive...simply alive...

I need to experience periods of summer Sabbath....to let go of the chattering of science and religion. To let go of business and politics. To let go of a sorting and shifting through thousands of opinions...To let go of cleaning and straightening, managing and making order, making plans...To let go of sorrow and anger...to release the constant longing to do better next time... To just be, filled with awe and wonder at the grace of being alive...

Looking and listening, letting poems, and art, and song be the language of my travels into the geography of my faith...

Just walk through the fields, put one foot in front of the other, feel the earth, let the earth and nature reveal itself, observe what is not you...

Be blessed!

Then, you may come to the only question that needs to be answered.

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Look up, look out, from your tasks and projects, from the busyness of your lives, watch a tree sway in the breeze, watch the sea come in and go out, pass through the fields, sit on the mountain... Sit with what isn’t you.

You may find your way back to yourself...

“Be idle and blessed.”

The Painbody: A Reflection on Eckhart Tolle

2009-06-15T10:46:00.004-04:00

Opening Meditation

“In this quiet time, in this safe and beautiful place,
Let us relax into acceptance of ourselves
And one another.
The walls of ego and judgment,
Expectation and self-critique,
Walls that we hope can protect us from hurt
Can also trap us inside a shape that is not our own...
So for this moment, may we simply let those walls dissolve.

Nothing to do. No one to impress. Held in love.
Simply be.

May we remember this truth:
Though we are bruised and battered,
Though we fall short of our own highest ideals,
Though we and our world are imperfect and broken,
STILL...still...we are ALSO and ALWAYS
Whole in our brokenness,
Perfect in our imperfection,
Beautiful in our woundedness,
Blessed beyond all imagining to be alive.”

[from “Becoming Real” a sermon by Rev. Elizabeth Stevens]

Inner peace and communal harmony...the twin themes of love and justice, are ideals so many of us long to be made real. Yet, hatred and violence, conflict and division continue to rip our world apart. So much pain shouting to be heard, expressing itself through acts of hatred and violence.

Me! Me! Me!

So many wounded egos seeking to be heard, seeking revenge!

Shouting... “I’ve haven’t been loved enough. You have done me wrong. You have caused me pain. I will seek vindication to get what I am due, what I need to ease my suffering....”

Every one of us has experienced pain, hurts and wounds, slights and harshness from others, from life itself. Every one of us has at times re-acted to the pain we feel by causing pain in some degree.

When will it stop?

It’s as if our minds have concluded that there is not enough love to go around, so we must fight on for what we can secure for ourselves. We even erect “gods” who will fight for us; projecting our needs on an authority beyond the self, hoping that it will take away our pain. We erect gods, nations, “causes” who will battle for us against the enemy who must be annihilated so they will not hurt us again.

Surely, there is another way...beyond the battle of egos, of nations and of gods. Surely there is enough love ....somewhere...for peace to prevail. Surely, there is a way to satisfy our longings for love and justice, for peace and communal harmony....to soothe the pain we feel....the hurts we’ve experienced...a way beyond strife and war... a way that will not cause pain to ease pain...

Eckhart Tolle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Power of Now and A New Earth, which have both been widely regarded as two of the most influential spiritual books of our time, offers another way.

In these books and in his videos, Eckhart shares what he learned from a profound spiritual awakening in his own life. He believes that as more and more of us come to experience a similar transformation of consciousness, our collective enlightenment will usher in the next step in human evolution. A modern day mystic, what he teaches is what mystics have taught throughout the ages. Moving away from the ego-based state of consciousness down the pathway of inner peace, we will find the power to stop the cycle of hate and violence... we will experience a new sense of oneness with all that is...

Perhaps, Eckhart’s message is appealing to so many, who in the millions have bought his books, because he answers the question ...where is the source of peace and harmony that is boundless and universally available that can give our lives meaning and purpose when so much of what we have previously relied on appears to be in such short supply?

Where is there enough love to go around?

He describes the journey past the cycle of suffering, past the pain we inflict on ourselves and each other as one that involves both heightened awareness and practiced disengagement. Rather than ignore our pain, whether it be emotional or physical, rather than pull away from it, or use it as sword to hurt what hurts us, we must breathe into it, relax into it, feel it.

The way to “deal’ with the pain body (that bundle of “done wrongs”, of hurts that we all carry around inside of us) is to more deeply feel our pain, and to observe how the cycle of being hurt and causing hurt works...to learn to disengage from that cycle.

By feeling our pain, by becoming keen observers of the pain we carry within, becoming alert to what Eckhart calls the “painbody” and what it needs to stay alive, we begin by simply feeling our pain. By being fully present with what hurts. When we do that we will begin to disengage the auto-pilot link between feeling pain and re-acting to pain.

Feeling pain, without feeding pain with more pain...takes practice!

It takes a heightened form of self-awareness, of just observing, of simply watching without the rush to action, and without identifying with the pain. Accepting what simply is.

To become masterful at observing, to sit with what is, is part of the age old path towards what mystics call enlightenment. The practice of conscious awareness, begins with becoming deeply familiar with the shadows within ourselves, feeling loneliness, emptiness, and fear and need.... feeling, yet disengaging from the ego’s urge to action, to “fix”, to repair all the “I’ve been done wrongs”. Eckhart calls this practice of presence with what simply is...the power of now.

As we learn to be fully present, not rushing to fix, to give advice...we will learn to let go of shoulds, and just listen, observe, feel..... The power of now comes from being able to fully observe (be present with) the dilemma of being human.

We are wounded again and again. Again and again our egos push and pull us into participation in the cycle of pain. Being aware of this means seeing how the thinking mind tries to construct an identity that says “I am not like others”! Either “I am more wounded than others” or “I am more loving than others”... or all the constructs in between; all of which serve to feed the pain.
Awareness of this process will open the way for a new consciousness of that which exists beneath and beyond the needs of the ego.

It takes practice to empty ourselves of re-action, to just sit and be present with the feelings of pain, with the aching need to be loved, to be loving; to be there and only there, without re-action.

With practice one will let go of all need, of all aching....

One will come to experience what mystics experience...a unity that lies beneath all separation...

A new consciousness will arise from this experience of union with all that is, that ever has been and that ever will be...

Perhaps the oneness we later try to describe, putting words on what can only be experienced, takes the form of existential nothingness, where the “constructed” self has completely ceased to be. Some mystics describe the experience of emptying the self as becoming one with the black- hole- of nothingness, one with that which has no being, no distinctiveness, no form, no shape....yet is...

Perhaps the oneness we later try to describe takes the form of unity with all that is and ever has been, the life force that is and has always been the source of all life.

However one might later put words on one’s “mystical” experience of unity, the defining characteristics of this experience have to do with how transformative, memorable, moving one’s experience has been.

The result of mystical “enlightenment” is re-member-ing, a return to a sense of forgotten wholeness, a knowing beyond knowing that we are all one within the interconnected web all being.

The “I” becomes empty of all that makes me unique, yet I am one with all that is and ever has been and ever will be. Freed from my situatedness in time and history, fully present to now, I return to time with a different awareness, different priorities, different consciousness...

Once we experience this enlightenment; this being in the now, where what is... is fully accepted...knowing that now is all there is, and all there ever has been, we will return to time (to history and future) with the “working” knowledge that there is enough love to go around.

Acts of compassion, works of justice, will flow from this experience of union with the life force that is present when the needs of the ego are suspended and we just are.

When we all can say “I am” and that is enough, we will stop fighting...because we will know that what gives life meaning and purpose is boundless, universally available, always present.

There is enough love to go around.

Will we all travel the mystic journey? Will all of us go down this path of enlightenment? NO. Yet, some will. Many have.

We Unitarian Universalists, (sometimes called “the thinking mystics”), lift up, as our First Source, the value of awakening that comes from direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.

We can all learn to practice feeling, deeply feeling pain, yet suspending acting upon pain, disconnecting for a time... feeling from thinking. We can learn to feel and observe pain, without feeding pain.

We can learn, we can teach... that there is enough love to go around. That the energy of love is present and universal and that the life force will flow, does flow through us, among us, between us both now and forever more.

“In this quiet time, in this safe and beautiful place,
Let us relax into acceptance of ourselves
And one another.
The walls of ego and judgment,
Expectation and self-critique,
Walls that we hope can protect us from hurt
Can also trap us inside a shape that is not our own...
So for this moment, may we simply let those walls dissolve.

Nothing to do. No one to impress. Held in love.
Simply be. “

Feed the Hungry

2009-06-01T14:03:00.002-04:00

Have you seen any of the shows on TV or read in the print media about the ordinary people that are doing extraordinary things to help other people who are facing desperate situations during this economic downturn? One of Oprah Winfrey’s shows profiled some of the folks that a recent edition of People Magazine was also show-casing.

One of the stories was about a woman named Marilyn Mock. She just happened to accompany her son to a real estate auction. When she got there, she saw this woman sitting on the floor in the entry crying. She got down on the floor and asked the woman what was wrong. At first the woman wouldn’t say. Apparently Marilyn Mock wouldn’t leave this other woman’s side until she knew what the crying was about. When she heard that the woman’s home was about to be auctioned off because the bank had foreclosed on it, she marched right in to the auction and placed the highest bid on that woman’s home. Her winning bid was $30,000. Much less than the house was worth, but way more than this ordinary woman (now called the “foreclosure angel”), had in her pocket or her checking account. She hadn’t come to the auction to buy a house. She said she didn’t even think about how she was going to pay for it until later. Turns out she had good credit and enough collateral to secure a loan for that amount.
She was compelled to do what she did, because she wanted to ease the pain the woman was feeling. She simply followed what her heart told her she had to do.

Every story was like that...ordinary people who let compassion tell them what they had to do.
As I sat there watching, I was touched by the stories. So many doing what they could do to help others, letting the spirit of compassion lead their actions.

These stories weren’t about religion. Whatever these folk’s religious orientation was; wasn’t mentioned at all.

I couldn’t help but think that acting with selfless compassion, doing what the spirit says one must do to act with compassion for the person standing right in front of you in need, as the essence of all religion.

These ordinary people felt compelled to act on another’s behalf. They felt so compelled they didn’t hesitate; they just did what they felt like they had to do.

The stories were very moving. I felt inspired.

But, then I started asking all sorts of annoying practical questions. (How do these transactions really work?...What are they not telling us?...on and on...)

I realized that all the questions my brain was coming up with were just ways to keep me from feeling incredibly guilty! Too often I have walked past, moved around people, seeing something is wrong or painful and have not even asked about it! I have allowed practicalities, rules, “boundaries”, fear ...to allow me to hesitate, to turn away from acting with compassion, not to go wherever compassion might lead...

Too many times I have said in effect “not now”, when I could have said “yes, right now” to a transformative connection with another being that would change me.

I got a terrible stomach ache.

It didn’t ease up, until I began to think about all the times when I have said yes, when I have let my heart lead, when I have used my resources, skills, talents (which often are focused on the practical details), to say YES to what the spirit of compassion says I must do.

So often I hear these stories of people acting with compassion as a welcome balance to all the bad news we are hearing about the economy, good acts that balance the counter weights of greed and of hate that are putting so many in such desperate situations.

This time I heard these stories of ordinary people acting in extraordinary ways as “scripture”, stories that inspire me, stories that help me to get in touch with what I hunger for....

Do what your heart says do, use the resources you have, don’t let thoughts of what you can’t do keep you from doing what you can...what you must do. Surround yourself with people who put acts of compassion first.

The rest of the story about Marilyn Mock was that she was so sure that her friends, who had even more resources than her, would want to help others who were losing their homes. She took the story about what she had done and her ideas for how more people could do the same thing to a dinner party where those with bigger amounts in their pocketbooks were. Not one person was interested in helping! But, she didn’t give up. Eventually, she started a foundation called Foreclosure Angels. She’s finding people who want to put compassion for others first.
I need to hear these stories. I need to know there are ordinary people who do and will come together to be heroes and heroines, who say yes to each other, who don’t hesitate to reach out to those who need help. I need to be with those who like me know that the knot in the gut that comes when one hears these stories is about a hunger in the soul to be of use.

That’s why I am here, to feed that hunger...in my soul.

I believe you have that hunger, too.

Yes, I am quite aware that sometimes, just like each one of you, I hesitate and let an opportunity to be compassionate, pass me by. Yes, I am quite aware that sometimes, just like each of you, I let my ever-present questions and the urge to analyze “the problem” keep me from saying yes to a person (or the animal, or the environment) that needs what I can give.

Thankfully, I can and I do forgive myself for falling short. I know I have each new moment to try again. And, again and again, just when I think nobody cares, somebody steps forward, ....sometimes that’s me....sometimes that you... Those times are enough times to keep my faith in us alive.

I come here to open myself to what the spirit says do. I know you do too. Leading or being led by the spirit of compassion can be exceptionally frightening. It can feel like you’re falling off a tall building, taking a leap (of faith) hoping that a rush of wind will keep you from crashing to the ground.

When I do let go of whatever I was trying to cling to, that’s suddenly just gone, and get caught up in that rush of wind, that YES, RIGHT NOW spirit....I know then that I am living, truly living, our common vision ....where deeds are more important than creeds, where love is more powerful than hate, where we are all one, where every spiritual pathway leads up the same high mountain where compassion rules.

All the big dreams of that compel us to feed the hungry, visit the sick, free the captives, work so that there is health care for everyone, liberate all who are oppressed, insure that every family has what they need to sustain a life that is worth living....come from a faith that takes that leap to do what the spirit says do. That faith comes from the heart. It comes when the fire of compassion burns away our complacency, quickens our spirit to create justice, so that we share what we have without reservation, we take only what we need, we stand on the mountain and live by the law of loving our neighbor, compelled to do what the spirit says do, ....living, truly living...feeding the hungry...

We are an open, welcoming and warm community.

I pray for myself, and for you, that we will be inspired and transformed by acts of compassion, doing what the spirit says do.