Humble Pie a la Mode

This Could Be the Place!

2011-06-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

This Could Be the Place
© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and given to:
The Unitarian Church of Vancouver
12 June, 2011

I’ve been to Toronto three times in my life.

Once when I was in grade 8 for a field trip. It’s only about 4 hours from Detroit, you know. We went to the Ontario Science Centre and the Old Spaghetti Factory. It seemed a very glamorous and glorious adventure to me in 1983.

The second time I was in Toronto was for about twenty minutes. I’d made a wrong turn going from Sarnia to the Peace Bridge.

And finally, I went just last month. This time on purpose, and with a purpose. Like the first time, and I guess the second time, too, I was coming from Detroit. But this time was different. I was there for a conference. Actually two conferences. One was the Canadian Unitarian Counsel Annual Conference and Meeting, called the ACM, and the second was the annual gathering of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers of Canada.

While I was at the CUC ACM, I took part of what’s called a “leadership track.” It was essentially a five part lecture, each just under an hour, given by church consultant, Rev. Robert Latham, about congregational dynamics and Unitarian spirituality. This was the first offering of its kind, but it was very successful and I doubt it’ll be the last.

The five sessions were: Religious Mission, Religious Identity, Religious Message, Religious Identity and Character and then a summary session.

I’m not going to take you through all five sessions, but some interesting ideas were looked at, which caused some questions. Some of them about Unitarian Universalism globally, and some about my time with this congregation.

Rev. Latham sees his work with congregations as being made more effective when the work is done through the congregation’s sense of mission. On the front of the order of service this morning is some word art I created, using the text from UCV’s mission statement.

Latham states emphatically “Commitment to a clear sense of mission will meet the demand of every issue or challenge a congregation encounters.”

If a congregation doesn’t have a clear sense of mission, it can lead to trouble.

Who creates that sense of mission? The people do.

Through working together in meetings and using the democratic process to elect leaders, the people of a congregation work out and live out the mission of their church.

“A congregation may have ministerial leadership but if it does not also have strong lay leadership it still will not succeed in its mission,” writes Latham. “However, it is not simply a matter of having qualified leadership. What makes this leadership effective it its commitment to the mission above all else. Indeed, when a congregation is in trouble it will inevitably stem from some element of its leadership that is committed to an agenda that is antithetical to the congregation’s religious mission.”

I am not standing up here saying that this congregation is in trouble, or its leadership has somehow gone awry. Remember the title of my sermon is “This Could be the Place,” not “We are in trouble here.”

Further Latham warns against the habitual practice of “a warm body approach” to filling volunteer positions. Every congregation needs not just a nominating committee, but a leadership development group whose responsibility it is to help further the effectiveness of its leaders.

In our jobs, we often have professional development goals, if not down-right expectations.

“Leadership makes everything happen that is going to happen,” Latham concludes.

In short, what I want to ask is that as UCV continues on, how are you choosing your lay leaders? I’ve been on nominating committees before. You meet and try to figure out who has the skill sets you need, and then you make a list of people to call, and you put them in order of preference. And then you start making the phone calls, or coffee dates.

What might happen if you change that pattern? Would you consider someone who was clearly dedicated to the mission of this church, and then help them develop their skill set? This might be beneficial to the congregation and the individual. I’m not suggesting that we through the baby out with the bath water, but maybe mix things up a bit.

In another session, entitled “Religious Identity and Character,” Rev. Latham talks about the characteristics of being a Unitarian, and also a Unitarian Universalist. Some of his thinking in this area might be a little controversial, but still it’s good grist for the mill.

I’m going to quote him here “The nature of openness throughout our history has caused Unitarians to reside on the cutting edge of theological relevance. This has not been an easy journey. We began as theological heretics proclaiming the unity of God (asking the question: Who or What Is In Charge?) We moved on from this point to open ourselves to creation and other theologies as sources of knowing (asking How Do I Know What I Know?) In the 1930’s we created the theology of Humanism (asking Who Am I? or What Is In Charge? What Is Our Purpose?) Presently in our midst is a growing but not well defined view of reality that can be called Spirituality.” We are on an evolutional move theologically…

Here is the rub. Once we find a theology that we like we often become very resistant toward both ourselves and others evolving any further.”

Just this week on Huffington Post, Rev Marilyn Sewell wrote a piece that flashed up on my facebook page like a wildfire. People posted and re-posted this article “the Theology of Unitarian Universalism ,” and some, of course, responded to her, too. In the written copy of this sermon, I’ve included the web address to that article if you’d like to read it yourself.

At first I was mostly just excited that Unitarian Universalism was getting as much exposure as it was going to get, being on Huffington Post and all! And then I read the article, which I enjoyed.

Among the things that Rev. Sewell wrote was this: “We are a free religious faith, and so have no creed. And as freedom is wont to do, our faith invites a certain degree of wackiness and abuse. But if that’s the price of freedom, then I still choose freedom.

“Our faith, of course, does have requirements. To become a Unitarian Universalist, you make no doctrinal promises, but you are required to do much more. You are required to choose your own beliefs—you promise, that is, to use your reason and your experience and the dictates of your conscience to decide upon your own theology, and then you are asked to actually live by that theology. You are asked to take your chosen faith very seriously.”

And a paragraph later she offers a history lesson of our faith, lest you forget that our faith is serious business, she starts with this: “Our free faith was hard won. It has a long history, and our religious ancestors died for this freedom.”

Robert Latham included in his lecture information gathered from the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. He quoted a poll that showed that in our midst: Christians feel ostracized; Humanists feel threatened; Pagans feel oppressed and Mystics feel ignored.

I’m going to repeat that. In our congregations, Christians feel ostracized; Humanists feel threatened; Pagans feel oppressed and Mystics feel ignored.

In a totally happy coincidence, here at UCV, our 9-12 year olds recently conducted a survey of people attending church two weeks ago on Sunday. They have compiled their numbers and I can now share with you a theological snapshot of our congregation. I am grateful for their curiosity and willingness to share their data.

In this poll, it was revealed that on average, as individuals, we first questioned the faith we were brought up in, when we were 14½ years old. Our average age as a congregation is 59.61 years old. And our average tenure as a Unitarian? 19.8 years.

Also, you may remember if you were here on that Sunday, there were questions about your belief system. I’ve added this information to the last sheet of the printed sermon, so please don’t worry if you don’t get all these figures, but they are interesting to hear.

20.4 % of respondents identified with the statement “God is Nature.” 19.2% identified as Humanists, 18.4% as Mystics, 13.7% as Agnostics, 8.2% as Pagan, 7.8% as Atheists, and 5.9% as Christians.

If you’ve been adding in your head, you’ll note that the percentages did not add up to 100%. People were not asked to identify with only one spiritual path. We are Unitarians after all, and no one would’ve followed that direction anyway.

Getting back to the UUA poll I mentioned earlier, it suggests that 5.9% of our people feel ostracized; 19.2% feel threatened; 8.2% feel oppressed and 18.4% feel ignored in our church. What do you think about that? Can you yourself identify with feeling one or more of these things?

In an article by Robert Latham, which was not accepted into the UUWorld magazine, suggested that in our zeal to differentiate ourselves from the rising tide of Christian fundamentalism in the early mid-20th Century, the Unitarians “went beyond rejection” to create three substitutes for what we thought of as “dead dogma.” The first substitute was community, the second was social action, and the third was political correctness. The result is an identity crisis. We still, 50 years after the merger of the Universalists and the Unitarians and the creation of the CUC, still we cannot define our living faith statement as a whole people of faith.

Marilyn Sewell suggests in her article that we do however have a theology:

• We believe that human beings should be free to choose their beliefs according to the dictates of their own conscience.
• We believe in original goodness, with the understanding that sin is sometimes chosen, often because of pain or ignorance.
• We believe that God is One.
• We believe that revelation is ever unfolding.
• We believe that the Kingdom of God is to be created here on this earth.
• We believe that Jesus was a prophet of God, and that other prophets from God have risen in other faith traditions.
• We believe that love is more important than doctrine.
• We believe that God's mercy will reconcile all unto itself in the end.

Naturally, not every Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist has accepted Rev. Sewell’s suggestion at first blush. Some will doubtlessly be upset by inclusion of such words as “God,” and “Jesus,” and even the patriarchal word “Kingdom.”

But there are a couple of them I’d like to lift up again. “We believe that revelation is ever unfolding.” “We believe that love is more important that doctrine.” Surely this is a place we can start to agree.

Religion isn’t easy. At least well-thought-out, honestly practiced religion isn’t easy. Perhaps especially for us Unitarians, with our uneasy relationship with authority, and our well-practiced resistance to being told what to do.

I’m as guilty of that as anybody.

But maybe we should focus on coming together here in our churches. As Sewell rightly reports, people have died for our religious freedoms. As Latham posits, leadership focused on the mission of the church above their own agendas is the best way to live out our values through our faith and our religious institution.

This past week, at the North Shore Unitarian Church’s annual meeting, they passed something extraordinary! A resolution:

Resolved that the congregation of the North Shore Unitarian Church considers the decision to become a member as a major step in one’s life journey, requiring careful thought and deliberation, and believes it is reasonable and valuable to have the following expectations of membership:

1) members make attending worship services a priority;
2) members take part in the life of the church;
3) members act in service both within and beyond the church;
4) members make a personally significant annual pledge to the Church;
5) members make efforts to better understand and live by the principles and values of Unitarian Universalism as they understand them to be.

As you might imagine, there was long discussion about this resolution. There are some concerns, some hurt feelings. Some feel like this is too close to dogma, and some are relieved that have a statement about expectations, not requirements mind you, but expectations of membership in their church.

What I hope you’ll be able to see in this message, my weaving together of Latham, Sewell and the North Shore Church’s work, is that there needs to be more coming together in our faith. More focus on the beloved community, and a longer view about what we are doing here.

On Sunday mornings around the world, people sit together in churches hoping for an experience that touches them, that moves them, and even one that transforms them.

With so much already going well here, this could be the place that it happens for more people than are here now.

This could be the place;

• Where deep friendships are made.
• Where spiritual awakening can happen.
• Where a lonely person knows that they matter to someone.
• Where leadership skills are developed and put to good use.
• Where the laughter of children and sages ring to the rafters.
• Where no one feels ostracized, threatened, oppressed or ignored.
• Where, when we gather hands and sing “Carry the flame,” people look around the sanctuary at all the people they’ve come to love over the years they’ve been coming.

This could be the place…for more people than are here with us now.

This could be that place.

As we go on, living our lives in faith, may we always keep that potential in mind and at heart. Living boldly in the knowledge that the universe is ever unfolding, that love is more important than doctrine, and the person sitting down the row from you is someone who might just help your life be transformed into something even more wonderful than you imagined.

Benediction

Brethren, farewell. I do you tell, I’m sorry to leave you, I love you so well.
Now I must go, where I don’t know, wherever Life leads me the trumpet to blow.

Thank you for allowing me to walk with you, this congregation, for a year. For the conversations and lessons, for the laughter, for trusting in me as a minister for whom you can turn when troubled, I thank you.

I am sorry to leave you, I am deeply grateful to have had the chance to get to know you as I have. You are part of my journey, and I will carry you with me always.

In gratitude for our time together, I made this pulpit fall for the congregation. I hope that when you see it, today and the future, it’s gentle chevron pointing upwards encourages you toward your higher natures, and reminds you of the bright, vibrant future I know this congregation will have.

If you are new to our congregation, each week at the end of service, we gather hands and sing a song called “Carry the flame.” We repeat it twice. Let the people gather together and sing.

Gardening is an Act of Faith

2011-05-09T14:20:00.000-07:00

Gardening is an act of faith. When we plant seeds, we know there is no guarantee that flowers will grow, or bell peppers. We work in concert with the Earth, we tend, we weed, we water as necessary. But we can not force a plant to grow.

I invite you now to close your eyes and settle for a moment as you are comfortable.

Take a moment and figure out, what is your most precious hope?

Imagine that you and your hope are a tiny seed, planted in the spring’s dark rich earth.

Visualize your hope growing from tiny seed, it starts with the cracking of the shell of the seed. Before there can be growth, there must be a disturbance.

As the rain comes from the sky through the earth to your seed, sometimes not often enough, sometimes too frequently, your hope grows.

The roots of your hope grow strong in the earth, as this precious little seedling pushes it’s way up to the surface. Up toward the Sun and sky.

Once your hope is visible to the rest of the world, you may notice several things. You are not alone, there are others nearby.

And they and you are not the same, there is beauty in your diversity.

And as you grow, you in turn, produce seeds within your own being.

And these seeds become the hopes of tomorrow.

As you grow, within you and your hopes, grow the hopes of tomorrow.

Grace (A Sermon for the MFC)

2011-04-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

Chalice Lighting:

Unless you call out, who will open the door? - Ethiopian Proverb

Sermon:

“I do not ask for this faith because I shrink from paying the great debt of nature. But I ask for it that I may have respect for myself
—that I may feel life is worth living—
that good is worth striving for above and beyond its mere return of earth.
And above all else, I ask for that faith because it makes life grand,
and gives to us sublime possibilities. And further,
it gives a substance of joy and bliss which nothing earthly ever gave,
and which nothing of earth can take away.”
-Eunice Waite Cobb

Eunice Waite Cobb was a 19th century Universalist.

I chose this quote from her for this morning because I think it invites us into some bit of discomfort, and self-reflection.

Mrs. Cobb does not take her faith as the default position, as the lowest common denominator, as the easy thing. She challenges herself, and her reader, to strive, to work for their beliefs. And she also lays out an expected reward for her labor. Her life will be made grand by her faith, and a joy that nothing on earth can give or take away will be hers.

We rarely make statements of faith like this anymore.
And I fear that it’s starting to show.

Recently I was in an interview for a Chaplain Residency and one of the interviewers, a Jewish pastoral care person, said to me “I know that Unitarian Universalists have difficulty with theology and God. How do you deal with this problem? To whom do you turn when you need help?”

When the co-interviewer behind the desk, an American Baptist, nodded his head in agreement, I was a little embarrassed. He then asked me: “Do you pray?”

This? This is our reputation among our clergy colleagues?

While working through an answer, I was able to articulate the following:
“I desire from Divinity not salvation, but a companion on the Journey of Life. I don’t need to be saved by a Loving God, I need to be reminded to be radically loving.”

My faith is not about accepting the easiest answer, a relativistic stance of believing in all things and no things at once. Like Eunice Cobb, I embrace this faith for both its work and our promise of a life made better by that work….and by something unstated above: grace.

As Unitarian Universalists, I’ve noticed that we don’t speak much about things like grace, do we? We like to think of ourselves as being the directors of our own success and happiness. I’m comfortable in that theology. If I work hard and am a good person, my life will have meaning and that shall be my reward.

Except there are a lot of people who work hard who don’t get the same sorts of benefits that I’ve gotten. That we’ve gotten.

Like the actions of the three goddesses called the Graces in Ancient Greece, we can’t see what life offers us. Sometimes we get more than we deserve and sometimes less, seemingly at random, out of our control. I prefer to think of grace as a gift, a generosity from what many may call God.

Perhaps if we engage our faith more strongly, having greater intent with that Unknown Component of Grace we might be more willing to see our fellow humans with greater charity in our hearts. We might be less ready to pathologize them, and have a ready-made solution to their problems.

I’m not suggesting that this pathologizing is born from a place of cruelty. Part of human development is learning to categorize things. Ask any toddler who’s just learning to talk, and you’ll find out that what’s known as a dog to them might be a dog, or a kitten, or a cow. Eventually that child will be able to discern patterns and realize that a dog is only one of many four-legged creatures with whom we share our world.

But also as we grow, we begin to lump things and people into categories, and unless we’re careful, we may over look important details which distinguish one thing from another. We might mistake a white youngster with dreads for a homeless person, or one young person of color as a member of the Hotel staff.

There are others who have worked as hard, if not harder, than we have, who will likely never see the benefits we have now.

This has been a hard realization for me. My parents are laborers. I was a laborer for most of my working career to date. But that’s all changing for me, and I now find myself in a different part of the map. My employability is no longer about how many words a minute I can type, or how much I can lift, or how many tables I can serve effectively.

And suddenly I find myself the guy who doesn’t operate the copy machine or take out the trash from the church office, because that’s no longer “required” of me. It’s no longer in my job description. I’m not blind, however, to the reality that there are going to be times when I am typing, making copies, answering phones and yes, even taking out the trash.

Yes, I worked hard to get here, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all worked hard.

But what about grace? What part does grace play in our successes? Why do we tend to omit grace from our own reflections, not as individuals, but as a whole faith?

Is it because to focus on grace would cause us to focus on the things we can’t control? That which will not respond solely to labor and reason; the things that our sheer force of will, and planning have seemingly no effect on? Is it because to focus on grace would cause us to focus on the other-worldly?

I have heard over and over that Unitarian Universalism doesn’t deal well with tragedy, loss and the more difficult sides of life. Focusing on grace more often might help us to do that.

Once we know in our bones, and can admit freely, that we are not in complete control of our lives, we can begin to really know that others are not as well. Hopefully, we can then move away from a patrician model of charity and into real relationships with the people who aren’t as fortunate as we and from whom we can learn a lot about being in the world.

We are not bad people, and I hope you won’t think for a moment that I’m suggesting that we don’t try to make the world a better place.

I do, however, think with grace as our focus, we could approach our justice work from a different position. One where we continue to recognize that the Spirit is loving and by seeking the companionship of the Divine, we may become as radically loving as our best selves hope to be.

May we be so bold.

Where is your Wonder?

2011-02-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

Feb 27, 2011
Given at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver

Some of you may be familiar with the following quote from David Henry Thoreau, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” It’s from his book Walden.

Thoreau lived for a time in a tiny community along with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had worked to create a community of thinkers and spiritual folk in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa May Alcott grew up there and Margaret Fuller was an on and off resident there. Concord was quite a little hot bed of transformational thought then. Louisa, at the time, of course, was just a young girl, with a mad crush on Henry. Sad, sad Henry who was never the same after his brother drowned in Walden Pond. Theodore Parker, radical Unitarian Minister was a frequent guest. It was Louisa’s Dad that Emerson had recruited, Bronson Alcott, a radical reforming educator. Also Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for a while as did the man who had a life-long, unrequited love for Nathaniel, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. The names of the people he gathered there are legendary in Unitarian history.

Theirs was an intentional, vibrant, volatile community of people outside the norms of society. In her book, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever chronicles the very soap opera story of this gang of friends. Love triangles, death, and the intense exchanges of ideas were very much at the heart of this movement that would later come to be known as transcendentalism. At the time they were living this life though, they were not so organized as to give it a name.

Throeau wrote his book, Walden, during these heady times at Concord, and I think this is a good way to frame our question this morning: Where is Your Wonder?

As you might be able to tell from what I’ve briefly told you this morning, the people gathered at Concord did not lead simple lives of scholarship. They didn’t live in a cloister there or a monastery. They lived real lives, full of tulmut and chaos. And they weren’t paragons of virtue, either. Not modern day saints.

They were just people, like us.

Emerson struggled with his ministry, and his relationship with the Unitarian church. Bronson Alcott was trying to reform public education. Fuller was a master mind trapped in a woman’s body. Thoreau was largely unemployable and lived in a simple structure he built himself, though Emerson’s wife did all his laundry. Melville was haunted by his love for Hawthorne, who in turn had his own demons.

And yet together they managed to articulate a new spiritual path. In part, they learned to experience the ordinary as extraordinary.

Earlier this year I quoted the Reverend Lilia Cuervo as she talked about the spiritual practice of cooking. She said “Each time I cut into a pepper, I remember that I am the first being ever to see inside that pepper. It is a whole new landscape to be observed.”

Lilia has taken the ordinary and recognized it’s value as a unique experience.

Louisa May Alcott, in her book Little Women, describes an apple, lovingly, as a miracle of nature. The ordinary apple, made holy.

We too can make the ordinary holy.

In fact, we should.

One of the things that Thoreau’s quote about desperate lives warns us against is apathy, the routinization of our lives.

Are you that person who gets up because your alarm is screaming at you, then you go make the coffee, hop in the shower, get dressed, put the coffee in a travel mug and hit the road onto work?

There you’ll spend hours trading your labour for money, and then head home, tired and exhausted?

Or you head to classes. And sit there, wishing to be almost anywhere else?

And then maybe you have family obligations.

You eat dinner.

You do your homework, check the internet to see what’s going on, maybe watch a little television.

And then before you know it, you’re brushing your teeth and going to bed.

How many wondrous things might you have missed on a day like that? Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into years. To quote Burt Bachrach’s Do You Know the Way to San Jose:

“In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star. Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass. And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.”

No one can make you a star but yourself. And by that I don’t mean a star of stage and screen. Even though this is Vancouver, and there’s a lot of movie-making going on around here.

You can be the star of your own life, I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy, by paying attention to the ordinary in your life.

Transcendentalist scholar Meg North, explains that there are 7 things you can do, 7 practices of transcendentalism, you can do to help avoid living a life of quiet desperation.

The are:

1. Incorporate Nature
2. Incorporate Meditation
3. Incorporate Reading Sacred Texts
4. Incorporate Writing or journaling
5. Incorporate Conversation
6. Incorporate The sacred in both a time set aside and a place
7. Incorporate creative expression.

So easy, right? You’re probably half-way there already!

I’ll be honest with you, most of those sound pretty easy and fun, but that journaling business? I hate that. I had a teacher in Grade 9, Mr. Callahan, who tried to extol to us the wonderful daily practice of journaling. I didn’t do it then, which might explain my B+, and I don’t do it now.

But I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a failing of mine not to write in a journal daily. Or at least weekly!

I have spent years trying to train myself to keep awake to the beauty that surrounds me. And for all that work, and all the beauty I see each and every day because of that work, I can not tell what wonderful, amazing thing that I saw a week ago, Tuesday.

And that’s sort of a small tragedy.

I can’t go back in five years and remember the colour of shirt Denis wore when first told me he loved me. And that’s the sort of sweet memory one should be able to recall, don’t you think? Had I written it down in a journal, I could go back, re-read and re-live that moment.

I know this, and yet, I don’t journal.

But the other six? I do them, or try to do them daily.

I incorporate nature into my daily life. I have a house plant at home. I try to walk by and touch it every day. In some perhaps silly way, I’m letting my plant that it’s not alone, even though it’s not next to other plants. I also have a pair of fish that I feed and say hello to.

There’s also walking to the bus, or in the park, or, last weekend, walking on Bowen Island. Something spectacular happened to Steven and I on our way to the minister’s retreat on Bowen Island. Between Horseshoe Bay and the island, each of us saw our very first dolphin in the wild. He saw his first, and though he tried to help me see the same dolphin he’d seen, I ended up seeing another dolphin on the other side of the ferry.

I meditate, usually daily. I have a series of guided meditations on my iPhone and I sit in a quiet place for meditation. We do a short meditation here on Sundays.

Naturally, as a student minister I read a lot of sacred texts. But you know what, before I entered seminary, I read sacred texts often. I sought meaning in the writings of the women and men who lived before me. This is part of why when I discovered Unitarian Universalism, I stayed here. As a people of faith, we are seekers. The reading of texts, both generally accepted “sacred” texts and those reading that our own souls define as sacred, is something that we all seem to have in common.

I enjoy exchanging ideas with people. This, done with intention, can easily be seen as Meg North’s “incorporate conversation.” Talking with others about our faith, our confusions, our hopes….this is spiritual work.

Because you’re here right now, you’ve already begun to designate time in your life dedicated to a sacred space and a sacred time. By coming this morning, you’re already addressing the need to carve out a place that is separate, intentional, for your spirit. You don’t have to limit time to feed your spirit to just Sunday mornings. In fact, I encourage you not to!

Even in the tiniest of suites, one can set up a small altar. I know that word altar might make some people here jump a little inside, but stay with me for a moment. You can substitute “niche” or “corner” for the word altar, but I encourage you not to do so right now. If you have a strong reaction to that word, ask yourself why. And then ask yourself if you want to grow enough to reclaim that word.

On my altar at home, which truth be told is jus the top of my half-bookcase, on my altar at home I have a little statue of the Buddha. I bought it in a bookstore. It’s called “itty-bitty-buddha.” I have it there to remind myself that every being is a potential Buddha, and that my work in this life is treat my fellow beings with the respect that my own highest aspirations can muster.

I also have a prayer by St. Francis, given to me by a Franciscan Nun who works with the … She brought back this from her visit to Assisi.

A Simple Prayer

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, let me sow pardon.
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith.
Where there is despair, let me sow hope.
Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

– St. Francis of Assisi

You may struggle as I do, with some of the language in this prayer. Theologically, I do not feel comfortable with asking God to grant me these things. I don’t like the idea of having to rely on God for anything really. I want to feel like the master of my own destiny, to be the force in the universe that is responsible for my own happinesses and successes.

But even so, to live this kind of life is I think a life well lived.

And Ms. North’s final recommendation to live the life of a transcendentalist is incorporate creative expression. This can take many forms, of course. Cooking, painting, photography, dancing, singing in the shower by yourself. The point, I think of this part of spiritual practice is to celebrate life. To let your soul speak though your right brain, and not just your left brain. To work both halves of your mind is one way, and perhaps a pretty great way, to fully embody your spirit’s experience.

To do these seven things, though, requires one to pay attention to your life. And this paying attention to your life is, I believe, the thing that will keep you from living a life of quiet desperation.

If you can train yourself to be mindful of the wonders around you, you can celebrate them. They will not whiz by you, in your life, moment by moment, leaving you at the end of the day asking “where did the day go?”

You will know how your day was spent. You will remember your first cup of coffee and it’s rich flavour. You’ll look back on those early spring flowers you saw pushing their way up from the ground, while you walked to the bus, train, car. You’ll smile at a joke you heard this afternoon. You will remember the robust flavours of the food you ate for dinner.

You’ll be able to see just how rich with experience your days are. And if you’re wiser than me, you’ll write them down.

I’ll make you a deal. I will begin the spiritual practice of daily writing, beginning this evening. If you join me in this discipline, starting sometime this week, I hereby grant you permission to ask me how my journaling is going. Who knows, at the end of the church year, maybe we can create a “journaler’s coffee shop” here, and some of us can read a few favourite parts of our journal to each other over tea and cookies.

The idea of spiritual practice might bring to mind arduous daily tasks and/or great personal sacrifice. Some of us may not even like to think about spiritual things on a daily basis, but I tell you that it is important work, and it doesn’t have to be painful! I hope that this list of 7 things, which I will put up on Ning, that this list of 7 can be recognized for what it is: a lot of things we’re already doing.

This is your life. Depending on who you talk with, we only get this one, and certainly this incarnation is unique. You, and you, and you deserve to drink deeply of it. To celebrate the days of your life! This is about you, your stumblings and your victories. You are the star of your own movie.

Even when, as will sometimes happens, the movie takes a turn for the sad. Love dissolves, there are financial struggles and health concerns. You worry about your supporting cast, your daughter, your friend.

When the music takes on a minor key, and your life is difficult it is especially important to seek out the small beauties that life can offer us.

Please, pay attention to your life. It is, on balance, filled with important events and amazing people. A life fully realized is a gift! Allow yourself to walk around, watching and be filled with wonder.

You are worth that gift.

The Rabbits Are Coming!

2011-01-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

At first blush, a sermon about rabbits may seem a little odd. After all, what is a rabbit but a little mammal with notably little strength at very near the bottom of the food-chain. How should we find inspiration from one such as this?

And they’re so common! Just Ask the people over at the University of Victoria. Last summer the population of feral rabbits at UVic was estimated to be between 1,400 and 1,600. As of January 20, however, the population is down to 50. UVic has promised that all rabbits removed to date have been done so humanely and were sterilized and released into appropriate places elsewhere in the province. They have a goal of zero rabbits by summer.

Since I was fourteen, I’ve been collecting quotes, and I have quite a collection now. Some 28 or 29 pages, single-spaced. One of my favorites is “If dandelions were rare and difficult to grow, they’d be welcomed on any lawn.” I guess the same is true for rabbits.

In just a few days, we will celebrate the Chinese New Year, and the year coming up is the Year of the Rabbit. Lynn Sabourin, she was pleased to tell me, was herself born in a Year of the Rabbit.

The fourth year of every cycle of Chinese years belongs to the rabbit. Rabbits are in folklore around the globe. One telling of the story of how rabbit was honoured with a year of his own goes like this:

Buddha, before he ascended, invited all the animals to be in his presence. He honoured the first 12 to appear by making them part of the zodiac. Of these 12, Rabbit was the fourth to appear.

Another East Asian legend tells us, that:

The ancient god of India, Indra, King of the gods, was weary and disguised himself as a lowly traveler. One of Buddha’s earlier incarnations was in the form of a rabbit, who kept company with a monkey and a fox. When Indra, as the beggar, entreated them for help, the three animals went searching for food. The monkey came back with a handful of nuts, and the fox also had something for the traveler, but the rabbit found nothing. So great was his sense of honor that he said to the beggar, “I have found nothing for you to eat, so I beg of you, so that you don’t go hungry, eat me.” And he jumped into the fire. Indra was so impressed at the sacrifice the rabbit made for him, that he placed the rabbit on the moon where he became the Rabbit or Hare in the Moon, unlike the Man in the Moon in Western traditions.

A little earlier, Lynn shared with us a story from Cameroon wherein Rabbit uses his wit to become the prince of a land, following his hearts affection, and employing his mind to achieve his goals.

In many lands, the rabbit is a trickster god. An almost direct link can be easily drawn from the story from Cameroon and in other parts of Africa, to the Br’er Rabbit stories from the southern United States; wherein Br’er Rabbit outwits his enemies, time after time. You might be able to see, without too much difficulty, how a population in slavery and historic oppression might find comfort in stories about a creature so seemingly weak, and it’s ability to thwart those with more power.

In Native American and First Nations tribes, the Rabbit is also a trickster god. With the rabbit trickster, here are two interpretations—one positive and helpful and the other devious and aggressive. Known as Cottontail to the Paiute tribe of the the Great Basin region, this rambunctious figure carried on a war with the North Wind. After seducing the daughter of his enemy, Cottontail then burned her alive with her brothers. Conversely, the Omaha tribe of Nebraska saw the rabbit trickster in a more positive light. According to Omaha myth the rabbit, known as Mastshingke, is a defender of early man. When the world was plagued by ferocious, man-eating bears and gargantuan snakes, Mastshingke arrived to show ancient man to safety. For this, he is viewed as a giver of life and protector of mankind.

We also have a modern version of the rabbit as trickster god: Bugs Bunny. How many times has he faced the barrel of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun and gotten away? How angry does he make Daffy Duck, because Bugs always turns the situation around?

What lessons, then, can we learn from our little furry friend with the big ears? Clearly from pre-history, humanity has been fascinated by this little creature who, well, breeds like rabbits, who survive and thrive even though they have seem to be so vulnerable.

There are times in our own lives when we doubtlessly feel vulnerable, no? When we feel as though even though we’ve made our best effort and did our best planning we find ourselves facing a metaphorical fox.

Perhaps it’s related to work, where you’ve been careful and diligent in your work, only to find that you’ve been made redundant. Or at home, parenting, where your kid seems to be more like a trickster god than you.

What does a rabbit do?

Pulling us completely out of myth for a moment, let’s look at what the rabbit, the real rabbit, does.

The rabbit has long ears, and they are for detecting the sounds of its predators. When a rabbit hears danger, she thumps her big long foot on the ground to warn others. And then, she runs like Hell to safety. And if the road to safety is blocked, and I think this part is amazing, and actually leads to so much of the mythology about rabbits, if her way is blocked, she can make a 90-degree left turn so quickly as to almost seem magical.

In the warren where she lives in safety and community, she keeps her individual “room” clean. She does not lay her waste in the warren, she goes outside to do that.

What can you learn from her?

Go about your business, and find the sweetest, most tender grass you can find and enjoy yourself. If you like sunshine, then go, eat in the sunshine! If you prefer a place more shady, that’s okay, too. While enjoying your food, or frolicking around with others, do keep an ear out for danger.

By all means though, do not stop enjoying your life for fear of danger.

When danger appears, warn those with whom you share your life. Thump your foot, let them know something is wrong, and then run to safety. Once there, regroup.

As I spent the last couple of weeks thinking about rabbits, one image kept returning to my mind. And that is one of the rabbit’s ability to make a 90-degree left hand turn, seemingly at a full-speed run.

Even if we’re not running away from a hawk in the sky, or a fox in the shrubbery, we are living our lives at full-speed ahead, aren’t we? Even if one has retired, or works in a non-9 to 5 job, still we are living our lives non-stop.

Do you ever feel trapped by the pace of your life? Do you ever feel like you’re just trying to get quickly to the warmth of your own warren, so you can rest? And on the way home, all you can focus on is the path in front of you?

What can the rabbit teach you? She can teach you that it’s okay to make a sudden right turn, because that ability is part of survival.

When is the last time, while driving home from work, you just made a turn and did something unexpected? Went down an unfamiliar street, or popped into a store to have a look-see?

Obviously, we are not all rabbits here in this church. Our lives have become complicated by more in our live, than any rabbit has to worry about. After all, we have mortgages or rent to pay, our education to pay off, or helping our children get theirs, and the list goes on. But still, humanity has for eons watched the lowly rabbit for clues about how to live a better life. There must be wisdom for us in the modern age in there somewhere.

It’s rare for me to re-read a book of fiction. There are already so many to choose from, going back and re-reading seems to be a missed opportunity for some new adventure and universe of characters. One book I have read, over and over, about once a decade is A Brave New World. I first encountered that book at age 11. As a boy from Detroit, the very idea that people would worship Henry Ford and the Model T religiously was fascinating to me. Also, from that first reading forward, I’ve never really trusted government completely.

As I’ve read it, like I said about once a decade, each time I re-read it, I’ve gotten something new from it.

I first read Richard Adams’s Watership Down in grade 6, in Mrs. Kramer’s English class. At the time, I didn’t know how old the book was. It was published in 1972, making it less than 10 years old when I read it. I didn’t know the importance of contextual things like when a book was written back then, and I’d like to publicly thank Mrs. Kramer now for introducing me to such a book, which has become a classic of juvenile literature. When I first read Watership Down, it seemed like an adventure story.

I read the book again about 10 years ago in a book club. My second reading of Watership Down was all about relationships and community.

Briefly, and I hope not too briefly, the novel Watership Down, is the story of 5 younger male rabbits in a warren who venture out on their own to create a new warren. They are inspired into action because one of the smallest rabbits has a vision, which shows him that human developers are coming and the warren they currently live in is doomed.

They try to warn the Chief rabbit, but because they are young, not even 2 years old yet, their warning is not heeded, and they strike out on their own. Along the way they have dealings with two other warrens, neither of which is suitable for various reasons. Once they arrive in the place where they will create their warren, two of the smaller rabbits start digging, which is work that only does, or females do.

This by the way, caused a great discussion in my book club.

Eventually, their leader, Hazel, begins to understand that in order for Watership Down to continue, they must find mates. Find mates they do, suffering losses and gaining allies along the way, and the book ends with an elderly Hazel looking out over what he helped to create.

When I told my teaching pastor, Steven Epperson, that I was doing a sermon called “The Rabbits Are Coming,” he shared an article with me written by Stanley Hauerwas, an orthodox, conservative Christian about the book Watership Down and Christian Ethics.

In this article, Hauerwas examines the little band of rabbits not as the rag-tag group of friends that I’d read about in 1981 or even in 1999. Instead, draws parallels between the story and communities of faith. Of course, he means the Christian universal church as he understands and promotes, it. But I see easily how this relates to any group gathered together to practice their faith. Written in 1981, Hauerwas’s article is available through google books. Google books is both terrific and frustrating because the site offers so many resources, but unless the resource is in public domain they must redact it, meaning that every so often a page or two gets skipped in their reproduction. But if the article captures your attention from google books, perhaps you’ll pursue it further.

Hauerwas writes that the little band of rabbits does not start off as a community. It’s the trials and tribulations that the rabbits go through together, and the learning of their own limitations and the strengths of their compatriots that forge them into a community.

Look around you at this community. See the strengths of the people around you, and know that they can see yours. Know that this community is made stronger not just by your ability to excel at tasks, but also your ability to stand back and let others share their abilities. Learn that it’s okay that you can’t do everything, and that relying on others, within your community, helps to make that community stronger for all.

At first blush, a sermon about rabbits might seem frivolous and potentially silly, I know. I mean, what after all do we have to learn from them?

Enjoy your daily tasks in the sunshine. Keep an ear out for danger. When danger appears, warn others. When it’s time to do so, run for home. As you’re running for home, if the way is blocked by danger, don’t be afraid to turn quickly in a new direction to save yourself. If you have to strike out on your own and form a new home, know that it can be fraught with danger, lessons, loss, and successes.

Once you’re home, don’t leave your waste lying around and be respectful of the others you live with. Work to make your community strong.

And then go out and enjoy your daily tasks in the sunshine.

Repeat as necessary.

Many blessings for our shared journeys.

Amen.

Eschatology: Good News or End Times?

2010-12-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

Good News or End Times: An Examination of Eschatology
A Dialogue Sermon between the Rev. Dr. Steven Epperson and Joe Cherry
December 12, 2010

Eschatology, Steven, Part 1

In June 1976, the city of Vancouver was the site of the Third Session of the World Urban Habitat Forum sponsored by the United Nations. It was big deal. 15,000 people from around the world registered and participated in the discussions, workshops and events of Habitat. It involved governments, local authorities, civil society, nongovernmental groups and experts in every sphere of urban life. Some of those Habitat participants may be sitting in this Sanctuary today.

One person who showed up in Vancouver for Habitat was Thomas Banyacya, a tribal elder of the Hopi people of Southwest United States. He carried an extraordinary message from his tribe; I’m only going to quote a brief passage from a speech he gave one early June morning in Vancouver:

“According to many prophecies “purification” is near,” he said. “It is my sacred duty to relate this message…Hopi and other Native spiritual leaders are greatly concerned with the conditions of Mother Earth and her children…They have watched the white brothers systematically destroy the Native people as they did natural resources….the Hopi know that greed, pollution and the lack of understanding of nature are about to destroy Mother Earth… According to our beliefs and prophecies if this destruction continues, man’s existence on this world will soon be ended.”

Today, Joe and I are going to talk about a kind of worldview, a sensibility and belief that focuses on the times ahead of us. It’s not the kind of time reckoned simply by sunrise/sunset, or one calendar year succeeding another, or what next year’s fall fashion season has in store. Rather, it’s a kind of human attentiveness to a larger, mythical canvas about last things, final things—the kind referred to by that Hopi elder and prophet—that, and the consequences of this way of looking at things for the here-and-now. The theological term is eschatology—a general term for teachings and beliefs concerning the end of the world, and the processes of salvation that include death, judgment, the afterlife, and a longed for future golden era of peace on Earth that Christians call the millennium.

If this seems a little foreign to you, picture in your mind, or think about the following: what do disaster movies like Dr Strangelove, The War of the Worlds, 2012, and The Day After have in common? What connects the 19th century Taiping rebellion in China, the Peasants War in 16th century Germany, and Karl Marx’s end-of-history communist utopia? What links Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the million words written by Sir Isaac Newton interpreting the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and jokes about meeting St Peter at “the pearly gates?” What drove George de Bennville, James Relly, John Murray and Hosea Ballou to repudiate the doctrine of hell and preach universal salvation instead? Last year a Canadian journalist writes a best seller about religion and politics in the Harper government and calls it The Armageddon Factor. The Arma—what? How is it connected with the eleven novels in the “Left Behind” series that have sold 55 million copies in North America and a thirty volume spin off for teen readers called Left Behind: the Kids, in which four teenagers are left behind after the Rapture and band together to fight Satan’s forces. I kid you not.

Whenever and wherever human beings have been haunted by death and the prospect of hell and heaven, or crushed under the grinding boot of oppression, or mocked for their beliefs; whenever history just doesn’t make sense anymore, when the times are out of joint, when mushroom clouds loom on the horizon, or the fate of nature is perceived as hanging by a thread—there you find eschatological, end time, Kingdom of God, tipping point, gallows humour, messianic, millennial thinking, writing, believing, politicking, and art making. The world is and has been awash in it; but it seems we don’t swim in those waters much, or we don’t like to admit it publicly. And aside from the rhetoric of environmentalism, eschatology isn’t something Unitarians think or talk about. We’re more likely to echo Emerson’s words, when he said: “Five minutes today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the millennium. Let us be poised and wise, and our own, today.”

But recently, a Unitarian Universalist theologian named Rebecca Ann Parker has taken a closer look at eschatology. And Joe has some interesting things to say about it….

Eschatology, Joe, Part 1

In Minneapolis, at General Assembly and a student breakfast hosted by the UUMA, a member of the UUMA Executive pointed her finger at me and very dramatically asked “Can you define your theology in three words?” I worried that this was some hazing ritual. After she said that she was only kidding I still felt the call to rise to her challenge, and so I answered her: “There’s always hope.”

Now ‘there’s always hope’ isn’t likely to go down in history as one of the great theological statements of all time, but I’m sticking with it. Hope isn’t always easy. In fact, hope is sort of a hard place to stay in. Life can really kick you around, and being hopeful means being vulnerable to disappointment.

In her essay, “The Holy Ground,” contemporary theologian Rebecca Ann Parker explored the issue of place of hope in liberal theology as part of her analysis of three eschatologies: Social Gospel, Universalist and, Radically Realized.

Having studied Jane Addams and her intersection with the Chautauqua Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I was pretty familiar with the Social Gospel eschatology. Parker sums this up “We [the practitioners of the Social Gospel] are here to build the kingdom of God on earth.”

Universalist eschatology was something that came naturally to me as a child. I rejected Hell by second grade because to me, the messages that ‘God is Love’ and ‘God allows eternal punishment’ did not seem to go together. I didn’t know the Bible, and I didn’t know about Hosea Ballou, but eternal punishment seemed cruel and didn’t allow a person a chance for redemption or hope. “God intends all souls to be saved,” Parker identifies as the Universalist eschatology.

Radically Realized eschatology on some level marries the two aforementioned eschatologies. For me it is what has been missing in our Unitarian Universalist understanding about the world around us. Yes, we are responsible for creating God’s Kingdom on earth by working to alleviate suffering and injustice around us. Yes, God’s love is transformative, redemptive and available to all souls. But also, as Parker states, we are still in the Garden of Eden. This is Paradise, and we need to also focus energies on helping ourselves and others realize that this world contains not only suffering, but beauty. Great beauty surrounds us, we need only to learn to see it.

There is beauty and there is pain. There are flowers that bloom in the sunshine, and there are places where the garden needs tending. As people of faith one of our roles is to observe the world, tending it where it needs to be tended, admiring it where it is appropriate and being deeply grateful for being here at all.

Hope isn’t always an easy stance to keep in this life. It is complex and often leaves you open to profound disappointment. There are those who may even say that I have been expelled from the metaphorical Garden of Eden by people who have worked to marginalize me based on my birth defect, my sexuality, my working class background and by my half-and-half racial make-up of bi-raciality. It would be easy to imagine that I’ve been oppressed and shoved out of the Garden’s flower patch, vegetable area and out onto the lawn. But in reality, the lawn is part of the garden, and there is unique beauty to be explored there, too.

Do you feel like people have tried to remove you from a place because you didn’t act, look, feel or seem like “one of them”? It’s could’ve been when we you were young, when maybe your older cousins didn’t want to include you at family gatherings. It could’ve been at work where maybe your methodologies where new and untried, or you yourself were new to the profession. It doesn’t take much to feel like an outsider, and it takes even less when there are people around you who are hinting that you’re not part of the “in” crowd.

And, brave face on it or not, that hurts us.

When we are hurt, or when we are confused, if we can have an eschatology to help guide our thoughts and help us to deal with our situation, that can be helpful. Look to the front of your orders of service. Let me be clear about this: I am not suggesting that Lucy has the eschatology that you should adopt!

In Bahá'í eschatology creation does not have a beginning nor end. Instead the eschatology of other religions is viewed as symbolic.

The Brahma Kumaris believe that the old world will come to an end, at the end of the cycle, through extensive destructive events which will wipe out the whole population of the old world. The end of the cycle is referred to as "the end". At the end of the old cycle, a new cycle begins.

Christian eschatology is concerned with death, an intermediate state, Heaven, hell, the return of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, a rapture, agreat tribulation, the Millennium, end of the world, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth

Contemporary Hindu eschatology is linked in the Vaishnavite tradition to the figure of Kalki, or the tenth and last avatar of Vishnu before the age draws to a close, and Shivasimultaneously dissolves and regenerates the universe.

Islamic eschatology is documented in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, regarding the Signs of the Day of Judgment. The Prophet's sayings on the subject have been traditionally divided into Major and Minor Signs. When these signs come to pass, the Day of Judgement is here.

Zoroastrian eschatology says at the end of time there will be a great battle beteen good and evil, which good will win.

With so many eschatologies to choose from, which is the right one for you?

Oh, would that I had some sort of magical “eschato-meter” to tell you. That you’ll have to figure out on your own, and its going to take some work. In fact the only way you’re going to find a valuable system of beliefs is if you spend time with yourself thinking about what’s of ultimate value to you.

Eschatology, Steven Part 2.

Several weeks ago, Joe and I talked about Parker’s essay and her analysis of these three kinds of eschatology. What really stood out for me, especially in her advocacy for a “radically realized eschatology” were the statements that we are still in the Garden of Eden; that this is Paradise; and that great beauty surrounds us, if we only had eyes to see it. My response to those statements…? Well let me put it this way. One Sunday morning some time ago, Diana and I were listening to a Unitarian minister preaching eloquently about the holy now and beauty in the world, when she leaned over and whispered to me: “only someone with central heat and air conditioning would say that.” It’s not that Parker’s statements about Paradise and the Garden are flat-out wrong; I just find them wanting in serious reflection about the darker side of nature and human history.
Looking back, it seems, by my lights, that beauty’s taken quite a beating, and that baldly stating that we are in the Garden of Eden just doesn’t cut it. The 20th century and the first decade of the present century have been grim teachers. World Wars, totalitarian regimes, the gulags, the camps, genocide, residential schools, our chronic inability to adequately feed and house our own people, the spectre of global warming, the daily onslaught of media, advertizing, and materialism…where’s the garden in all of this? How difficult it can be to find, feel and experience the holy now!

A fear I have with Parker’s radically realized eschatology, it’s assertion that we are in the garden, is akin to my feelings about the conclusion, the summation that comes at the end of Voltaire’s Candide. His fictional characters have gone through every kind of imaginable affront to human dignity: earthquakes, inquisitions, kidnappings, senseless deaths—catastrophes innumerable—and his philosophical conclusion to all this mayhem?: “cultivate your own garden.” I get it; and am tempted myself. But there’s something wanting here…a kind of lateral disregard for others; a resignation, a final, self-absorbed indifference to the fate of others and the world.

The Scottish poet Edwin Muir wrote a poem called “One Foot in Eden.” One foot in Eden…? It’s a tentative conclusion that Muir claimed; and it was dearly won—arrived at by him only after severe personal losses and a sober reckoning with the mass violence he lived through in the 20th century.

One foot in Eden…? perhaps; though more often than not, I still feel very much cast out from it; and the road is long, though I’m trying to find, somehow, a way back in. It’s not easy.

And beauty? Think about this with me for a moment: The root meaning of our word beauty means fairness, not just what is comely, or attractive. Rather, beauty is a condition of fairness; of what is good, well, and fitting. Beauty is closely related to the word bounty; that is, plenitude and liberality. Our language of moral judgment is saturated with aesthetic ideas, opinions and judgments. The virtues and vices we experience in the lives of others and ourselves prompt us to come up with expressions like: fine, delightful, simple, pure, sweet and rotten, vile, foul, ugly, sick and gross in order to help us describe what we do, think, value and feel. That is to say, the experience of beauty and ugliness can put us in contact with moral ideals or the absence of them.

It’s possible, though far from certain, that by placing ourselves on the path of beauty, we prepare ourselves for justice, not just tending one’s own garden. It may be that beauty acts to agitate us to bring more beauty into the world; it can convey a heightened sense of aliveness to ourselves and access to what’s alive and striving in others. It puts us into a state of high alert to the arrival and achievement of beauty, and can make us even more conscious of when it is not attained. Rather than stopping us from seeing and striving against the ugliness of injustice, want and violence, the desire to walk in beauty seeks the widest possible distribution of its goods to the greatest number of people. It incites us to share its wealth: that heightened sense of awareness, care, protection and enhancement we feel whenever we encounter what is truly beautiful. “Beauty prepares us for justice.” (Elaine Scarry)

If that’s what Rebecca Parker means by paradise now and beauty—then how can I be a Scrooge; how can I say: Bah Humbug!?

Eschatology, Joe Part 2.

I would add to Steven’s comments on beauty, which I appreciate and agree with, that part of the core at the center of the spiritual discipline in finding beauty is gratitude.

Take this jar of tomatoes I brought with me from my Mom’s kitchen. It has it’s own simple beauty, and not just because my Mom canned it herself.

This jar, for me, represents many stories. We, as a family, learned to can in the late 1970’s because my Mom is always trying to save money, because honestly, my parents needed to watch every penny. There are a lot of family stories about canning and putting up vegetables and jams and things in my family.

Those stories are in this jar of tomatoes. And other stories of my own. I have canned my own vegetables and put up fruit also to watch my pennies. There are also stories of women in the plains and farms who put up food to this day to make it through long harsh winters. There’s a whole history of food here in this little jar.

What people who live at the less lush corner of the garden know is this: If you can’t take away my ability to see Beauty and bounty around me, you can’t break my spirit.

The working poor of this world know that they’re never going to own their own house on the Lake or Oceanfront, if they ever get to own a house at all. But in their own spaces, beauty can be found, even if, compared to the volume of obvious beauty around the wealthy, it is precious little.

Yes, it’s true. Life in this world can be unfair and can punish those who ought not be punished. But when life is not handing you a dozen long-stemmed roses in a pretty box, still there are dandelions in the park.

When we stop saying that long-stemmed roses have more beauty value than the dandelion, when we can stop attaching our own sense of worth to which flower we get to see, and how those flowers cross our paths, then we are really going to be on to something!

Yes, there is ugliness in this world. And injustice and mistreatment. But if all I ever focused on were those things, I couldn’t go on. I would feel crushed that only once in my life did I receive long-stemmed roses.

Instead I walk the sidewalks, looking for little purple wildflowers in the cracks. Knowing that like so many, those flowers have pushed through concrete to be seen, and so often they’re walked right by. I promise to try to see them and be glad for the gift.

I’ve been working with Laura Imayoshi’s program for 3 months now, and I see first hand every week women who remind me of my cousins back home. Rough lives, addiction, men who abuse them. And then I watch them interact. True, there is sometimes pettiness about who is getting more variety of food, or more volume of food. These are the women who’ve lost their ability to see any beauty. It stings my heart. And for them, I try to bring a little beauty into their lives, even if it’s only a couple of hours a week. I’m a former waiter, and I treat the ladies as if they’ve come into my restaurant to dine.

And then there are the ladies for whom beauty is not lost. They’re able to acknowledge a small kindness, because even in a harsh life, they are not completely closed to it. I have seen them bring new women in from the street, get Laura involved and already I’m convinced they helped save one young woman from freezing (to death) last month. They brought her in for dinner, they called her Honey and Sweetie, and sat her down to eat with them, and then Laura and others found some clothing to wear that would be better for the cold snap we were having.

Their collective action is a good example of what I mean when I say that we have a responsibility to attend to the Garden. With their very limited resources, still they were able to reach out to someone in at least temporary deeper need then they themselves were. They offered her kindness, they used their knowledge to offer material assistance they might not have had themselves.

To me, this is why the ability to recognize that we are all still in the Garden of God is so important.
Maybe the Garden of Eden has been oversold to us, as some place where everything was handed to Adam and Eve with ease. There are stories of “the Golden Age” of fill in the blank in every culture.

And yes, our world is anything but fair and equitable.

But if we can celebrate the small beauties that enter our lives, we don’t have to be filled with despair. We can share those beauties with others, we can create new beauty for others. We can use the energy, the love that comes from beauty and all that Steven said about fairness as the root word, we can use this to do what the Social Gospel folk charged us to do. We can create God’s Kin-dom here on Earth. We can use the power of our Love to witness to the world our eschatology that God loves every being.

And we can stay together in this Garden, our Garden, and invite new folks to join us. And we can share with them our ways that we find beauty, and we can ask them to teach us how they find beauty.

May we be bold enough, and brave enough and loving enough to make this so. And from here, we can and will change our world.

Volver: To Return

2010-11-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

Delivered to the First Unitarian Society of Chicago,
November 07, 2010.

Volver is a Spanish verb that means to return to a place. Return and place are sort of my topics this morning.

For those of you who do not know me, Hi, I’m Joe. This has been my home church since 1996. I’m now sort of a wandering member, though, and so you may not have seen me before. But no matter how far my travels take me, this place is never far from my heart. Gathered here every Sunday are many people I love.

The ancient Jewish people believed that G-d, Jaweh, the Holy, was a god of place. The first temple, sometimes known as Solomon’s temple, was built in about 957 BC, and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The second great temple was begun in 528BC, and was eventually destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Some believe there will be a third great temple built on that same site.

For the ancient Jews, this is G-d’s place.

I’m not explaining this to ridicule the ancient Jews. This, to me, is not a silly idea of people from a time long ago. It’s actually quite amazing.

Think of all the temporary things we have in our lives. What, in fact, is permanent?

Nothing.

Nothing.

And yet, there is a spot on this earth, where for centuries, people have believed that this space is G-d’s space.

To their cousins, the Muslims, since the 7th century, this has been where the Dome of the Rock has stood. For almost three thousand years of recorded history, this place, where Solomon’s temple stood, has been a place to engage that which is most Holy.

Our sanctuary is not so old, few man-made things in North American are that old. But even so, it is a place where we come to engage with that which is most Holy.

And this is the place where I came, week after week, for a dozen years, to find people that mattered to me, people for whom I mattered.

I can think of perhaps no place that is more Holy to me.

Relationships are what make this sanctuary Holy. It is the friends who are no longer with us, our friends downstairs whose ashes are in our crypt, our friends who are here with us now, and the people we have yet to meet and with whom we will discover a kinship. These relationships are an expression of the Divine.

I have been away on my internship. Vancouver is a lovely city, though a bit pricey! It’s Canada’s most expensive city! I moved from Detroit to Chicago, and my cost of living went up. I moved from Chicago to Vancouver, and my cost of living went up. If this trend continues I’m going to have to either move to Hong Kong or London.

Vancouver is a lovely city. And the congregation that I am serving has been very welcoming and embracing. I gave my first sermon there in September, and I got many positive responses to it. I am happy where I am.

So why am I speaking this morning about Volver, returning?

Because more than my physical return to Hyde Park, which has been so very nice, my heart returns here often.

You can’t see it from where you are, probably, but the wallpaper on my cellphone is a picture of our Rose window. So literally, every time I pick up my phone, to answer a call, to check email or to add another appointment in my calendar, I am transported back home for an instant.

Except, really, you can’t return completely, can you?

Life is a flowing stream, and as the popular saying goes, you can’t step into the same river twice. Part of the flavor of volver is the sadness and longing that knows this. Part of it is the joy of recognizing this and still having so much anticipation about seeing the familiar.

Have you ever had the experience of returning someplace you haven’t been for a long time? Have you ever gone back to your elementary or high school, and had a good look at it?

It’s not quite as big as you remember, is it? You don’t feel quite as small there as you once may have.

Even if you are the exact same height you were when you graduated from those places.

Where is a place that you long to return?

In Pedro Almodovar’s film Volver, from which I shamelessly borrowed the title of today’s sermon, two sisters leave the coastal town of their birth and move to Madrid. They are called back to the town after the death of their beloved Aunt, Paula. It’s a lovely film, and I recommend it highly. Penelope Cruse is perhaps the world’s most beautiful crier.

The sisters are caught between their lives in Madrid where they work and have children, and their ancestral home, where they still feel some responsibilities, and of course, the emotional pull of the familiar.

Maybe you can relate to this idea. Even if you have never moved away from the home you were born into, you’ve changed and grown. You’ve built for yourself a life in a new place.

While I was in a second-hand store in Vancouver, I checked out a globe, and I am farther away from home that London is from Istanbul. A more accurate distance is that between Paris and Cairo.

I will tell you that when I discovered that I got to feeling very homesick. Not just for Chicago, but also my family, another 380 miles further away.

I’d like to ask you to settle in and get comfortable for a moment. If you feel comfortable, please close your eyes. I’d like to take you on a little guided meditation. When you hear the sounds of the bell, please open your eyes.

Take a deep, relaxed breath.

In your mind, think of all the places that mean something important to you.

Don’t forget things like swing-sets from your childhood.

Or your first school dance.

The place where you had your first kiss.

The place where you first told someone you loved them and they said they loved you back.

Your first day of your very first job.

The place where you had to say a difficult good bye.

The place where you find rest.

Of all these places, which is the most cherished?

(end meditation.)

Later today, or maybe tomorrow, revisit some of the places that came to your mind. Picture them in your mind and ask what they mean to your soul.

Human beings are meaning makers. We connect dots that aren’t even there. Human pattern recognition is part of our software. It’s how we are able to see a complete circle when there isn’t one. It’s why we see shapes in clouds that aren’t really there.

Recently, I was at a UU Men’s retreat at Lake Sasamet in British Columbia. I got up very early one morning, as is my habit, and I went down to the Lake to watch the sunrise. Except since I was in the middle of big hills, not the mountains, and there was no giant lake to the east, I mostly saw the sky getting lighter, but not really a sunrise.

Next to the lake there is this giant rock. And I mean giant. Most of it is submerged below the soil and still the area you can stand directly on is about as big as the apse in this church. I had to look that word up, by the way. It’s spelled A P S E, and it’s the place between these steps and where the empty niche is.

So I’m on this giant rock, and it’s a bit chilly, and not quite light out. And then this idea strikes me. For thousands of years, men have stood on this rock. They came from Africa through Asia, the Bering Straight and into Canada, and they have stood here, watching the sunrise just as I am doing right now. In deference to this idea, I took off my socks and shoes, to join the women and men who’ve stood at this rock, overlooking this lake.

And as I stood there, feet admittedly cold, I saw a miracle. Not a super-natural miracle, but an ordinary, every day one.

Across the surface of the lake, I watched moisture gather from the surrounding land. Over and over, it kept just falling from the land, which is at a higher point than the lake, into the lake, but the little bits of fog did not fall completely into the lake. Instead these wisps of fog skimmed along the surface of the lake, eventually coming together and then forming a large column that reached up into the sky.

It was breath-taking.

And these wisps of fog, to my brain, looked often like people, walking. Now I k-n-o-w that this is just my brain’s pattern recognition software kicking in. But I let it kick in, and I stood there, in the slowly brightening morning, watching these “people” gathering, wave after wave.

I saw a little girl with a bicycle. I saw an older, heftier couple dancing a waltz together. I saw individuals taking hands, I saw some who walked alone. I even saw one woman walking her dog.

And for the first time in my life, in seeing this, I know why people describe ghosts the way that they do.

And the thing that made me cry on that beautifully warm autumn morning was that these people, whether they were young or old, alone or in pairs, all came together as one. That whichever part of the lake they came from, whichever side they were on…it didn’t matter. In the end, they came together and together they rose into the heavens.

Theologically, I am a Universalist. Which means that I believe that God, the God we cannot wholly know or wholly name, is Love. That eventually we return together to gather in a place of Love. That all will be reunited there, that love is our final destination.
And on that Sunday morning, so very early, I had a vision of what that might look like.

We humans are meaning makers. So go forth from this place, and make meaning in and of your lives. Visit the holy places of your life, if only in your heart, often.

And of course, come to church often!

May each of us develop the courage to live our life emboldened by Love. May we be strengthened by that Love so that we may share our Love with the world through acts of friendship, generosity and kinship with the friends we have yet to make.

May it be ever so.

Amen.

A Whole New World

2010-10-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

I entitled this morning’s sermon “A Whole New World” not because I imagined us spontaneously breaking into that song from Aladdin, but rather because every moment, we are living in a wholly new world. Were you reading this text, instead of hearing it, you might be relieved to know that I used the word wholly with the w and not the other one. Though truth be told, I also believe that every moment is holy….without the w.

Change happens to us instant by instant. We may think that sometimes we’re stuck in a rut, but really, there is no rut. Each time we get up on Monday morning and go to our jobs may seem the same dull routine, but there are subtle differences. Last year at the UUA’s General Assembly, I attended a workshop on Unitarian Universalist Mystics. There the Reverend Lillia Cuervo, who’s voice and rich Mexican accent reminds me so much of my Great Grandmother’s, spoke about her spiritual practice of cooking. She said that she tries to remember that every time she cuts into a pepper, she is the first being who has ever seen inside this pepper, and it’s a little miracle.

Life takes place in sometimes large changes and sometimes subtle ones.

Like Steven Epperson, I walked into my first Unitarian church about 15 years ago. I was a sort of under-developed 27 year old, who was trying to find my way through life. The man that I was dating at the time told me he thought I might really like his church, and asked to me accompany him on a Sunday.

To my 27 year-old ears, this was practically a marriage proposal.

It wasn’t by the way.

But Greg brought me to the First Unitarian Society of Chicago in the Autumn of 1995. That congregation is my home church, and they are sponsoring my candidacy for the Unitarian Universalist ministry.

What Greg understood was that while I was attending a Presbyterian church near my apartment, the theology didn’t really fit me. I was attending largely because I enjoyed the community setting. I had chosen the Presbyterian church near my home because it was gay friendly, and as a boy, for a couple of years, we attended a Presbyterian Church.

But even as a boy, I was a trouble maker.

When I was in second grade, which made me about 8 years old, and the year 1976, my family attending the Peace Presbyterian Church. It was meant to be a progressive church, new building, young pastor, etc. My Sunday School teacher’s name was Rhonda. There are two things you should know about Rhonda. Number one, she was very patient with me, and number two my Sunday School teacher had such an impact on my life that 32 years later I still remember her name. In saying that I just want to momentarily lift up just how important our teachers are.

Rhonda sent me twice to the minister’s office that year, and one time she actually physically walked me down to Pastor Jim’s office.

The first time I got sent down, it was because I, at age 7, wanted to know why Mary was not God. I knew where babies came from, I am the oldest child in my family, and I’ve always asked a lot of questions, and my parents were honest about sexuality with us. “So, if Mary gave birth to the Saviour of the entire human race, without touching a man, why isn’t Mary God?”

The second time Rhonda sent me to see Pastor Jim was during our lesson on the Holy Trinity. “When the Holy Spirit comes to earth and talks to people, does she let them know who she is?” “Joe, do you keep saying “she”? “Well, you have the Father and the Son, and you can’t tell me that they tried to pull this off without a woman involved. I mean, you can’t do anything without women.” And off I went.

Now Pastor Jim was a very nice man, and he didn’t threaten me with heresy or anything. During our little talks he twice said to me “It’s a matter of faith, Joe.” To which I replied “Pastor Jim, I don’t know what that means.”

To him “it’s a matter of faith” was an answer. For me that was just confusing.

The time that Rhonda took me by the hand down to Pastor Jim’s office was one of the last times I remember going to church. She sat me in one of his office chairs and said to me “Tell Pastor Jim what you just said in class!” I think I’d finally worn away her patience, because she spun around and went back to our classroom.

Pastor Jim looked at me. “Well?”

And I said “I said that I didn’t believe in Hell.”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked me.

“Hell is a stupid idea.” I said, “It can’t be real.”

And Pastor Jim asked me to explain this, and this is essentially what I said: The whole reason for punishment and discipline is to get people to change their behaviour, right? That’s what prisons are for, that’s what being grounded or spanked is for. It’s to get you to change what you did and to make you do things differently. Part of the deal is that you get to show you learned your lesson by changing what you do. If you don’t get a chance to show that you’ve learned something, then there is no point to punishment except cruelty. If Hell is nothing but eternal punishment, with no chance to show that you learned something, then it’s just cruelty. God’s cruelty. And you’ve been teaching us that God is Love. So either God isn’t Love or Hell is not real.

He just looked at me and said “You’re like 8, right?” I nodded. “Who’s giving you these ideas?” he asked me. I told him “No one. It’s just me.”

I’m sharing this story with your for a couple of reasons. The first is so that you’ll get a little larger glimpse of who I am at my core. I question things. I want to know why. In seventh grade, my English teacher nick-named me “ya-butt” because I was always saying that in class. “Yeah, but what about this? Or Yeah, but what about that?” That hasn’t really changed much.

But what has changed, is the phrase “it’s a matter of faith, Joe.”

Faith is not an answer. Faith is not what gets one safely from point A to point B. It is not a ferry boat that takes you to Victoria and back. It’s instead closer to the idea that Faith is what lets you get on that boat, assuming it’ll get you safely to Victoria and back.

There is no proof. It can’t be reasoned. Faith can only be embraced. Faith is that thing that is just beyond the intellect and all the academic training we may have. It boils down to, “It’s just what I believe.”

Change is constant. Sometimes it’s a grand sweeping change, sometimes it’s subtle. I can’t tell you exactly when “It’s a matter of faith, Joe” went from being a wholly unsatisfactory answer to one that I can accept and embrace.

Change is necessary for growth.

Earlier Meredith presented a reading, written by a 40 year old woman from my former home town of Chicago. I selected this reading was because it talked about change. This author, who identified herself only as “BC from Chicago,” is confronting change in a big way. Much of her self-identity was being challenged because at 40, she’s no longer the 30 year old she once was, and this is shaking her to her foundations. One can easily imagine that she sees 40 as a little bit of dying.

But she needn’t see 40 as that at all. If she could just shift her perspective a little bit, she could see 40 as a time to really step into her own power. How can she do this? Change. Can she do it alone? No. There is too much cultural baggage and too many businesses relying on BC’s fears, who are selling her that lip-gloss.

As a culture, we need to change to show BC that 40 is not the end.

One of the things they warn you about in seminary is putting too many sermons in one sermon, so I’ll save my thoughts on feminism for another time.

There are times when change comes at us like a slow train coming. And there are times when it comes like a tiger out of tall grass.

Change is a spiritual challenge. When it comes slowly, like a train, we must do what we can to prepare for it. This could come in the form of an child going away to college, a partner getting some very terrible health news, or a new degree from a college or seminary, that’s coming soon. In each of these scenarios, we owe it to ourselves to prepare for these shifts in our reality as thoughtfully and purposefully as we can.

When change comes like a tiger, we must do what we can do adjust and not lose ourselves wholly and permanently in transition. We must mourn a loss, or celebrate an promotion, and we must try to find balance. This is not to say that mourning should be artificially abbreviated, we must mourn for as long as we must. But we musn’t stop living.

When I told my Dad that I was going to seminary to become a minister, his first words were not “Congratulations!” or “Have you lost your marbles?” But instead his first words were “What will you tell people when their child dies?” My second brother, Christopher, died at 11 months old, in 1970. Some mourning goes on a lifetime.

But even so, we must go on living our lives. We owe it to ourselves to live as richly as possible, to experience this, our lives. We should absolutely rejoice in cutting open a green pepper and looking inside of it, experiencing the small miracle of being the first to see inside.

Change happens.

According to Charlotte Rasl, author of “If the Buddha Got Stuck”, these are 10 traits of people who get stuck.

1. A Sense of Helplessness or lack of entitlement at one’s core
2. Negative Thinking
3. Keeping life chaotic
4. An inability to calm or soothe oneself in healthy ways
5. Difficulty connecting with other people and a lack of support system
6. Looking to external sources for a sense of happiness
7. Lack of an adequate concept of self-care and setting limits
8. A sense of self that is identified with images, concepts and beliefs
9. Repeating the same behavior and hoping the outcome will be different
10. Focusing on the overwhelming, how bad life is and the terrible state of the world.

I can safely say that I can identify with some of those traits at different points in my own life. She also offers a list of 8 traits of people who stay “unstuck.”

1. Confident in one’s capacity to problem-solve and take action
2. Unwilling to remain in extremely unhappy or stressful situations indefinitely
3. Able to give and receive support from friends and family
4. Do not attach their identity or ego to success of failure
5. Willing to experience, try new ways of doing things, make mistakes and then try again with a new plan
6. Able to tolerate frustration and uneasiness in the interest of taking on a challenge
7. Possess a sense of humour and lightheartedness
8. Demonstrate profound care and concern for the well-being of all life.

I know that the above lists are long, and I’ll be happy to share them with anyone in written form later, or to recommend Dr. Rasl’s book. But for now, just try to see where your commonalities with these lists lie.

The story of the two wolves that I shared with the young folks this morning demonstrates, that we have agency in our own lives. We can choose to feed the wolf who resists change unhealthily, or we can feed the wolf who tries to embrace change as best as possible, even though it sometimes hurts and is frightening.

Change is a challenge. But it is the very stuff of life.

Our lives swing from the greatest happiness to the deepest sorrow. As part of my spiritual practice, I try to think about that daily. Let each of us look for the courage within ourselves to consider the changes that life brings to us, and in so doing live a life deep with meaning.

Joseph M Cherry
Delivered Unitarian Church of Vancouver
26 September, 2010

The Theological Promise of America. (Part I)

2010-07-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

(This homily was written to be presented on July 4, 2010. The service was shared with me by the Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Society of Chicago, the Reverend Dr. Nina D. Grey, who presented Part II.)

Good morning.

This morning I’d like to share a story with you. It’s the story of a people, come from many different lands, different languages and different reasons for arriving on the shores of this country.

It’s not a perfect story. There is a lot of heartbreak involved.

According to archeologists, humans first came to this country after leaving Africa, from the west about 20,000 years ago, over the Bering Straight from what is now Russia, through what is now Canada, through the United States, and into Mexico and the South American countries.

And for a long time these peoples lived isolated from the other 5 populated continents. That is until the Europeans developed boats that could traverse the Atlantic Ocean.

There was a culture clash, and things have been somewhat messy, but sometimes they’ve also been beautiful. Relations between peoples and people have gone well when each person has operated out from a position of generosity and grace.

In 1492 Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue, but the part of the story I want to focus on takes place in a little village called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire in the United Kingdom, starting about 1590.

In that little village, which I visited last summer while in England serving a church near Manchester, has today about 400 people living in it. It’s this tiny, really sort of no-where place. But it’s very important to the history of the modern United States.

In about 1590 a small group of villagers decided that their religious calling was in a different direction than that of the Church of England, which was then the state religion, and remains so this very day. And so they began to meet in secret.

As I said, I went to Scrooby last year. I went as sort of a religious and historical pilgrimage. These separatists from Scrooby eventually become the people who land at Plymouth Rock. So I went to St. Wilifred’s Church, from which this group dissented and formed their own faith community because they are direct ancestors of ours theologically. It was a very moving experience for me.

They broke free from the state religion because they felt there was more to their beliefs than what the established church offered them. And they went to Holland and stayed for a generation, and then moved to America in 1620.

They were engaged in what we call “liberal theology.” I bet you never thought you’d hear the Pilgrims being called liberal! James Luther Adams, Unitarian Universalist theologian, defines liberal theology as one that is open to critique and criticism at all times. The people in Scrooby did just that, and found the Christianity being practiced around them wanting, so they branched off and created a version that spoke to their souls. Literally.

And then they founded their own version of The City on The Hill, in Plymouth, MA, and became orthodox. They stopped examining their theological assumptions and traditions, and insisted that they had the right way to do things. A little later on, others would challenge their system, as they had challenged the Church of England, and the pattern continues to this very day.

So here we have this pattern. People engage with a system. They think about it, they question it and if they think they have a better answer, they pursue it.

I’m suggesting that when people engage with a system they are operating in, they do that because they have a sense of abundance around them. They feel like there is something more out there. And when they act on this hunch, they become reformers, and often they set themselves up in opposition to the orthodoxy, or those who wish to keep the traditions they’re used to.

We, we being Unitarian Universalists, come from a long line of reformers. Both as a People of Faith, and people. You can ask my Mom, I’ve been challenging orthodoxy since I first learned to talk. This self-reflective examination of our place in the world and the way we engage with that which is most sacred and holy to us is a small microcosm of the theological promise of our country.

In our country now we have what’ve been called “the culture wars” going on. I don’t really like that phrase, but it’s convenient. In this clash, we have the reformers on one hand and the traditionalists on the other.

The reformers, like myself, like to think that we are operating from a position of abundance. Of course all people should have access to health care, marriage rights and a whole host of other things, because we should all be equal.

Now, it would be easy, and frankly both intellectually and spiritually lazy to say that the traditionalists are just people unwilling to share the abundance that they already possess. But we’re not going to do that.

Throughout American history we can see that the people in the traditionalist camp don’t like change. They have a view of what their world should be and they want it to stay that way.

Why is this?

I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, but I have a theory.

They live in scarcity, not generosity.

Traditionalists want to hold on to what they have because they don’t think there’s enough to go around. They are not mean, or evil. They are worried. It is true, though, that sometimes in their worry, traditionalists have done some pretty awful things.

In the 17th Century some of them banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston for her religious views. In the 18th Century some of them imported millions of human beings in a system of slavery. In the 19th Century they claimed states’ rights to uphold human slavery, fought a war over it and denied our Universalist Ancestors the right to defend themselves in court, because we didn’t believe in Hell, and therefore could not be depended on to tell the truth in court. In the 20th Century there was racial violence, codified homophobia and the cold war. In the 21st Century, there is a fight over gay marriage and immigration.

The Reformers, though have not been innocent, so don’t feel too pleased with yourself. Over and over we push the envelope, disturbing the peace with our ideas about fairness and equality. The Traditionalists didn’t fight a war against themselves. We’ve been plenty agitating.

What we Reformers need to do in our quest for equality for all is to remember that the Traditionalists are also part of the equation.

In our heady feeling of generosity, we often forget to be generous with those whose system we are challenging.

Through our spirit of abundance, we must learn to be generous with those Traditionalists. Because honestly, until people in the Traditionalist camps can come to see the Abundance that we see, they will never stray from their camp, clutching onto the few things they think they have, all the while eyeing us suspiciously.

In Abundance and Spiritual Generosity, it is our charge to be gentle with the people who are not yet with us in spirit. To push for change, true enough, but to do it first and foremost with love in our hearts for ALL of humanity, not just those to whom we share a natural, mutual bond.

Afterall, we know, in our heart of hearts, when we are being our best selves, and living the very theology of abundance…we know that there is enough for everyone.

There is enough food

There is enough water

There is enough clothing

There is enough housing

There is enough love to go around so that each and every person feels surrounded by it.

And when the day comes that all people understand this as we do, there will be no more denial of the rights of people, there will be no more denial of the basic humanity of people, no more exploitation of the Earth and her resources.

But that day will only come if we lead the way in love.

Pentecost: A Common Language

2010-05-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

Story for All Ages:

The Parable of the Herbs
(adapted from the Lotus Sutra.)

The Buddha acknowledged that his student did in fact understand importance of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Sutra. When the student said he was concerned that all beings be able to hear the Sutra, the Buddha told him this parable.

Full knowledge of the truth is very important. Imagine for a moment, a vast forest. In the forest there is every kind of plant, from the largest flowers, to the oldest trees to the youngest sprouts.

Can you see all the plants in their variations, almost too many different types to name or count?

The Buddha continued:

These plants live together, side by side. Each of them seeking the same nutrients from the Earth, the same sunlight to feed them.

When the rain comes, clouds come from the West and cover the sky! And what happens when dark clouds come over the sky? That’s right… it rains.

And when the rain comes down from the cloud, each plant gets the water it needs to live, to thrive.

Each plant in the forest gathers water in it’s own way. Leaves are often shaped to trap water, and direct water to the plants’ roots. And there as many different leaf shapes as there are plants!

But even with all the diversity of plant leaves and plants, each plant gets the water it needs to live. And it uses the water to help it to reach it’s full potential of plantness. The sunflower becomes the sunfloweriest it can. So does the Birch tree. It becomes the most Birch tree-ish it can; so to do the fern, the shrub, the mushroom…. All of them use the same water, as best it suits them, to reach their potential.

They have the water in common. Whether they produce strawberries or thorns, the water unites them.

In the same way, no matter how a person worships, or practices their religion, even if they practice no religion, each person is nurtured by a common source.

Buddha called it The Wonderful Dharma, or Law, of the Flowering Plant. Other people call this source God. Some call this source Allah, The Great Goddess, and many other names.

Like the plants, some of us will use one idea to gather our nourishment, others will use a different method.

What is important though, more than the name used, is that you use the source to help you to become the best person you can be.

Pentecost: A Common Language

We are living in The Information Age. We have 24-hour news channels, Internet, and talk shows that come to our radios, televisions and NPR that uploads shows directly to my iPod.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

It seems like no matter where we go, we can’t get away from the constant barrage of information, opinion and people trying to influence the way we think.

And no, I’m not blind to the irony that here I am on Sunday morning, talking.

What if we took time for listening? Really, deep, listening?

This morning’s readings told us the story of the Tower of Babel and the time of the Pentecost. Are we in our modern version of Babel? Or of Pentecost?

Are we instead, in a modern blend of the two?

Through the internet I can read papers from many lands, as long as I speak the language. And really even that’s changing. Google is introducing a new free service that will translate any language for you. It’s actually pretty amazing. Through skype and the internet I can speak with friends from around the globe. That doesn’t make Poalo’s English any better, and my Italian is so poor as to not really count as a language. I speak more like a parrot than a person.

But still the tool exists. And frankly, if 20 years ago, you had told me this technology would exist and be so common that I would have it in my own house, I would’ve thought you were nuts. Honestly, I expected flying cars, long before I expected personal, laptops with which I can literally talk to the world.

Is the Internet a tale about Babel or Pentecost?

There are many ways to consider and think about the stories of Babel and Pentecost. Pride and humility. Angry God and Loving God. Punishment and Grace are among them.

I’d like to suggest that instead of a dichotomy, we consider theses two paired stories as a continuum, in which our behavior and engagement in the world slides from one side to the other, seeking, hopefully, a balance in the middle.

Earlier I listed just some of the barrage of information and data heading our way on a daily basis. There is now so much information that we cannot possibly take it all in. Time was, not even so far back as a whole century, the town had one or two newspapers, and that was for your data input. Well, that and the local pub, or back fence, depending on your gender.

We used to have time to digest news.

The Reverend Alice Blair Wesley gave a series of lectures in 2000, on the history of religious covenant in the United States. In 1637 there were some families who founded the town of Dedham, Massachusetts. She gave the first lecture there. The men of Dedham decided that they needed to form a commonwealth and consider the founding of a church. They meet weekly, in someone’s home. Before the end of the weekly meeting the topic for next week’s meeting would be decided upon so that each speaker, man or woman, would be able to present quote “a considered opinion” on the question.

When is the last time you had a week to consider a question?

With all this data and information flying passed us seemingly every moment of the day, in someways, it can feel like we’re living in Babel. Even if the language is all my native tongue, there is so much of it as to render it confusing and meaningless.
Modern communication is both Babel and Pentecost. Confusion and salvation.

Through our modern technology, we can have friends from around the world. I have friends who’ve moved to Belgium, Germany and far-flung parts of this, our own country. I have friends that I made when I was the summer minister in a church outside of Manchester England. I have friends who speak many different languages than I do.

There are people we interact with on a regular basis for whom English is a second language.

When is the last time you sat with someone and just talked? When is the last time you sat with someone, for an hour, and didn’t pull out your laptop, cell phone or other communication device? When is the last time you sat with a friend, new or old, for an afternoon and didn’t have to care about what time it was?

We have made our own Babel.

And since we’ve proven we can do that, perhaps we can help bring our own Pentecost into being. We can plant the garden in which a Pentecost can grow. We can make space in our lives for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Love, to come to us and to help us communicate passed all the noise, to communicate from one heart to another.

We can take time to engage the shop clerk in 90 seconds of actual engagement. Instead of the precursory “How ya doin’?” What if you looked in their eyes and asked them “How are you today?” and then waited for an answer?

What if you took the time to ask each person you met three questions about themselves, and not about your business transaction?

In some ways I think of the gift of the Pentecost as a break from the babble of multiple languages, not just as a tool to teach what the Lord said, but also to listen. Most people approach the story of the Pentecost from the point of view of the people in the room. They were able to speak, through some miracle, so that each person outside the room could hear the message in their own tongue.

But what if we considered the miracle from the point of view of the listeners? What if the real lesson here isn’t about speaking, but listening?

Like the Parable of the Herbs where the water reached each herb, as the herb was, and helped the herb to reach it’s full potential as the herb it was meant to be, so too is the ability not just to hear the myriad of sounds that go by us every moment, but to understand and discern what’s being communicated.

Imagine the shock and amazement you might feel if suddenly, instead of hearing a thousand different sounds, and dealing with a hundred distracting thoughts, you were able to hear, really hear and understand your neighbor; your beloved.
Your “enemy.”

From the Christian Century in an article on the Pentecost: “What would it look like if in our worship, our speaking truth to power, we invited the Holy Spirit among us to bring the miracle of understanding? What would happen if amid our ongoing speaking in our native tongues and world-views and truths, we could at least marvel at understanding what the other was saying, whether or not we could shout amen? What if I could at least grasp that had I been shaped by another’s life, and that I might think as another does, even though my life shaped me to think that person is dead wrong?”

Susan Werner wrote, in a song called “Forgiveness” these lyrics.

How do you love those who never will love you
Who are happy to shove you out in front of the train
How do you not hate those who would leave you lie bleeding
While they hold their prayer meeting

How do you love those who never will love you
Who are so frightened of you they are calling for war
How do you not hate those who have loaded their Bibles
And armed their disciples, ‘cuz I don't know anymore

And I can't find forgiveness for them anywhere in this
And with God as my witness I really have tried
How do you love those who never will love you
I think only God knows and he is not taking sides
I hope one day he shows us how we can love those
Who never will love us but who still we must love

What Ms. Werner is looking for is understanding. She is acting as the hearer, asking how we can love those with whom we don’t agree. How can she practice the love she believes God wants her to, when the people she’s supposed to love are actively engaged in ways that not only confuse her, but actually leave her feeling frightened and threatened.

The answer may be less pleasant than we’d like.

We have to put ourselves out in the world, and hold our arms wide and our ears open. We have to take on the responsibility of being the ones who offer the olive branch of peace first. If we want peace and understanding, we must be prepared to offer it to the world.

In the story from Acts, the Holy Spirit came down from heaven, and allowed the people to hear each other.

If we understand the message of Pentecost, not as a story about the speakers, but the hearers, the focus of the story shifts from that of the message, to a story about understanding. Through this understanding the people can come together. And through coming together, they can effect change.

If we want to create a Heaven on Earth, we must strive to learn to hear and understand one another.

If we want to help the homeless on the street, the women struggling with reproductive choices, the new immigrant who left his entire family of origin so that his children might have a better life, we have to learn to hear. And then we need to learn to speak, speak the language of those we are called to help.

Theodore Parker said “Ours is not a Sunday Morning religion, but a religion for all seven days.” Go into the world and practice spreading your arms open wide to the world, exposing your heart. Try to make a habit of asking each person three questions. Practice listening to the people around you. If the world is to be made a better place, then we are the ones who must start the work.

Many blessings for your journey.

What You Want, What You Need.

2010-02-02T04:56:00.000-08:00

You can't always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need. – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

This week I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. Just yesterday in class I sang a Bob Dylan song, a capella. Today I’m quoting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Who knows what tomorrow might bring.

And that’s what I want to talk about this evening. Not knowing what tomorrow brings.

Our world is sort of in bad shape right now. Well, depending on where you are, our world is in really bad shape. The people of Haiti are on our minds frequently these days, and as well they should be. They are in real trouble there. And there are the folks in New Orleans, who still haven’t had ample chance to recover from their disaster. There are many people who are suffering because of humanity’s inability to interface well with Nature. Places where Nature has just not conformed to our will. And where we have failed to subdue Nature, sometimes we suffer.

You can’t always get what you want.

And if you try sometime you find, you get what you need.

Notice the lyric does not say “And if you try some time, you find, you get what you want.” Nope, you get what you need.

Who among us can say that they, at all times, know what they need?

I am not prepared to stand here and count myself among them. Often times I’m not even sure what I want.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess to you that I’ve never heard the Rolling Stones version of that song I quoted earlier. I know only the version from the television show, Glee. Also, I’ve never heard Bob Dylan sing “I Believe in You,” the song I used in class just yesterday. I know only Sinead O’Connor’s version. I’ve never had a lot of exposure to either the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan, just enough to know that it isn’t really the sort of music I enjoy, and yet here I am this week, betraying my Motown roots. I’m sure Diana Ross is furious. And yet, both songs express something that I deeply needed this week. Not what I wanted, but what I needed.

As part of my own spiritual journey and practice, I have been working very diligently at remaining open to Possibility. And by that I mean the capital P possibility. I’ve been working very hard to embrace the things that Life, also with a capital letter, has to offer. Largely I blame my dear friend and colleague Pam Rumancik for this, as she spent our first two years in seminary saying to me “It’ll be what it needs to be, Joe.” At first I used to grumble under my breath, because I needed to know what it needed to be. I didn’t need to wait for it, whatever it was, to be. I had a deep seeded need to help it become whatever it was going to become.

Eventually, like water over a stone, Pam wore me down and I began to embrace the wisdom of what she offered me. It was hard at first, and like all new skills, I was very clumsy at first, and often impatient for results.

What I’ve cultivated now, instead of my impatience, is an awareness to the Universe around me. From Luang Por Sumedho

Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings,
of attitudes, of moods, or material change,
and emotional change:

Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible.

It’s not something that changes.

It’s a refuge you can trust in.

This refuge is not something you can create.

It is not a creation. It’s not an ideal.

It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or nor noticed.

When you’re mindful,
you’re beginning to notice,
it’s like this.

If you concentrate only on what you think you want, you may be missing what it is that you really need.

We live in a world where our desires are constantly manipulated by corporations whose very existence depends on our deciding that we need or deserve the product they’re selling. And often, and perhaps not surprisingly, things are not really what they seem.

We’ve all seen a cute little car commercial with a zippy little car, or a grand dame of luxury, right? They’re not really selling you that car. They’re tying to sell you happiness.

Just like when you were a kid, they tried to sell you happiness in the form of a slinky that walked down stairs, alone or in pairs.

The slinky and the car are really only the means by which you get the opportunity to gain or achieve this happiness.

Except of course, that’s a lie.

Happiness can’t be bought, and since it can’t be bought, they can’t charge you interest on it, or raise market share. So they fool us into thinking that we want that Bose stereo system with the iPod dock for our study. Because music brings joy, joy brings happiness. See how easy the formula is?

Except of course, happiness can’t be bought.

The accessories to happiness, however might be a different matter.

But as nice as the Bose system might sound, and look, I don’t need it. I just want it.

So, what does one need? That of course, is a highly individualized answer. What does one really need? Can you search within yourself and identify that which you really need, and not just desire?

Those people in Haiti? They need shelter, they need food.

None of us needs an iPod system. Though, obviously, some of us want one very much.

I’m not advocating a life with a stark, monastic quality without comforts. What I’m suggesting is a little more attention be paid to what we need, and not what we want.

And what we need is often a lot less about material items than we’re pressed into buying.

Spend some time this week thinking about what you absolutely need. Listen for the answer that comes from within. Honestly, sit with yourself, and with integrity, ask yourself if this is what you need. If you don’t spend time with yourself examining your values, you may never know the difference between what you need and what you want.

There is no guarantee that you’ll get what you need, according to Mick and Keith, but sometimes you just might.

And the rest of the time, you’ll have to figure out how to make do.

Now making do isn’t always fun. I’m not blind to that. It means stretching what you have, doing as my parents used to say “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” But there is something to be gained in this experience of not having everything that you need. If you take to heart what my friend Pam says “It’ll be what it needs to be,” you just might find that you what you thought you needed, you didn’t.

And that, friends, is a form of spiritual growth.

The Reverend Kate Braestrup, Chaplain for the State of Maine's Warden Service is a minister who came to her own ministry largely through grieving her late husband who was a State Trooper and seminarian. She tells this beginning of a story in her memoir;

Around three in the afternoon, as my kids are trooping into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks in the mudroom, describing their school days, the telephone rings.

"Your Holiness!" Lieutenant Trisdale roars: "We've got a situation up here by Masquinogy Pond we could use your help with.

What Kate wanted to be was a minister's wife. She wanted her husband to finish seminary, and to continue her own writing career.

This, of course, isn't what happened. And while searching for what she needed to grieve her husband, Kate discovered her own call to ministry.

You may think that you need one thing, and maybe you’re wrong. Instead of a new romance, you may need to deepen your friendship with someone close to you already. Instead of needing a night on the town, perhaps you need an evening in, a pot luck with friends.

Open yourself up to the possibilities the Universe can offer you. Spend some time with your soul and ask questions. Make room for the Grace of the Spirit of Life. This’ll take some work, of course, and sometimes when you’re scrabbling around to make sense of your life you might not feel like investing your energy in this.

But this is important spiritual work, friends, but your life will be the richer for it.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you’ll find, you get what you need.

Blessings for your journey.

Amen.

Be Gentle with Heroes

2010-01-01T20:49:00.000-08:00

A hero, according to Daniel Webster, is defined as:

1 a : a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability b : an illustrious warrior c : a person admired for his or her achievements and noble qualities d : one that shows great courage.

Hero is a word that gets used a lot. Certainly there are many who show great courage, and there are many people who could be admired for their achievements and noble qualities, but so few of us are endowed with great strength and abilities due to our grandparents who live on Mount Olympus.

If we tried, collectively we could come up with a long list of both archetypical and personal heroes.

Recently President Barack Obama made a trip to China. It was all over the news. And President Obama’s trip is what got me thinking about this idea of being a hero.

It must be very hard work to be a hero.

Today is the 314^th day of the presidency of Barack Obama. Think back, all the way back, to January 20^th, Inauguration Day. Where were you? I know where I was. I was at school. The entire Meadville Lombard community came together and watched the Inauguration on a big screen. There was a lot of weeping for joy, and we were probably not alone in that.

But it has been an embattled 314 days, hasn’t it?

Just think back over the summer and all of the town meetings held about Health Care reform. Part of me was very happy that so many people turned out for discussions about the political process, and seemed to be interested in the democratic process (our 5^th Principle!), but I was very disheartened by the way people chose to express themselves. There was an utter lack of not only respect, but what I would call common decency in the way people chose to express themselves.

Please understand that I am not making a political statement here, nor am I endorsing the policies of any one party over those of another. This is not about politics. This is about the difficult job of being a hero.

Before the President went to China, he did not have a meeting with the Dali Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. And people were plenty upset about that, too. But really, the President was in a difficult situation.

He was about to go to meet with President Hu Jintao. President Hu is the leader of China, one of our biggest trading partners, growing industrial power, and potentially the world’s next super power.

President Obama knows about the Dali Lama, and he knows about the human rights abuses. But he also knows that we are a trade deficit, that we have our own human rights abuses to deal with.

And yet here Obama was, caught between our country’s need for trade for economic growth, and our citizen’s needs to recognize a difficult situation regarding Tibet and the Dali Lama.

Before this turns into an apology and apologetic of Obama’s 314 days in office, let me point out to you why I used his story as an illustration.

When there are two seemingly diametrically opposed sets of needs, it’s hard to create a win-win situation.

A very close friend and mentor of mine and I were talking about Obama’s presidency recently. She is a life long liberal, and introduced me to the term “red diaper baby,” meaning that her parents were extreme leftists from her childhood. She’s worked for decades in the political system of her home city. She told me “When Obama was first elected, I felt like I was walking with him. I celebrated, I cried, I was elated. But as this year has gone on, and decisions have been made, or delayed by political process, I feel like we’re no longer walking side by side. Sometimes I bump into him, or he bumps in to me, or he walks so far ahead that I can’t see him around the corner.”

This is how our heroes get tarnished. We begin to see that they are human beings. We bump into their reality.

Sure, it’s easy to hero worship superheroes or fictional heroes, or human heroes who are no longer alive, who’s short-comings have been erased by time. One can easily admire the poetry of Walt Whitman for example, and think about his genius. And that’s much easier when you don’t have to watch him get food caught in his moustache as he eats. Abraham Lincoln’s words are to this day inspiring and carry great weight, but when delivered with a high reedy voice, which he is reported to have had, some of their gravitas might be lost.

I’m here suggesting that we be gentler with our heroes.

Unlike Wonder Woman, the personal heroes I have in my life are just people. They have bad hair days, and sometimes they don’t feel like being heroic. Worse yet, sometimes they make mistakes of judgment.

When this happens, you can either abandon them as your hero, you can shun them, or you can reach out to them. One of my classmates at Meadville Lombard Theological School is a Buddhist minister in Rissho Kosei-Kai. I thank the Universe almost daily for bringing him into my life. I have learned so much from him.

One lesson I have learned from him is that we are all Bodhisattvas. A Bodhisattva is a teacher.

When your hero, or teacher, or Bodhisattva, stumbles and shows their human frailty, you can become the bodhisattva of the moment, and teach the importance of compassion by showing compassion.

You can step up to the plate, so to speak, and let your highest self be gentle with your hero. This will be good for both you and your hero. Your hero will be shown love and caring. Living heroically in this world takes a lot of energy and effort, it is good to offer some in return to those living heroically. It will be good for you, because you will begin to realize your own bodhisattva nature, the hero within you.

We’ve just entered the 6 week-long sprint in America called “the holidays.” What’s that line from that Christmas Carol “There’ll be much mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing on and on and on….” That’s a lot of pressure.

There are presents to buy, which is stressful. At my house we’re having a cookie party, where everyone is supposed to be bringing a batch of home-made cookies. There are parties to attend, and a lot of red and green to wear, and on top of all that there is the emotional baggage of Christmases long, long ago. Hap-happiest season of all? Maybe.

I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment. Place your feet on the ground and relax. When you hear the sound of a bell, you may re-open your eyes.

Call to mind a favorite holiday moment from the past.

Who is there with you?

Are there any particular smells, like cookies or pine?

What makes this moment special for you?

(ring bell twice.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the moment you picked was not the moment you were driving around the mall parking lot, searching for a spot.

We’re all under a lot of pressure for the next six weeks, to make as many amazing, life-long memories as we can. Probably we’re under pressure to make more of those memories than are humanly possible.

Cookies to make

Presents to buy

Homes to decorate

People to please

Parties to attend

And all that on top of our already busy schedules.

One would have to be a superhero to do it all, and do it flawlessly.

And you’re only a regular hero.

So be gentle with yourself. Take care of yourself during this busy time. Take time for a cup of tea, or coffee. Have a moment where you just stop and look around your home and allow the gratitude, for the imperfections and good things in your life, allow that gratitude to flow over you.

Try this at least once a week.

Try this year-round.

Be kind to yourself, especially in times of stress. It’s often hard to remember that, but try.

Because you are a hero, to someone, be gentle with yourself.

Many blessings on your journey.

Re-Creation

2009-08-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

A Story for All Ages

A Cherokee Legend

Here is the story; it is called "Grandfather Tells" which is also known as "The Wolves Within"
An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, "Let me tell you a story.

I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.
But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times." He continued, "It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.

Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."
(http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TwoWolves-Cherokee.html)

Few of us in this church this morning believe unconditionally what the Bible says about the beginnings of the world. With varying degrees of generosity, we might speak about the Creation story of Genesis, and its allegorical meaning. With less charity, we might even congratulate ourselves, because we “know better” than to read the Bible as literal truth.

One of the things Unitarian Universalists pride themselves on is our ability to go beyond mere tolerance to celebration and integration of people unlike ourselves. Yet I have observed that when it comes to being generous about the churches we’ve left, we tend to be edgier and less gentle.

Many, but not all, of us are known by some as “come-inners;” meaning that we come-in from somewhere else. We came from that other place because we didn’t agree on something there. So not only do we have the emotional baggage of what we didn’t believe in, sometimes the very act of leaving our faith of origin, leaves it’s own wounds.

There are also the people here who grew up at Unitarians or Universalists or Unitarian Universalists. They may have their own confusion about the creation story of the Hebrew Bible.

Whatever our past, individual relationships with the Hebrew Bible and its stories about the origin of the world; these tales are a formidable force in our culture. We can’t ignore them, because to do so would be short-sighted. So, how do we do this?

We begin at the beginning.

What if we re-imagined Creation? The Biblical Creation, I mean. What might it mean if we took the creation story that we all think we know, and really took a good look at it? How much do you know about the Creation story in Genesis?
Did you know there is actually more than one story there? There is Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.” In this story, God creates everything in six days,and rests on the seventh, which is why the Jewish people observe the Sabbath. Even though this is currently the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, there is much scholarship that suggests it is not the first creation story, but a second, later story, put in front of the original creation story.

Current Biblical scholarship suggests that the Hebrew Bible bears the footprint of four major schools of editorship . They are called J, E, D and P. J is for Yahwist, J being the first letter in the German spelling of YHWH, as German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen was the man who brought this idea fully to light. E is for “Eloist.” E’s distinction is based partly on the use of the word Elohim as a reference to God, and not Yaweh. D comes mostly into play in Deuteronomy, and was probably active during the 7th century BCE or Before the Common Era, a term used instead of BC-Before Christ. P is the Priestly editorship, which reflects the concerns of the priestly class, most active while Israel was in exile in Babylon, or shortly thereafter in about the 6th or 5th century “BCE”.

This morning we are interested in the Yahwist and Priestly editorship of the not one, but two separate creation stories in Genesis. If you’ll open up your Bibles to…… I’m kidding. I bet you’d thought you’d never hear that phrase in a Unitarian Universalist church!

The second story in Genesis starts in chapter 2, verse 4. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

It could be very easy to now get lost in a whirlwind of discussions about language, translations, ancient documents that seem to demonstrate the age and relative dates of these Biblical texts, but we’re not going to do that today. What’s important for us is that there are two distinct stories, and that they are written by two different groups of ancient Hebrews.

Why is that important to us? Because it affords us the opportunity to ask the following questions: What did they think they were doing? What motivated them? What was their goal in adding a second, and often contradictory story, and placing it in a position that creates, because of its place in the written text, primacy over an older story?

And, what can all this mean for us?

Now, I don’t plan to stand up here and deliver a lecture on Biblical scholarship. It’s a topic I never thought I’d find very intriguing, but in truth, it has captured some of my interest. I will, however, take the chance on suggesting it as a possible topic of thought for you. The Bible is not, more and more this is the accepted academic point of view, and I mean no offense to those who disagree, the Bible is not written by one hand. It does not have one author or even one editor. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were assembled by human beings. Inspired by God or no, humans put these books together.

And even humans inspired by God have an agenda. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their agenda is nefarious; and in fact, I’d like to say that my own belief in the genuine goodness of humanity allows me to say that I think each person who worked on the Bible from the time of it’s original assemblage probably did so with the best of intentions.

So these Priestly folk who placed their account of Creation in front of the Yahwist account… what were they thinking? Simply stated, I’m suggesting that they thought they were doing a good thing. Now I can’t guess, as a 21st century person, their exact motivations. Given my own theological standpoint that people are basically good, I’m going to say that I believe that the Priestly folk placed their story in front of the older story because to them, they understood it as more accurate, or a more correct accounting.

And this adding material to a sacred text is serious business. This is about God. This is not about adding to a state’s constitution to take away the rights of American citizens. Think how upset some of us got when the citizens of California voted to strip gay and lesbian people of their right to marriage. And that’s just a law, a law can be overturned. And, hopefully, it will be.

Imagine for a minute what the responsibility would feel like to change the covenant of your people with your God.

Well, naturally, this is just the sort of thing that we do, isn’t it? We re-imagine our relationship with that which is Holy. It is part of our own spiritual practice. All of us accept and reject bits and pieces of the belief systems of others. What if we were really bold and re-imagined Creation?

Now, I’m not talking about the Big Bang, or I’ve also heard it referenced as “The Big Birth.” And I’m not talking about Quantum Physics either. The whole idea that all matter is mostly empty space is interesting, but not the point this morning.

We’re here. We had an origin. What is the tale we’ll tell about our beginnings? What will our tale mean to us and to our children?

Gordon Kaufman, in his book In the Beginning…Creativity, writes “I had come to the conclusion that all theological ideas—including the idea of God—could best be understood as products of the human imagination, when employed by men and women seeking to orient themselves in life.”

So, let us be about the business of orienting.

In her book Face of the Deep, a Theology of Becoming, Catherine Keller among other things, highlights a very question of creation. Is it creatio ex nihilo or is it ex nihlio nihil fit? Is the reality of the story of the beginning creation out of nothing or from nothing comes nothing? Ms. Keller writes that in order to truly examine much of the way we think about the world we have to dislodge the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. We are so entrenched is this doctrine, that one would be hard pressed to think about the beginning of everything and not have this doctrine pop up in our heads. Think about the beginning. And by this I mean THE BEGINNING, with a capital T and a capital B. What was there before the beginning? And if something was there, what was it? And if something was there, then have we really identified THE BEGINNING? Unfortunately, I don’t think I know that answer.

Another image that Keller invokes in her book is that of a 100 year old translation from Gunkel that God engaged in this act of creation by “vibrating over the face of the waters.” She goes further to say that this vibrating creates a butterfly effect.

I find the image of God vibrating over the deep of the unknown waters to be especially powerful, and though I’ve spent a couple of months thinking about it, I can’t really say why. Perhaps it’s because vibration indicates energy, and that energy is being employed to create WITH something other than God. Ex hihlio nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing. There has to be something there, right? So where did God come from? Where did the deep waters that God vibrated over, come from?

These are not answers we can ever really know. None of us can go back in a time machine to the moment of the Big Birth with a video-cam and record it for the rest of us.

But we can still tell a tale of beginnings, and in that tale, we can give primacy to those things we think are important.

A surprising, well to me it was surprising, number of different Hebrew verbs are used in the Hebraic Bible to reference creation, with God as subject: bara; to create, pa’al; make, yasar, “form”, anahl “build” yalad: to bring forth. I bring this up not as a way to criticize the ancient Hebrews for their lack of consistency, but to praise their poetic sensibilities.

How do we begin our tale? What a difficult task it would be to write the story of the beginning of everything!

As Unitarian Universalists it seems unlikely that we might ever agree on a written single story that tells the origin of the universe, but we might agree on many themes. What are some of our shared values today? They should be in any tale that we tell about the origins of our common experience.

Of our seven principles, the first and seventh principles seem to me to be the ones we should really look at in any discussion about ultimacy. Our first principle declares that we Affirm and Promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Our seventh principle adds that we are all part of an interdependent web of existence. These are core values to us.

Every person has worth, and we are connected to all that is around us.

So as we tell this tale of the origin of everything, keeping in mind that there are those who don’t believe in a driving force behind creation, but also feeling a certain pull toward story telling, let’s re-caste the creation story in Genesis.

In the beginning of our tale, one possible of many, there was community. Well, actually it was more of a proto-community. The gathering of people became a community after an awakening.

One morning, a young woman died in childbirth, leaving behind a baby. The eldest woman in the group saw the baby and was moved by the new, small and helpless animal. She encouraged a young woman who was nursing her own child, to also feed the orphaned baby. This child had no name, it’s mother likewise died nameless. The old woman had no name, it was a time before names were needed, because no one thought of themselves as belonging to anything. We give our young names to show that they have a place.

Until this old woman named the helpless child, no one ever needed a name.
She named the child Adam. And she named the woman who fed Adam, who in turn named the old woman, Eve, because she was the mother of a new way of life. A life in which people belonged. They formed a community.

Now this wasn’t a perfect community. It’s not that kind of a tale. It took the community a couple of thousand years to figure things out like farming, and building houses. Even after thousands of years of doing both, they still hadn’t perfected either process, and turned from eating what they planted to producing surplus to sell. From building the houses they needed to survive the elements, to attempting to transform the natural world into a world that was about comfort and status. They developed agri-business and real-estate booms and busts.

The community, as you can well imagine, has made a few mistakes along the way. We’ve forgotten that we’re all connected. That the person who died last week in the Gaza strip was killed by a cousin, no matter how distant.

We’ve forgotten that we are related to all things, if you go back far enough.

In his book Zooagraphies, The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, Matthew Calarco speaks about not the personality of animals, but their animalities. My own Mom violates this very rule all the time by remarking that her dog, Sassy, is a people person. Sassy is a dog, she doesn’t have a personality. She, if anything, has a doginality. The very concept of us having a personality goes against what Eve and Adam knew. They had animalities; an animal nature that connected them with the rest of nature. Calarco’s argument is more about the valuing of the non-human….. our non-human cousins, than about devaluing humans. Just like the two people involved in the Gaza tragedy I just spoke about, so we are cousins, however distant, to the animals in the field, in the jungle and in the slaughterhouse.

Our Creation story isn’t over.

Part of being a practicing Unitarian Universalist is engaging in liberal theology, or the re-examination of your belief system. We are not the only church practicing liberal theology, nor does liberal theology guarantee a politically liberal identity.

As we continue to think about our place in relation to that which is sacred, part of that consideration must be about our place in the physical realm as well. Our own James Luther Adams once wrote “The unexamined faith is not worth having.” I invite you today to think about your own place in creation and the story that we’re weaving everyday as we live.

Earlier, during the story time for all ages, before the kids went t to their classes, I told the story of the two wolves that are inside each of us. Which wolf are you feeding? And how are you defining those wolves?

Adulthood is complicated. Given an absolutely limitless income, many of us would give money to charities we believe in, we would drive that hybrid we want to, we’d have energy efficient houses. We would be all that we could be.

But this is not our reality. Instead, we cut corners on our better selves. We choose to balance our check book, and make that rent or mortgage payment, and we keep driving that car whose gas mileage is not what we’d like.

We feed and clothe our children rather than build a new home that’s LEED certified.

And for some of us, it means not eating organically, locally grown food, because we frankly just can’t afford it.

Part of what was so compelling to me when I first read the tale of the Grandfather, Grandson and the two wolves was the liberal theology aspect of it.

Dr. Mike Hogue, a professor of mine, and I had a talk about just what IS theology anyway? Mike is a recent Templeton award winner, which is given for excellence in theological development. When I asked Mike for a portable answer to the question What Is Theology, he told me “Theology is the way in which we engage with what we call the divine.” Action, actual verb-creation is the way that Mike Hogue sees theology. Doing is theology.

When deciding which wolf to feed, you are engaging in theology. What does your theology call you to do? Going back for a moment to Keller’s idea of God vibrating above the primordial waters, it is clear that we are in fact the co-creators of existence. God, by this I mean whatever force there is in this universe, not necessary the white bearded God of the middle ages, is still creating. We co-create right along side.

And we’ve made some serious errors. Look at agri-business, factory farming, nuclear bombs, the exploitation of workers, twenty-first century slavery, holocausts….the list can go on. But also, we’ve done some things very well.

Each day, maybe even at times each moment, we are choosing which wolf to feed. This gives each of us innumerable times each day to start afresh. We continually have the opportunity to be our best selves!

Do we go beyond good and evil and move toward the responsible and away from the short-sighted? In our daily lives can we do what Eve did? Can we free ourselves from our past systems of behavior, governance and limitations by an act of compassion?

I say we can.

After all, Creation, like revelation, is a never closing book.

A Million Things to Say

2009-08-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

Have you ever found yourself with about a million things to say and about 15 minutes to say them in? I can now tell you from first hand experience what that feels like.

Today I am delivering my final address to you, this lovely congregation at the top of a hill. Behind us lay six weeks of laughter and growth. For while I cannot speak for the lot of you, I can tell you that I have grown in ministry. And for that I thank you from the deepest, most sacred place in my heart.

On the first Sunday that I stood before you, I spoke about Journeys; traveling far from home, being nervous about being here and how wondrous it all was. The next Sunday was Father’s Day and I shared with you the story of my friendship with Wallace Rusterholtz, and the importance of nurturing the world around us. On Sunday number three I wrote about doubt and it’s role in faith development. Next came Flower Sunday where the youth of our congregation presented the theme “Diversity in flowers and people,” which I thought was a brilliant theme.

And now we’ve come to this, the final address.

You might notice that I’m standing up here in the high pulpit. Something I never thought I would never do, I assure you, even though it was requested and joked about. I’m a little nervous about heights, you see…. but more importantly, when I practiced preaching from up here in my first week, it felt too distant from the pews.
Since my arrival six short weeks ago I have been asking you gently, or at least I hope gently, to look at the way things are done here in Old Chapel. And you put up with my questions quite nicely. You moved to the front of the church, something that every person I spoke to, couldn’t believe. The kids and I brought in a computer, a projector and a screen and provided a mulit-media service for the congregation. This was also a radically new idea.

By standing here in this pulpit, I hope to demonstrate several things.

The first is that while the minister is the spiritual leader of a congregation, that is not the only job of a minister. Ministers and congregations must work together in concert to deepen the connectivity within the congregation, between the members who are already here; and also they work to show the world outside our walls, what an example of a deeply caring community can look like. On the sign out front, you have boldly placed a quote by Francis David “We need not all think alike to love alike.” And together you demonstrate this admirably.

A minister must also follow their congregation. We cannot charge ahead, sure that we alone know what’s best for the congregation, or without regard to the congregation’s concerns and place in the world.

We can however, agitate and try to massage the congregation into a position that we, with our academic training and preparation, might think is best.

No relationship, of course, is perfect.

And so, today, I’m up here because people in the congregation thought it would be good for my growth as a minister to preach from this position. I’m here because I thought the congregation was most likely right. Although I’m still a little nervous about being locked in up here.

Another reason that I chose to preach from here is out of my profound respect for this congregation and it’s history. It has been an honor to be here with you since 6 June of this year. I will never forget this experience.
The third reason I chose to come up here was to demonstrate my belief that we are all capable of evolving as beings until our very last breath. Earlier this afternoon I led a short worship service to begin Fun Day, it contained the Native American story of the Two Wolves. What’s important to me about that story is that each moment, we are given chances to choose to do the more correct thing. That even if we’ve made a string of mistakes and bad decisions, still, just around the corner is the chance to make a good decision.

Around every corner lies a chance to make a better life.

And also though, there is the lesson that even if you’ve made 1 million good decisions in a row, you can’t rest on your laurels. You must be ever aware of how your choices affect the people around you and the people you’ll never meet.

Obviously, mistakes will be made along the way, as no one is perfect, and it seems the more sophisticated our understanding of the world becomes, the less clear the line between right and wrong becomes.
This evolution of the individual also applies to evolution of organizations, and yes, congregations. I was speaking with a member of this congregation about change a few weeks ago, and she spoke about a resistance to change and a loss of comfort. I am aware of the comfort of some routines and rituals. I have my own. But what came out in our conversation was the idea that change is constant. Even if we dig our heels in and promise to fight the good fight to keep things the way they have been for as long as we can remember, or for as long as it’s been the way WE like it, change comes.

It comes in the form of the death of a beloved member of your church. It comes with a parliamentary vote in which few could’ve predicted the outcome. It comes in the form of a minster in training from a far-off, former colony.

What matters is not change itself, for we can not stop change, it is a force of the universe. And really, if we didn’t change, on some level, we’d still be in the stone age. What matters is how we engage change.
Anatoloe France tells us: All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Change can be very exciting for some, and for those who like change, we must remember that others will mourn, and if we are to be our best selves, we must do more than tolerate their mourning, we must make time and space for them. We must lovingly walk with those mourners of the old ways, even as inside, our hearts are leaping ahead.

I’ll be leaving behind a document for the congregation to read about my experiences and observations here in Old Chapel. I hope that when it’s widely read, those aching for change and those who aren’t, will walk together in the loving way that I have seen you doing since I arrived here.

The time for our walking together is almost complete.

As I look from here into the faces of the people I have come to have genuine affection for, I offer a silent prayer of gratitude to the Spirit of Life, the God of Love, un-nameble and wholly unknowable.

Our lives are not complete. Here are the words of John Dewey, American Unitarian and educator “Where everything is complete, there is no fulfillment.” Individually, it is my hope that each day you will carry the story of the little boy, his grandfather and the two wolves with you. That you remember from the tiniest child to the eldest sage, you have agency in your life. Your life can be and will be affected by the choices you make, from stealing a cookie to reaching out for help.

As a congregation it is my greatest hope that you will find the strength, courage and mutual affection, to boldly step into your future. A future where you show Dukinfield, Tameside and the world, the human miracle of a loving community. Our world needs your example. Blessed be.

Please join me in this, what will become our final prayer together.
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Journeys (A Sermon)

2009-06-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Saint Denis of Paris was said to have walked and preached two miles, all the while holding his head in his hand. Reflecting on this tale at seminary, an observer said “It’s really the first step that’s impressive.”

I took my first step toward Dukinfield nine days ago when my Mom and I drove to the airport in Detroit, Michigan, my plane ticket in my hand. I guess it could be argued that perhaps my first step toward Dukinfield was taken when I met the Reverend Doctor Ann Peart, Principal of the Unitarian College of Manchester, while she visited my seminary.

Or maybe my journey began when I entered seminary, or even further back than that. Perhaps my entire life has been in preparation for this very moment.

Earlier this week, I had the distinct pleasure of attending some events at the Unitarian College of Manchester. I’d like to share a moment of one of those events with you. There is a tradition when the Past and Present Students of the College toast and respond with each other. I was honored to be asked to take part in the event.

I was most impressed by the eloquence of the ministers gathered there. So much so that upon completion of the ceremony, I asked several members for a copy of their remarks.

Here are some of the words of the Reverend David Shaw, delivered under the topic of Civil and Religious Liberty:

“How easy it is to raise a glass to Civil and Religious Liberty in a comfortable setting such as this, and how uncomfortable it is to spare a thought to those of the past who struggled and suffered and to those of the present who are struggling today.

"There are people today—upon our doorstep—locked into a system of uncompromising religion that holds them fast in fear…

"It is a hard world in which Civil and Religious liberties are hard won. In a moment I shall ask you to rise with me and give a toast to Civil and Religious Freedom the world over, and as you do I ask you to bear in mind that we not only raise our glasses to aspirations embedded in history, but to so much of the very real world around us today.

"It is more—more much than raising of a glass—it is a thank you, for what has been achieved, a recognition of the much that still needs to be achieved, and a commitment that we will—however we can—in whatever way we can—however small—be part of striving for the achievements yet to be.”

Here the Reverend Shaw speaks of a journey, too. It is the journey of a people of faith. A journey, if we are truthful with ourselves, that is far from complete.

And it is a journey that includes others of us. In America there are close to a million Unitarian Universalists who are walking this journey, too.

And there is me, just one man who flew across the Atlantic Ocean because of your generous offer of a summer placement.

I stand here before you, a man on a journey.

A few words from the well-known author and philosopher, Unknown.

“A person’s journey through life is somewhat like a long walk through a forest on a dark night. Part of the way a companion carries a lantern, but then the path divides and one must go alone. If one carries his own lantern—an inner light of faith—he need not fear the darkness.”

My Unitarian Universalist faith, my faith in God, and my faith in the core of goodness in humanity is my lantern.

Possibly never before have I been more confused by my surroundings. People I meet tell me that they live in Bolton or Stalybridge or just up the road in some town. I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve just arrived this week. It took me until Friday to venture by train to Manchester!

Oh, and the words we use that have different meanings! I was taught in school that we all spoke English, but clearly hundreds of years of separation have taken their toll on our shared mother tongue!

On a bit more of a serious note, my time in the UK has brought an even deeper sympathy for the immigrants in our world. Until yesterday, I didn’t know how to ring the police. But sadly yesterday, I had to learn. While having breakfast in a café down the hill there, someone stole my rucksack. I lost a pair of books in it and nothing more, thankfully. But still I lost a book lent to me and the personal journal I’ve been keeping for this journey.

And yet I have never been more sure that I am on my correct journey. My lantern, though sometimes it feels a fragile light, is helping guide my way.

My theology professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School is Dr. Michael S. Hogue. Last year, he was named a Templeton scholar, an honor focusing on young, rising academic theologians. Mike holds a theology lab each week at the school for no credit for us and no pay for him. It’s just his way of giving the students a chance to work out ideas. My first class with Mike Hogue was Liberal Theology, and I wasn’t sure I was going to live through it! In a ten week quarter we read 14 full books and dozens of articles about liberal theology. In my second year of seminary, I asked Mike in theology lab, what did theology really mean? We’d studied Schlieirmacher and Kant and Derrida and Heidegger, but really, beyond tracing the back and forth arguments of these academics, what does it mean?

Dr. Hogue told me that the meaning of theology could be better answered through the question, “How does your belief system influence the way in which you engage with the world?”

And I’ll ask you a similar question: “How do your values and belief system influence the way in which you engage with the world?”

On the journey that is your life, what does your theology do for you and for others? For Reverend Shaw, clearly it means taking into account the privileges he enjoys and using them as a strength as he challenges the systems of oppression he sees in the world around him; “a recognition of the much that still needs to be achieved, and a commitment that we will—however we can—in whatever way we can—however small—be part of striving for the achievements yet to be.”

My theology, my relationship with what is ultimate and divine, calls me to be my best self. This, in part, means that I must strive to grow as a human being, and as a minister. Even if this means that I wind up in a town called Dukinfield, in the United Kingdom, for a good part of a summer, far from home, far from my loved ones and my family.

These weeks are a big challenge to me. I enjoy knowing where I’m going. I enjoy being able to speak the version of English where I know what all the words mean, and I enjoy walking along next to the street on a sidewalk--sorry, "pavement"--knowing that the cars are going along on the correct side of the road.

Naturally, I’m teasing a little here. But all kidding aside, for me it was a daunting idea to come here, to meet a whole new group of people. To practice a version of Unitarianism that is related to, but not wholly, my own.

But I took a leap of faith, because that is what my best self wanted to do. It is what my theology called me to do.

And look what’s happened! I have met dozens of lovely people! I have seen the world’s oldest railroad station.

I have eaten fish and chips.

I got my rucksack stolen.

You take the bad with the good, right? From the reading that Claire shared earlier “Today, this hour, this minute is the day, the hour the minute for each of us to sense the fact that life is good, with all of its trials and troubles, and perhaps more interesting because of them.”

I took what felt to me like a big chance in accepting your most gracious invitation. Change is difficult for me. Perhaps it is also difficult for you. But change we must, or we’ve stopped our journey.

My theology called me to risk just about everything, and fly to the Old World from the New to practice ministry. Each of us is on our own individual journey. But happily we walk with comrades.

What does your theology call you to do?

I know so few things for certain, but this I believe to be true: A life lived on the growing edge of being the best one can be is a life well lived.

I invite you to live such a life.

Blessed be.

Flying Across "The Pond"

2009-06-08T01:34:00.000-07:00

My flight from Detroit to New York’s JFK airport was uneventful, though a bit crowded. But that’s what you get when you fly coach, I guess.

By the time I arrived at JFK I was not quite hungry, but knew the food places would be closing at 8Pm, so I grabbed some Burger King. I’d read that the State of New York had passed a law requiring all restaurants to publish, on their menu, the number of calories a given item had. Well, I can now say, having seen it in action, that it was a horrifying experience. I had no idea that a Double Whopper with cheese was over a thousand calories.

I think of eating as sort of a budget, a loose budget it’s true, but a budget nonetheless. I allow myself about 1,500 to 1,700 calories each day. I do this in a very unscientific way. I know the value of some foods (an apple, a piece of bread, about 100 calories) etc. This is part of why I cut down dramatically on my soda intake. But to see even the single Whopper (no cheese) clock in near 750 calories was almost enough to make me not eat dinner. Except that I knew I’d be flying for the next 9 hours, and I needed something in my stomach. And the Sam Adams restaurant around the bend started at about $19 for the cheapest item. So I opted for the Whopper and promised myself at least a week of extra-healthy eating to make up for it. (So far, I’ve done pretty well!)

Once we boarded the plane--only about 30 minutes behind schedule, which I didn’t think was very bad--the seat next to me was empty and the seat next to it was occupied by a young twenty-something woman named Courtney who was on her way to England to play Playstation 3 with an online friend she’d never met before. She had just come from some major gaming convention. She freely admitted that she was traveling from Los Angeles to Manchester “just to play video games on someone else’s couch.” I hoped, silently, that she’d get more out of the experience than that.

The flight was largely uneventful until we started our descent into Manchester. At this point we hit some major turbulence, more than I’d ever experienced in a plane before. I can’t estimate drops and jolts, but it was very similar to riding a roller coaster--except, of course, with no rails beneath us.

And then it happened. Again.

In the middle of my day, someone asks me to help them. A young-ish mother and her two children were in the row in front of the row I shared with Courtney. She put her right hand on the seat in front of hers, to stabilize herself (I thought) and then she put her left hand behind her, into our row, also I thought as for stability. And then she looked me in the eye, and said the in the most polite British accent flavored with panic, “Would you mind holding my hand?” I could feel a warm smile come to my face and I took her hand. “Of course I’d be glad to.”

So here I was, holding the hand of this stranger, during a very turbulent descent, and I felt wonderful.

Connectivity is a major theme in my spiritual path. We are each looking for ways to feel connected to each other in our increasingly busy lives. I lead as busy a life as almost anybody, I’m sure, and there are plenty of times when I feel utterly alone, even in the middle of a city of six million people, like Chicago.

Why do we wait until crisis comes to reach out? Is it because at that moment our twin fears of vulnerability and rejection are finally outweighed by our need to know we are not alone?

We are not alone. We are tied, for better or worse, to our families, our neighborhoods, our places of work and study. We need only to find the connections that are healthy, joyful, and growth inspiring, to make our lives wealthy with living.

Find those people, forge those connections with them, and be filthy-rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Just One Key

2009-06-08T01:32:00.000-07:00

When I started working in high school, the manager of the restaurant I worked in had a set of keys to the store. Each manager did. The key not only gave them access to the “store” but allowed them to control the cash registers.

Those keys became the symbol of power and authority for me. I saw that set of keys as some sort of affirmation of earned responsibility. Perhaps in the way many people who take up smoking see it as a “grown up” activity, I saw those keys as a trapping of adulthood. And I really wanted a set.

There are a lot of keys I’ve wanted over the years: the key to my first car, my first apartment, the key to a certain man’s heart. And yes, even work keys.

I’ve developed quite a key-ring over the years.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I gave back the keys to my house; my congregation; my friends’ keys for when I would cat-sit (three sets); the keys to my seminary, too. I have one key left--to a seven-year old Honda Civic with 118,563 miles on it.

My life is in transition right now. I believe that everyone’s life is in transition at this very moment, but sometimes it’s more obvious than others. Like when all of your possessions fit into a car because you’ve given up everything else.

There was another time in my life when everything I owned fit into my car, and I had only one key left. It was a far less happy time. For a period of a couple of months, after my brother and I lost our apartment, we were homeless. My car became my shelter, my storage locker, my way of moving from place to place. It was a very scary time for me. With help I was able to recover from it, but it took years and years to repair my credit and has left me scarred for life.

This time, though, is much different.

For the next 24 months I will be in transition. Moving from Chicago to Dukinfield UK and then to Amarillo, Texas and then back to Chicago, with a potential summer 2010 in Germany.

Whereas before I looked at my single key as a symbol of powerlessness, this time my single key is empowering.

I have chosen to have only one key this time. I have leapt full-force into the future, with few guarantees. It’s different this time because I have faith and a goal, and faith in my goal.

What is the Point?

2009-05-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

This morning I took a walk with a beloved friend to Lake Michigan. In the neighborhood where I live for now, there is an artificially created point into the Lake, known as “the point” locally. She and I have walked dozens of times to the point and back home again.

This was to be our final time.

We talked the whole way about Life and the questions and challenges it brings. It was a good conversation.

And then I stood at the edge of the breakwater for a while, alone. I watched a seagull gracefully floating along the water. I saw two little birds playing tag. I heard the waves crash against some rocks, and I looked at the water intake station, a mile out. And I began to cry.

In a class I took in seminary, I was introduced to the idea of God as the God of a certain place. That a place itself is sacred, because God was there. I believe that God is everywhere, but that doesn’t make this place, this City any less sacred to me because it shares God.

This is the place I came, or more accurately, ran away from home to, when I was 28. I have been here a long time. Here is where I became me. And I am tied to this place. To the Lake, to the neighborhood of Hyde Park.

I tried to soak up as much of the Lake as I could this morning. Deep breaths through my mouth to taste the moist air. Eyes, made blurry by tears, trying to memorize the glorious wonder and size of Lake Michigan.

It’s rare that we know we’re doing something for the last time. I tried to take advantage of it. As I was standing there at the edge of the water a single word entered my consciousness: exile.

Self-imposed and temporary, only 12 months, but exile none the less. Forced out of my home for academic training.

Every step on the way evoked memories. Here’s where Greg and I, young and in love, had a picnic. This is where I first met Wallace, and here’s where he died at age 94, almost 95, 8 years later. Here’s where I lived with Karen and Stephanie. Karen died 8 years go at age 33. Here is the church where I found my spiritual home and path. The very path that is leading me away, walking slowly in grief.

Before my friend and I left the Point, we met an African-American woman, no odd occurrence in Hyde Park, who was also leaving the Park. She commented on my friend’s sweatshirt and we got to talking. She’s not from here, but from Ohio. She’s here with her daughter, who is dealing with 4th stage breast cancer at the University Hospital.

Ministry calls.

We spoke for a while. Her daughter’s name is Carole. I said a silent prayer for Carole and her Mom, who never gave us her name.

As I had experienced during my chaplaincy, a person needing an ear to hear them is a gift to me. The Universe is saying “You can help this person, remember your purpose.”

And so, in a morning of grieving and thinking about all I am losing, it's a little reminder that I have a place in the world.

Even if that place isn’t the neighborhood I’ve come to love.

God is everywhere, and God is Love.

What's in a Name?

2009-05-24T14:44:00.001-07:00

I thought I was just being clever in naming my blog "Humble Pie a la Mode." I really didn't know that origin of "humble pie." So I did what all good people of an academic bent do, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. But by the time I'd found out the beginnings of humble pie, I'd already found this cool photograph through flickr* and I couldn't give it up. So, the name stayed. And with apologies to the vegetarians and the squeamish of stomach in my life, I'll share with you what I found out.

Humble Pie, according to the OED.

1. = UMBLE PIE, a pie made of the ‘umbles’ or inwards of a deer (or other animal). Obs.

a1648 DIGBY Closet Open. (1677) 203 To season Humble-Pyes. [1822 T. L. PEACOCK Maid Marian 241 Robin helped him largely to numble-pie..and the other dainties of his table.]

2. to eat humble pie: to be very submissive; to apologize humbly; to submit to humiliation.
[From HUMBLE a., perh. with jocular reference to sense 1 here. Cf. to eat rue-pie (Lincolnsh.) to rue, repent.]

1830 Forby's Voc. E. Anglia App. 432 ‘To make one eat humble pie’ i.e. To make him lower his tone, and be submissive. It may possibly be derived from the umbles of the deer, which were the perquisite of the huntsman; and if so, it should be written umble-pie, the food of inferiors. 1847-78 HALLIWELL s.v., To eat humble pie, to be very submissive, var. dial. 1855 THACKERAY Newcomes I. xiv. 136 You must get up and eat humble pie this morning, my boy. 1863 READE Hard Cash xlii, ‘The scornful Dog’, had to eat wormwood pudding and humble pie. 1871 J. C. JEAFFRESON Ann. Oxford I. xiv. 224 The town had..to eat a considerable amount of humble pie. 1883 HOWELLS Register ii, Trying to think what was the very humblest pie I could eat.

b. In other analogous expressions.

1862 SALA Seven Sons II. ix. 217 The staple in the bill of fare was Humble Pie. 1895 Times 9 Jan. 4/1 To sue for peace when further resistance becomes hopeless is a kind of ‘humble pie’ that fate has condemned all vanquished nations to swallow from time immemorial.

I promise you I was completely unaware of the first definition.

My intention was more the latter definitions, but not entirely. I also meant to reference humility and taking what you've got and doing the best with it that you can. Humility with ice cream.

I guess the joke's on me with that innards bit, huh?

In a funny way though, the definition demonstrates my point beautifully. I was being cheeky, and I got served my very own plate of humble, from the first entry.

*photo credit to cobalt123