Presented by Rev. John Cullinan, Tina DeYoe, and Nylea Butler-Moore

MUSIC
“Shades of Peace” – Nylea L. Butler-Moore
“We Laugh, We Cry” – Shelly Jackson Denham
“Find a Stillness” – Transylvanian hymn tune
“Spirit of Life” – Carolyn McDade
“It Is Well with My Soul” – Philip P. Bliss, arr. Joel Raney
“Grant Me Vision, Grant Me Courage” – Jim Townley & Nylea L. Butler-Moore

READINGS
The gospel reading was from Luke 21:1-4, Common English Bible
*Special thanks to Maryann McKibben Dana for permission to share from her book, God, Improv, and the Art of Living.*

OFFERING
Our offering partner for March is Strong in Nature, a local organization that “facilitates deep healing through positive connection in outdoor spaces. We empower survivors, we de-stigmatize conversations, and we help build community.” Please consider a direct donation through their website, and sign up for their mailing list while you’re at it!
https://stronginnature.org/

PARTICIPANTS
Rev. John Cullinan – Minister
Tina DeYoe – Director of Lifespan Religious Education
Nylea Butler-Moore – Director of Music
Rick Bolton, Mike Begnaud – AV Booth Crew

MUSIC
“Walk with an Open Heart” – Scott Roewe, arr. Nylea L. Butler-Moore
“Standing on the Side of Love” – Jason Shelton
“Thanks Be for These” – 16th century Hungarian Melody
“Spirit of Life” – Carolyn McDade
“Come, Thou Fount” – Robert Robinson, Eugene Navias, John Wyeth
“Draw the Circle Wide” – Mark Miller & Gordon Light
“Go Now in Peace” – Natalie Sleeth

READINGS
“The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister
“There Is No Easier Way” by Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen

OFFERING
Our offering partner for March is Strong in Nature, a local organization that “facilitates deep healing through positive connection in outdoor spaces. We empower survivors, we de-stigmatize conversations, and we help build community.” Please consider a direct donation through their website, and sign up for their mailing list while you’re at it!
https://stronginnature.org/

PARTICIPANTS
Rev. John Cullinan – Minister
Tina DeYoe – Director of Lifespan Religious Education
Nylea Butler-Moore – Director of Music
Rick Bolton, Mike Begnaud – Livestream Booth Crew

Presented by Rev. John Cullinan, Tina DeYoe, and Nylea Butler-Moore one March 15, 2020.

Our reading is the poem “Pandemic” by UU minister Lynn Ungar (used with permission)

This morning’s hymn tunes:
#18 “What Wondrous Love” – music from The Southern Harmony (1835)
#101 “Abide With Me” – music by William Henry Monk (1823-1889)

Service music:
“Morning Has Broken” – traditional Gaelic melody, arranged by Cat Stevens
“Make Us One” – words and music by Twila Paris

For more information on our congregation, visit us at www.uulosalamos.org

So, I was working up the next installment of my series about using a portable communion set when the coronavirus outbreak created a very long and stressful week. (As you well know.) And this was just the beginning for the United States, western Europe and Australia where most of my readers come from.

Churches and temples of all kinds have closed, at least for this weekend, and for many at least through the end of March. We might still be under some kind of restriction through Holy Week and Easter (April 12) now. That’s a hard thought, but people have had to manage living with epidemics before, and it’s during difficult times that you learn to make alterations and concessions that both keep people safe and fulfill religious desires and duties. This weekend we’ll see a new flowering of online services. What’s next? Perhaps a renaissance of mainstream religious broadcasting?

But with Holy Week (specifically Maundy Thursday) and Easter, you have communion services. Unlike the long-televised Catholic mass “for shut-ins” there’s not much of a custom for broadcasting the Lord’s Supper, at least not at the Reformed end where we come from. In part because, apart from the Campbell-Stone traditions — it’s still a “special service,” a break from the normal Sunday preaching service. The Lord’s Supper, too, is felt but low Reformed administration of the ordinance isn’t much to look at if you’re not in the middle of it. You might ordinarily broadcast a sermon, but not the sacrament.

So, what to do without risking the spread of a deadly illness? I wanted to introduce the thought, and in short order review the history and map out some options.  Publishing this, to make some momentum…

Shekhinah, goddess of wisdom, has an open door policy at Her office. The lessons of a universe’s lifetime are kept inside. Will we knock on the door? Can we even find it? This morning: the story of Wisdom . . . and our relationship with Her.

As I mentioned last time, I bought two vintage portable communion kits from eBay sellers and this article shows what they contain. Readers who aren’t interested in the specifics of these particular items can skip over this article. If I left out a detail you were looking for, ask in the comments.

I ordered the kits thinking they were identical models and while very similar, this was not the case. Indeed, as only one is marked, so I can’t be sure that they are from the same maker — Sudbury Brass, which no longer makes a kit like this — but if they are, they must come from different periods of production.

The smaller kit is the model 1215, and from advertisements in ministers’ magazines seem to have been sold from about 1949 to 1955, perhaps longer. Other than a mark on the clasp of the case (SB 1215) the only markings are “silver on copper” on metal pieces. The larger case and its contents have no markings at all.

While the cases are different sizes, they contain essentially the same items, or did originally. Each has a shallow silverplate basin with a silverplate disc with six holes; this holds the six glasses. The one in the larger case is slightly larger and the disc lifts off easily, while the disc on the smaller one is more closely fitted: a bit harder to clean, but quieter. There is also a shallow bread plate; these are identical between the kits. (A loaf three inches in diameter would fit on the plate, but not in the kit.)

The smaller case with the purple lining has no bread box, but has a place for where it would have rested. The bread box would be suitable for host wafers, small pieces of bread sold to Protestants and perhaps oyster crackers. The smaller kit has its original wine flask, while the larger kit had the original silverplate cap awkwardly wedged onto a modern plastic bottle; they were not threaded the same. The silverplate on both caps is worn. The box and flask are not interchangable with the other kit, which brings us to the cases themselves.

Each seems to be made of masonite or some other hardboard covered with a coated paper or cloth, similar to what would be used in bookbinding. Each is subdivided into three compartments, lined with velveteen: blue in the large case and violet in the small. The combined glasses tray fits in one compartment; the plate in another, while the flask sits in a “well” under a flange that holds the breadbox. The small case originally had a leather strap, now lost; the larger has a metal handle, like those found on small tool boxes of the period.

There’s no room for anything else: candles,  common cup, service book, cross or the like. You might slip in an icon card and a handkerchief, but otherwise what you see is what you can carry here.

I’ll be thinking about how you would use it next.

If you are in Washington, D.C. on March 15, please come to worship with Universalist National Memorial Church. I’ll be preaching from the Revised Common Lectionary texts for the third Sunday in Lent, from the Book of Exodus and the Gospel of John.

Our congregation has a vision of how our community and the wider world will be because of our presence and our action. It is a story that we tell about a possible future. But what does it take to make that story into a reality? This Sunday, we kick off our annual canvass with an exploration of how we use our resources to live into our vision, and how your practice of stewardship makes that vision a reality.

Imagine…if you believed democracy were essential. Not just a “choice” among variations of how to govern a group of people, but an essential structure. This is the claim authors Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen make in their new book, Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want. They write:

Creating democracies truly accountable to their citizens is essential to our very survival—to the flourishing of societies supporting human life, and now, because of climate change, to the survival of the Earth as we’ve inherited it.

This is a colossal claim, we know. But there’s one point on which human history makes us absolutely certain: it’s not the magnitude of a challenge that crushes the human spirit…. What most defeats us is feeling useless—that we have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, that we don’t count.

Imagine that each of us could play an active, meaningful part in shaping the world we want to live in. Imagine a system in which the people share power. All the people—without limit or ranking according to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or the amount of money in their accounts.

Or, maybe we should imagine instead what it would be like to not live in a democracy. In some ways, it’s not too hard to imagine. Perhaps, like me, you have a fondness for period TV shows and/or for historical fiction. Any other fans of the PBS show Victoria? Over the years, there have been many such shows depicting life under a monarchy. I watch mesmerized by the beauty of palaces and gowns, feasts and gardens. And yet, I wonder—why do such portrayals of inequality of wealth and power have such a draw for me and for so many others in our democratic nation?

On an episode of Victoria, the young queen decides to visit the French king. Although the English prime minister seems wary, Victoria confidently exclaims that she would think that a self-made king should be very pleased to receive a visit from an anointed queen. I know it’s just TV, but think about Victoria’s attitude. What she says reflects the centuries-long belief that the authority to govern came from God, the Universal Ruler. Anointing a ruler was the sign of this divine blessing, this divine choice. So, this offhanded comment of Victoria’s reveals her clear bias that a ruler chosen by God would be better than a self-made ruler.

Yet, what is democracy if not a collective of self-made rulers? At its best, the democratic process allows people to “rule” themselves by sharing the power of governing. Choosing how to share power, how to govern, is of course the purview of politics. And yet, underlying these political choices are assumptions about who or what is the source of authority and power. In other words, underlying the choices of politics are ideas about human nature and the nature of the universe. Such ideas reflect religious commitments about the ultimate nature and purpose of existence.

For example, if the God of your understanding is an all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of the Universe, then the source of all power must be understood as coming from that God. God holds the power and can divvy it out to those God chooses. This theological point of view supports the notion of the Divine Right of Kings that Victoria alludes to. Such a view of God as a power over others, who is due allegiance and obedience by “His” creation, generates an acceptance of hierarchal power as the natural order of the universe. When one accepts hierarchy as natural, the application of the same principle among human beings can be vast. Aristocrats with land are better than landless peasants. Men are higher than women. Whiteness is superior to people of color. And so on.

Of course, not all views of God support such a hierarchal understanding of power. For some, God may be all-powerful, but God created humankind as equal to one another. In my own training in feminist Christian theological discourse, I learned to rely heavily on Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In this view, God remains unquestionably superior to humankind, but among humans there is the expectation of equality. Indeed, this kind of just society is the fulfillment of God’s plan for humanity.

And what of us as Unitarian Universalists? As inheritors of a Unitarian legacy, we hold fast to the individual capacity of a person to make moral and religious decisions. We have faith in our reason and in our ability to do good. And, as inheritors of a Universalist legacy, we claim an inclusive vision that values all persons, in a love that embraces people universally. Together these threads of individual capacity and universal inclusion emerge in our fifth principle: “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregation and in society at large.”

Our commitment to conscience and democracy emerge because of a long religious tradition that values the worth and dignity of every person. When we take these values as foundational to our understanding of how the world is, this is a religious claim.

I believe that religion is bigger than politics. I believe religion is about answering the biggest questions about who we are as fragile, fierce creatures; about where we find ourselves in this complex, beautiful, maddening world; and about how to navigate the ever-shifting dynamics of being who we are in the world in which we find ourselves. I believe religion is making sense of life by naming the landscape of how things are and values that will help us chart a course. I have chosen to be a part of the Unitarian Universalist religious tradition that values the capacity for moral choice as well as the dignity of each life, that promotes equity in human relations and the use of the democratic process in an effort to share power.

And it is from the basis of these moral commitments, these religious commitments, that I then take political action. It is from the basis of my humanity, my effort to craft a meaningful life in a shared world that I engage both my religious life and my political action.

And so I think that as religious persons and as a religious community we can engage in actions that seek to shape the kind of world we want to live in. We can promote and support issues that align with our inclusive values of human worth and dignity, of equity and justice in human relations, of the use of the democratic process in our larger society. We can live our values and religious commitments through our actions—through public social witness and the political process as well as through direct compassionate care to individuals in need.

There are limits to what we can do and to what we should do. By law, engaging in partisan politics endangers our non-profit status. Neither the congregation nor I can endorse or denounce political parties or candidates from the pulpit during an election. Nor do I think we should do this—even if it were legal. As a religious organization, we are exploring a much larger and bigger world than that of politics. We are reaching out to understand the expanses of meaning and the contours of moral action. I would never want who we are and what we do to be reduced to any political party’s platform.

And yet, I also do not want us to be curtailed in our relevance because we fear engaging in issues and actions that seem political. I believe that we can act in a public way as Unitarian Universalists with a religious voice, that we can call any and every political party to uphold certain shared values in their proposals and in their votes. We come together with a commitment to valuing every person—even those from a different political party. And we come together to live out those values in our actions—some of which may be to engage the political process.

We may not always agree on how to live out our values. It is a bold thing for a congregation to take a public position on an issue—to hang a Black Lives Matter banner, to offer sanctuary for a person facing deportation, to fly a rainbow flag on our steps. But, it is something we can choose to do as a religious act. Deciding what we should or should not do as individuals, groups, or as a congregation—that is a matter of conscience and the use of the democratic process.

Democracy is essential not because it is the only possible form of government. Democracy is essential because it is shared power that aligns with valuing the right of conscience and the worth and dignity of every person. Democracy is essential because to live out the fullness of who we are as human beings we need to feel like we can meaningfully shape the world we share.

Imagine what kind of world you would like to live in. Imagine believing, really believing, that you can be a part of making that world come to be. Imagine that democracy is essential.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110122023/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/01.mp3

The Unitarian Universalist minister David O. Rankin liked to relate a story from his career. In 1968 he preached a sermon just before the presidential election in which he was not thrilled between the choice of Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey. Instead of making the case, however subtly, for either candidate, he chose instead to recommend that everyone vote for the most intelligent, experienced and compassionate candidate. Moments later, in the receiving line after the service, he was confronted by a man loudly and angrily shouting at him, “How dare you use the pulpit to support Hubert Humphrey!”

I endorse no candidates here, nor even stake a position on individual items on any ballot. No, let’s talk politics, but not parties. For decades now, we have repeatedly been told about values voters, and the moral majority, and the religious right, and family values and “pro-life” voters and so on.

It’s time to change the script.

Because friends, I’m a values voter. And the values I hold dear are taking care of my fellow human beings, ending oppression, and making sure that people have healthy food and a safe place to live. My values support     people of all gender expressions and sexual orientations, people of all races and ethnicities, of all national origins. My values are truly pro-life, not just pro-birth.

I consider myself both moral and part of a majority. I try to live a good life, to not harm others as much as possible, to do the right things and to be a good person. And I believe that the majority, perhaps all of us, are doing those same things, even if we might sometimes differ on how to accomplish them.

And I hope it goes without saying, I’m religious, though not right. I’m tired of the conversation about religion in this country assuming that religious people span the gamut from fundamentalist Christians to conservative Christians. There are liberal and radical people of faith, and there are Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and dozens of other religious groups who are here and politically engaged! If we could get this word out to the major news networks sometime soon, that would be great.

I think I have great family values. Those values include supporting same-sex couples in living their lives the way they choose, with the same access to rights and privileges I have as a heterosexual, cisgender man in an opposite-sex marriage. And I have family values that say children should grow up in a home where they are loved and cared for and supported, and that matters more than other concerns.

And I’m pro-life, but not in the narrow, nonsensical way I often hear used by those who claim that title. I support life—I want to support the flourishing of all human life. I recognize that women have a better understanding of their own bodies and decisions than I do. I oppose the death penalty—again, because I support life. I’m anti-poverty and pro-prison reform, because I’m for life. I’m pro-medicine and pro-science, and even pro-socialized medicine, because I’m for life.

I’m even, and here’s something you probably didn’t expect a minister to say, pro-gun. At any rate I’m not totally anti-gun, and that feels radical in an age where there’s precious little middle ground. Though I don’t own any, I’m not opposed to guns. I’ve lived in places where guns are important, and not as a symbol or for some inflated sense of self-defense. I lived in rural Mississippi and spent time with people who hunted, for whom guns were part of a way of life, with people who each donated hundreds of pounds of meat a year to a local children’s home as part of a program called Hunters for the Hungry. So I’m pro-gun, and I’m pro-responsible gun ownership, and I’m pro-sensible gun control—something this country lacks right now.

Maybe you think at least some of these same things about yourself. Perhaps you cringe at the destructive, divisive policies and platforms you hear from people who are too eager to lift up their moral framework as the right, and proper, and only one for this country. You might see the US as a country too large and too diverse and too amazing to be contained by any one system of thinking or seeing.

We follow the prophetic calls of those who have come before us, like Frederick Douglass and Barbara Jordan and Rosa Parks, and those like the Rev. William Barber working today. Barber has called upon people of faith to lift up and defend the most sacred moral principles of our faiths. We support pro-people and anti-war policies, equality in education, healthcare for all, fairness for all people in the criminal justice system, and rights for all people, especially people of marginalized identities.

The work that Unitarian Universalists around the country and the world are doing in the political process, the work we do in our local communities, all of this is part of the same work of creating the beloved community. And whoever we elect, this work will continue.

Friends, vote for the most intelligent, experienced, and compassionate candidates. And then go love the hell out of the world, each of us in our unique ways. The world cries out for our efforts, and no election alone will end that.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121926/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/02.mp3

Do you trust democracy? In your bones, do you trust it? Do you trust yourself and your fellow citizens?

Have you ever feared the democratic outcome?

Rhetoric is high and relentless these days. While we like to claim our openness to difference, I sense there are times we feign deep listening. Or maybe it’s just me. As the posturing and gamesmanship barrages our senses, we retreat to our corners, sure in our truth. Or we may even retreat to our well-honed middle position.

We duck as the messiness of ideas fly back and forth. “They” are not listening and are not going to listen. It feels tough to engage—there is a hopelessness in the political climate of today.

Religion on its own, or politics on its own, is each fraught with triggers. Mixing the two is dicey, and yet the spheres aren’t separate.

Our 5th UU principle directly states that UU congregations will affirm and promote “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” Right there—we view the democratic process as a principle of faith.

It’s not new. When the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961 it was stated this way: UU congregations “affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships.”

Lifting up “democracy” as one of our religious principles goes back even further. In the 1940s, Rev. A. Powell Davies, minister at the All Souls Church, Unitarian in Washington, DC, had the democratic method identified as a nationwide core value of the faith.

Davies was born in England at the turn of the century, and in England was trained as a Methodist minister. He came to the US in 1928 and was a persistent public advocate for civil liberties, government accountability, family planning and desegregation. In time he shifted and in 1933 was fellowshipped as a Unitarian minister.

Consider his context. He was raised during WWI in Europe, lived through the Depression in the US, and was developing these Unitarian values well into WWII. He’d experienced fascism, was part of a world struggling to respond to communism, and he still held his long term social justice concerns.

In the mid-1940s Rev. Davies was appointed to a national committee charged to “advance” the Unitarian faith. The group focused on rejuvenating and growing the Unitarian faith, in large part by clarifying its purpose.

The committee only agreed to five principles, and one was Unitarian faith in “Democratic process in human relations.” It stuck. It is still around.

Recall that Rev. Davies was the spiritual leader of congregations around the DC Beltway, the center of the US government. A decade later, he still was expounding on democracy. In a sermon in 1954 he offered:

“[Unitarianism] is an inclusive, not an exclusive faith, based on individual freedom of belief…finding salvation not through someone else’s martyrdom, but by education and the disciplines of democracy….

A …commitment of the Unitarian faith is to democracy—not merely as a political system but as the just and brotherly way in human relations.…

We think that discussion is the path to true agreement. We are educators one of another, and all can learn from each.

We are well aware that democracy can be a discipline—sometimes a harsh one. But this is part of its value. We grow by learning to get along with other people. We grow even more when we learn to respect and like each other, to have a concern, each for all, in the words of the New Testament, to “love one another.”

For Rev. Davies, democracy was not only a public institution, but was a moral institution as well.

He worried democracy would be taken for granted. He saw modern democracy needed advocates and protection. It was not a squishy niceness. Davies had seen the alternatives, and put his trust in an engaged democracy. An engaged democracy. Not a vote and move on democracy. He saw the best method of protection was to live into the deep ideals of democracy by working through difference.

And differences we will have. While humans have a propensity to cooperate with one another in social groups for survival and fulfillment, we also have a propensity for violence within and among groups.

I sense our trust in the institution of democracy is slipping.

Our founding documents, adjusted over time, have checks and balances that spell out the processes for self-government. Let’s be real here—the initial set up was for white, male, land-owners to do the deciding and the governing. But slowly these principles have changed. The democracy created was to be deliberate and slow.

This foundation is sturdy, but not a guarantee. Frustrations are high and cynicism festers. Our democracy is not a guarantee. I hear this as Davies’ central point. The imperfect institution needs to be protected, and improved, and this is the mantle we are called to carry.

Modern democracy offers a path toward affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all. It is a moral assumption. It is a moral aspiration.

What are we individually and collectively ready to risk for democracy? To heal democracy?

Democracy is about voting, but it has to be more.

For democracy to work we need to bring our whole selves to the process—head, heart, and energy. We have to be in connection across our differences. Yet, as challenges have mounted, many have pulled back, often living in echo chambers with those who agree with them.

We are called to deeply engage, even knowing that probably means our hearts will break. Will our hearts break open to possibility instead of breaking apart? Parker Palmer, in his book Healing the Heart of Democracy, suggests that if we gain “greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life.”

Isn’t that what it takes to live in democracy? To authentically participate. To listen, and to speak up. To risk to trust in a democratic system we know as imperfect, but which in its most engaged forms may be our best hope to get through the challenges of human relations.

We’re called as citizens in a democracy to hold life’s many tensions consciously, faithfully, until our hearts are opened. It is in doing so that we sustain and build trust so we may live into the responsibility of governing ourselves.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121839/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/03.mp3

One hundred years ago the state of Maine was sharply divided between Republicans and Democrats. The little lakeside town of Naples suffered animosity so severe that the village had two stores, two libraries, and even two schoolteachers, a Republican and a Democrat. Unfortunately, they only had one schoolhouse. The Democrats and Republicans took turns locking one another out. In the middle of this political turmoil, a reporter asked a five-year-old boy whether he and his family were Republicans or Democrats. Thinking hard, the little boy scratched his head and said, “I think we’re Baptists.”

Politics and religion.

In the South about twenty years ago, a group began growing in power and influence within local conservative churches. The movement soon spread to other parts of the country. They published voting guides, and surreptitiously (and sometimes not so surreptitiously) supported candidates, until ultimately the Christian Coalition was told by the Internal Revenue Service that if they did not curtail their political activities, they risked losing their tax-exempt status. That status was indeed taken away in 1999, and with it went several local congregations. Meanwhile, hundreds of other churches have been left in tatters, irreconcilably divided between those who wished to pursue partisan agendas and those who decried the loss of the spiritual core of the faith. The little-known side effect of the infusion of politics into their religion was schism and grief.

Politics and religion.

One hundred seventy years ago, a Unitarian clergyman named Theodore Parker developed a vision of American democracy, one with no remaining elements of aristocracy, monarchy, or that scourge he saw as the largest obstacle to the human spirit, slavery. He criticized the Mexican War from the pulpit, and at great personal risk preached openly his resistance to any form of government that fell short of “direct self-government, over all the people, by all the people, for all the people,” a phrase that would later be adapted by President Abraham Lincoln.

Politics and religion.

Only five or six decades ago, Unitarian and Universalist churches struggled with the issue of civil rights. Many who resisted change did so not because of open bigotry, but simply because the change itself was uncomfortable. It was too much to keep hearing about integration and racial justice. They wanted a feeling of comfort and refuge from church; they didn’t want to be challenged. Others felt the challenge should go further than it ever did. We owe part of who we are as a religion and as a society today to those courageous Unitarians and Universalists who decided that sometimes justice takes precedence. Some, like Rev. James Reeb, lost their lives for what they believed.

Politics and religion.

Politics and religion—these are the two proscribed dinner table conversations, the topics to be avoided at all costs. Like it or not, though, you can’t ignore politics, or separate political views completely from religious views. We live in a political age, no less so than Theodore Parker or James Reeb or Susan B. Anthony, or anyone else. Our lives are infused with politics, and to ignore that fact is to waive the responsibility our faith calls us to.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121815/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/04.mp3

I grew up in a deeply political UU family. From the earliest time I can remember, we talked about politics and religion at the dinner table. I don’t know if my parents did this to counteract the influences which were coming at us from our conservative Baptist neighborhood, or if it was simply what they liked to talk about, but my three siblings and I were all weaned on political discourse.

By the time we were adolescents, my siblings and I had done things like make lobby visits on issues we cared about, campaign for chosen candidates, put unpopular bumper stickers on our bikes, argue with our schoolmates during recess about the issues of the day and write letters to the newspaper. It has been surprising to learn, especially as an adult, how rare this experience was. Many of my friends have told me that they never thought about politics, and that their parents never talked about the subject.

The small UU fellowship in West Virginia where I spent my elementary school years in the 1960s was awash in the political issues of the day, mostly connected to civil rights. It was, after all, Adlai Stevenson who helped my parents find Unitarian Universalism. Stevenson, who ran for U.S. President in 1952 and 1956, shared that he was a Unitarian. My parents had never heard of Unitarianism, but they decided if Stevenson, whom they loved, was a Unitarian they wanted to check it out. The story goes that my mother went to church in Houston, Texas in 1956, while my father stayed home with the three of us kids, aged baby to five. When my mom got home, she said, “Church was fine, but coffee hour was great! I have found our people!” They spent the rest of their life as UUs, though not as Texans.

I think about how it must have felt for them to find their people in those days of the McCarthy hearings, living in a very conservative place where they had just moved for my father’s first job. To find a community that was open-minded and progressive, to meet other people who had similar values and commitments to fairness and democracy. And I think about all the people now who could benefit similarly, who are bereft in a world gone increasingly authoritarian, who are lonely for human contact in a world that is increasingly driven by technology, who are longing for a place to reconnect with fundamental decency and kindness. This is one reason why I am so committed to sharing Unitarian Universalism—because people need spiritual homes in hard times!

For me, politics and religion have always been inseparable, using the definition of politics which folks like the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone espoused:

Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.

But that connection of religion and politics is complicated. In the US today, politics have increasingly become equated with partisanship, with politicians seeming to dream of and aspire to nothing more than re-election. That kind of politics has no place in spiritual communities—our faith is not on the ballot.

I spent 10 years living in Washington DC and directing the UUA’s justice work there. We worked in interfaith coalitions for bills that supported our faith commitments to justice and equality and democracy. I can also say that we never worked on a bill that we felt 100% good about. Every single one of them was problematic in one way or another. That, I think, is what partisan politics is about—profound compromise, and 51% of the vote.

I think that getting the necessary percentage of the vote, in the United States at least, has been part of the divisive place to which we have gotten—that all of the major cities and even the larger towns are much more progressive than the rural areas. Political parties in the US significantly wrote off rural areas because we can achieve 51% of the vote without them. No outreach, no education, no campaign efforts to speak of. I wish progressive folks spent more time reaching out to rural areas, where (again, in the US) white nationalists and other hate groups have been actively recruiting for decades.

I get why political parties use limited resources to win elections. That’s their goal. Don’t get me wrong; winning an election is no small thing! But faith, unlike partisan politics, is about clear and uncompromising values, and including all of the people. People of faith have a different charge around spreading our values than political parties do. Whether our chosen candidates in the elections have won or lost, our charge is to keep reaching out with values which are more clear, consistent and sharp than what is possible to pass in the legislature. It’s up to us, not the politicians, to be clear about our values and to insert them into public discourse.

My siblings and I raised our own kids the way we were raised—to see the value in serving the common good, to work for a better world. This next generation lives in three countries now, and the form the work takes varies from person to person and place to place. But the values I was raised with continue on in my family, and I remain grateful for my early grounding in connecting up spiritual beliefs with work for justice, and for Unitarian Universalism’s commitment to a democratic and fair world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121754/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/05.mp3

I had a proud parenting moment the other day. My young adult daughter texted me “I have officially become the kind of annoying adult that won’t shut up about politics.” I replied “This makes me so happy.” Yes, I do feel that it says something good about my parenting that my kid is paying attention to politics. When she was little I made a point of taking her along with me to the polls to vote, so that we could talk about how important the process of informed voting is. And yes, when she turned 18 I badgered her into actually filling out her ballot and getting it in on time. My daughter is a young Black woman, and I feel like the world needs her vote, and she needs to feel that she can have an effect, however small, in shaping our country toward the way she wants it to be.

When I was her age, I did vote—I haven’t missed a presidential or congressional election since I turned 18. But I was hardly the kind of adult that wouldn’t shut up about politics. Politics seemed to me something like flossing—an annoying chore that you attended to because apparently it was important. Understanding issues was complicated and the information tedious. Politicians were better or worse, but not inspiring.

Then, in women’s studies classes in college, I learned the phrase “The personal is political.” That began to capture my imagination. How we live our lives, the choices we make, the way we treat the people around us, the words we speak or write, the songs we sing—it’s all political. Who we are as individuals shapes who we are as communities and who we are as a nation. That made sense to me. It also gave me an out. If I wasn’t going to protests or writing letters or campaigning, well, I was doing other things. Personal things.

Beyond voting and the very occasional protest my politics stayed pretty personal for some time. I just couldn’t bring myself to get invested in any activist way. I moved to Idaho in 1991 to serve my first congregation as an out lesbian. Surely, that was a personally political act! Well, in 1992 Kelly Walton, a local minister far into the right wing of Christianity started collecting signatures for an initiative that would stop gay people from having “special rights” like employment non-discrim-ination. And the personal got a whole lot more political. Somehow, two years later, when they had gathered enough signatures to get Initiative 1 on the ballot, I ended up as the chair of a faith-based organization opposing the initiative, and got out on the streets canvassing people to talk about why Prop 1 was wrong. In the end the initiative was defeated 50.38% to 49.62%, and we couldn’t help but feel our efforts made a difference.

I’d like to claim that my experiences of turning the personal political turned me into a life-long activist, but that would be a considerable exaggeration. I hate calling people with a nearly phobic passion, and standing in a group of people yelling just makes me feel squirmy. I make the occasional phone call, write the occasional letter, attend the occasional march. But I read about politics, and as the political situation gets more extreme and more bizarre my reading takes on an almost frantic quality. As if by knowing more I would have more control over the political tidal waves crashing through my country. Politics has gone from being tedious, to horror movie levels of jaw-dropping terror.

And I find that I have become the kind of annoying adult who won’t shut up about politics. To my friends. To strangers on Facebook, to anyone who will read what I write or engage in a conversation. Because it has become clear to me that not only is the personal political, the religious is political. Who I am as a minister is not more separable from who I am as a political person than it is from who I am as a mother.

And while it is not anywhere explicit in our UU principles and purposes, I believe that it is a central tenet of our faith that we are called to be in conversation. We are called to have convictions about how human beings are treated—with inherent worth and dignity. We are called to have convictions about how the earth is treated—as inseparable from our own lives. And we are called to talk with passion about what matters to us. We are also called to listen intently to what matters to others. We don’t have to agree, but we are called to be in the conversation. And we are called to move that conversation beyond the bounds of comfort into the wider world, boldly bringing all of our personhood into the realm of the political, working for a world in which everyone’s full personhood can flourish.

It isn’t easy. We will never do it “right” and we will never be done. But’s that’s how it is in any relationship. We talk. We listen. We choose. And then we do it all some more, trying to nudge ourselves, each other and the wider world toward something that looks more like wholeness.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121732/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/06.mp3

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered two vintage communion kits from eBay sellers. This is the first of a short, open-ended series about what I bought, what I plan do with them and (since there’s not an endless supply of such kits) what some alternatives are.

I bought two because figured that between them I would have enough parts to have one good kit. But don’t go looking for a chalice or linens. These are the communion kits well known to “low” Protestants, and are often used for communion in home or hospital visitation. They typically include small, individual glasses and a way to present them, a vessel for serving some kind of bread and containers to store the bread and wine. Today (and for the two decades I’ve been ordained) these kits can be quite small: larger than an eyeglasses case, but usually smaller than two combined.

Unfortunately, they’re also often quite cheap looking, made of plastic or some other unknown hard material, lined with acetate cloth or molded plastic. These are nicer than most. Some use disposable plastic cups. (I’ve even seen one that is basically a carrying case for those all-in-one juice and wafer sets. The ones that look like individual coffee creamer cups. Think Keurig for communion; on second thought, don’t. My sacramental theology isn’t so high, but this form is so ugly, that I couldn’t bear it and wouldn’t serve it.) The most you can say for the typical communion set is that it’s convenient and light-weight, but they cost more than they should.

Contrast this with how beautiful and refined other consumer goods have gotten, and it’s clear to me that we can and should do more for worshiping God. The Lord’s Supper shouldn’t compare poorly in form to a take-out cup of coffee.

Next: what’s in the cases.

I preached from this sermon manuscript at Universalist National Memorial Church, on February 23, 2020 with the lectionary texts from the Book of Exodus and the Gospel of Matthew.

From the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Exodus:

Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me into the pulpit again, and thank you for welcoming me back.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, and this is why that’s important. To transfigure here means to transform in such a way that improves and elevates, namely by being brought closer to God in space and purpose but mostly in spirit, and in so doing becoming more like God. It’s this becoming more like God that I think is the main purpose of life, and how we are able to enjoy a life of blessing here and now. If you want to know the point of the sermon, it’s that. It’s one thing to believe we are loved by God (and we are) but another to become more wise, more loving, more compassionate, more creative, more forgiving and so much more. In other words, to accept the inheritance we have as beloved children of the God who is. So I believe that we can, by grace and patience, grow in a God-like way.

Which makes the Transfiguration — the feast and the concept — very important. The passage we heard in the second reading is its warrant. It’s marked today in some Protestant churches: the capstone of the season following Epiphany. On the day of Epiphany, last month, Jesus’ divine essence was disclosed by the presence of a star and discerned by foreign sages, the “three Wise Men.” Now at the Transfiguration, the dim light of a star has become a light that is unavoidable and blinding, though seen only spiritually and not with the eyes. At Epiphany, we come as seekers, but at the Transfiguration we approach as trusted (if unsettled) friends. But the message is essentially the same: we will have more understanding, and that is what will guide us towards God. The wonder and amazement remain constant.

Today’s last-Sunday-before-Lent observance is a Christian minority opinion though. Catholics, Episcopalians and the Orthodox observe it on August 6, which you will recall is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. That makes me shudder. But perhaps reminds us that dramatic change can also be traumatic change, and that bright light and power can also utterly destroy. And yet that horrible coincidence, which chills the blood and might move you to tears, is also a reminder that change for the sake of change promises us nothing more than change. What we want is a change towards something better. And yet the Godwards life has no promise of happiness, or sweetness or creature comforts in the usual sense. There’s so much pain and hurt in our world. To both love the people and living things in it, and yet hope for something greater and eternal, will stress us, will tear us, will break our hearts.

And so being changed is usually unwelcome, often distressing, and sometimes painful. But it is not optional. To live is to change. How you change, and what you become, relies in part on what you choose to become. Growing into the likeness of God means taking God as your guide. There are other options, but I cannot recommend them. Becoming an indifferent person (say) with a callous soul is also a change and a path, but one where where others pay the price for your comfort.

Sometimes I complain that the recommended passages from the Bible are hard to preach. After all, in any number of lessons brought together by custom or committee, it’s sometimes hard to see the connection. Or there’s a bit of Iron Age morality that needs to be interpreted for the Silicon Age. But I’m not complaining today; the lessons lock together like puzzle pieces. Someone early on, hearing the passage from Matthew, might have thought, “I know where this is going.” And like any good story, you’re happy to hear it in a new voice or from a new angle. Even in Jesus’ time, the story from Exodus about Moses and the rest was ancient. Arthur and Merlin and Guinevere ancient. Moses took his key deputies to a high place, where God was made manifest to him in the others’ presence. And Jesus took his key deputies to a high place where they had a stunning, divine vision of Moses and Elijah. So Jesus made the connection himself, and it was obvious to the disciples, if overwhelming.

These are both hierophanies, manifestations of a higher power like God, but can also be legendary heroes, angels and the like. We can anticipate them or prepare for the to a degree —that’s part of taking a pilgrimage, say — but we don’t have control over them, and there’s no reason to believe that any of us will have this transcendent experience. But can try and understand experiences like those in the reading. And we do have moments in our lives on which we must pivot or chose, and very often we don’t have control over those either.

But what if we have experienced something. Moses experienced hierophanies, and one can say that Jesus was a hierophany. What makes a manifestation a manifestation? Perhaps you’ve had an experience that defies description, or didn’t demand an explanation: an experience where you were called by God without words, or were just pulled up by a sense — somewhere between grief and elation — to a new place where you understood something in a new way. And that leads us to the devouring fire atop the holy mountain. Its light reveals what we carry in our hearts.

On the mountain in the gospel reading, Jesus was also joined by a manifestation of Elijah, and Elijah also had a hierophany It was one of my preaching texts a few months ago, but I don’t expect you to recall the details. He had just slain the priests of Baal — that’s another sermon — and now was on the run for his life. From the first book of Kings, chapter nineteen (7-12):

And the angel of the Lord came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God. And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

The New International Version translates the sound of God as “a gentle whisper” and the New Revised Standard Version as “the sound of sheer silence.”

And so seems to me that the violent storm surrounding Elijah, the “devouring fire” on the top of Moses’ mountain or even Jesus’ sure crucifixion mentioned in his disclosure to his disciples that a hierophany isn’t made up of troubles and tumult, violence and strife, but that they surround and perhaps hide it.

And one thing is sure: you don’t return from the mountaintop the way you came. The experience changes you. And even as we live, we are not exactly the same people we were. We do have some choices: to grow or to wither; to learn or to ignore; to take on a greater likeness to God or withdraw and betray what we might be.

Hierophanies give an experience of great and holy things, but not the means to interpret them to others. That is what we add to our experience of the holy. But direct language fails, even though we have vocabulary and concepts the people living millennia ago didn’t. We can speak meaningfully (if partially) of the working of our minds, of language, of various religious experience, of economics, of the natural world in the micro and macro scale and much more besides. Little wonder we turn to figurative descriptions and the arts to help. Little wonder we relive them though ritual. Preaching is supposed to help explain or at least describe sacred encounters, but can only go so far with the words and gestures we have in common.

Nevertheless, once we have experience of the Holy (if we have it) and once we have some interpretive means for understanding it in our lives — and this interpretation will take on new meanings over the years — you have to do something with it. Growing into a greater likeness with God has responsibilities.

Universalists have not, historically, made much of the Feast of the Transfiguration. An exception is Edwin Hubble Chapin, long-time minister of the church now known as Fourth Universalist in New York. He described a painting in the Vatican by Raphael depicting the Transfiguration, and what its moral implications were.

Writing in his Living Words (1860), he had to paint his own pictures in words of what he saw. The first thing you would see is Jesus is blazing white garments, lifted up as if swimming in the air.

But [Rafael] saw what the apostles at that moment did not see, and in another portion of his picture has represented the scene at the foot of the hill, — the group that awaited the descent of Jesus, the poor possessed boy, writhing, and foaming, and gnashing his teeth, — his eyes, as some say, in their wild, rolling agony, already catching a glimpse of the glorified Christ above; the baffled disciples, the cavilling scribes, the impotent physicians, the grief-worn father, seeking in vain for help. Suppose Jesus had stayed upon the mount, what would have become of that group of want, and helplessness, and agony? Suppose Christ had remained in the brightness of that vision forever, — himself only a vision of glory, and not an example of toil, and sorrow, and suffering, and death, — alas! for the great world at large, waiting at the foot of the hill ; — the [280] groups of humanity in all ages: — the sin-possessed sufferers: the cavilling sceptics; the philosophers, with their books and instruments; the bereaved and frantic mourners in their need! (pp. 279-80)

Raphael tied the scene of the Transfiguration with the next passage in Matthew, where Jesus healed the boy with epilepsy and scolded the faithless around him. Chapin carried the point in his own ministry in New York. The experience of God demands a change, and that change demands positive action that shows that each of us are heirs to God, whether we know it or not. And it shows God that we have heard and seen.

Now, if you know your Moses, Elijah and Jesus, you’ll recall a span of forty days. It’s a biblical convention for a long period of time. Elijah survived forty days on the divinely provided food he ate. Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days. And Noah had his forty days of rain and flood when all the earth was destroyed.

Friends, starting this Wednesday, we are beginning our own forty days with the coming of Lent.

In our society, Lent has become something between a self-improvement opportunity and a running joke, if it is known or understood at all. This is fine, so long we see the forty days as a preparation for a persistent change in our lives. We wouldn’t give up cruelty for Lent, only to re-adopt it for Easter. At its best, Lenten discipline changes you for the better, putting your steps in a Godwards direction. So I charge you not simply to do better but to be better. If you choose a Lenten discipline, make it something practical than will stretch you, but you can accomplish. Tie it to the direction that you feel God leading you towards. If you do not have a clear sense of how God is directing you, make your discipline an act of discovery. Review your life, so as to get a better scope of your life. Learn from the example of others who have gone before you, both to test your self-examination and to encourage you.

And with renewed focus, you can be better by adopting those habits of love and mercy that the logic of this world can not readily understand. Or if it does understand it, it is through the evidence of our lives made glad, living in a way that honor loving kindness.

In short, we will be known by our love for one another, with love to spare and overflow.

Bluebird by Charles Bukowski
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I’m too tough for him
I say, stay in there
I’m not going to let anybody see you
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke
And the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks
Never know that he’s in there
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I’m too tough for him
I say
Stay down, do you want to mess me up?
You want to screw up the works?
You want to blow my book sales in Europe?
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes
When everybody’s asleep
I say, I know that you’re there
So don’t be sad
Then I put him back
But he’s singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die
And we sleep together like that with our
Secret pact
And it’s nice enough to make a man
Weep
But I don’t weep
Do you?

Sermon: Hush

A couple months ago, my daughter was having an especially hard moment of being in 8th grade.  Feeling awkward. Insecure.    

I decided to show her a picture of me in 8th grade (which I will not be posting here), and I told her that if she knew what I was like when I was her age, she’d never feel awkward or insecure again. 

So I showed her, and immediately, she was like, wow.  You’re right mom.

Especially after I broke my leg skiing in November of 8th grade, and I had a full straight leg cast for four months – “Awkward” doesn’t cut it.

That heavy, clumsy cast experience (plus whatever was going on with my bangs) would’ve been enough to call 8th grade a big year for me.  But it didn’t end there. 

That same year, one of our family members came to live with us while she was pregnant. A lot of my memories that year are related to her pregnancy – rubbing her growing belly, watching her skin move like there was an alien inside her, laughing at her unusual cravings. 

And, looking at profiles from prospective couples, people who would be the baby’s parents, someday. 

See, her mom had decided to make an adoption plan for her child. So alongside all the other parts of that year, I also remember all the dreaming we did to create a future for this emerging human that I already loved.  A future where she would not know me.

I was at physical therapy (my cast finally removed) when the call came: the baby was coming. She came home a few days later – big brown eyes, healthy, beautiful. And for three months, she was ours. 

Until the day came, when we had to say goodbye.  I was old enough to understand, and of course I didn’t understand at all.  

I remember the feel of her head on my lips, the inhale and exhale of her skin. 

And then, I remember she was gone, and my stomach hurt. 

Or rather, I don’t remember my stomach hurting, at least not with my thinking brain. 

I feel my actual stomach hurting while I tell you this story.  It’s not nausea, it’s tension, like a fist in my gut.  

My breathing becomes shallow, and short. It’s not as intense as it was 30 years ago, after we said goodbye.  But I can still feel it. 

My mom, if you’ve met her, you know she’s a talker.  She believes in talking as a cure for most anything. So she made sure, we talked about this experience– before, during, after.  She sent us to a therapist where we talked some more.

So while this is a really formative story for me – and it’s not like I forgot about it, I didn’t actively think of it as unresolved – until 14 years ago.  Which is when we picked up my daughter from the hospital when she was 2 days old.  Because within a few days of Gracie living with us, my stomach started to hurt in exactly the same way it did when I was in 8th grade. 

My kids were both adopted through foster care, so there was about a year with Gracie where we didn’t know for sure if she would stay with us – with Josef it was more like 5 months – still, plenty long.  

During this time, we loved them already, claimed them; and we didn’t know for sure that they would stay. 

My stomach is beginning to clench a little, even now.

Last week, Sean talked about the power of naming our emotions, and taking hold of the story that has attached to them. The power of language to process and heal and grow through our feelings.  Which remains – true.    

And, what we also know, is: language has limits.  Language can only take us so far when it comes to describing our emotions, and even more, language can only go so far in processing or healing our emotions. 

Before the language, and the naming, there is the experience. Before the thinking brain attaches the story to the feeling, there is the body where the experience happens.    

Feelings happen first, in the body.  Before the words, or the meaning-making.   

This is why Sean asked us during the music last week to name the experience we were having in our bodies – first, before we give that experience a name. 

And it’s why my spiritual director asks me all the time, when I’m telling her about an emotional reaction I’m having: Where are you feeling that feeling in your body?

To which I often reply: I have no idea.   Or, I say, I feel it in my head.  I thought it in my brain…so, here….?

Actually, the first few times I first heard this question, I was like: what does that even mean? I thought it was a joke. 

Where do I feel a feeling in my body? Do people actually feel things in their body?

I mean, in the past couple months, I’ve been running again after a few years not running, and I feel that in my body. 

But – connecting emotional “ideas” from my brain – into a felt body experience – what does that even mean?     

My very patient teachers have helped me to break the question down a bit – first by offering some options – for how you might answer….    

For example, as you focus in on an emotional experience, in your body, you may notice an expansiveness. An ease.

Or, you might find numbness.  Floppiness. Weariness. 

Or, you might notice constriction.  Tightness. Pain. Energy. Warmth.

If a feeling is pretty alive, you might notice your heart beating faster, your breathing intensifying – or the opposite, like, you start to slow down, check out. 

All of these experiences are the work of the vagus nerve – the place where we first experience all emotions: Love.  Fear. Grief. Hope. Belonging. 

All of the things that make us human start with the vagus nerve. 

Which is maybe why somatic therapist and activist Resmaa Menakem calls it the Soul Nerve. 

The Soul Nerve connects to literally everything in us – from the throat to the lungs to the kidneys – everything – except the thinking, rational brain.  The Soul Nerve does not do “thinking.”  Instead, it does things like alerting the body to danger – especially by initiating the flight, fight or freeze response, regulating our breathing, our heart, our blood pressure.  Its other job is to do the opposite: to say to our bodies, you’re ok. You’re safe. 

Instead of consulting the thinking brain to decide: danger, or safety – the soul nerve mostly consults – our guts.  Literally, the soul nerve is all about “gut feelings.”

Which means my stomach ache was my soul nerve being all:

DANGER, DANGER!

 A lot of the time when my spiritual director asks me: where do you feel that in your body?

I have to say, honestly: I don’t.  I connect in with my body – and there’s just, nothing.

 This whole struggle can seem funny- I’ve spent many hours laughing with my sisters about it, they struggle with it too….but it also brings up a lot of shame, and judgment.    

I think: I should be more connected, more integrated – I’m a minister, a Unitarian Universalist minister.  I should’ve gotten over these anti-body messages that are clearly at the root of this disconnection, messages from my childhood, from Catholicism, from the culture. I am fully grown, queer, feminist – a mom of two middle schoolers.  What is wrong with me?   

These were the very loud messages in my head at the workshop I attended last year about this time, with Resmaa Menakem, as he was telling us to locate our feelings in our bodies. 

The silence in the room was thick and expectant, and I waited.   But – nothing.  Except my head, and the voices saying I should be better. 

But then he said:  If you’re struggling right now, I want to tell you, that you’re not defective, you’re just protective. Your body, probably across generations, has learned to protect itself; your mind has learned to protect your sense of self – by disassociating yourself from yourself.  These feelings you are trying to feel were at one time – truly dangerous. And the body will do anything to ensure its own safety. Including putting a hard barrier between your mind, and your body –  it’s not defective, it’s protective. 

Hearing this, draws me out of judgment, and lures me instead into compassion even for myself – a feeling I can almost feel in my body. 

When we remember, as in Charles Bukowski’s poem – all the ways we say to the bluebird in our heart: “I’m too tough for you, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you” – 

We’re not defective, just protective.  

Especially for men, in our culture – when we say: “stay down, do you want to mess me up?….You want to blow up my book sales in Europe?”

Not defective.  Protective. 

Remembering this opens up compassion, starting with ourselves. 

Resmaa tellsthe story of his grandmother’s hands.   He used to rub them for her, when they hurt.  Her hands were rough, and hard, too big for her small body.

One day he asked how they got like that. She explained: she started picking cotton when she was four, “the cotton plant has pointed burrs in it. When you reach your hand in, the burrs rip it up.”

When she first started, her hands were torn, and bloody; but then her hands got thicker and harder and bigger – until she could reach in without any bleeding. It had been a long time since she’d picked cotton, but her hands didn’t ever change back.  

I try to remember this story when someone is being particularly cold, short, calloused – I try to imagine that maybe sometime in the past, this same behavior was helpful, maybe it even saved their life. It moves me out of judgment, into compassion.

Especially when I pair it with another insight –this one from psychologist Noel Larson – he says, “If something is hysterical, it’s usually historical.” 

He means: if someone is having a reaction that has far more (or far less) energy than what the situation seems to call for, it’s likely because it’s bringing up un-processed – or what Resmaa calls “unmetabolized” feelings from the past….if it’s hysterical, it’s usually historical….the soul nerve in its unthinking ways, often seeks to repeat whatever has been left unresolved, it tries to find healing – for things from our past, and from even farther back than that. 

Over the past few decades, neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda has been studying the physical effects of our biggest feelings, by studying veterans, and holocaust survivors, and survivors of 9/11. In each of these, she found very similar physical manifestations of their stress, and trauma – memory loss, muscle weakness, chronic anxiety and depression – all of which she found, they pass on to their children, and grandchildren.

As she says, “the trauma itself is inherited.” 

Inherited first through the embodied behaviors of those whose bodies carry the original trauma. The ways their bodies express all that depression, anger, anxiety – the impact this has on their children – the new trauma the children experience. 

And also, trauma is inherited literally in the body – through biology. Yehuda’s work discovered that grandchildren of holocaust survivors –show the same genetic markers as if they experienced the holocaust itself. This same pattern is seen across generations in African American communities, Jews, Native Americans, and although it hasn’t been studied as extensively, surely it is present in today’s immigrant community. 

Still, Yehuda is quick to point out that the impact she’s describing is not confined to large scale traumatic events – whenever any of us experiences an overwhelming change that floods our system, our bodies, our soul nerve – it can take up residence in our systems in the same ways. 

Overwhelming feelings like this, she says, often “reset and recalibrate multiple biologic systems in an enduring way.”  

Feelings happen in our bodies, and when they are overwhelming and under-processed, they are passed on person, to person, across generations – biologically inscribed, inherited – like a contagion –which we should not take to mean that these same feelings are our destiny. 

Actually, it’s just the opposite. 

The body does not just contain painful, traumatic feelings afterall; the body also holds resilience.  Intelligence. Joy. Hope.  The capacity for growth, and change.  In our bodies lives a visceral longing for freedom.  

With practice, we can engage the soul nerve in its wisdom – rather than only its wounds. 

Especially through the use of ancient practices in a community setting – practices that somatic teachers call “settling.”  Things like singing, or humming.  Swaying, or rocking our bodies. Stuff we do in church – I mean, “ancient practices in a community setting” !!  

Settling the soul nerve so that we are not perpetually in in flight, fight, freeze – or flood – is not in and of itself healing.  But is a pre-requisite to healing. 

This is important, let me say it again.  

Settling ourselves – becoming calm, feeling safe, peaceful; remaining connected, and present – this is actually not healing. We often seem to think it is – that if we can get to serenity, peace – that we are healing.  But really, it’s the pre-requisite to healing. 

Practicing settling when we are not in distress or discomfort, allows us to more easily feel settled when distress and discomfort arises.  We learn to tolerate discomfort, without shutting down. We teach our soul nerve to trust that even when we are uncomfortable, we are OK.  

Which in turn allows us to go towards what might otherwise see, TOO MUCH, TOO PAINFUL…we build a capacity to feel the feelings as they actually are, in our bodies – and by feeling the feelings we metabolize them, heal them.

To do this, we might use ritual, art, movement… likely many of the things we named in community time – these practices that engage our bodies. Remembering that it’s not just trauma that gets transmitted, but healing, too.   

One more story.

My father’s father – his name was Gus, was 7 when his father took a train ride across the country, promising to bring him back a special toy.  But while he was gone, he got an infection, and he died – so he never returned.  A few months later, my grandpa’s mother also became ill – she died.  My grandpa had 8 siblings, and when their parents died, within a few short months of each other, all 9 were sent out to foster families, across three states – they didn’t meet again until they were adults. 

When we brought Gracie home, and I loved her immediately, and my stomach clenched with anticipatory grief – I didn’t think about my Grandpa, or the loss he must have held in his body his whole life.  Any more than I thought of myself in 8th grade. 

And yet right there, as my stomach tightened, I was given a chance to heal not just for myself but for two generations back. To stay present there, to feel the anxiety and the grief. 

And even now each time I choose to lean in to the experience of loving my children -which is, even now they are middle schoolers, often an embodied experience….to feel all all the feelings, to not shut down, or close off from the risk, the grief, the fear – it feels like small way to metabolize at least some of these experiences of grief and overwhelming loss that live in my body -like the bluebird longing for freedom – feelings from my own past, and from the past I have inherited. 

We all carry in our bodies feelings like this, our own, our inheritance – stories that words cannot help or touch.  In the silence, and in the space between us, our bodies have everything we need to heal, we have everything we need to release everything in us that longs to be free. 

Crow is back with a really tough question: What happens after someone we love dies?

Resilience is not just a personal quality. Similar to grace, it is a gift that can be offered to others when needed. When others around us have lost all hope, it sometimes falls to us to lend the strength that comes with the relentless message: “You are loved. You matter.”

Last week, I was musing in front of minister friends about how I should read David Bentley Hart’s That All Should Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019) for reasons that should be obvious to even casual readers of this site. And past the obvious: who would be the best audience for the book? I’ll write about it as I get deeper into it.

Well, muse in front of friends and what happens? One ordered a copy and had it shipped to me. My thanks to the Rev. Victoria Weinstein, D. Min. for the gift.

Last week was full of unhappy (personal) news, and a token was a balm and an encouragement. (It worked.) That’s a benefit of having friends for a long time. But she is not only a friend, but a colleague. The graces of collegial support aren’t always formal or programmatic, though it’s tempting in professional spaces to privilege structures and forms. Indeed, I wonder if most acts of ministerial collegiality are informal, or at last the ones that have lasting impact. Informal but not unimportant. It’s no secret that I don’t participate in formal, institutional collegial structures; my reasons are several and have changed in priority over the years. But my informal connections — some deep, some momentary — are now as wide as ever, and that’s a gift that also deserves thanks.

A Japanese proverb says, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” But, where do we find the courage and the strength to get up that eighth time . . . especially when our own reserves are worn down? Can we exercise our own sense of resilience?

In her TEDTalk “What Fear Can Teach Us,” novelist Karen Thompson Walker tells us that fear can be understood as an amazing act of the imagination; as an unintentional storytelling that we are born knowing how to do.

Fears have the same elements as stories, she points out: characters, usually us and the ones we love; plots, usually catastrophic ones; and plenty of suspense. The task, she argues, is to read our fears like stories, for the glimpses of wisdom and insight they have to give us. This makes sense to me, because over the years, stories themselves have helped me manage my fears.

As a child, Maurice Sendak’s beloved book Where the Wild Things Are, controversial at the time for its scary monsters and gnashing of teeth, gave me a safe place to look at those terrifying beasts on the page in front of me and confront them there, at a safe distance.

As a teenager, the diary of Anne Frank and novels set during the Holocaust allowed me to dip my toe into acknowledging the evils of this world from the safety of my own soft bed—to encounter even the idea of such evil, to see the tenuousness of all our lives in such a world, and survive that knowledge. Every child deserves to first encounter evil at such a distance. All too many don’t. Still, all children need tools to help manage their fears.

In an article for The Atlantic about Maurice Sendak, Joe Fassler writes:

In his book The Uses of Enchantment, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggests that fairy tales help children externalize, and ultimately diffuse, their deepest anxieties. ‘The child must somehow distance himself from the content of his unconsciousness and see it as something external to him [if he is] to gain any sort of mastery over it,’ Bettelheim writes. This is why so many fairy tales take place in the deep and mysterious woods, he argues—it is the realm of the subconscious, where the wandering child-mind can encounter its fears and wants in reified form, then neutralize them.

Alas, I must not have neutralized them all, as I have gone from being a worried child to a worried adult. The other day, when my husband forgot to tell me that he was going to be home late, and then didn’t answer his phone when I called, for just a moment my imagination ran away once more. What if the lights had gone out on his bike? What if he was in a ditch somewhere?

When he got home, I yelled. No, I declared forcefully, “I was worried about you. I pictured you in a ditch!” He apologized, and when I had calmed down he said, “I love you too.” Aha.

If our fears are themselves compelling stories, then they most often have something to tell us about what we value, as all stories do. Our fears are not something to shun or shut away, but rather powerful stories about the true depths of our care.

In other words, our worries are drenched in love. And honestly, sometimes I think it’s a miracle we don’t all walk around this world scared out of our wits all the time. Our hearts are so tender, and the world around us is beautiful and awesome, but it is not tender. Life is fragile, contingent on so many things, and we love it so much.

From the storybook Wild Things to the wilds of life, eventually we grow up and realize that we don’t get to control the story. The monsters don’t stay on the page.

Somehow we keep on loving anyway, keep on living. And that is courage. Not our capacity to overcome fear, but the capacity to move through life in the face of loss, in the fact of change.

Perhaps courage is simply the beating heart of our story, or better yet, the story of our hearts. In this way, courage is a fact of our lives. Life stretches our hearts, and lo and behold, they grow and do not burst or shatter.

The poet David Whyte says:

We are here, essentially, to risk ourselves in the world… we seem meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. And in all this continual risking the most profound courage may be found in just the simple willingness to allow ourselves, amidst the hazard and vulnerability, to be happy along the way…

After all, when we’re doing it right, we walk this earth giving away pieces of our hearts, and not always into safe-keeping. It is a huge risk. But what joy it brings us. It takes courage beyond belief to trust our hearts to love, and yet every person, perhaps every creature on this planet, does so every day. We are already brave.

Listen, you are here with pieces of your heart scattered across the country, the world. And you are already brave. Because some of those pieces have been shattered by betrayal, or loss, or tragedy, or simply change. But still you give them, and have found a calling in life to give more. You are already brave.

The miracle is that love has not left me quivering on the floor in fear. Love has made me braver. I have climbed mountains for the love of my spouse, and dealt with worms for the love of my dog. I have pursued this wild and crazy calling with the love of my family and friends. I have pursued justice with your love and partnership.

If I did not love, I’m not sure I could leave my house each day. So, yes, opening our hearts puts them at risk. But opening our hearts is also what makes us brave. Perhaps courage, like the heart, is just a muscle—in us already, pumping away without notice half the time as we move through our days, sometimes noticeable only when working hard or causing pain, but always, always made stronger with exercise.

As you move through the challenges of life, I invite you to remember that you are already brave. We can, each of us, practice the courage that sustains us, not through acts of valor or physical prowess, but through the simple willingness to extend our hearts a little further, fill our stories a little fuller, keep our imaginations working away in the service of love, so that our story becomes an exercise in compassion, strength, and hope.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110105651/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_02/01.mp3

We see them on big screens and small ones
In comic books and in toy stores
Wearing their fancy outfits
With capes or masks or armor

They save the world
In big dramatic ways
Fighting the bad guys
Defending the helpless
Always on the side of good

Isn’t that what we do, too,
Or at least what we hope to do?
Together we work for a better world

Speak out against tyrants and bullies
Use our privilege
In service of those with less power
Trying always to answer the call of love

And this is where we learn to do it
Or learn to do it better
Or teach others to do it

This is superhero school
And we are all invited to enroll,
To choose the path of good
And become the kind of superheroes
Our world needs.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110105603/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_02/10.mp3

As a first grader, Ruby Bridges was part of the first group of students to racially integrate schools in Louisiana. In 1960, six African American children passed placement tests to go to white schools. Ruby was one of them. Two of the six children decided to stay at their all-black schools, three were assigned to McDonough School and Ruby was the one student assigned to integrate William Frantz public school. She integrated that school all on her own. In that first year, many white parents pulled their children from the school, including the parents of the rest of the first grade class. Most of the teachers left too. For all of first grade it was only Ruby and her teacher.

As Ruby remembers it, her mother rode with her in the car with the federal marshals for the first two days of school. After that, her mother had to get back to work and look after the two younger children. So, Ruby rode with the marshals by herself. Ruby’s mom told her, “If you feel afraid, say your prayers. You can pray anytime and God will hear you.”

I highlight this because when I explore faith, I keep bumping up against courage. When we look at faith not as a set of beliefs, but rather as a source of strength that keeps us holding on to our values when it gets difficult, or a source of hope when we feel lost, we are also talking about courage. In Ruby’s story, you hear how her mom was showing her how to keep moving forward even when she was afraid, through prayer, through her faith.

It’s so easy to see courage as boldness, bravery, fearlessness. It’s so easy to ascribe courage to heroic figures throughout time, to put it on such a high shelf that it feels unattainable. I want to rid you of that idea.

Courage is something we all need. It’s something we all can live in our lives—something attainable. More than this, it is needed. Not just in historic lives, not just in dramatic moments, but every day. We need the courage to show another way to live—a way that is not based in ego or control, not out of domination, power or materialism. We need ways of being in the world that don’t place our sense of worth in being right or being successful, but rather in being human, in being true to ourselves. And for this, we absolutely need courage.

As researcher and author Brené Brown says, we need the courage to show up fully as ourselves in our lives and to let ourselves be seen. Vulnerability begets vulnerability and courage is contagious. She points to Harvard researchers who show that real change is sustained by leaders who are able to show vulnerability. This vulnerability is perceived as courage and it inspires others to be courageous. We need this kind of courage in a world, in a country, in a society, that needs great change. To do this, we need to learn how to develop courage in our own lives and how to teach courage to our children.

Courage is not simply a virtue—it is a quality that the rest of the virtues depend on. C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Whatever it is we hold highest—if it is a commitment to peace and nonviolence, if it is a commitment to human dignity for all, if it is equality, if it is kindness or compassion, a respect for the interdependence of creation—to live these in our lives, to inspire them in our world, we need courage. To truly live these values, there will come a time where we need
courage to stay true to them, to practice them at the testing point.

Courage isn’t just strength, and it is certainly not just a forcefulness of will. We look to Dr. King, Ruby Bridges, Mahatma Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Harvey Milk and we call them courageous because in their dedication to principles of human dignity and worth, of equity and opportunity, they risked themselves. Their actions made them vulnerable. Brené Brown, in her book Daring Greatly, writes “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.”

Vulnerable comes from the Latin, “to wound;” it means being in a place of risking yourself. Brown talks about the problem of being so afraid (even unconsciously) of our vulnerability that we seek to control everything around us in order to minimize risk and avoid being hurt. When we do this we separate ourselves from others, and even from our own lives, in order to distance ourselves from the possibility of pain. In this circumstance beginning to learn to share yourself—your whole self, your fears, your needs—being willing to be seen is a critical step to developing courage.

It takes courage to let ourselves be seen. But it is so important because it is in being seen, in vulnerability, Brown says, that we find the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, empathy, authenticity and courage. The vulnerability of sharing our whole selves opens up a door to a level of connection and being and understanding that is a source of incredible strength and joy.

On the other hand, I want to be careful about how we look at different types of vulnerability. Brown’s definition and perspective is valuable, but it might sound different from a place of social or physical vulnerability. Many of the people I named as models of courage were or are people marginalized because of the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation. They would rightly argue they didn’t need courage to get in touch with their vulnerability; they needed courage not to be victimized by it.

Vulnerability on its own is not courage. We can make ourselves vulnerable out of stupidity, out of a thirst for drama or danger or adventure. Sometimes we are vulnerable because of our position in life, vulnerable because of poverty, vulnerable as children to the power of adults, vulnerable for any number of reasons beyond our control.

Vulnerability and courage are not the same thing. In fact, Brown says “Perfect and bullet-proof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience.” All of us are vulnerable. Of course, we are vulnerable to the elements of nature and illness, but also to the risks of loving and losing, of trying and being unsuccessful, vulnerable to social and political circumstances. We are not all equally vulnerable, to be sure. Nevertheless, it is simply a fact of existence. Courage is how we respond to that vulnerability.

So courage is not the same thing as vulnerability. Courage is an inner strength to recognize our vulnerabilities, yet to go forward in spite of them. The courage to take action is not about being certain about what’s next. It is instead a determination not to surrender to the vulnerability, but rather to try to go forward despite the risks.

This is important because I don’t want to leave you with the idea that vulnerability is something we ought to seek, or cling to. Attempts at perfectionism and control are dangerous, but it is just as problematic to think only of our vulnerability, to deny our power, our agency, our choices, our worth.

When it comes to developing courage, or inspiring it in others, the very first step is being able to be fully yourself.
Sometimes sharing your story of truth—sharing fully the way you doubt or fail, the way you experience the world, that “raw truth” as Brown describes it—is the most courageous thing we can do in a moment. And in those moments, vulnerability not only sounds like truth and feels like courage—it looks like courage. And it can inspire others to be courageous in telling their truths, in being fully themselves and openly engaged.

We remember our agency, and we hold on to the faith—by whatever name we call it—that gives us strength to keep working for what we believe in, to advocate for ourselves and others. We teach courage by living it in whatever ways present themselves, by getting off the sidelines and letting ourselves be seen.

Ruby Bridges says she remembers that her dad didn’t want her to go to the white school. Her mom did. She thought it would give Ruby better opportunities later on and she thought it would matter to other black children and families. She said her parents talked all summer about it and finally her dad was persuaded by her mom. I have no doubt that her mom’s courage, her parents’ courage, and that of the families that stood with them, and the teacher who taught and came to love Ruby, all helped her develop courage—a courage that stayed with her throughout her life.

We teach courage by modeling it. We grow our courage by being able to name our own vulnerability—connecting with others by sharing our truth, but not getting stuck there. We grow our courage by holding to our agency, our sense of worth and our own power to shape our lives. And we grow our courage by living our values, even at the testing point. May we all grow courageous hearts, and may we teach courage to our children.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110105514/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_02/03.mp3

I was a fearful child. And frankly, most of those fears stayed with me into young adulthood. I was scared of…let’s see: Dogs. The dark. Matches (that was a hard one for someone training to be a minister—lots of candle lighting involved). Driving on highways (that was a hard one when I moved to the DC area…it took several years and a lot of early morning practice on the George Washington Parkway).

In fact, I had a whole understanding of myself as Someone Who Was Afraid of Things. A fearful person. Someone without a lot of courage, I guess. Of course, eventually I got wiser than that. You are probably already that wise: you realize that being afraid is in no ways counter to having courage.

Really, most people who act courageously do so full of fear; frankly, if you weren’t afraid, I’m not really sure it would count as courage. For me, that realization came when I decided that I could be near a dog and be afraid and not run away (which, incidentally, isn’t a great choice if you don’t want the dog to chase you). I learned I could stay there and just sit with, and hold the fear. That was the courageous thing for me.

So how do we manage this? How do we find the courage to be with our fear, to face it by walking alongside it, to do the hard things in our lives and in the world?

Because the world seems to require a lot of courage these days, doesn’t it? We are called to work against oppression and injustice all the time, and I know that some of the courage we may be looking for is the courage to respond to the world around us, to go to the march, to shut down the traffic, to resist hate speech, to intervene and de-escalate. Or maybe just the courage to go on, to feel as though there are reasons to bother fighting, rather than hiding away with our heads in the sand. We need a lot of courage these days.

I find that courage is contagious. Consider penguins. Penguins line up, you know, at the edge of a cliff of ice, to jump into the water below and fish. But the thing is, none of the penguins want to be first. They all waddle forward—you can just imagine their little waddles—peering over and pulling back, jostling for position, wondering who will take the dive. Eventually, one of them loses their footing and…swoop! They dive down to the water below. Their penguin friends watch, and wait, and finally see them, surfacing in the water, full of fish. Then suddenly all the penguins want to go, tipping themselves forward to fish together. Sometimes, courage is like that: like penguins, unsure who will be the first to fall, waiting until someone tips over and then…swoop! They find the courage together.

This is what we do for each other, in a community like this one: we inspire each other, we face fears together, we convince each other that we have the power to be courageous. Courage is contagious.

But is courage to resist the only kind of courage there is?

My congregation hasn’t been shy in its criticism of the policies enacted by this US administration, or the values that the administration and some of its supporters espouse, and I don’t regret that. To my mind, that’s not being overly political; that’s continuing our values, including our core value, the idea of the worth of every person.

But how does that value—the worth of every person—come into play when we are fighting for justice…fighting, perhaps, against those we think are creating injustice in the world? It seems to me sometimes that being courageous for the resistance is the easy part. Having the courage to also stay in relationship, to honor our deepest value of inherent worth, is harder…and if I’m being honest with myself, I’m not always sure I want to have that kind of courage.

Does it even take courage? I think so, because I know at least for me, I carry plenty of fear when I think about talking with relatives and friends who believe very differently than I do. I’m afraid I won’t be able to maintain the relationship at all…or that I’ll maintain it, but I’ll do so by betraying my values and not speaking up when they say something I disagree with…or that I’ll try to talk with them and it will all go horribly wrong…or, worst of all, that I won’t want to maintain the relationship, and I’ll decide they aren’t worth the relationship and walk away.

The word courage comes from Latin, by way of Old French, and the word for heart. Hidden in that root may be the key to facing the fears that come with relationships, the courage that is needed to stay connected with all, to be a space where “only love is welcome.” We hold on to those fears with heart.

For me, heart, and courage, are about faith, too. One of the things we say in Ethical Culture specifically is that we don’t find worth in all people (sometimes, indeed, it’s really hard to see it there!) but rather we attribute worth to all people. We believe it’s there, even when we can’t see it.

My colleague Jone Johnson Lewis says it this way:

Here in this community, we value the actions that come from beliefs, more than we value the beliefs. We have no common creed. We have some commitments to act…We say…that we will attribute worth to every person. We admit that we don’t know whether there is such a “thing” as worth, but we will take an action, anyway—attributing worth.

That action, that attribution, is a kind of courage to me.

I’d like to end with a story, one about the football player Colin Kaepernick. I thought he had one kind of courage, the standing up to injustice kind—which he did, and faced harsh consequences for his career. It turns out, though, that Kaepernick also has the other kind of courage, the using your heart as you approach relationships, and seeking to bring out their best.

I found this on Facebook, so I don’t know the author—but I did verify that the story is true:

Why Kaepernick kneels instead of sits:

Do you wanna know how Kaepernick came to the decision to #Kneel #TakeAKnee?

Aug 14, 2016—Colin Kaepernick sat for the national anthem. No one noticed.

Aug 20th, 2016—Colin again sat and again, no one noticed.

Aug 26th, 2016—Colin sat and this time he was met with a level of vitriol unseen against an athlete.

Then on Aug 30th, 2016 Nate Boyer, a former Army Green Beret turned NFL long snapper, penned an open letter to Colin in the Army Times. In it he expressed how Colin’s sitting affected him. Then a strange thing happened. Colin was able to do what most Americans to date have not… He listened.

In his letter Mr. Boyer writes:

“I’m not judging you for standing up for what you believe in. It’s your inalienable right. What you are doing takes a lot of courage, and I’d be lying if I said I knew what it was like to walk around in your shoes. I’ve never had to deal with prejudice because of the color of my skin, and for me to say I can relate to what you’ve gone through is as ignorant as someone who’s never been in a combat zone telling me they understand what it’s like to go to war. Even though my initial reaction to your protest was one of anger, I’m trying to listen to what you’re saying and why you’re doing it.”

Mr. Boyer goes on to write “There are already plenty of people fighting fire with fire, and it’s just not helping anyone or anything. So I’m just going to keep listening, with an open mind. I look forward to the day you’re inspired to once again stand during our national anthem. I’ll be standing right there next to you.”

Mr. Boyer showed empathy and understanding…and Mr. Kaepernick reciprocated. Colin invited Nate to San Diego where the two had a 90-minute discussion, and Nate proposed Colin kneel instead of sit.

But why kneel? In a military funeral, after the flag is taken off the casket of the fallen military member, it is smartly folded 13 times and then presented to the parents, spouse or child of the fallen member by a fellow service member while kneeling.

The two decided that kneeling for the flag would symbolize his reverence for those that paid the ultimate sacrifice while still allowing Colin to peacefully protest the injustices he saw.

Empathy, not zealotry under the guise of patriotism, is the only way meaningful discussion can be had.

May we all be so courageous.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110105449/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_02/04.mp3

Reading: Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front 

Sermon: Inefficiently Yours 

Every day this week, I had at least one package on my front porch when I got home. 

Every day.  At least one.  Not all of them were from Amazon, but most. 

My partner and I decided to get a bunch of small things to get more organized – new shelves, towel rack, that sort of thing. 

We didn’t have a lot of money, so getting good deals mattered. We love free shipping.

Plus, with two middle schoolers, a clumsy dog, and both of us working in demanding jobs –  we don’t have a lot of extra time, either.

A few clicks, a careful read of the small print and the dimensions, a few more clicks – done. Packages on their way. 

It was perfect, and felt like freedom, even for a few fleeting moments. 

All of this clicking was especially ironic this week because – in addition to my low-grade always-awareness of the negative impact of Amazon has on local economies, small businesses, the environment – over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for today’s service, I have been paying closer attention to the conditions for Amazon employees.

Specifically the conditions for the people who responded to my clicks by finding my item.  Packing it up with other boxes in a bigger box.  Placing the blow up supposedly recyclable plastic things in the empty places to keep things in place, and then shipping it directly to me in two days or less.

 “Soul sucking” more than one employee called it.  “Soul Sucking.” 

Usually when I hear someone say “soul sucking” I assume they’re being hyperbolic. But in this case, I’ve started to think it might be accurate.  That Amazon is literally sucking our souls. 

To start, the work is physically demanding – 12 hour shifts where you end up walking 15-20 miles with lots of squatting, and reaching, and lifting.   You can get used to this, and it’s not entirely new or unique for blue collar work. 

What’s new and uniquely soul-sucking at Amazon comes down to what they call their “efficiency standards.”  They ways they have centered success entirely around efficiency.  Equiated efficiency with BEST. 

Each employee is given a scan gun for every component of their job, which allows everything they do to be monitored, and timed, and also to alert a manager if there’s too many minutes where they are “off-task.” 

Generally, you are allowed 18 minutes off task per shift. 

This year, Amazon will likely employ 300,000 people, most of those working in the warehouses.  

Many of us are familiar with our economy’s crisis of income inequality – As a recent NPR report confirmed:“the gap between the richest and the poorest US households is the largest it’s been in the past 50 years” –  

But Mennonite theologian Mark Baker says that even more pressing, and much less tended to; even more pressing especially for us as people of faith is our economy’s crisis of human dignity.

~~~~~

When I first started thinking about the Amazon warehouse, my first question was: why don’t they just use machines? If they really want a hyper-efficient work enviornment – why don’t they just use robots? 

After all, humans are inherently inefficient.  For example, humans have bodies.  And bodies require bothersome things like using the bathroom, eating, sleeping – all incredibly inefficient. And, humans are wired for conversation, connection, emotions, relationship – all, inefficient.

One Amazon employee theorized that their assignments were especially designed to ensure they crossed paths with as few other humans as possible.  

Loneliness and isolation are some of the biggest complaints from workers today.  Not just at Amazon. The younger you are, studies show, the lonelier you are – nearly 8 in 10 Gen Zers (age 18-23) and 7 in 10 millennials report being lonely; only half of boomers.  (The study I read says nothing about Gen Xers, those of us in the middle of our working lives….which is, typical.)  

Humans are not wired for loneliness – it turns out to have the equivalent health impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 

And even more obviously, humans are not readily oriented towards highly inflexible, repetitive tasks over long periods of time, which is the epitome of efficiency.   

But machines have none of these issues.  Machines are not hard wired for connection, or relationship.  Machines don’t get lonely. And they are good at inflexible repetitive tasks. That’s the point of machines. 

So, why doesn’t Amazon just use machines?

As AI technology and robotics engineering continues to develop, I’m guessing, they will someday. Which will be another sort of crisis for all those 300,000 workers, when it happens.

But for now, what I learned was – humans have a few particular advantages over machines that make them preferable to Amazon and other efficiency-driven work environments. 

Two things: fine motor control, and subjectivity.  Machines aren’t yet as good as humans at the fine motor skills, and at least for the foreseeable future, humans are better at inference, nuance, subtlety and gut-feelings than machines. As anyone who has ever tried to ask Siri or Alexa anything but the most straightforward question would attest. 

All this means that work environments – and increasingly our whole culture – expect us to perform like our machines in all areas except the couple where we are better. Our work, and increasingly our entire culture expect us to conflate efficiency with ultimacy.  

Which means we have created an economy, and increasingly a culture that requires us to suppress our humanity. Suppress your humanity, or lose our job. Suppress your humanity, or struggle to do life today.    

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made….When they want you to buy something they will call you. 

Check, check, check, check, check.  

~~~~~

Now, as anyone who has ever worked fast food will tell you, there’s always been a push to get the most done with the least amount of time, money, or energy.  Anyone who has ever worked anywhere in corporate America would probably say the same thing.

What’s new is just how efficient we believe we can be – technology has changed our expectations exponentially. 

Which is not just because of Amazon – it’s also Netflix, and Hulu, and all the apps on my smart TV that I LOVE.  It’s Grubhub and Instacart and King Soopers Pick Up (which also SAVES me regularly). It’s messaging apps and facetime and its spotify, Youtube, Stitch Fix, and maybe most of all it’s Google. 

All of these technologies – these amazing, salvific, liberating technologies – have taught us that whatever it is we need, we can get it now. 

Without much effort – just click!

 My son recently found this sweatshirt that he was so excited about, he had the money to pay for it, but then it said it would be delivered in three weeks.  He was like: nope.  

Three weeks. There was literally no reason for him to need it sooner.

I tried to explain to him about the Sears catalogue and about the little forms we had to fill out, number by number, and then we had to mail them in, and wait, and wait….but he’d already moved on.

If something’s going to take more than a couple steps, today – and if each of those steps aren’t guaranteed to lead us to a successful end, my son is not alone we often decide, it’s just not worth it. (Which I’ve come to believe is the business model for health insurance companies.  How many people find the process to submit for reimbursement so confusing and time consuming, you just give up?! It can’t just be me…)

Our technologies have taught us that life can be, should be instant. Seamless. Effortless. Continuously available and responsive to our every impulse. 

These expectations for life in turn become what we expect from each other – instant. Seamless. Effortless. Continuously available and responsive….and we come to expect this from ourselves too – that we will be continuously available and responsive…

It’s why Mark Baker encourages us to think not only about how we might influence Amazon, but even more, how Amazon is influencing US.

“Efficiency is our existential purpose;” This is a quote from Malcom Harris; he’s talking specifically about millennials and the ways the generation born between 1981 and 1996 has been “optimized” for efficiency their whole lives.  “Efficiency is our existential purpose; and we are crafted to be lean, mean production machines.” He says, it’s especially true for millennials and Gen Zers; but it applies to so much of our culture today. Efficient has become a synonym for “best.” 

And of course, sometimes efficiency is best.  In the middle of an emergency, we hope first responders love efficiency.  That they are OBSESSED with it.

Efficiency is also a necessary antidote to bureaucracy.  When we set up the Emergency Immigration Fund a couple years ago, we made sure that our system for getting the money to someone in crisis – was as efficient as possible.  One call, one day, check in hand.    

And in case my confession at the top didn’t make it clear –  as writer and activist Courtney Martin says, “efficiency is a survival mechanism” for many of us.

She writes:

“I simply couldn’t care for my children and make a living and nurture friendships and contribute to a community in the way that I want to unless I was extremely judicious with my time and energy.”

When I read that I’m like: yes.  I bet she orders from King Soopers pick up too. 

Growing up, my sisters and I were expected to help bring in the groceries when my mom got home.  Sometimes we’d try to carry lots of bags all at once; they were paper bags, so we’d have to rush to the house before the bags broke. 

My dad would chastise us, saying, don’t take the lazy man’s load. And we’d sigh and put a few down, and make more trips. 

But later, we started to resist his advice with a quick retort:

“It’s not a lazy man’s load, dad; it’s an efficient woman’s load.”

Efficiency can be a way to survive, it can feel like freedom, even if fleeting.

And besides, inefficiency is often a luxury, made possible by having enough resources to create margin in your life, time to dawdle, or even loiter as in that great essay from Ross Gay we read back in December. 

If you can pay someone to clean your house, prepare your meals, tend to your lawn – you can be quite inefficient in all other things and still manage to accomplish the basics requirements of being a grown up today.    

Inefficiency is a luxury, and at the same time, poverty is a recipe for inefficiency. Without reliable transportation, employment, housing – and all the stuff that comes in a house – a washer and dryer, a shower, a place to put all of your things for easy access – inefficiency is destiny. 

It’s one of the traps of poverty, that everything that is obvious, easy and seamless to middle class folks becomes maddeningly time-consuming and demoralizing when those basics aren’t reliable. 

Which makes acquiring those basics a colossal feat. 

It helps to explain why, when you talk to low wage workers today, you mostly hear resignation about those soul-sucking conditions; and gratitude, for a steady job.     

~~~~~

Anyone remember the book The Jungle from high school English? Upton Sinclair’s 1906 expose on the meat-packing industry was a part of a journalistic reform movement known as the Muckrakers. 

For about a decade at the turn of the century, the Muckrakers investigative reporting led to one systemic change after another – from safety conditions for coal miners to child labor laws to election fairness and anti-corruption measures – and yes, reforms for the meat-packing industry.

I was thinking about The Jungle this week, and the muckrakers, because sometimes we forget that there is nothing inevitable or mandatory about the world we live in. 

Our economy, our society, our culture – this crisis of human dignity we find ourselves in – there is nothing inevitable or mandatory about any of this. 

Despite a pervasive popular pull towards efficiency as our “existential” purpose today, our faith reminds us that we hold both the agency, and the responsibility to create a world that amplifies and celebrates our humanness – our true existential purpose which our faith names as our utterly inefficient interdependent humanness – we hold both the agency and the responsibility that celebrates our humanness, rather than suppresses it.

For example, I’ve been thinking that the most counter-cultural value we could promote today might be patience.  Patience that is not to be confused with complacency, but rather, patience connected to an unwavering commitment to the long-haul faith we explored a couple Sundays ago.

To create a world that amplifies and celebrates our humanness would require that we practice and prize a faithful patience, that we become experts in patience, model it, and teach it, declare it our good news for a world overly focused on instant success and frictionless ease.

Over the past few weeks, in this series about the future, I keep imagining all the people from the past who worked for a future they did not live to see.  People like James Reeb that we heard about last week.  Or even Roy Jones whose sermon we heard a couple weeks ago. 

All those whose dreams we inherit.  Our grandparents, great-grandparents.  Our ancestors – familial, spiritual. 

This year marks the 100 anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, so I’ve been especially tuned in to the stories of the suffragettes, women who worked to get the vote.  I imagine they must’ve taken so much ridicule, including from their own husbands. They probably had so many reasons to stop turning up at the White House, for march, stop writing letters, stop speaking up. 

They weren’t perfect, especially in terms of race and racism. 

And still, their willingness to plant trees they would not live to harvest means that no one here today, has ever lived in a time when women could not vote. 

The idea is as unimaginable to us as it is to my son to wait 3 weeks for a sweatshirt.

I wonder, what future will we invest in today so that 100 years from now, all those who gather together will take for granted its reality?  And I wonder, how we will cultivate the patience required for such commitment? 

Afterall, the future does not have to be faster, more automatic, more stimulating in the ways it’s been imagined in movies.  The future could be slow.  Manual. Even, boring.  The future could also be connective, personal, playful, real.

Every day, we get to decide, in the smallest moments, private moments – the future we will make. 

 So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it

Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.

Wendell Berry’s manifesto is brilliant, instructive for our crisis of human dignity – most of all the last line of the poem – two words that often feel like a shock when it is read; fitting for a poem that urges us to remain unpredictable and wild – he says:

Practice resurrection.

In these days, let us remember that it is never too late to begin again; to create life anew; to forge an entirely new way.  It is never too late to forge a future where all of humanity flourishes, freely, and together. 

“Later that night, still turning the parable over in his head, the rich man returned to the place where the disciples slept. He found Jesus at the fire and sat down with him. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I think understand who my neighbor is. But . . . how shall I love myself?’” 

For all our talk of connection, it is also true that there are times when we must disconnect to protect ourselves from harm. How do we maintain healthy boundaries while still upholding our sense of interconnection?

“Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.” How do we stay true to our deepest sense of self in a world that demands so much compromise on our parts?

Reading: The House Called Tomorrow by Alberto Rios 

Just over three years ago, we convened an impromptu evening service – the night after the national election.   

People poured in to social hall for the potluck meal we invited before the service – they came urgently, and also cautiously, seeking comfort and community.

More and more people came.  All ages.  Some who were already here started pulling out extra tables, first from the closets in the social hall, then running across to the other building to set up more – until we ran out of tables and then people rotated, after they finished eating, giving up their seats, willingnly.   So many people came we spilled out into the patio. It was cold, but no one complained.  

And the food – there was so much food.  Homemade mac and cheese and the biggest box of pizza I’ve ever seen; all the salads and fried chicken and mashed potatoes.  Comfort foods.

Every table filled with people – most I knew, but many I didn’t.

I remember from the service – Sean’s prayer – he’d just been at Foothills a couple months, and his prayer had a swear word in it, and for a moment I was like oh no – but everyone laughed through their tears, because it was the most honest thing anyone had said yet. 

I also remember the candles, one by one, lit – just like we do on Christmas Eve – like we did four times this Christmas Eve – and we sang together –in that silent night we sang – 

There is More Love, somewhere
There is More Love, somewhere
I’m gonna keep on – till I find it.
There is More Love, somewhere

As we were planning the service, I confess feeling unsure what to do, I mean, unsure how to make it clear that we still did not mean to say liberal religion is the same as liberal politics.  I wanted to say then, as I’ve wanted to say so many times since then: this is different. 

Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford says it this way, 

“This is not about Republicans and Democrats; it’s about ways of being human in the 21st century, and certain ways are loud now and ascendant, ways of being which are in fact choices, and they are beneath us as a people: ways such as greed and the celebration of greed, lying and the celebration of lying, sexual predation and its celebration, military bravado, disdain for the poor, for working people and the land, white nationalism (whether spoken in code or explicitly), and more – all amplified and sanctified, and increasingly normalized, and thus infused with power.”

This is different.

The pain in those days, the pain that led so many to come for an impromptu prayer service at the Unitarian Church on a cold night in November – was about all of this that was suddenly our reality – our present tense – we came seeking to tend to this feeling that as Adrienne Rich wrote, “my heart is moved by all I cannot save – so much has been destroyed.”

We came grieving the present, and we came grieving the past – the past, as in – the prior year, which, if you remember the election process, had been brutal – but also the past as in, history. 

In that moment, the weight of history was everywhere.  What we as a country have been capable of in the past, capable of doing to one another, doing to anyone considered “other” – the ways we had failed to truly reckon with and reconcile let alone redeem our history – and what that says about what we might do again in the future. 

We came grieving the present, and the past, but most of all, the thing that brought many of us to gather was about the future.  The future we had imagined we were headed for, that we were carving out by our efforts, small though they may be – but still worthy, possible – the future we imagined – for our children, and grandchildren, the legacy our lives would leave – I quoted the great 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker that next Sunday:

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways.  I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

In the late Fall of 2016, we gathered because many of us were suddenly unsure if we agreed with him.  

Which was then, and is still, new territory for progressive religion.

For all the ways we have evolved over the centuries, one anchor has been our unwavering optimism about the future. Not superficial, or naïve optimism –  though that is always a danger and sometimes a reality – but an unwavering loyalty to seeing the world as it is – in both its beauty, and its brokenness, and saying – we can do better, and we will.

As one of our hymns says:  we revere the past, but we trust the dawning future more.

We are so oriented to the future – as a religion, that we are technically what some would call an apocalyptic religion.  

I know, it’s probably not what you’d think of when you think of Unitarian Universalism – but as theologian Rebecca Parker says,

“our version of the apocalyptic dream doesn’t imagine that old worlds are destroyed and new ones created simply by the act of a transcendent god.  We put ourselves into the drama. We assign ourselves the task of dismantling evil empires, and we go to work hammering together the New Jerusalem.  In place of the thousand years of wrong will come the thousand years of right.”

For a lot of our history, actually, it wasn’t just that we were up for this task, but we believed could get it done with relative speed.  Like, in the course of our next five-year plan. Or at least, we could make good progress.

A lot of the twentieth century was about coming to terms with the fact that this was – let’s say, naïve.  Starting with holocaust.  And then, the unfinished work of the Civil Rights era. And then the unresolved conflicts around Vietnam, and the devastating toll that war took, the growing economic gaps and political polarization of the 1980s and 90s –  none of these broke our faith in doing our part to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice – but we did start to realize, it might take a bit longer than we first thought. 

That Sunday after the election in 2016, I talked about the LONG arc of history.  Affirming that the future seek exists far beyond a single lifetime.   And so we cannot rely on the hope of results to keep us going – but instead remember that, as Vaclav Havel says, 

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” 

Since then, I have seen so many people – in this community, so many of you – working to take this in, and live it out – continuing to show up even when your hearts have been broken, serving in and beyond our community, listening to each other, and learning – pushing yourselves to grow, even when it has been really uncomfortable.  

Together, we keep finding our way back to gratitude, and joy – even when it has felt impossible.  We have learned what it means to be hope for each other. 

It has been beautiful to witness – to see in real life what courageous love looks like. 

And still, in these same years, especially as time has gone on, I have also witnessed our inevitable weariness, and a feeling sometimes articulated, sometimes not – that maybe we can just fix this in the next national election – which is, suddenly, within sight.

We know, we really do – that change will take a long time.  But also, it’s so hard to accept that we are working for a future we will not live to see.   

It reminds me of when we had Ingrid here in sanctuary with us, in the fall of 2017, many of wrestled with the hopelessness of her case – how long it would likely go on. Despite the recent pardon for her felony conviction granted by Governor Polis, even today, her path is narrow. 

Basically, she has committed to remaining in sanctuary until there is real comprehensive immigration reform. Likely, that is her only path out of sanctuary. 

It is a noble, courageous commitment.  

But here’s what I wonder – if she was here with us, still – would we be able to keep showing up for her on that path? Knowing that the journey would be long – like, years long, with many, many setbacks, and not many victories? How would we respond to a journey like that? 

Of course, there are different ways to think about sanctuary as a strategy for immigration reform – but I still think the question is good for us to think about – what it means for us to consider this work our faith calls us to dedicate our lives to – that is the future our faith orients us to – that it is the work of our whole lives? 

Or, maybe just to start – what it would mean to think about it as work for the next decade? From now, until 2030.  

I mean, whatever your work is – your place in the call of courageous love – how might it shift things when you actively consider that this is work you’ll be in for the next ten years? 

How would it shift your pace? 

The resources you’d need? 

The spiritual practices? 

The people you would show up for, and with? And how would you show up for them, and when?

When immigration activist and minister Alexia Salvatierra was here a few months ago, she spoke about the need to learn to grieve while you are in the work – if this really is the work of your whole lives- then we must acknowledge that our hearts are moved by what we cannot save – Name the pain of knowing how much has been destroyed –

If we are committed to a future beyond our own lifetimes, we need to learn to grieve with each other regularly, practice speaking aloud our grief, be present for others in their grief, make a space for grief as a regular companion – and learn its ways, its rhythms not as an aberration of life, something to minimize or escape, but instead we must know it as central to human existence, central to what it means to live, to love.

For many of us, this is not just challenging, we literally wouldn’t know where to begin.

So many of us are taught to avoid feeling – anything! In public – especially, let alone grief, or pain – we learn to shut it off and get over it – we learn to protect ourselves.  It’s what I’d call maladaptive coping – and it’s passed down generationally – we learn it in our families. 

Luckily there are those among us for whom this is not the case.  People we can learn from, and with. People who William James, in his book, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” called “twice born,” by which he meant, those who have confronted tragedy and loss, fully – and come out the other side. Come out not the same, but changed. Transformed.  People who bear the scars of suffering, and survival –often these are people of color, people who have known poverty – especially generationally, queer folx, the disabled community, immigrants….to learn from, to honor them – to learn from and honor not just those who are alive today, but those who came before –

I was remembering this week this poem from Unitarian Universalist minister Theresa Hardy:

I got out of bed this morning because of all those who had to get out of bed before me: 
Martin and Coretta, the day after his home was bombed. (What did they tell the children?).
John Lewis, after nearly escaping death on the Edmund Pettus bridge.
My ancestors, who were dragged to the U.S. in chains,
laid flat like chattel on ships… and survived.
They survived and got out of bed each morning.
I am sick and tired and grieving and ready to quit this country.
But I got out of bed, shamed by the thought of letting these ancestors down.
And for now that’s how I am getting through this day.

To keep showing up for this future that is beyond what we will see, we must turn again and again to these guides, and so many others whose lives never saw the results of their efforts but on whose steadfast commitment rests many of the freedoms we know today. 

In the last few days, I confess however, that I have been less worried about cultivating patience and commitment towards a far-off apocalypse. Because instead, I’ve started to think – maybe it’s already here.

How can you not think of Apocalypse when you see the images of Australia burning? Or read about the animals, and habitat destroyed? Or the helplessness of knowing that those in power continue to deny the science, knowing what inaction will mean. Thinking already of the summers ahead.  How can you think about any of this and think anything other than: this is the world ending.

Which is another way to think about the future – to imagine that the destruction we might fear, the overturning of the world, which is to say – our potential for rebirth is not in some future time, it’s now. 

That this moment we are in is not about the darkness of the womb rather than the tomb – which is a message Valerie Kaur offered a couple of years ago as a message of hope – that this darkness we are in is not about death, but about life – but if we are actually living in the middle of the apocalypse,  it’s both the womb, and the tomb.  

That’s what Apocalypse is, afterall– the ending which signals the beginning; deconstruction that can bring rebirth. It’s another reason Rebecca Parker says to turn to those guides who have bear the scars of suffering, and survival – because they are living evidence that resurrection is possible. 

Civil rights leader and my teacher Dr. Vincent Harding used to say we are midwives for a world trying to be born – and, he’d also say, we are hospice chaplains for a world that is dying. 

We cannot neglect either of these roles, and the tenderness they invite, the embodied human community they necessitate – the chaos they imply, the pain, the risk, the circling around.

It’s an image that makes sense to me in the middle of catastrophe.  Just think of what it is like to find yourself in the middle of a true disaster – there is so much kindness, generosity – tables are set up and we sit out on the patio in the cold without complaint, and we eat mac and cheese and light candles even though we don’t know where we’re going or what will happen next. 

“The bad do not win—not finally….”

Alberto Rios was inspired to write his poem “The House Called Tomorrow” by the journey of his father, an immigrant from southern Mexico, and his mother, an immigrant from Northern England – they met, fell in love, and their family grew up together – in the border town of Nogales Arizona –  

The bad do not win – not finally        
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. 
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need
To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going.”

That night in November, when we sang about there being more love somewhere – we knew it then.  The somewhere we were longing for – it was already here. And in so many moments since then we know it again. 

Everything we need for the world ending, and for its beginning again – its and our resurrection – is right here. 

In you, in me, in the choice to keep showing up with tenderness, imagining something more. 

Here is the future we’re longing for, this is the land called tomorrow, the tomorrow that is already today.

January 6 is Epiphany, the day legend says the Magi arrived at the cradle of the infant Jesus, having followed a star to Bethelehem. What meanings might we draw from these mysterious travelers? And what about our own epiphanies and guiding stars? The Dolejsi family joins us as storytellers and Yelena Mealy offers music.

Thresholds are sacred. Religions of all kinds, cultures of all times and places, have ways to mark the moments when we are on a threshold between one state of being and another.

As a culture, the United States is a bit lacking in rituals for such moments.  We mark weddings, of course, and deaths, and births and graduations. But it’s a little thin considering all the many, many thresholds that we cross in our lives.

On the other hand, we are a greatly diverse culture, weaving together many cultures with all their riches of millennia of human development. And so we can all learn from the very beautiful traditions that exist among us to mark thresholds, whether or not they are from the cultures in which we personally grew up. For example, some cultures, such as Korea and China, mark the 100th day of life. The Diné, the people of the Navajo nation, mark a baby’s first laugh. Many cultures mark a time of coming of age: 12 or 13 years for a Bat or Bar Mitzvah to mark the taking on of adult responsibility in the Jewish world, 15 years to mark a girl’s becoming a woman in much of Latin America, etc. Around the world, people have devised rituals as needed.

And yet sometimes we feel them to be necessary and don’t have them available to us. When we don’t have such rituals and know we are upon a threshold, we may seek them out or create them. Many feel the lack of a ritual to mark the end of a marriage. We have so many to mark its beginning, but nothing to mark its end. So some people crossing the threshold that is divorce have created “marriage wakes” or other rituals to honor that momentous threshold, to honor the beauty of what is on both sides: the life shared and all the hopes of that marriage, and the new life that awaits on the other side. I think that part of the attraction of neo-Paganism for so many, including Unitarian Universalists, is that it pays attention to large and small thresholds and provides—creates—new rituals to recognize those moments.

And UU congregations do have our own threshold rituals. We have Coming of Age services, sharing of joys and sorrows, the welcome of new members, the dedication of children when they arrive, the memorial celebration of someone among us when they depart, the care that we give each other at times of sickness and birth and dying. Bringing a meal to someone who has just emerged from surgery or who has lost a loved one isn’t just a pragmatic matter meant to help out with a daily task that has become difficult. It is also a way of honoring the occasion and witnessing—being present for, and listening to—a time of transition. It is an offering and a celebration.

Physical thresholds, literal doorways, get a lot of attention around the world for the same reason that we need to have attention given to these figurative thresholds: they are symbolic of those great moments of in-between. The lintel of a Maori meeting house, for example, is elaborately carved with holy images, because as one passes below it, one is moving from one holy domain into another. The outer doors and gates of a Jewish home bear mezuzot, which hold excerpts from the holy Torah, to remind those who pass through of their most important commitments as they come and go—to point out Who is with you as you cross every threshold of your life. In ancient Greece, each part of a doorway had its god: the lintel had a god, the posts had a god, the door, the hinges, the sill (the threshold itself). All of these practices of marking physical doorways, like the practices of marking the figurative doorways of our lives, are meant to say the same thing to us: Pause here with awareness. Know that when you are in the space between, you are in a sacred space of your life.

But why are thresholds sacred? I think there are two basic reasons. They are about identity: they are a place of acute awareness or questioning of who we are, what we are, to what community of people and land we belong.  And they are about change: shedding one identity and taking up another. In other words, they are about being and becoming, that great balance of our lives.

The origin of the word is exactly what you might think from its sound: threshold comes from thresh, threshing being the removing of a grain from its inedible shell. And when we are upon a threshold, we are in the act of stepping out—like the grain that is losing its skin—stepping out of our old identity and stepping into a new one that is yet unknown.

So a question for us as a spiritual community is: what do we need at such moments? What can we provide for each other?

We need to honor what is on both sides of the doorway: to celebrate the whole of our lives, the self we are leaving behind as well as the self toward which we are going.

We need something—some words, some music, some ceremony—that will recognize the significance of this moment, not leave it unmarked as if it means nothing. And we need one another.

Thresholds can be particularly challenging when our culture—which might be our community, our family, our larger culture—doesn’t have a way to recognize the threshold. So I’d like to invite you to take a moment to pause and reflect silently on a time when you might have been at a threshold in your life (perhaps right now), and our culture offered no particular way to recognize it as such.

And before you take a moment of silence for that, I want to acknowledge that in some way it is, if not a trick question, then a tricky question, because to some extent it’s hard even to perceive a threshold when no one else is recognizing it. So here are some feelings and thoughts that might be a clue that we are crossing a threshold, that we are in that in-between land:

We might have an awareness of a first or last of something. We might have tears. There might be a sense of momentousness. Time might get strange: things slowing down or speeding up much too fast.

We might have a powerful sensation that there ought to be music for this moment—some kind of inner soundtrack.

We may have a strong desire to talk to other people about what is happening to us, or a desire to talk to ourselves about it—in a journal, or by the creation of some private ritual marking the moment.

Just take a moment to reflect on whether you have had such a moment.

************

It’s never too late to honor a threshold. If there is a threshold that made you think, “Mm, that never really got marked as such,” in some sense you are still there. And that’s fine. You might always be, in some way. But it is not too late for others to help you to honor it, to recognize that you are in a very sacred place.

Of course, the threshold isn’t always where and when we think it is. It’s not always the spot that gets a highlight, even from our community.

And it’s not only a moment. When is it that love arises, so that people know they wish to marry? Is it just one moment? It’s certainly not the moment in which they say “I do.” When does it die, and they decide to part? That also is not just one moment. Even with birth: a person is born in an instant of gasping for breath, but childbirth takes hours, and gestation takes months, and the preparation for parenthood and for new life takes lifetimes. A person dies, perhaps, in a discrete moment, when the last breath is drawn or the brain ceases its hum, but dying can be a journey of years. We may mark a single symbolic moment later, like an anniversary, birthday, or date of death, but when we are on the threshold, it is much wider than something we can cross in one moment. We feel ourselves in the in-between for long, long periods of time. And that can be very beautiful and sweet and good, and it can, at the same time, be excruciatingly painful.

This, perhaps, is when we need each other the most. This is when we need words and art, music and symbols, stories and the squeeze of a hand, to say: Yes, this time is sacred. It is a time of becoming for you; it is a time of being for you. Time has slowed down and held us here, in mid-step, in the no-one’s land between what we used to be and what we will be. Here we are, not knowing exactly what or who we are in this moment.

So why are thresholds sacred? Because they teach us to live fully in that in-between and that unknowing.

And why is this so important? Because that’s where we really live all the time. All the time. Honoring threshold times is a practice that helps us to live more fully in the in-between, uncertain, traveling place where we always, in some way, are.

Now, the arrivals are real too. Being a wife is real, and being a widow is real. Being a child and being an adult. Being single and being married. Being a student, being a worker. Each of those states is real and we try to live there fully too. And also, in the deepest sense, we are always and at every moment poised between two states, between two times, between two selves.

To be here, fully present when we are neither inside the temple nor outside it, neither child nor adult, neither spouse nor widow, but right on the threshold, in that state of in-between and unknowing, is the hope of our lives. It is the only time that we ever really have.

There is a Jewish prayer that is heard at every holiday and every momentous occasion. The beginning is the standard for a short Jewish prayer of blessing: Baruch atah adonai . . . Blessed are you, Lord, Ruler of the universe. This one closes, shehecheyanu—who has kept us alive—v’kiyimanu—and protected us—v’higianu l’azman hazeh—and brought us to this time. It is called the Shehecheyanu after its key word: who has kept us alive, or you might say, kept us in life, or more simply, en-livened-us. One says this prayer at beginnings: the first night of a long holiday such as Hanukah, the first time one eats matzah during Passover; also at the birth of a child, and upon moving into a new home. It is a threshold prayer, one that may be said at any moment that is a new experience or an infrequent experience, to mark it as a time of transition. And what is it that is being said on each such occasion? Shehecheyanu—“who has enlivened us.” So that we might remember what has brought us life, so that we might remember: this is life. No matter what is happening, no matter how in-between we feel, and how in flux our lives are, we are alive and we are grateful for this very moment.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110095737/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_01/02.mp3

In between, liminal, that space where we wait.
Between moments; events, results, action, no action.
To stand on the threshold, waiting for something to end,
And something new to arrive, a pause in the rumble of time.
Awareness claims us, alert, a shadow of something different.

In between invitation and acceptance.
In between symptom and diagnosis.
In between send and receipt of inquiry and question.
In between love given and love received.

Liminality, a letting go, entering into confusion,
ambiguity and disorientation.
A ritual begun, pause … look back at what once was,
Look forward into what becomes.
Identity sheds a layer, reaches into something uncomfortable to wear.

In between lighting of the match and the kindling of oil.
In between choosing of text and the reading of words.
In between voices and notes carried through the air into ears to hear.
In between, creation thrusts ever forward.

Social hierarchies may disassemble and structures may fall.
Communities may revolt or tempt trust.
Tradition may falter or creativity crash forward.
Leaders may step down or take charge.
The people may choose or refuse.

In between, storm predicted, the horizon beckons.
In between, theology of process reminds us to step back.
In between, where minutia and galaxies intermingle with microbes and mysteries.
In between, liminal, that space where we wait: Look, listen, feel, breathe.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110095655/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_01/04.mp3

Today we’ll be exploring the idea of Janus, the Roman god of doorways and transitions.

I preached from this sermon manuscript at Universalist National Memorial Church, on December 25, 2019 with the lectionary texts from the Letter to Titus and the Gospel of Luke.

The service format was drawn from the twelfth order of service (for Christmas Day) from the 1937 Services of Religion prepended to the Hymns of the Spirit. The responsive reading used the alternative, second-person text of the Magnificat from the English Language Liturgical Consultation.

Merry Christmas.

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me to preach again, and thank you for welcoming me back.

Plainly put, Christmas sermons tend to write themselves. The stories are well-known and well-loved, and they say something different to us in our different stages of life. And we fill in the details with the singing, the shared companionship and the general warm feeling. My sincere hope for anyone struggling now (and struggling with Christmas in particular) that these moments will bring you rest and refreshment; you’re among friends.

And yet for the familiarity of the Christmas stories — I learned part of today’s lesson in King James English through repeated viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas — it takes years of living to recognize what strange stories they are, and to appreciate the differences between them. Today, we have two lessons from the Gospel of Luke, the most familiar version of Jesus’ origin story. We heard the part about the manger, the shepherds and the actual birth from chapter two, and Mary’s song from chapter one, which we read as the responsive reading. Though considered separately, they are part of a whole. In Mary’s song, she recounts her place in cosmic history. We took her part, and declared to God:

You have mercy on those who fear you from generation to generation. You have shown strength with your arm and scattered the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. You have filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

This is perhaps less familiar than the angel and Bethlehem, but it is very much part of the same story.

Mary speaks of those who fear God; they will receive mercy. Similarly, the shepherds were terrified: God was being revealed for them, as an infant and nearby. Yet it’s awkward to speak of fear and think of the love of God at the same time. Too often, we fear that which can and would hurt us. This is not what we mean by the fear of God. Rather we also fear what we cannot understand, and we fear disruption to our customary and ordinary life, even it means something good might be coming.

Divine living is not customary or ordinary, and we can scarcely understand how it might come about. That itself is frightening, but also gives us cause for hope. God’s ways are not our ways. In Mary’s time and ours, the proud get their way, the mighty get their way, the rich get their way and it’s hard living for the rest. When Jesus said “the poor will be with you always” we was not mandating poverty, but recognizing what had always been, casting a light on it, dignifying the suffering rather than ignoring it. Divine living is living with a God who knows us and sees us, and desires our good. And God acts by confusing our expectations. Thus a baby, not a warrior or Caesar. Thus Bethlehem, not Rome. Thus a word and not a sword.

And so too, the confusing, unexpected love that God shows us. It can make us afraid because we may not want to love so deeply. God would not hurt us, but love often does. It breaks our hearts, but also gives us life. We can be afraid of being loved so deeply. Consciousness of God’s love pulls out out ourselves, and away from anything low and self-serving. It can lead us to a life of serving one another, as Deacon Eliserena spoke of on Sunday. Is this how God scattered the proud, and cast down the mighty? And it is how God lifts up the lowly?

Or as the author of the letter to Titus puts it, “when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy…” We do not earn this love and cannot earn it; it’s God’s unreserved gift. Accept it. Let it take you to a moment of tenderness, answered by gentle tears. Let it take you, like the shepherds, to the manger.

And then, on returning, what? Where then do the Christmas stories take us? At the very least, this tender goodness and loving kindness should lead us to reflect on how we regard one other in families, among friend or at work, as a nation and in the world. Have been too hard on one another? And in doing, have you been too hard on yourself? For the gift and goal of Christmas is that nearness to God which draws out our likeness to God. Day by day, we can (by God’s grace) strengthen and express those same divine qualities, and above all, a heartfelt love for the world and the people in it. By it, we fulfill the angel’s song of peace and goodwill.

God bless each and all of you this Christmas morning.

If you are looking for a Christmas Day service in Washington, D.C., I’ll be preaching and leading worship at Universalist National Memorial Church,  at the corner of 16th and S Streets, N. W. at 11 am.  (Map)

Update! Four well-loved carols!

We will meet in the parlor — easier to heat and cheerier for a small congregation — with refreshment to follow.  (There will, of course, also be a Christmas Eve service at 8 pm.)  Hope to see you there.

Imagine you are living in a time with the long reign of a narcissistic dictator, a rise that meant multiple generations living with tyranny, oppression, fear.  Imagine for many years your people have been terrorized and even killed by those in power.

Imagine that for many years you have not been able to gather or practice the religion and customs of your birth – all those things that mean the most to you have been outlawed.

And then imagine, hope against hope, that a small band of rebels, without enough resources or enough people – without any real reason to think they could be successful – manage to overthrow those in power, and liberate everyone into a new and possible freedom.

This is the story of Hanukkah. 

The story of the Jewish people after the rebellion of the “small band” known as the Maccabees.

Finally, they who had lived on the edge of despair for so long would be able to return to their temple, which was for them a place of security and memory and hope.

They were celebrating, purifying, remembering and re-claiming – the Assyrian army had been defeated, they were free. 

In the historical record, this is the “miracle” of Hanukkah. 

Just this.  And it is enough. 

A small community of people who refuse to cooperate with their own oppression, refuse to accept the world as it was, even after generations of it being that way – and a small group continuing to act until liberation finally becomes reality. This is an amazing miracle. 

The rabbinical record, however, keeps going – past this part of the story.

The rabbinical record reminds us that for many years before the uprising – when the Jews were hiding in caves, and fending off arrest – they had missed their great festival of Sukkot, which must be celebrated in the temple, and so now that they had returned, they could begin the ritual as their promises with God required.

As they began, however, they realized that the Assyrians had destroyed all but one night’s worth of oil for the lamp.

They needed 8 days’ worth – anything less would not allow a true re-dedication or commitment to begin again as a religious community and as a people.

After all they had been through, it mattered that they do it right, and completely – it mattered that they not let the light go out.

And as the story goes – rather than the lamp staying lit for one day, the oil lasted for the whole 8 days.

These 8 days are why Hanukkah is celebrated for 8 nights, with each night lighting a new candle on the menorah.

In the rabbinical telling, this was the miracle – that the oil that lasted far beyond what it should have – that’s how you end up with latkes and other oil-heavy foods as a part of the Hanukkah celebration! 

Both of these moments – the uprising of the Maccabees, and the oil that lasted – are miraculous, amazing, and inspiring –  and yet they aren’t what has always struck me as the most miraculous truth at the heart of this story.

For me, the miracle is in something less showy, more routine. 

The miracle, for me, is the choice that the Jewish people made to light the lamp in the first place.  

The choice that made the 8 nights of light possible. 

They made the choice to light the lamp, even though it was hopeless.

They made the choice even though they probably didn’t think it would make a difference.

Something in them persuaded them to expect that something else could be at work. 

Something beyond their own effort, their own vision.

In making that choice they chose to believe, as Arandhati Roy writes, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” 

This choice was the miracle. Expecting the miracle was the miracle. 

Because by their expectations, they made the miracle possible. 

This is the power of expectations.

Since researcher Robert Rosenthal began studying expectations and their impact in the 1950s, it’s been repeatedly shown that what we expect shapes not only our own experiences, but also others’ experiences, and then all of these accumulate so that all of these small, yet often meaningful ways, our expectations can impact – as in change –  Reality.  

For example.  “One study described golfers who were told they had a ‘lucky’ ball. They made more putts than when using an ‘ordinary’ ball.” 

Another: “Highly-trained weight lifters out-do their personal bests when they believe they’ve taken a performance booster.”

And repeatedly, “studies have shown that a teacher’s expectations can raise or lower a student’s IQ score.” 

Not just their grades.  Their IQ.

This was one of the earliest discoveries from Rosenthal – how a teacher’s unconscious bias – specifically racial bias – impacts how well a child learns – because, for example,

when a teacher expects more from a child, they will wait longer for the child to answer, and take a longer time explaining a subject they may seem not to understand. 

These are barely-noticeable, usually sub-conscious shifts resulting from our expectations – with a huge collective impact.

This is what we might call the placebo effect – this long-disparaged idea where we can be fooled by “fake” medicines that trick us into believing we are being healed –  but here it’s being played out socially, collectively. 

Except- what we are learning is that far from “fake,” the placebo effect is actually a manifestation of a very real, very complex scientific truth – it’s just that rather than the medicine, or more generally – the change- coming from a pill, it comes from within us – from our brains. 

This is the basic premise of science writer Erik Vance’s fascinating 2016 book, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. 

Our brains, Vance describes, are wired for the future – they are constantly assessing what’s going to happen next.  Almost entirely subconsciously. 

This is connected to the “time warp” Sean spoke about last week – because the way that our brains predict the future is by drawing on what they know from the past. 

All the time, our brains are taking experiences from the past – and by the past, that might mean two seconds ago or two years ago – and using it to predict the future, and therefore guide our choices in the present. 

And then – as I feel like I’ve been saying in every sermon lately: our brains don’t like to be wrong.  

Our brains don’t want those expectations they are making to be wrong. 

So sometimes, amazingly, instead of shifting our expectations, our brains shift reality. 

Let me offer an example:

Returning to golf.   If we know from the past, about an experience that felt like we were playing with a “lucky ball” because we played better than we ever played before – when we play with a ball we are told is lucky – our brains expect the outcome to be the same. 

And so our body and mind automatically make small, unconscious choices that can ultimately all add up to playing a better game. 

We are more focused.  Less anxious. More confident, clear.

All because our brains want the expected future to line up with the actual future. 

What’s wild is that it doesn’t always matter if you know that it may not actually be a lucky ball.  Acting as if it is – like, the “theatre” around having a lucky ball – this is the thing that hooks your sub-conscious to engage the things that will produce the original expectation. 

One of my favorite stories from Vance’s reporting is the story of an experimental Parkinson’s treatment – not a pill, surgery.  Participants in the study come in for brain surgery – but then some get the surgery, and some don’t.  And the doctors make the same marks on your skull so you can’t tell. 

Well, one patient – after he had his “surgery”, it changed his life.  “He went from having trouble walking and talking to — heli-skiing. He did a half-marathon. He climbed the backside of Half Dome.”

And everyone was thrilled – they thought they cured Parkinson’s. But then two years later, when it was time to un-blind the study, his doctors were shocked. Because he was one who didn’t actually get the surgery.

Again, it’s important to say this – it wasn’t that it was all fake.  The experience itself activated real physiological differences in the brain, in the body – that literally created this patient’s expected future. 

Of course, expectations do not entirely determine reality – as Chris Berdik describes in his book Mind Over Mind –  there are limits to what the placebo effect can do. 

When my son broke his arm last month, we couldn’t simply “expect” him to be healed, and make it so.  Expectations can’t fix poverty, racism, or the climate crisis.  I wish.  

Vance describes it like this: placebos can’t stop the disease, but they can often limit, even erase, the impact of the disease. 

Expectations shift things in small, often imperceptible ways.  As our expectations shift, small, imperceptible things shift in us, in our bodies, in our actions; and from these shifts, small, imperceptible things shift in others, and in the world around us.  And all of these small effects can end up making a big difference. 

There’s another story from the Talmud – a story of the Jewish people hundreds of years earlier, when they were slaves in Egypt – until a man named Moses led them to their freedom.

This story, is the moment when he’s try to do just that.  They’ve left Egypt, Moses is leading them to the Promised Land – until he finds himself at the edge of the Red Sea.

His people were all around him, hungry for liberation.  All Moses and his people had to do was go forward. Freedom was waiting.

Except for the sea. This big, deep, wide sea.

Moses looked to God, unsure what to do. But nothing happened.  The ocean remained wild, unfriendly, hopeless. 

Until, from the back of the crowd, a man named Nachshon pushed his way forward, and started walking into the sea.   

A regular guy who’d never heard a voice from a burning bush. In that moment, he decided what he could do – was keep walking.    

Moses stared at him. Others started to point and yell. What are you doing? You’ll drown!

But Nachshon just kept walking. He waded through the rising tide, the water hit his calves.

He kept walking. Water hit his waist.

He kept walking. The water came up to his chest, and then his shoulders. He kept walking, the water all around him. Until finally, it was at his nostrils, about to fill his lungs.

And it was at that moment, the Red Sea parted, and the Israelites could continue their journey to freedom, moving safely through the walls of water, safely through the sea.

His expectation of the miracle made the miracle possible. 

In the story of Hanukkah, when the Jewish people decided to expect something other than what all reason might’ve told them was possible, this is a story they would have remembered.

This is the memory – the collective memory that their brains would’ve used to shape a story about the future.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt – Hebrew scriptures say again and again –

so that when the question of whether or not they should step out to resist the oppressive regime; or whether they should light the lamp even though there was not enough oil – though the present reality said it was hopeless, their brains were sure something else was possible: freedom, and liberation.  

They expected a miracle – and made the miracle possible. 

Over the past few years, there have been many moments where I’ve seen people wonder if there’s anything they can do would make a real difference.  So many places today make the Hanukkah story feel not all that distant. In our world – and in our personal lives.

Which is why the Hanukkah story should feel like such good news for us in our lives today.  Because what Hanukkah reminds us – is that we can unlock the power of expectations – We can draw on our past in all the ways we have changed and healed and walked into the sea and it parted.  We can draw on a collective courage – which is one of our core values at Foothills.  

For as many times as I have seen people struggle to know how and when to act, just as often I have been bolstered by someone stepping out like Nachshon.  Making the way by just walking forward. 

This is a collective courage, a collective memory, that can fuel a collective expectation, and a collective liberation.

We don’t know what the future will bring – in our own lives, or in the world.

We don’t know if our actions will be enough.

But the only ways they could be, is 

if we act as if they are

If we take the step forward to light that first candle 

If we act in expectation of the miracle –  making the miracle possible. 

Rev. John tells a story or two about the spirit of the season

This week, we’ll gather together to tell one another the story of the rebirth of the Sun King.

(Be sure to join us on Saturday the 14th for a mask-making workshop for this year’s Yule pageant.)

This week, we’ll gather together to tell one another the story of the rebirth of the Sun King.

(Be sure to join us on Saturday the 14th for a mask-making workshop for this year’s Yule pageant.)

As we enter into the fullness of the Holiday season, let us take some time to explore what it means to be a people of Awe.

As we enter into the fullness of the Holiday season, let us take some time to explore what it means to be a people of Awe.

If you are looking for a Christmas Day service in Washington, D.C., I’ll be preaching and leading worship at Universalist National Memorial Church,  at the corner of 16th and S Streets, N. W. at 11am.  (Map)

We will probably meet in the parlor — easier to heat and cheerier for a small congregation — with refreshment to follow.  (There will, of course, also be a Christmas Eve service.)  Hope to see you there.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition does not limit our access to God’s love. This liberating fact means our on-ramp to God can be wherever we are.

The post Seeking God: An Unlimited Love appeared first on BeyondBelief.

Reading: Ross Gay’s Loitering

Sermon: Lose Your To-Do List

Growing up, I learned a special way to mark time at this time of year. Even better than the “Christmas Countdown app.” I learned to mark time with an Advent Calendar.  

In my family, we had a relatively elaborate Advent Calendar. Homemade by one of our family friends using felt. 

It was big, and green, with all the days of December marked out on the bottom, and a blank space at the top – where each day, we would add a piece of the nativity story, so that by the end of the month, the whole scene was there. 

Each day was actually a pocket, that held the different nativity characters and scenery – plus a paper with a story snippet corresponding to the felt you’d be putting up.  

And also, of course, a treat. 

Sometimes chocolate or candy canes.  Sometimes Barbie clothes. You never knew. 

It was all part of the magic.  I mean, the treats, but also, the repetition, the re-creation of the story, every year.  We knew it so well but we also loved acting like we didn’t. 

Where will Mary and Joseph stay? Where will she have the baby?

And why is there a dog in the nativity? Were there dogs in ancient Jerusalem?

Every year, these same questions.  

There’s something about repetition like this at the same time each year that helps you with the marking of time. 

Sometimes Unitarian Universalists can be overly committed to novelty; but there’s a lot of wisdom in tradition – Sean’s going to explore this more in a few weeks.

How turning to something familiar at the same time, in the same way – clues your brain, your body, your heart in to the passing of time – and in the telling of these ancient stories, locates you in a greater story, too.

It’s what Ross Gay is getting at when he talks about “taking one’s time.”  As in, claiming ourselves in time, to know this day as the day we have, this moment, this hour, this life – as ours.  And to know ourselves as a part of the great arc of all time, past, present, future. 

Advent calendars, and wreaths, and the whole idea of advent – are all ways to mark time –both in the countdown sense, and also to mark ourselves – where we are and when we are – which in turn, connects us more fully to who we are – in time, and in life.  In the greater story of life.

Fitting for the Christmas story of a baby arriving at an inconvenient time and inconvenient place – marking time in advent is much like the marking of time while pregnant.  Pregnancy too has countdown apps these days – but even without an app, pregnancy means being constantly aware of time: the months, and then the weeks, and the days remaining –  the baby growing, yes, but also the things you have left to do in that time so you can be ready – even though the whole time you suspect there’s nothing you can do that would make you ready.

You might think, given this core story of advent, that the text in Christian churches today – which is the first Sunday in Advent – would be the story of Mary’s pregnancy.  But because sexism, it’s another story – also about marking time.  

It’s a text known as the “little apocalypse,” because Jesus tells everyone that SOMETHING IS COMING SO WATCH OUT – KEEP AWAKE he says. 

Except he doesn’t really say what that something is.  He says there will be angels, with trumpets, on clouds.  Or, he says, there won’t be.  Instead, maybe it will come without warning, like a “thief in the night.”  So live all the time READY – BE READY all the time – even though there’s probably no way to really be ready. It kind of reminds me of…. 

“You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout…”

It’s not just Christian households that mark time differently this season, with a sense that we need to get ready for SOMETHING THAT’S COMING…

The world around us, the stories within us – deep stories, I mean childhood stories – create in us a sense of urgency, and even vigilance, to hurry, to get all the things done, get ready – SOMETHINGS COMING. 

So we shop, and decorate, bake and celebrate, sing and gather with family, rush to holiday concerts and school plays, wrap presents, lose the scissors, shovel the walkway, travel cross-country, buy new scissors, trim the tree, pull together end-of-the-year reports, find the scissors you first lost, hurry to office holiday parties, watch the grandkids, light the menorah, ski (not enough!), drink hot totties and eggnog lattes (too much!), fill up on pecan pie and mashed potatoes, and don’t forget, pass back and forth the holiday cold.

Especially in a year where Thanksgiving is compressed so closely with Christmas…..Instead of marking time with the steady, intentional presence I learned as a kid through my advent calendar

The magical marking of time that links when you are with who you are – many of us instead mark this time of year with a mad dash of activity and consumption and production until we don’t know what day it is, or even our own names…

…. I mean, I’d have to guess at least a few of you received the notice about our worship series “Slow Down” in your email in box this week – and were like: you’re kidding. 

 It’s why, when my partner heard that the title of my sermon for this week was “Lose Your To Do List,” she responded quickly with: “that gives me anxiety.” 

And I’d bet she’s not alone.  

How many of you would call yourself a “list” person? 

I love lists, actually.  Lists are a way that we keep track of all those things that need to get done – but that haven’t gotten done yet – it’s a way to manage the anxiety of all that remains unfinished….Because without a list – you might forget to do the thing by the time it needs to be done; or just as bad, you might obsess about the fact that it’s not done yet, so you keep turning it over and over in your brain with increasing anxiety and adrenaline…

Sound familiar?

This anxious response to our unfinished business is what’s called the Zeigarnik Effect. 

Remember I said a couple weeks ago how the brain likes things to be resolved – similarly, it likes things to be finished. Once we start something, our brains want to keep bringing it up into our short term memory over and over – until it gets done.  Now you officially understand the entire Netflix Marketing Strategy.  (Next Episode…)

This Effect was discovered through a study on food servers in restaurants.  You know how amazingly your server can remember all the details of your order…? But what’s interesting is that after you’ve paid, they forget all about you.  Every table blurs into another. 

Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik picked up on this, and through a series of studies figured out that before the tables were “done,” the servers turned the orders over and over in their short term memories – adrenaline, anxiety – but then as soon as it was done – huge relief – they could forget all about it. And they did. 

This is explains what I was describing can happen in the mad-dash of the holidays – you get to mid- January and you’re like – what happened?! What did we even do on Christmas this year? Who am I?! 

It’s not just the holidays though that we have to figure out how to live with “unfinished business.” All those things – you know need to be done, but aren’t…yet. So much of life is about learning this lesson – or at least, it’s the lesson my kids have been trying to teach me every day for the last 14 years….which IS the whole of their lives.  

My children love to come breaking in to whatever thing I’m trying so hard to finish – dinner, a sermon, a conversation – whatever I’m trying to GET DONE, and provide me, instead, with an alternative. 

They are, as one author put it, a constant invitation to be “willingly distracted by the present.” And occasionally…rarely – by some combination of grace and luck and lots of prior investment in my own spiritual health I sometimes manage to relish their lessons – and somehow sometimes I manage to remember that unfinished business is actually a sign that we’re doing life right….

Afterall, as Reinhold Neibuhr said, “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime.”

And so “taking our time” can also mean letting ourselves take up to do lists that will take longer than our own lives – letting ourselves feel a part of the larger arc that will keep moving, and dreaming, and doing, and being – long after we are gone. 

To live with “unfinished” things means knowing that even at our last breath, we will be growing and changing and striving – that is, still learning, still healing, still becoming – that we will be still living, for our whole lives –  which is the hope, right? Unfinished business is a sign of a life well lived….which is beautiful, except for our brains! 

Because our brains still love all things to be resolved.  So they are at work – all the time to get us to clean up those “loose ends” –  whether we’re talking about unfinished holiday shopping or unread emails or an unresolved relationship – all this unfinished business can occupy a huge amount of mental energy, and creates an inflated sense of urgency – whether we realize it or not – it gives us a sense that we’ll never have enough time. 

Which means, we can never really relax, let alone “loiter.”

Because we need to hurry and get done – whatever it is we’ve left undone.  Especially things we’ve actually started – even if that’s in a hypothetical way, as in, we’ve thought about them a LOT, written them down, maybe transferred them from one list to another…and another…and another….with the guilt growing with every transfer, and the dread of having not done it, needing to do it, wanting to get it done…..

Which is why – it’s true, we may be better off losing our to do list. 

Don’t panic. 

Because think about what happens when you lose your to do list.   First, if you’re like me, you might freak out a little. But then, you take a deep breath, and a get a clean piece of paper, and you start from the top. 

And you ask yourself – what is it that I need to do?

If you want to torture yourself, you try to remember what was on that old list, sure you’re forgetting something. 

Or, instead, and this is my invitation to you, not just in December, but across the whole of our lives….you can open the question up, in a fuller way – so that you access the deeper thought process, the slow thinking part of your brain, your heart, your body – the part of yourself that knows itself “in time,” and that knows in a deeper way what it means to “take your own time.” 

The invitation of this season, and the challenge is to linger here, in this slow space.  To remember that dream that is just yours. A dream that lives in your inhale, and your exhale, that will go on long past your last breath – a project that you will spend the rest of your life not-finishing. 

This is the thing to record on your new list. Record it first, and then again, and again. 

Start here, and then return here.  

Because in this life – that is inevitably filled with unfinished business – it matters what we leave undone.  

This is what the Zigarnik effect teaches us most of all – whatever is left on our to-do list is what is left on our heart.  And so we need to be so careful about the work we pick up, the work we begin, the work we call ours – because it will be what our brain turns towards over, and over, and over.

Which if it’s the right thing – can actually be for the good – after all, any big, complicated achievement, any work worth doing – relies heavily on the obsessive nature of the Zigarnik effect. 

It is the opportunity of this season – to mark time in this slower, more intentional way. To know when we are in a way that connects us to who we are. So that we can know – long after the light returns, and the walks are clear and dry, that we are not perpetually out-of-time but that we are held in time, connected, and whole, and enough.

The Buddha once addressed his monks, saying: “Monks, all is burning. What is burning? The eye is burning, forms are burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.” Called “The Fire Sermon”, it is one of the Buddha’s most famous discourses, and considered one of the most important. An allusion to the Fire Sermon appears in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” with a footnote stating that it “corresponds in importance to the ‘Sermon on the Mount’.” In our sermon we will talk about how the Fire Sermon is a keystone to understanding the Buddha’s remarkable discovery, 2500 years ago, about the essential nature of suffering, its cause, and its remedy.

John Ambrosiano is a retired physicist and dharma student who teaches meditation and dharma at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Los Alamos. He has been a student of the Vipassana teacher Matthew Flickstein for 12 years.

The call comes on a stunningly
ordinary telephone: the doctor
telling you the test is positive,
the agency saying that you have a child,
the lover who left so long ago
wanting to make amends.
Suddenly the earth tilts.
The path you thought to follow to the lake
heads sharply up the mountains.

The trail through the dense woods
comes around the bend into an open meadow.
Of course you weren’t prepared.
Who knows how to dress
for such a journey? Listen.
Inside your ear there is a high,
insistent ringing. What do you
suppose might happen
if you should answer?

Lynn’s book of poetry, Bread and Other Miracles, is available at lynnungar.com.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110085045/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/10.mp3

Two months ago, Sky was having one of his recurring nocturnal fights against a bad thing, a monster of some sort. Except instead of attacking me, as he usually did, he attacked the air off the side of the bed, and fell out. Gashed his forehead on the bedside table, and needed five stitches. Then refused to sleep in that bed again.

We dragged the mattress onto the floor, took the bed apart and put it in the cellar, and I headed to the furniture store. I bought a new frame that sits closer to the floor and a king size mattress to replace our double. I posted the old bed on Craigslist, and sold it. Given that all of our bedding was for a double bed, I bought new sheets and made a new king-size quilt. I’m glad we had the money to do all this.

Expect the Unexpected.

Also about two months ago, Sky said he felt he could no longer read books—it was too much work keeping track of the sentences, and he often forgot what he had just read and had to go back to the beginning of the sentence to try again. Maybe a Kindle would help? Fewer words on a “page” and he could make the font size whatever he wanted. We downloaded some books from the library. That was better than paper books, but still too hard.

He took an audio book out of the library. We hauled out our rarely-used sound system, and he gave it a try. That was better. With his headphones on, he could sit happily in his chair and “read.” I bought him a small, portable CD player so he could listen to books in other locations — in bed, on the porch, at another house.

Expect the Unexpected.

About a month ago, just as the weather was getting better, Sky started taking long bike rides again. Except he found himself having a hard time swinging his leg up over the seat to mount the bike. He found himself falling off his bike if he didn’t get a fast enough start. He became too scared to ride his bike anymore, even though he never was physically injured, just psychologically injured.

Today we talked about what to do. Did he want to try a recumbent bike? (Closer to the ground, mounted in a different way.) Did he want to try an adult tricycle? (Sturdy, for sure, but maybe too humiliating? After all, we’re in Vermont, not Florida.) Did he want to give up bike riding all together, and take up walking? No clear answers yet, we’re still thinking on it.

Expect the Unexpected.

A handful of times in the last month, Sky has walked away from a hot pan on the stove when he was preparing his lunch. Once the smoke detector went off. The other times I noticed, and sent him back to the stove. I am waiting, and watching, to see if it’s time for Sky to stop cooking for himself. I hate for that to happen, but I would also hate for the house to catch on fire. Good thing the cats know to skedaddle out the cat door when the smoke detector goes off…..

Expect the Unexpected.

Because of Sky’s inability to read books anymore, I recently read aloud Bill McKibben’s new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?. We are both concerned with the climate change/climate chaos that is transforming our planet. We both are concerned that the human race may be heading for extinction, that it may be too late to bring this dire situation around. We thoroughly enjoyed the book, and have had many deep conversations about what may be ahead for the planet, for the human race, our beloved mountains and lakes, our family and friends, and how we want to live our lives given this situation. We already live in a net zero house, and try to keep our footprint as small as we can. And to that we add the philosophy to live each day to the fullest, and not waste time with things that are not important. And, above all…

Expect the Unexpected.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110085025/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/02.mp3

Joy and woe are woven fine,
Clothing for the soul divine:
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

It is right it should be so:
We were made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Safely through the world we go.
—William Blake

…And the wicked witch turned into a toad and the evil sorcerer was banished from the land. The royal couple celebrated their marriage and were blessed with peace and prosperity and many children and lived happily ever after.

How many of us grew up with stories that ended something like that? First there was challenge and danger and hard work and then riches and blessings and happiness. The wicked were punished and the good were rewarded.

And then we discovered that life doesn’t necessarily work that way.

Twenty years ago, my life spun out of control. For some unknown reason, life started sending catastrophes my way, one after another. My life became a soap opera. Then it became too unbelievable for any self-respecting soap opera audience to swallow. I started to identify with Job. Then I started questioning whether Job had really had it that bad. Eventually I wanted to paint a warning message in huge letters on my wall: “Expect the Unexpected.” While I knew that this is impossible—if I could expect something to happen, then it wouldn’t be unexpected —the words captured how completely out of control my life felt. It seemed that the only thing I could do was to brace myself for the next crisis, to try to gather enough strength to ride it out.

Thankfully, my life has calmed down a bit since then, but I’ve been realizing that there’s more truth in that pithy saying than I realized when I wanted to paint those words on my wall. Because what got me through all the unexpected bad things was, in part, all the unexpected good things. I began to realize that expecting the unexpected didn’t have to mean bracing for the unexpected catastrophes. It could also mean keeping my eye out for the unexpected gifts, the silver linings.

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that the silver linings in any way negate the bad, that good and bad can cancel each other out. Silver linings don’t make everything okay, but somehow they make good and bad less black and white, less absolute. A friend’s father told me a story about a conversation he’d had with his rabbi. The rabbi said that some good comes out of everything. My friend’s father was incensed. “What about the Holocaust?” he cried. “Surely you can’t tell me that anything good could come out of something so monstrous.” The rabbi paused and then responded. “Were it not for the Holocaust, your wife of forty years would never have emigrated to the United States to escape Austria and you never would have met her.” It’s not that this blessed meeting and marriage make the Holocaust any less horrific. That would be ridiculous. But, nonetheless, these two events are intertwined: out of an event that shadowed the twentieth century came at least one small blessing.

Expecting the unexpected is something we need to learn. It does not come easily. Most of us want life to follow the rules. We want the good to be rewarded and the bad to be punished. We want predictability and control. Sometimes we get to live with that illusion—we make plans and then we carry them out. The person who deserves it wins a prize. Hard work pays off. Good deeds are rewarded. And then there are the times when life appears to make no sense at all, when the walls come tumbling down and suddenly everything we’ve taken for granted is up for grabs. What then? What happened to happily ever after? Buddhism may be correct that the only constant is change, but that’s not always comforting when life seems to be coming apart at the seams. For me, one comfort is knowing that not all of the unexpected surprises will be bad. Sometimes, what first appears to be a calamity may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

An acquaintance told me a story of a dismal time in her life. Her marriage had fallen apart. She was facing serious health problems. The future of her job was uncertain. Just as it seemed that her life couldn’t possibly get any worse, her car was totaled in a car accident. Cursing, she went to rent a car—yet another annoyance. How could she know that the man behind the rental car counter would turn out to be her future husband?

We do not have crystal balls. We cannot see into the future. What appears to be a curse may come with a blessing and what appears to be a blessing may come with a price. Meeting my late partner was clearly the best thing that ever happened to me. The five years we spent together were easily the best five years of my life. Watching him die was clearly the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Does the bad negate the good? Not on your life. Would I have traded the joy to be spared the pain? Not for a moment. Did I feel as though I was drowning in grief? Absolutely.

Sometimes it amazes me that the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to me were so intrinsically linked. But life is like that sometimes. Events are not necessarily good or bad. Sometimes they’re both at the same time. After my partner died, the Passover tradition of tasting the charoset and the moror on the same piece of matzoh—tasting the sweet mix of apples and honey and the bitter horseradish at the same time—made sense to me in a new way. Joy and sorrow can coexist.

A year of cancer treatment was not something I asked for, not something I would wish on anyone. Parts of it were pure hell. But at the same time it was such a rich year, so full of love and blessings and wonderful people and life lessons that I honestly don’t know if I would give it back if I had the choice. My cancer year wasn’t good or bad; it was good and bad, sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous. Charoset and moror.

Sandy Boucher, in her book Hidden Spring: A Buddhist Woman Confronts Her Life-Threatening Illness, writes about spending time in a large county hospital after major surgery and feeling overwhelmed by the sights and sounds. Desperately craving stillness, she feels assaulted by the loud voices and banging doors, the constant stream of medical personnel, her roommate’s many visitors and blaring television. Boucher’s friends pull the curtain around her bed to give her some privacy and one of them starts humming Amazing Grace, very quietly, to calm her. Suddenly, her roommate’s television set is turned off and she hears three women’s voices join in the song. The strangers in the next curtain have become earthly angels. The song is more beautiful, more precious for the surrounding melee. Boucher writes, “I felt as if I were being rocked and held in nurturing arms. . . Always there was some ray of kindness or beauty available to me, if I could be there for it.”

Shortly after this tsunami of calamities, I attended a week-long Art & Spirit retreat at a Quaker retreat center. During the opening activity we introduced ourselves by painting a crude image in primary colors on an altar cloth. As I sat there waiting my turn, I realized that I was feeling very peaceful—very happy and very sad at the same time. So I created a swirl of blue and yellow paint—yellow for happy and blue for sad, swirled together to show their coexistence. But I wasn’t content with my crude representation. This was a theme that I’d lived with for several years—that joy and sorrow can co-exist. How could I convey this in color and form? This question seized my imagination and would not let go. And thus I began a weeklong personal journey with sketch pad and oil pastels that took me far away from the regularly scheduled program of the retreat.

I wanted to convey the intensity of brief moments of joy amidst deep pain, but that wasn’t enough. Somehow I needed to bring to life the words of William Blake: joy and woe are woven fine. What would it look like to weave joy and woe? That was truly the question of my week and finally at the retreat’s end, I knew the answer. My clothing for the soul divine became a literal weaving of paper strips—charcoal gray interlaced with a vivid rainbow of colors.

I’m not trying to diminish the tragedies, not trying to say that everything will be all right. The pain is real. Bad things do happen. But it helps me to think of life as a rich fabric of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, gifts and losses, so tightly woven that sometimes the two extremes co-exist. And, in times of woe, it helps me remember to look for the silken twine.

We eat charoset with moror.

Life is not a fairy tale in which we live happily ever after. There will be happiness and there will be sorrow and they may even come as a package deal.

“We were made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know, Safely through the world we go.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110084941/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/04.mp3

Come share a meal with your church family, along with stories of how we use food to show love, concern, and hospitality.

I preached from this sermon manuscript at Universalist National Memorial Church, on November 17, 2019 with the lectionary texts from the Second Letter to the Thessalonians and the Gospel of Luke.

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me into the pulpit again, and thank you for welcoming me back. And I’d like to start, not with the sermon directly, but with an illustration I really wanted to work into the sermon, but doesn’t really fit.

Back in 1982 Ridley Scott’s neo-Film Noir movie Blade Runner introduced viewers to a dystopian future Los Angeles, where nearly perfect copies of human beings — essentially slave labor on other planets ― would only live (or last) three years, by design. They were forbidden from coming to earth, but some do, with hopes of extending their lives. The blade runners, one is the lead played by Harrison Ford, are the agents sent to find and destroy them. The title suggest our identification with the blade runners, with humanity and order, but is that how it works out? Watch and see.

That disturbing future took place in the far future of November 2019. That future is now, and so I wanted to work it into the sermon, in part to reflect on today, and also because science fiction provides such an easy and accessible window into theological discourse.

If you want to talk about human nature, what better contrast is there than to introduce a non-human character with human characteristics, whether living or an automaton. If you want a metaphor for a spiritual journey, you can depict it as a journey through space, into the literal heavens, where you will find nothing familiar except yourself. If you want an idea of what God is, or properly what God is not, have the characters meet a force which is greater than humanity — perhaps unseen — and whose good or evil works force crises and decisions.

Blade Runner adds another twist. There are several, slightly variant versions of the film, edited to suggest the different answers to the mystery underlying the story. (In fact, my brother worked on one of them.) So it’s not clear which version is canonical, or authoritative. All of them, perhaps? We approach biblical interpretation the same way, so this is another way to look at the film theologically.

But I’ve not seen Blade Runner in two or three years, certainly not contrasting the variations, and haven’t seen the recent sequel. Apart from the coincidence of dates, I couldn’t work it into the sermon. And (ironically, you’ll see) it was a heavy week at work, so I didn’t have time to run down all the leads: I’ll leave Blade Runner aside. I hope to come back to it, and other films, some day.

Instead, I started by going back to that article that Pastor Gatton referred to last week — the one from the New York Times (“5-Hour Workdays? 4-Day Workweeks? Yes, Please”) by Cal Newport — since he preached from the prior passage from Luke. (I have his book on hold at the library; there’s quite the wait.) The editorial’s main illustration was an experiment by a small German tech firm to have a distraction-free five hour work day instead of a longer day peppered with Twitter, email and urgent texts.

Imagining a world where we work less is also something frequently posited by futurists and in science fiction. It prompted me to lift out the ideas about work in the lesson from Second Thessalonians.

It’s funny that work itself isn’t more of a theological topic. For most of us, it takes up most of our waking hours, working either outside the house, in it, or both. Work for pay gives us access to the necessities and pleasures of life, even as it keeps us from them. A good work life will make you happy, a bad work life will make you unhappy and not having work or not being sure of what work would be good can be the worst of all. Work, like sleep, growth, family and food, is one of those foundational realities of human existence.

And yet, any number of commentators would have us believe that the future of work is optional or minimal, and with a science fiction-like zeal that the robots will take care of us, and so we need to look past work for both fulfillment and the distribution of goods. I’m not convinced, but not because I think people should be forced to work, but that it’s not so easily brushed away.

To be sure, work doesn’t mean the same thing as it did in St. Paul’s time.

Technological advances in the last nineteen centuries have moved us past the power of human and animal power and faster than sailboats. Electric light makes us a little like God for the day and the night are alike to us — but that means we can or must work longer than ever before, not to mention faster communication than even the last generation knew. The ideas of retirement and vacation are revolutionary. And we are less stuck — I can’t say not stuck — in the work paths our parents and grandparents set before us. Indeed, we may not work (and live) in the same place they were born or where we were born. And tomorrow we might be working halfway around the world, or speaking with someone who is. For most of us, and by us I mean the whole human family, work doesn’t mean farming or finding the next meal. It’s different, less physically demanding, but easier or better? I’ll leave that for you to decide. But work is different now than in the first century.

The first and second letters from St. Paul to the Thessalonians — that is, what’s now the the city of Salonica, in northern Greece — are essentially practical advice to that young church, and he was helping them in their own time. The churches were very young at this point, as old (more or less) as social media is to us, and the “rules” were still being developed. We take from the context that some of the people in the church in Salonica didn’t think they should work, or that they needed to work. Were some of the people taking the message of a liberating gospel so literally that they didn’t feel that they needed to work. Or perhaps took the injection to “give away all you have” so literally that they became dependent on the good-will of others. Or perhaps they believed that God would provide in all things, and too that to mean the supernatural supply of natural needs. Well, eventually. It’s not clear, but there’s indirect evidence of conflict.

So his warning, “if they don’t work, they don’t eat” should be read not as a kind of punishment but set a standard of how they members of the community should regard one another. Egalitarianism is implied for one thing. And that bit about “not being busybodies” might be translated idiomatically as an injunction to work, but not work each others’ nerves.

But this is a short passage, and to read it without inquiring and generous minds would miss the point. What about those who really cannot work? The sick or injuried or debilitated? The very old, and the very young? Are they left hungry? Of course not. This goes against good sense, and cuts against the kind of care that drew people to the gospel in the first place. So the lesson for us is that work is important, it resources our needs, it can build mutual understanding, but it’s not the ultimate good. Work has its place.

Five days a week I work as the operations director of a small international health nonprofit, working up budget, payroll, contracts and the like. It’s typical office work, with the typical mix of rewards and challenges.

It’s no secret that I used to be the minister of this church, but after that pastorate ended I didn’t want to leave town. The quality of life is good here, particularly for gay couples, and there were few if any churches that might appeal elsewhere. Those that did would pay very poorly in isolated communities, and would offer my husband few good opportunities. So I traded ministry for administration. I bring my theological training into my work: active listening, a kind word, and a willingness to get the bottom of a story have all been a part of my nonprofit life.

But I do miss church work, sometimes, and I do feel that God is keeping me in the ministry. One of the reasons I like preaching here, in fact is that it helps me work out my ministerial vocation when that will never again be my main source of income. St. Paul was himself famously and literally a tent maker, from which we get the term “tent-making ministries” when you refer to a minister who has a day job to cover most of the expenses.

Work has a value apart from earnings. It’s not an original thought to say that you get a lot of our sense of self from my work. We build collegial relationships with sometimes turn into friendships. Our work structures our daily lives. The problem is when our work let’s become our daily lives. When we have no other sources of validation or encouragement apart from work. Which also means that work has a power over us in more than providing earnings. And then subsumes that you somehow enjoy your job, or have one. I recall being unemployed and hating it. It was like I was always waiting for my life to restart.

I know that one from personal experience. I’ve had four multi-month long spells of unemployment and I remember how corrosive the experience was. I was lonely. I started missing the presence of co-workers who annoyed me. I worried about money. I doubted my worth. In one case, I’m pretty sure I took a job just to make the grind of not-having go away. That’s also why I don’t believe the stories of the “end of work” and that robots will do everything, and that we will have to prepare for a time past work. You need something to make life seem meaningful, and we have millennia finding that kind of value in our work.

But what if your job stinks, and you don’t have very good options? Sometimes you need to take or keep a job because there’s no time or energy to change. Or the one you have took a long time to get, and you don’t want to go through that again. Or it provides medical insurance you or a family member needs. Or if you can get through three more years you can retire without imperiling your retirement years. Or a hundred other variations.

Then take my advice: find your vocation, even if it’s not your day job. This is opposite of that cloying work advice, “Do what you love” which sounds like the kind of advice given by people with lots of options and cash to fall back on. Instead, find out what God is leading you towards, and be prepared to follow that off the clock.

That brings us to our lesson from Luke. The passage in Luke is different than the Thessalonian letter, both in that it’s not meant to be practical, and not meant to be clear. In it, Jesus is speaking of a final time, but doesn’t say when it will be, or clearly how to anticipate it. A time when nothing will be the same. It’s heavy and apocalyptic, and can unsettle you deeply if you’re not aware.

Time, of course, means nothing to God, but it does to us. So this future time, when even the Temple, falls in meant for us. The most we know, and this is so banal that I resist even mentioning it — the most we can know is that it’s terribly important. And that we should be ready.

But a cautious, moderate kind of readiness, I think. We cannot become extreme by denying what we can have now. We cannot become extreme by predicting exactitudes we cannot know. I feel a bit of sympathy towards those people who prepare not only for disasters but prepare for a full collapse of society.

They act as though it is inevitable that everything will collapse around us. Food supplies, safe water, public safety, the rule of law and the electrical grid. All things which human beings have built and must maintain. It makes me deeply sad that it makes more sense to some to run to the boondocks and try to reproduce society rather than to make it part of your life’s work to preserve all these things from collapse in the first place.

When we find our calling, and pursue it where or not it’s our job, we orient ourselves to that Day that Jesus speaks of. We live for the future. The past is done. Nobody can add anything to it, or take anything from it. We can, and should, be grateful for those who worked and struggled, usually unnamed and unrecognized, for us to be where we are.

In the meantime, what can we do until we find our calling. Reflect your faith in daily life.

To jump from Sunday prayer to Monday work then means taking on new habits that we may not directly benefit from. For instance, we might try and create virtuous circles in the workplace. No winking at little cheats or pilferage. We show our workplace — our coworkers and vendors, if not our bosses and clients — our honest, kind and careful intentions.

Be thankful and show thankfulness for the special contributions others bring to their work, including taking on work that’s unpleasant to do or has low status.

And outside of the workplace, we find alternatives to the Washington question. You know the one at social occasions? where we categorize each other by what we do.

In short, work to live, and find a better way of living. But do not live to work.

Find places were we have friends and not just coworkers or contacts, and interests that makes life interesting and rewarding that is not dependent on having any particular job. I will include church in that number.

Don’t treat your religion as a niche interest just because others project theirs badly. Your religion can be deep without being intrusive. The good ones are out there; you just may not know their religious motivations. May your behavior at work, at home and wherever you are the first way you express your faith.

Let your life’s work be a blessing for you and for others.

Social scientists say that only 10% of us (at least here in the USA) are truly effective listeners – people who listen to others in order to understand and grow. The rest of us, so they tell us, are simply listening to reply, to make the conversation as much about ourselves as possible (it’s comfortable territory, after all). As we continue to explore the theme of ATTENTION this week, some thoughts on how to be a better listener, to be in relationships with others that are not merely transactional, but transformative.

I saw how through these fixed identities and supporting structures, we the people are separated one from another. I suffered then and now because of the identities which separate me from others. Our Covenant brings us back to one another.

The post Queering Our Covenant appeared first on BeyondBelief.

An exploration of diversity of belief in America with pulpit guest the Rev. Munro Sickafoose, a consulting minister at the Unitarian Congregation of Taos and a community minister at the UU Congregation of Santa Fe. Munro is a graduate of Starr King School for the Ministry and focuses much of his work on healing our human relationship with the earth.

My seminary friend, Tim, was once the religion page editor for the Toledo Blade newspaper. As such, he came into contact with just about every faith community in the Toledo area. Once, he shared one of his experiences with us.

“Here’s the best ‘welcome’ message in town,” he said:

We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, gay, filthy rich, dirt poor, y no habla ingles. We extend a special welcome to those who are crying newborns, skinny as a rail, or could afford to lose a few pounds. We welcome you if you sing like Pavarotti or can’t carry a note in a bucket. You’re welcome here if you’re just browsing, just woke up, or just got out of jail. We don’t care if you’re more Catholic than the Pope, or haven’t been in church since little Joey’s baptism. We welcome our disabled worshipers who have brought their service dogs with them. We welcome Muslims, Jews, politicians, and sinners like us. We extend a special welcome to those who are over 60 but not grown up yet, and to teenagers who are growing up too fast. We welcome soccer moms, NASCAR dads, starving artists, tree-huggers, latte-sippers, vegetarians, junk-food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or still addicted. We welcome you if you’re having problems, or you’re down in the dumps, or you don’t like “organized religion;” we’ve been there too. If you blew all your offering money at the casino, you’re welcome here. We offer a special welcome to those who think the earth is flat, who work hard, don’t work, can’t spell, or come because grandma is in town and wanted to go to church. We welcome those who are inked, pierced, or both. We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down your throat as a kid, or got lost in traffic and wound up here by mistake. We welcome tourists, seekers, doubters, bleeding hearts . . . and you!

Talk about leaving no doubt as to how open their church’s doors are! And here, friends, is the kicker. What church do you think offers this message of welcome to all who walk through those open doors? If you guessed a Unitarian Universalist church . . . you would be wrong. The above is the welcome message of Toledo’s First Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Remarkable, no?

Each week, we open our service by telling those gathered, “Whoever you are, wherever you are on your life’s journey, you are welcome here.” I wonder, though, how many people hearing this message for the first time think to themselves, Even me? Just as I am? Maybe the laundry list of just who’s included in the “whoever, wherever” might help to answer those questions and allay those fears.

Then again, it might make the greeting message longer than the sermon.

In truth, it’s what happens after that initial welcome that truly matters. Beyond that welcome message, the Adventists have a pretty strict view of sin and salvation that might very well leave some first-timers feeling cold, oppressed, even wounded. The open door is wonderful, but not if one is left to wonder whether or not there’s a seat at the table after they enter.

The same is true for us. The “whoever, wherever” message is welcoming enough, the laundry list implicit. The answer to those questions — Even me? Just as I am? — come in those ever-important moments that follow the welcome, inside the open door. How do we make room in the sanctuary? At the table? How do we lay aside our own needs and expectations about who the person at the door should be so that we might accept them as they are?

True welcome is a continual practice. We must open our hearts as well as our doors for our invitation to be more than just words.

Speaking of welcome, our Thanksgiving service this year will focus on the ways we show care, attention, and hospitality with food. We’ll be trying something a little different with a potluck worship on November 24 titled, “Sacred Tables,” where we’ll share dishes we serve to visitors, extended family, and even strangers, with stories about how food and hospitality strengthen connections. Watch your email and our Facebook page for more details.

Rev. John Cullinan

There is a large duckling-yellow hardcover book in my mother’s house called a “baby book.” It is my baby book, in fact. The book where my parents recorded the details of my birth and development—I was 10 ½ pounds when I was born, my grandmother gave me my first bath. There are pictures from the first day of school every fall. A tiny ink footprint from my first days on earth.

When I was a kid, this book was a treasure trove of information about the “me” that I didn’t remember anymore. Over time, there were fewer and fewer entries until they almost petered out. Then, in the height of my cantankerous teens, I got into a huge fight with my mother. I no longer remember why we fought, but I do remember that I screamed “[BLEEP] you, mom!”

Except I didn’t say “[BLEEP].” I said something much worse.

My mother calmly walked into the dining room, pulled down the big yellow book from the bookshelf, opened to a new page, and wrote:

1997. Abbey screams “[BLEEP] you, mom!” at the top of her lungs for the very … first … time.

My family members have good senses of humor. There are times when we can laugh at our fights, then use our indoor voices to say why we’re really upset. We can get back into right relationship with one another. I’d like to say that 1997 was the last time I screamed “[BLEEP] you” at anyone, but I’m not that good a liar. I’d like to say that I’ve been able to laugh it off every time, but I’m not that good a person.

So, those of us in the US are about to have Thanksgiving, and I’m guessing many of you will be spending the holiday with family, so you know what I’m talking about, right? The laughter and the dreaded fighting? Anxiety as well as comfort? Gladness and sadness?

Being with family over the holidays can be wonderful—you get to eat second helpings of your aunt’s famous greens, watch your hometown’s football game, and pass around the newest family baby. In my family, we usually have more types of pie at Thanksgiving than we have guests. There are wonderful things about family.

But family can also push your buttons. Dad’s knee is acting up again, but he is too proud to ask for help with the yard work, and you’re worried sick. It’s 2pm, your son-in-law is sitting next to his three-year-old niece, drinking his fourth beer and yelling obscenities at the TV. Cousin Sarah refuses to acknowledge your partnership of ten years and keeps calling your wife your “friend.” We show up, exhausted after a long drive with a screaming two-year-old, only for our mother to criticize our parenting style. Our son returns home from his first psychology class in college and blames us for all of his maladjustment in life.

No matter how patient we are, we know we will erupt into a fight with someone who voted differently than us. No matter how we yearn for love and affirmation from our parents, they will never be able to express their feelings in ways that feel good to us.

It makes sense that our families push our buttons. After all, they are the ones who installed the buttons in the first place. But getting into the same fight, year after year, with the same family member can get wearing. Sometimes it gets bad enough that we avoid the family just to avoid the fight. Or maybe our anger is deeper than irritation. Maybe there is a history of abuse in our family that no one talks about. Maybe our wounds come from years of being put down, neglected, overlooked.

Being away from family over the holidays, having no family, or just being alone, can feel awful even when it is sometimes what we have chosen. Even when it’s the right choice.

No matter what, some of us find the holiday season rivals only the election season as the most stressful and anger-provoking time of year.

And yet, sitting next to the person who pushes our buttons more than any other person in the world, we are told that this is a time for gratitude.

There is a line in the Gospel song by Brian Tate called “Overflowing” where the choir sings “Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.”

This line has always struck me, because I have always associated gratitude with the times when we are happy. It is easy to be grateful in gladness. But if gratitude is not simply some nuance of gladness, if gratitude is perhaps not even an emotion at all, then what is it?

Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.

Like many of you, I have been looking for gratitude in the midst of a steady stream of horror.

I have been looking for gratitude after reading that we have only 12 years to turn around climate change if we hope to avert utter catastrophe, and that we are on our way to pushing a million different species to extinction.

I have been looking for gratitude for my fellow Americans, who voted for a leadership team that will do nothing to halt the violence against trans people, who will do nothing to halt the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, who have separated thousands of immigrant children from their parents.

I have been looking for gratitude when beloved congregants, friends, and loved ones are in the hospital, or facing frightening diagnoses, or assaults, or uncertainty about whether they will recover—whether they will survive.

If I don’t feel gladness, where can I find gratitude?

Too often recently, the place I have been able to look for gratitude is in the sadness.

Because gratitude lives there too.

Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.

I’m talking about the gratitude that makes my body weak and pours as tears from my eyes as I leave the hospital room of someone who might have died, but didn’t.

I’m talking about the kind of gratitude that comes when entering an African Methodist Episcopal church for a prayer vigil the night after a white supremacist radical Christian terrorist massacred nine black people of faith at another African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, and hearing the choir begin to sing:

How great is our god? Sing with me
How great is our god? All will see
How great, how great is our god?

The kind of gratitude I feel when I’m with people who choose faith in the face of devastation. Gratitude for those who choose resilience in the face of fear. Gratitude for those who show up, week after week, to do the work of greeting strangers, or lifting their voices in song, or passing the baskets of nourishment along the rows, all while they feel that the world is unraveling at the seams.

Grateful in sadness

I served as a hospital chaplain in Baltimore several years ago. If you ever want an education in gratitude, go spend some time at a hospital. When one lives in such close proximity to sickness and death, I think most people find practices of gratitude essential for coping.

Though working on the psychiatric unit was my most intense duty, I learned the most about gratitude from my stint with the folks in the elder care program. This was a day program where elders living in their own homes would be picked up in vans and brought to the hospital for group    programs, breakfast and lunch, and wrap-around medical care. It basically provided the community, fun, and medical support of a good nursing home, while allowing its members to stay in their own homes.

When I began, they told me I would be responsible for leading a short worship service every morning I was with them.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

I was a soft-spoken second year seminarian at the time, and had only preached a handful of times. Ever. The idea of leading worship multiple times a week for a multi-faith group of elders, most of whom struggled to even hear my voice, terrified me.

I wracked my brain for worship topics that would resonate with evangelical Christians, members of the Nation of Islam, cultural Jews, and Atheists. And what came to me, over and over, was the theme of gratitude.

So each morning, I would arrive, sweaty palmed and heart beating fast, and pick up the beat-up old microphone at the front of the room. After pressing the on button and making sure I was holding the bottom properly so that the batteries wouldn’t fall out—this wasn’t a well-funded program—I would ask the program participants what they were thankful for.

As they raised their hands, I would walk around the room and hold the microphone out for each of them in turn.

All kinds of gratitude were lifted up.

“I’m grateful for God,” one would begin.

“I’m grateful for my family,” the next one would say.

“I’m grateful for the bus driver who got me here this morning.”

“I’m grateful for this program.”

But the most common thing they said was “I’m grateful that I woke up this morning.”

Each time I invited them to share their gratitude, one after another of them would give thanks for simply waking up that day. Others around them would say “Amen” and then would ask for the microphone and say that THEY were grateful for waking up that morning.

Every day, so many of them said “I’m grateful for waking up this morning.”

They knew that one day, all too soon, they would not wake up again. And that made each waking so much more precious.

Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.

As you prepare for whatever Thanksgiving meal you may go to—whatever shared meal you may go to—remember that breaking bread with others is a revolutionary act. Especially if it’s with those who may not be like you, whether that is an Uncle who is a die-hard Trump supporter when you were a Bernie fan, a person who asks for some help getting something to eat on the street, a person who offers that help or even just someone you don’t yet know. Breaking bread together turns “them” into “us.” Breaking bread together turns a stranger into a companion. Breaking bread together joins us in a revolution of loving across difference.

Because we are nurtured by the world around us, our first duty is to be grateful for the world around us. Grateful for the sun, rain, the bus driver—grateful for each day.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074917/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/01.mp3

There’s an old joke—perhaps you’ve heard it. A man and his granddaughter are walking along a beach. It’s a wonderful day, although it seems there’s a squall just over the horizon, and it looks like it’s coming toward them. Even as the man thinks perhaps it is time to call it a day, a giant wave crashes into them and before he can do a thing the child is carried away. Filled with horror he looks up to the heavens and shouts, “God, how can you do something so terrible?” And even before the words slip from his lips another wave comes washing over him and as it recedes deposits the child in the man’s arms. He looks at the little girl to make sure she is okay. She smiles at him and locks her arms around his neck. The man then looks back up at the heavens and shouts, “Hey! She had a hat.”

We laugh. Okay, I laugh. There’s something so human in this. A slice of homemade apple pie is great. But, hey, where’s the scoop of French vanilla ice cream? We can be grasping creatures, missing the apple pie, missing the saved child. We can be resentful and angry about, well… there’s just a ton to be resentful and angry about. But lost in the waves of those feelings something slips away from us, something lovely and beautiful. Gratitude gets washed away in the waves, along with the hat.

It seems our English word gratitude comes to us through the French and back to the Latin gratus, meaning thankful or pleasing. It turns out gratitude is closely related to the word grace, with its various meanings of showing favor, pardon, mercy, elegance, songs, praises, announcements. I really like that—announcements.

But first, a pretty good way to understand something really important is to notice what surrounds it, what can turn our hearts from some deeper matter, what some of my friends call the near enemy of that which is important. And so, what is the near enemy of gratitude? I know how I’ve experienced people who seem to be expressing gratitude for something I’d had a part in, but afterwards I’m left with an uncomfortable feeling. It comes across as flattery, with a sense of manipulation hanging in the air after the conversation.

Here, to really get to the heart of the matter, we need to open our hearts, and perhaps even confess. And, so, yes, I’ve even been that person who expresses gratitude to flatter, to manipulate, often barely conscious of what I’m doing. Maybe some others among us here have also been that person, have embraced some facsimile of gratitude for any number of reasons, maybe even sometimes for good reasons. The world isn’t a very safe place, and a little flattery addressed to the powerful can be a smart thing.

But we need to be careful. There is something astonishingly important, I feel, in the act and the experience of genuine gratitude—the spontaneous arising of those feelings of thankfulness, of pleasure, of being present to the announcement of things. Cicerco claimed “gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues but the parent of all others.” I think this is so. And if it’s true, we need to attend.

But then, is this gratitude a noun, a state of being, something we achieve? Or, perhaps, does it come mostly as a verb, something we do?

Galen Guengerich, senior minister at All Soul’s Unitarian in Manhattan, delivered a sermon at his home church in 2006. In the following year it was adapted as an article in the UU World, our denominational magazine. Galen asked a very interesting question. “What should be our defining religious discipline?” He goes on:

While obedience, love, and even submission each play a vital role in the life of faith, my current conviction is that our defining discipline should be gratitude…. In the same way that Judaism is defined by obedience, Christianity by love, and Islam by submission, I believe that Unitarian Universalism should be defined by gratitude.

Now, I actually think gratitude lies near the heart of all three of the great Near Eastern faiths—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—not to mention perhaps all the great religions of our world. Still, as a discipline, as something we consciously do, I think he’s calling us in an important direction.

Wandering around the web I’ve found all sorts of advice as to how to cultivate gratitude. There are four-step plans, five-step plans, ten-step plans. For the most part they seem to center on stopping and noticing. With a dash of fake it ‘til you make it. As I consider that stopping and noticing with a dash of fake it ‘til you make it to be the heart of spiritual disciplines, I think most all of them are probably useful.

But reading the lists I found myself thinking of a one-step program. Many, many years ago I came across a small book called Wisdom of the Desert, which is a selection of sayings from the fourth and fifth century Christian monastics and sages called the Desert Fathers, and for those who pay attention, Mothers. This particular volume was collected and translated by Thomas Merton, who brings not only a great eye for matters of depth, but also a style sympathetic to a world religious perspective. I consider it one of the central books in my spiritual life.

And one of the characters who shines out from that collection, and whom I’ve encountered again in other translations of the actions and sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, is someone called Abba John the Dwarf. Abba or Abbot John was born around 339, studied under the direction of another of the great Desert mystics, Abba Ammoes, for a dozen years before wandering further into the desert, where, despite his best efforts, people came to listen to and follow his guidance. There are lots of stories about him.

Abbot John would recount the story of a pagan philosopher who told his student that for three years he should give money to anyone who insulted him. When the three years passed the philosopher told the young man to go to Athens, as he was now ready to really learn. At the gate to the city he encountered an old woman who insulted everyone as they passed. When it was his turn and he was insulted, the young man just laughed. The old sage looked closely at him and asked why the laughter. The young man replied how for three years he’d paid for this sort of abuse, and now at the gate to the city of wisdom he was getting insulted for free. The old woman smiled and replied “Enter the city of wisdom, young man. It is yours.”

Okay, maybe that might prove a harder discipline than the three or five steps you can get online. But here’s an easier discipline, this time from that late thirteenth/early fourteenth century German Dominican friar Meister Eckhart. The master once said, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”

Want to be grateful? Then just say thank you.

Now, I think there’s another mystery hidden within why just say thank you is enough. It has something to do with that noun and verb thing.

Leonard Cohen was once asked about his song “Hallelujah,” which is one of those divine thank yous that have caught my heart. He was asked what the song really meant. Cohen replied, “It explains that many kinds of hallelujahs do exist, and all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have equal value.” Gratitude takes many shapes. There are many kinds of thank yous. Some are perfect. Many, even most, are broken. I think of those near enemy thank yous that are so broken. But, here’s a secret. In fact, at bottom, at the end of the day, even those almost fake thank yous have value. All in some deep and true sense arise with equal value.

The reality is that within the web of relationships, within the world that we live in with all its horrors and all its joys, the moment we stop and notice, we discover we are bound up within a great mystery of intimacy. As natural as our breath, gratitude arises. And in my own experience, I find gratitude, kindness, and generosity all arise together. The mother virtue may be gratitude, but her sisters kindness and generosity walk with her.

I find motivation and sustenance through acting in the world out of this practice. I see the connections. I am horrified and I am grateful beyond any words. And I want to do something. Here, I suggest, is why our own tradition is so caught up with the work of justice in this world. The intuition of connection, of gratitude, calls us to service, to care, to love and action.

So we are caught by noun and verb, our actions and our being. When we attend to gratitude, we find something fundamental, something deeper than the hurts and longing.

We open our hearts to what is; we don’t turn away. And we discover a strange and mysterious and wild beyond imagination universe. And, we find the secret: we’re totally and inseparably a part of it. Noun and verb. One thing.

And as we notice, how can we not open our hearts, and open our mouths, and from that place, say thank you?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074856/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/02.mp3

Alice Walker has been in the media in some pretty awful ways, but I still think her book, The Color Purple, is one of the most extraordinary theological texts I’ve ever read. Her description of God wanting praise the same way people do has echoed in me ever since I read it more than 30 years ago:

[Shug says] “Listen, God love everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.”

“You saying God vain?” I [Celie] ast.

“Naw,” she say. “Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

“What it do when it pissed off?” I ast.

“Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

I love that. And the reciprocity described is what I feel when I am gardening, that the earth is offering to me as I offer to the earth, and together we co-create beauty and nourishment. Praise be!

For me, gratitude and praise go hand in hand. When I am grateful for something, I praise it. When I praise something, I am grateful for it. And when I am grateful and praising, my generosity follows naturally. Whether it’s the generosity of admiration or the generosity of attention or the generosity of support, I cannot be stingy when I am genuinely praising something or someone.

I think about when I am in a restaurant with someone and order something delicious. “Oh my! You have to try this!” is the first thing out of my mouth. If the deliciousness caused me to say Mine, all mine, it would mean I was not in gratitude or praise, but rather clinging to ideas of scarcity. Generosity comes from a place of abundance. Sharing creates more joy!

Praise generates gratitude, gratitude generates abundance.

Ideally. But those threads can break when the currency of generosity is taken instead of reciprocated. Increasingly, with pesticides and genetic tinkering and huge equipment, agribusiness does not praise the gifts of the earth, but seeks domination, a whole different form of currency.

I see it in a smaller scale when I offer a gift to someone—say, hospitality in my home—and rather than receiving thanks or generosity back, I experience the guest taking from me without appreciation, ignoring my requests or needs, concerned only with their own. My generosity, gratitude and praise can fizzle into resentment over time.

Which makes me think about Job. The guy who was living a good, faithful life, praising God and being ethical and kind, until Satan dared God to curse Job and see if Job remained faithful. So God killed Job’s family, destroyed his livelihood, and otherwise “tested” his faith. When Job finally cries out in anguish God says, basically, What do you know? I created the whole world and can do anything and you can’t do much at all can you? And we’re told Job then praises God.

When you look online for interpretations of this text you find all kinds of folks telling you what a great story it is, and how it shows that we need to praise God no matter what if we are faithful. I hate the story, myself. I loathe it. Years ago, in a religious education class, the curriculum was to share that story with fifth graders and then give them shaving cream on tables with which to finger paint what they thought about God. I needed to step out for a minute during the finger painting, and when I came back into the room they had thrown it everywhere in a giant finger paint fight.

They told me the story made them mad, and that was part of what started the foam-throwing. We talked as we cleaned the room and they were indignant that God would make a bet with Satan and be so mean to Job because of it. And I had to agree with them. The story does nothing whatsoever to strengthen my faith in God!

But maybe there’s another path besides faith in an omnipotent God to find a way to praise and gratitude when suffering profoundly. I note the people who have much, much less material comfort and wealth, societal privilege, and freedom to move about seem to manage better than I do to stay in a place of generosity and gratitude. I also realize that my own ability to remain in the currency of generosity and praise is in part the result of too much privilege. I have been awed, in my life, by the kindness and generosity of people who have reason to be much more resentful about their lives than I do. Praise and gratitude can become a spiritual path, a way out of no way, the only means towards affirmation of what is praise-worthy when none-other is evident. Spiritual practice can be born of suffering like Job’s, which is ultimately not about how great some omnipotent God is, but rather about how the holy can be discovered through blessing what is still possible.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074752/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/05.mp3

Eighty years ago today, the United Universalist Convention began at the Universalist National Memorial Church, Washington, D.C. It’s my home church, so a moment of pride.

The convention was not for the national denominational body (Universalist General Convention) alone, but included the meetings of the ministers association, the women’s association and the Sunday school association. For four days, they worshiped, heard reports, passed resolutions, broke into small groups and saw demonstrations. Given the size of the church, and the polity that sent 214 delegates from state conventions rather than every church, it was a smaller affair than today’s General Assembly. The banquet was, however, held at the Mayflower Hotel, which became famous later for other reasons.

Of the ministers welcomed into fellowship after the communion service, I recognize the names of Brainard Gibbons, later a General Superintendent, and Albert C. Niles, who wrote a biography of George De Benneville. A proposed pension plan never came to fruition. A rule change allowing dual fellowship (with the Unitarians and Congregationalists) passed, but I’ll have to research to see if this was an expansion of an earlier change; the Universalists entered comity talks with both the Unitarians and Congregationalists in the 1920s. Resolutions for co-ops and against gambling reflect their morals.

I don’t have access to the denominational magazines, so it’s hard to gauge the tone. Recall that the Germany had invaded Poland the month before, and Britain had declared war on September 3; a “phony war” to this point. The countries of the Americas had decided on neutrality. Yet the Universalists passed a resolution on conscientious objectors “which provoked considerable discussion but was finally adopted with a few dissenting votes.” I’m guessing the memories of the Great War were too fresh, and the writing (“times of war hysteria”) was on the wall. I can only imagine what Owen D. Young must have felt: he was the toastmaster for the banquet! The church’s tower was named for him and dedicated to international peace, recognizing the plan he proposed to restructure German war reparations a decade prior. But war was here.

You can read the official record of the proceedings here.

Yesterday, Unitarian Universalist minister and writer Kate Braestrup wrote an article called “Am I Still a Unitarian Universalist Minister?” Comments pro and con (so far as I’m algorithmically allowed to see on Facebook) seem to be splitting on the same terms and among the same people as Todd Eklof/The Gadfly Papers controversy. I won’t be rehashing that.

What’s new is the response, sometimes thinly coded, to Braestrup’s prior claim to be Unitarian Universalist minister at all. She is plainly states that she is neither a member of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, and has not fellowship of the Unitarian Universalist Association through the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, but was ordained “by my beloved UU congregation in Rockland, Maine!” That’s allowed in our tradition, and since I have long regarded other locally ordained ministers as colleagues, I’m satisfied to count her as a Unitarian Universalist minister. Had all this been a century ago, and Universalist, my answer would be different. But the polity first merged, then changed and now is burning to the ground. I’d rather have what we had then, but we don’t and so I’ll say yes to her based on (what’s left of) what we do have.

Braestrup recounts her bonafides at length, and an ungenerous person might think she was simply bragging. I think it’s a sign of her being a decent writer. What I hear without her being explicit is “I can have this ministry, it can succeed reaching many people and it’s without the blessing or strictures of the UUA.” An equally ungenerous person might think her detractors have the taste of sour grapes in their mouths.

I think DIY ministries are going to have to become the norm; again recalling a secularizing culture, the cost of formal preparation and the thinning out of paying pastorates. We should be able to rely on the UUA and UUMA to help overcome these limitations, and in those terms Braestrup could not and should not rely on that help. Local ordination cuts both ways. (Local ordinands also the subject of whisper campaigns; I’ve heard those for decades, and don’t take them seriously.)

But neither the UUMA or UUA shows firm or sustained interest in functioning religiously to meet these challenges, and hasn’t for years. Where are the services? Where are the leaders? Not to mention that it’s clear that fellowship is no guarantee of ethics or capability. The UUA in particular seems to exist to fix its own problems. Who needs that? Add this fixation on white supremacy within the gates, and you get a system that’s completely unworkable and frantic. (It’ll be interesting if there’s another cultural shift if President Trump loses the 2020 election. If there’s anything left.)

The most important part in “Am I Still a Unitarian Universalist Minister?” is the underlying theme that you can make a ministry without the legacy systems, and that doesn’t make it illegitimate. And further I’ll add: a guild without benefits isn’t worth the time or loyalty.

I feel wholly proper for suggesting using a Japanese titanium beer tumbler for the Lord’s Supper now that I’ve read Andrew Spicer’s “The Material Culture of the Lord’s Supper. Adiaphora, Beakers and Communion Plate in the Dutch Republic” — down to the re-purposing a vessel formerly used domestically, and perhaps using something even simpler for the bread plate.

And if you read this site, you might enjoy it, too.

I preached this sermon at Universalist National Memorial Church, on October 6, 2019 with the lectionary texts from the First Letter to Timothy and the Gospel of Luke.

Memory

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me into the pulpit again, and thank you for having me back.

Now that the weather has finally turned cooler(-ish), it’s beginning to feel like October. The Halloween advertisements and displays begin to make some sense: the gently spooky ones that combine pumpkins, the changing color of leaves, ancient headstones, bed-sheet ghosts and big bags of chocolate candy.

But truth be told, the candy seems like an inadequate bribe for the ever-present truth that life ends. The pretty red and orange leaves will soon dry out and fall. We see the pumpkins in their patch because the green leaves that fed them have withered away. For new life to thrive, it means that old life has to give way.

And yet the dead are present with us.

Washington, more than most places, is stuffed with constructed memorials: Greek temples, pavilions, engraved stones, benches, ceremonial walls and pathways, grottoes, pillars and obelisks, statues and fountains. Not to mention lecture series, endowed faculty chairs, scholarship funds, arts centers, even commemorative walls and plaques. We are surrounded by remembrances of the dead.

There are also the burial places, both those as famous as Arlington National Cemetery, but also the private and religious cemeteries that ring this and most cities. Places where even the rock-ribbed cry.

And then, as in every town or city, there are the informal, spontaneous memorials — made up of candles and flowers, pictures and signs, made up of teddy bears and crosses and too many tears — those memorials that that pop up on street corners and plazas or on lonely stretches of highways when something terrible happens, like when someone dies violently or senselessly. The dead may be gone, but we put up a fight to keep them.

Some of the memorials were created after a life of service or a moment of heroism, and are the people’s thanksgiving. Others were secured by substantial philanthropic giving. Some are homemade, the loved-one known by relatively few in this life. And each is evidence of dedication and love, that the dead may have their “part and lot with all thy saints.” We even pray in this memorial church, one of many in D.C. in dedicated that way.

So, who really, is the Universalist National Memorial Church a memorial to? John Murray? The people mentioned on the fading “scrolls” in the lobby? Someone else? That answer is now out of the hands of its builders. Because before the stone constructions, before those flowers laid, before a child’s toy left with sobbing, before any visible reminder were words. Perhaps thought and not spoken, because voices crack under grief. But words that say I loved her, and she’s gone. I miss her. I will remember her.

So in this church and all temples, at heroic monuments and roadsides, the memorial begins with our words, and our words become our prayers.

Memorials aren’t necessarily religious, but the answer to the questions they raise are. And in a Christian setting, the answers to those questions relate to God’s relationship and promises to us. Why do we make memorials of word and stone? Will they touch the heart of God?

I didn’t pull this theme out of the air. The first Sunday in October is, or was, Universalist Memorial Sunday, “for commemorating those friends who, during the year, have been taken away by death.” Although I don’t know of any churches that still celebrate it. It was one of a number of observances commended by the Universalist denomination that became a part of today’s Unitarian Universalist Association.

It was originally combined with All Souls Day, on November 2 or the nearest Sunday. All Souls, however, is an ancient observance, and served a different purpose. Ecumenically, it is for those Christians not included the day before, on All Saints Day. In the Episcopal Church is is officially called the “Commemoration of All Faithful Departed”. But it could also be to remember all who lived. That second one is the Universalist take.

It’s hard not to see the bigness of All Souls Day if it includes everyone who has ever lived and arguably everyone who will yet live. Possibly angels, too, possibly pre-human ancestors, maybe beings on other worlds if they exist, perhaps all that lives. There’s a vastness and inclusion in this vision of God’s reconciliation of all souls. So great perhaps that our own personal need to remember those we love gets lost in its vastness. What about Grandma and Cousin Joe? So in the 1870s Universalist Memorial Sunday became a thing. The memories of the Civil War must have been fresh and raw; in any case, it must have been perfectly clear that life was fragile. Our religious ancestors needed to say so in their own words.

Speaking of the Civil War, of the monuments on the National Mall, I think the greatest among them is the one dedicated to Abraham Lincoln. Having been brought up mostly in the South, where Lincoln is not as revered as he is in other parts of the country, I nonetheless choke up a little when I see the words above the seated statue of Lincoln there:

“In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

And his memory is a blessing.

When I think of Lincoln, Washington, D.C. and the Civil War, I also think of Walt Whitman. In part, because May 31 was the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. In part because I see his poetry every time I take the subway (more about that later). In part because a new commemorative stamp came out last month: a portrait of Whitman with a lilac bush and a hermit thrush, a reference to one of his more famous poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” That’s the one many of us read in school, about his grief and the nation’s grief over the death of Abraham Lincoln.

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d womenstanding,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

and ending

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

…

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

Whitman gave us a new, free way to feel and so to speak. He gave people words to grieve by. He came to Washington during the Civil War to look for his not-very-hurt brother: a soldier listed as a casualty at Fredricksburg. He stayed (ten years in all) to care for the broken and dying in the hospitals as something of a one-man volunteer morale officer.

Washington was swollen during the war. Universalist ministers started holding services here, perhaps in response to members relocated from the north, and Whitman attended services in that period. (A note. Ford’s Theater; the Lincoln death house; Whitman’s hospital, now the National Portrait Gallery; the Masonic Temple, the site of the Universalist services in D.C.; and Clara Barton’s missing soldiers bureau are within a short walk of each other, and all are still standing, if you wish to see for yourself.)

If you came today by subway, that inscription around the north entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro station is from the end of his poem, “The Wound-Dresser” and shows us what he saw and felt, but earlier he writes:

But in silence, in dreams’ projections,
While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,
With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,
Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.
I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.

Let us thank and remember Walt Whitman, a poet for the living and the dying.

I’d like to talk about the two lessons today.

As those of you who’ve heard me preach before know, I use the Revised Common Lectionary, an ecumenical reading list for worship. It’s one of the few places Unitarian Universalist Christians have had an impact in the ecumenical church for decades. It keeps me from cherry-picking lessons, and in return there are a lot of resources out there, as so many churches use in world wide. Today’s lessons are from the Revised Common Lectionary, and I didn’t want to avoid the passage from the Gospel of Luke just because it was hard. The fact there’s no obvious tie to Universalist Memorial Sunday doesn’t help.

The thing that sticks out is the reference to slavery; that you wouldn’t thank a slave for doing their job. Formal legal slavery was the norm in the Roman Empire and would remain a formal part of human relations for centuries. There were slaves in these lands four hundred years ago, with first-hand survivors of American slavery surviving into the middle of the twentieth century. The echoes of the African slave trade continue to this day: people who too often have to be remembered en masse, for there was nobody to write their names, save the Almighty, who inscribes them in the book of life. The recognition and memorials to slaves owned and sold by Georgetown and George Washington Universities, though relatively few in number, multiply in the mind to how many millions of lives were disrupted and destroyed by the slave trade. Of the many losses, sufferings and indignities the enslaved faced, I’m thinking today (in connection with memorials) of the broken connection with home. To never know what happened to the kidnapped, and to those left behind. To have families broken as a commercial transaction: the grief without recourse and without resolution.

And that makes me think of migrant children separated from their parents today. Or of those kept in human trafficking: modern slavery. Will they ever be reunited with their families? Will that break be healed? It’s not history, it’s not even the past. Something could be done about it. It’s not really the point of the passage from Luke, but if it sensitizes us to what must be and what must not be, then it has given us a blessing.

The passage from the second letter to Timothy is closer to the theme. While internally attributed to St. Paul, the consensus is that it (with the first letter to Timothy and the letter to Titus) weren’t written by St. Paul but together make up a set of letters offering advice to the very early church. So, we heard:

I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

The rest of the passage is about remaining firm and strong in faith. This is the only place in the Bible we hear about Eunice and Lois, and given the context we might think that they were both dead, but remembered and respected. What’s true of Timothy is true of us; he could hold on their memory as encouragement. We also carry traces of the characters of those who influence and molded us. When we act out of those influences to do the good, we honor the memory of those who went before us. Which doesn’t mean necessarily mean those influences started good. Take pigheadedness, for instance. You can transform pigheadedness into perseverance to defend the what’s right. Or remembering someone who struggled and faltered with addictions. That might make us more compassionate toward someone who struggle, knowing that some challenges can’t be wished away, but are are extraordinarily difficult to overcome. My point is this: someone doesn’t have to be perfect to deserve our memory, and those who are the most imperfect need it the most. That includes ourselves. We can and should pray for one another. For in prayer we witness to one another before the living God.

What then, will touch the heart of God when we remember those who have lived before us, and especially those whom we love? Nothing we can add. We trust that God already leans towards us. Our memorials of stone and candle and prayer reach to the mystery of God call out, and say “hear us.” “Hear us, and make us whole again.” God waits to hear. We are bound together across life and death, by love, and by God “whose nature is Love” for whom time is no thing.

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.

May God bless you all, this day and forever more.

This month we are taking on the gnarly topic of sacrifice. It is a concept that makes many of us uncomfortable, distrustful and a little bit surly, and rightly so. The religious tenet of sacrifice has kept women in abusive relationships, created the justification to wipe out whole nations of people, destroyed landscapes in an equation of loss versus gain that usually involves some form of violence or coercion, and is destructive in its nature.

But today I want to start with trees, trees that say over and over again, “How can I give my love away?” Trees that in essence live out love, and might just share some wisdom about how we can reframe and reconsider sacrifice.

In 1997 a young PhD student, Suzanne Simard, went out into her beloved forests of British Columbia, where she had been born and raised and shaped, to conduct an experiment for her doctoral project. She wanted to see how carbon moved from tree to tree. So she set up an experiment in which she planted a Douglas fir and a paper birch next to one another. She labeled the trees with isotopes, or markers. One tree got C14, and the other C13, so she could track what was being exchanged between the trees. She then went on to shade the trees with little tents throughout the multi-year experiment to create different scenarios to which the trees might respond.

In the first year of the experiment, with the trees growing naturally, the Douglas fir and the paper birch did indeed find connection with one another and exchanged nutrients and carbon in this beautiful reciprocity between species. They used the great underground highway made up of fungi or mushroom networks and their own root systems in this symbiotic communion.

Now, in the second year she tried something different. She shaded the Douglas fir to different degrees with her tents. The more the fir tree was deprived of light and air, the more stressed out the fir became, and the more nutrients and carbon the birch gave to fir tree.

This was the exact opposite of everything science had said so far, that competition was and is the driving force of nature, that evolution depended on survival of the fittest and exploitation is baked into our DNA. Instead, Suzanne was coming to understand the deeply cooperative nature of life, that one species would sacrifice for another’s well-being in some kind of great exchange.

She characterizes this pivotal experiment as elementary in comparison with what we know now, and yet it was such an important awakening in forestry and science. She recounts how people threw rotten eggs at her after her paper was published, because it so upended their notion of the order of things.

In those days no one used the word “communicate” when characterizing the relationship between trees in a forest, but that is exactly what’s going on. Scientists are coming to understand what indigenous folks have been saying for a millennium or more: the trees talk. When you step onto a forest floor there are hundreds of miles of fungal and root networks below your feet, hundreds of miles of communicating software.

• What we call a forest is actually a fraction of what a forest really is. Most of it is below the surface of the ground, far from the human eye.
• Forests have elders, trees who nurture their community of neighbors and young, and provide defense, nutrition, support and structure.
• We know that when a tree is sick or is experiencing some kind of insect infestation it sends out an alarm message to the other trees around it saying: “Protect yourself, I’m sick.” And they do.
• Forests store massive amounts of carbon, and in fact are doing their best to counterbalance the lopsided ratios of greenhouse gases.

This is not what I say as a theologian; this is what scientists are discovering about forests, and indigenous peoples have lived and breathed in their cultural and religious patterns since time immemorial.

The forests are telling us something about love, and sacrifice, and this great exchange that is available to us all if we would but root ourselves in the question How can I give my love away?

I once sat with an old priest as I was trying to figure out my path in ministry. We were talking about living life as a sacrament: making my life a visible sign of an invisible spiritual truth.

He stopped me mid-sentence and asked: “May I?” My journal was sitting open between us, so I could take notes. He took my pen and drew an infinity sign. And then he said, “Sacrament is more than making the spiritual visible. It is more than giving up or sacrificing in order to be spiritually good. There is something in the giving that increases the gift, and comes back on itself in this experience of receiving, an offering that expands the well-being, the life force in the exchange. It is the exact opposite of coercion, or violence or exploitation. It is a way into unitive living.”

I can’t help but think of the forests as I think about that conversation and the concept, the practice, of sacrifice, which means to make holy, a holy exchange. It’s about love.

Love is many things. It is energizing. It is joyful. It is intimate. It is powerful. It is life changing, and it demands sacrifice. Love has costs—that’s the honest truth of it.

I think this is what Jesus was talking about when he was describing the kingdom of heaven, or this idea of right relationship, a network of justice and peace that can emerge in the here and now of human community through love. I imagine him taking us on a walk in a forest, and talking to us about the trees, who know that you love your neighbor—all the hundred thousand species of your neighbors—as an extension of yourself, and when you do that the community is transformed, and health and wholeness of the forest abounds.

If we don’t get our heads around sacrifice I don’t know how we are going to address the huge issues staring us in the face. How are we going to address climate change without coming to grips with love for our planet that costs something? If we don’t get our heads around sacrifice, I don’t know how we as white people will ever get our heads around reparations, by which I mean, as TaNehisi Coates writes in his essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations”:

our collective biography and its consequences as the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely…more than recompense for past injustices, more than a handout, a payoff, hush money or a reluctant bribe…but a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

Coates is talking about sacrifice in its true form, an offering that comes back on itself and is experienced as unitive living.

I for one, will go to the forest. I will look for a mother tree, and ask her to teach me. I’ll say, “I am open. Would you tell me about the meaning of love, and sacrifice, and the great exchange of which you and I are a part?” And I know she will share her wisdom,    because trees talk and they know the true meaning of sacrifice.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063528/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/01.mp3

Sacrifice is a powerful, ancient, evocative word that conjures images of animals slaughtered in rituals to bind a community together in a celebratory feast for a long-awaited harvest after a drought. Sacrifice can be a visual, visceral and vivid concept that attracts our curiosity but repels us morally. Sacrifice is also described as a blessed act of holy reverence, a necessary rite to cleanse the soul of an individual or restore the hope of a people.

The concept of sacrifice is a complex religious, social and political construct whose meanings derive from cultural experiences and expectations, but I want to explore sacrifice as a political act associated with social violence. These days political and social sacrifice seems ubiquitous, from the rhetorical mobilizations at the U.S. southern border; to the ideological sacrifice of austerity for the poor and largess for the rich; to the “necessary” constructs of neoliberalism and libertarianism that emphasize privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government services. We see the sacrificial environmental violence associated with the lack of urgency to address a rapidly changing climate.

Drill down into the data for an hour, and you will see that sacrificial thinking is the new normal. The motif of “sacrifice” or “blessed brutalities” and sanctioned violence permeate all layers of the social and cultural fabrics purporting to offer an explanatory framework for contemporary imperial American practices. Each instance of our blessed brutality—whether it is the execution of Quakers in Boston in the 17^th century, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of native people, or the abuse of wives in the early American republic—is all a distinct trajectory that is the bedrock of the American empire of sacrifice.

Yes, friends, today American sacrifice is an intentional machine gun mounted on a hill of lies that is aimed at the rule of law, the truth and role of expertise. Everywhere you turn, it seems, some form of sacrifice is rearing its head, demanding tribute and governed by an algebra of expected returns. The transactional nature of sacrifice creates unholy alliances and disturbing binary outcomes of either/or.

When we look more closely at sacrifice, we see that sacrifice is a form of violence that places itself in relation to a desired effect, so that the gain depends upon the loss or destruction of something—call this something the offering. The conscious act of sacrifice links the two. The offering might be a black rooster or a packet of tobacco, but it could just as well be a species, a landscape, the heart of a captured enemy or the youth of a nation. What matters is the necessity of this destruction within a logic that renders the destruction understandable—and worthwhile—as a means to some higher gain. Sometimes the terms are blunt, issued as a judgment: This species is common, uninteresting or of “least concern.” This landscape is worthless, remote or uninhabited—it can be destroyed. The minimal value of what stands to be destroyed will be recovered, many times over, in the projected return.

But friends, sacrifice also comes in the disguise of moral control. Just pay attention to the arguments that weave through the next housing development, the next culled species, the next police review board, the next military intervention, the next cut to the Special Olympics. Sacrifice is almost always a mechanism in which loss and gain have been made equivalent, the balance settled—like trading a mountain for jobs in the mining sector, a forest for a highway and a faster commute.

Derrick Bell was the first Black tenured professor in the law school at Harvard, and founder of the academic discipline of critical race theory. His 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well includes an allegory entitled “Space Traders,” which explores what happens when extraterrestrials make first contact with the United States—using a holographic projection of Ronald Reagan—and offer to solve all of the country’s economic and environment problems. As proof of their power, the aliens turn the Statue of Liberty into solid gold and clean the polluted air over Los Angeles and Denver. The extraterrestrials have a price for this service. All Black Americans must be given to the aliens, for purposes unknown.

Will African-Americans become food, pets, subjects for experimentation? Perhaps they will be feasted, protected or worshiped? The extraterrestrials provide no answers. Could this be the ultimate solution to the centuries-old “Negro Problem”? A Republican president and his administration debate the merits of the offer from the aliens and eventually decide that the American people should vote on the matter.

Of course, this outcome has the superficial veneer of being “fair,” because the outcome was “democratic.” The safety, security, and freedom of Black Americans are treated as something illusory, debatable, something that can be compromised. The historic resistance to providing Black people inalienable civil and human rights makes the results clear for the majority of white voters. “Space Traders” concludes with millions of Black Americans—much like their ancestors being loaded into the bowels of slave ships centuries before—being marched at gunpoint into the cargo holds of the alien vessels. A return is calculated, and the decision is made to execute a sacrifice.

When this book came out in 1992, I remember talking about it with Black and white friends and our reactions were reminiscent of the OJ verdict in 1995. Very different responses. Many white friends were horrified by the story, unable to believe that such a vote could happen in the year 2000 when the story was set. Many Black friends were horrified that the white people were so naïve as to believe that it could not happen. And there was still a small set of us (me included) who pondered leaving the US for what could be a better life with the aliens. Many of us said that anything might be better than this place. I was willing to take that trip on the spaceship because the unknowable future might provide me with a new hope that I lack after 400 years in America. What would it be like to live in a world where I am not vilified, minimized, objectified or pacified by a system that has struggled so desperately to obliterate me and my ancestors?

Friends, remember the basic tenets of sacrifice. The sacrificial offering must be destructible—but also, it cannot be worthless. If anything, it must be exalted, because the destruction of its value is what renders the sacrifice worthy, even heroic. Sacrifice infuses the destruction of value with value, justifying itself not only in the prospect of a return, but also in the inherent nobility of surrender. Here the idea becomes not just dangerous, but also insidious, continuously threatening to identify destructive surrender not just as moral action, but also as the very ground of morality. To be good—to be a good citizen, a good person—is to surrender what you value, what you love, for a “higher” cause. In “Space Traders,” one of the ideas floated by the government was to create a selective service for Black people to volunteer to go with the aliens as a duty to country.

As Unitarian Universalists we have the imperative as people of faith to be spiritually animated by the sacrificial violence all around us. We need to be animated enough to see the sacrificial violence in policies that appeal to our heads and ignore our hearts. We need to be animated enough to dismantle false equivalences of sacrifice. We must be animated so we can demand answers, so we can resist the duplicity of sacrifice. We must make our faith three-dimensional enough to resist sacrifices out loud. When people of faith and goodness charge head on into that sacrificial altar to destroy it, the mechanism of sacrificial thinking will be disassembled, their logic revealed, their syntax demystified, and their weapons made inoperable.

So pause for a moment at the next “justified” sacrifice you are asked to vote on or participate in, the next “trade-off sacrifice,” and dwell on these questions: What is hiding among the lines of spreadsheet calculations and seemingly innocent platitudes of this sacrifice? Where is the scapegoat and how is sacrifice being framed? How does this sacrifice hide in plain sight? Whose hopes stand to be fulfilled in this and whose losses are guaranteed? And where do I stand as a person of faith?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063450/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/02.mp3

I have learned about faithfulness and sacrifice as a result of a very strange journey I have been on since I inadvertently found some of the men who were in Vietnam with my older brother, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Christian Jr., “Bobby” to me, who was killed on April 11, 1969.

My son, Luke Christian, did an internet search for his own name and turned up a webpage where some of my brother’s Marine brothers paid tribute to him. In the years since then I have met with many of those men and even attended their reunions.

After my brother’s death in Vietnam, I saw him as a victim more than anything else. My brother joined because he received a draft notice after he graduated from college. He wrote a poem questioning war shortly before his death. The Marine Corps took a gentle young man who was taught “Thou shall not kill” in church and turned him into a killer. It’s hard for me to even speak that sentence; but, of course, that is what young Marines are trained to do. The Marine Corps part of his life was not something I wanted to dwell on and so, for many years, I did not.

The Marine Corps motto is Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful. Many of the guys end their email messages with “Semper Fi” or “S/F” and I often end mine with “Always Faithful.” We are all faithful, but to what or to whom? When this journey began, I would have said that my faithfulness was quite different from Marine Corps faithfulness. I would have said theirs is a blind faithfulness and that mine is a questioning faithfulness. I would have spoken about the differences in how we view doubt and ambiguity.

But what I have learned has both surprised and humbled me.

Marines have a commitment to leave no body behind. For these men, it meant that they would risk death to haul a body out of a rice paddy. My mom used to say, “Do not spend money on me when I’m dead. Wherever I die, dig a hole under me.” I would have also taken this to mean that I shouldn’t risk my life to haul her body out of a rice paddy.

In one conversation with a Marine, I said, “I can’t imagine my brother would have wanted someone else to risk their life to retrieve his body. I would hate to think that others might have died to do that.” He looked at me like he didn’t know where to start, because I just didn’t get it. He was right, but now I get it. Everything hinges on what we are willing to do for one another. Our willingness to sacrifice ourselves to protect one another is everything. We are all in this together. We are all we have. We are the saviors we’ve been waiting for.

The greatest sin is to put your own safety above the safety of others. The higher your rank, the greater your position of privilege, the greater the sin. When we put our own safety first, we are lost and so is everyone else. There is no such thing as individual salvation. We are lost or saved together. When we know that others will put our safety before theirs, all things become possible.

There is another part of “leave no body behind” that illuminates Marine faithfulness. You are part of something greater. It began before you and it will go on after you. You enter into a stream of history and you will be remembered. You are part of a living tradition. Your memory and your sacrifice will not be in vain. Your Marine brothers will continue to carry you with them, whatever the cost.

And my brother’s Marine brothers have continued to carry him and others who made the ultimate sacrifice. While still in the midst of war, these boys and young men contacted family members of killed and wounded brothers. They sent their own family members to visit the sick and wounded. They came home and named sons after fallen brothers. One son is named Robert Christian Ager. They made pilgrimages to The Wall just to touch a name. One of the men drove 2,400 miles to attend the memorial service of the man whose face he first saw when he woke up after losing his left arm in a firefight. Whenever they gather for Company or Battalion reunions they hold memorial services.

Another part of Marine faithfulness is that the right thing is not always the easy thing. You do it anyway. Let’s say, for example, that the sister of a Marine calls you out of the blue to ask you about a day that you have relived many times. By that, I do not mean you have remembered it, but rather that you have relived it. You were the Company Commander that day. When you think of that day, you are filled with regret and guilt and it is as if you are back in that place and time. The sister doesn’t know that even though you met your wife right after you returned from Vietnam, you have never spoken to her about it. What do you do? You sit down with her.

You ask for a piece of paper and you draw a map and you touch it several times before you can bring yourself to say, “They said, ‘Let’s put a company in there and see if it can survive.’” You look over at your wife who is hearing this for the first time. Her eyes are wide and full of tears. You tell the sister that you called her mother when you got back to San Francisco. It is like you have the phone in your hand again. You hear the mother’s voice, “My boy…. What happened?”

We need one another. Others are in need of us. We owe others a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid; it can only be honored. Doing the right thing often requires sacrifice. It is not always easy. We do it anyway. I can sadly say that the United States Marine Corps did a better job of teaching my brother those lessons than the religion of his childhood.

It is easy to say of Marine faithfulness: “Well, that sort of thing requires an enemy. It requires not questioning authority. It requires brainwashing people. You have to get them young.” At least it has been easy when I have said these things. It’s easy for me to denigrate sacrifice based on what the sacrifice is for and to even lull myself into believing that sacrifice and extremism of some sort seem to always go together. I have often trivialized what people are willing to do for their faith because I have not respected what they put their faith in or the ways in which others take advantage of that faithfulness.

I find that, in the name of liberal religion, we often trivialize sacrifice. In ways both subtle and obvious, we give the impression that sacrifice is for people who can’t think for themselves, less independent-minded sorts. Liberal religion often smacks of the old commercial which tells us “Have it your way.” Life is a buffet and you get to choose. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it. You even get to complain about what other people are eating or what is on the buffet table or how it was served. I have often heard liberal religious folks brag about how little their faith requires. Many of us don’t even want to use the word faith or faithfulness, let alone sacrifice.

We are not sure we even like “clear expectations.” Some of the most heated, emotional discussions in the congregation I served have been about what we could or should expect of members. Some are concerned that expectations might be seen as fostering exclusivity. There is concern that we might “turn people off.” We are reluctant to ask anyone for anything that they may not want to give or be able to give. This is especially true when it comes to financial support. In some religious traditions, it is assumed that people will tithe by giving 10% of their income. If everyone tithed in the last congregation I served, we would have had about an extra $900,000 dollars a year to bend the arc of the universe toward justice.

I think liberal religion can and should stimulate me to ask: What am I living for? What am I willing to die for? What am I willing to sacrifice for? What am I willing to put above my own comfort? To whom or what do I owe a debt of gratitude that can never really be repaid, but only honored? What does a life of gratitude look like? What would it mean to be faithful to what I say I believe?

I have used the word sacrifice the way it is typically used, meaning “to give something up.” But when we look at the root meanings of the word, we find that it is not about giving something up, but rather about making sacred. We might question what people are making sacred through their actions, but do we really question the act of making sacred, of finding something worthy of our faithfulness?

I think war is evil. It’s indicative of massive human failure. If we aren’t going to sacrifice for war, we had  better start sacrificing for peace and for justice. The answer is not less sacrifice; it’s more sacrifice. If sacrifice and faithfulness are only for others, then we need to be prepared to live by someone else’s faith or with the ramifications of their faithfulness. Each of us has cause to live a life of gratitude for all we have been given. We are called to work for justice and to bind up the broken. Imagine what it would look like if we, too, could say that we are “Always Faithful” to our highest ideals.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063421/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/03.mp3

The roots of violence: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character,  commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.

This Gandhi quote has haunted me for years, as I’ve wondered: What does it mean to worship with or without sacrifice? Does Unitarian Universalism call for sacrifice? Is it a root of violence if we do not participate in sacrifice?

So, seeking wisdom on the matter, I tried an experiment. First I went to my personal Facebook page, and I asked my wide assortment of associates (the word friends being highly overused)—What is the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made? Overwhelmingly, the responses were about having or not having children, doing or not doing things because of the needs of a spouse or family member, paths taken and not taken for reasons other than personal choice. No one mentioned religion of any kind, including Unitarian Universalism, as a source of sacrifice.

Then I went on the “CLF Coffee Hour” Facebook page, where discussions flow on all kinds of topics, and asked, What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made? What motivated you to make it? Do you think Unitarian Universalism demands any kind of sacrifice?

There the conversation got very interesting! Here are some of the things people shared:

• Those of us who came to UU from authoritarian churches had to sacrifice certainty. No longer do we have someone to tell us what we need to believe and constantly reassure us that our doctrines are correct. But when we let go of certainty we open ourselves to seek and find wisdom and inspiration in those traditions we had dismissed as false. So the sacrifice becomes gain rather than loss.
• I feel like UUism has encouraged me to sacrifice easy answers, superficial comfort, and ingrained prejudices. (I don’t know if it has required that of me, but without it, I’m not sure I’m striving towards the principles.) It’s hard work, all this thinking and questioning!
• I would say that UUism has drawn me out of my comfort zone and has caused me to look at the bigger picture and realize that we’ve got to be out in the world to fight for social justice, interact with people and learn new ideas. It is scary at times, since I suffer from panic and anxiety and being gay in a hostile world, but I’m determined to help make a difference.
• When I was young, people told me I had to make sacrifices to achieve success in my life. So I made all the sacrifices, but didn’t get the success I was promised. So now I am very skeptical of anyone who asks me to make a sacrifice.
• We are continually “giving up” something for something else. … sometimes it’s giving up needed change to preserve our ego or comfort. Sometimes it’s giving up our comfort to bring about needed change.

That’s just a sample, and the diversity of responses is compelling, but no one answered “No. UUism does not make me sacrifice anything,” though one person, as you see above, voiced skepticism about being asked to sacrifice after having made futile sacrifices in the past.

As for me, I’m still mulling it about. It’s always easy to compare what I do with what other people do and come up feeling that I have made no sacrifices in my life, or to compare myself with others and believe that I have. But I don’t think sacrifice is a competitive sport. And what sacrifice means is subjective. Over and over, when I exclaim about what I perceive as a huge sacrifice someone else has made, I’m told that for them it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all!

When I was a UU kid and the Catholic kids I knew were giving up something for Lent—usually candy—I know that some part of me wanted to join them, despite my love for candy. When my own child grew up with Muslim friends and learned they were fasting for Ramadan, there was an immediate impulse to fast with them, to join them. I think that sacrificing in solidarity—not competitively, not to one-up someone else’s sacrifice or to have sacrifice bragging rights—can be immensely satisfying. Whereas sacrificing when others are not can be immensely infuriating.

I still wonder what Gandhi specifically meant—he who lived in poverty when he could have been rich, who gave his very life for the freedom of his people. I’m pretty sure that our UU religion does call us to some kinds of sacrifice—giving up certainty, giving up easy answers, giving up the comfort of old assumptions and prejudices that do harm to others. And it also calls us to work against the ways that our society seems all too willing to sacrifice the needs of some people in exchange for the comfort of others. I don’t know whether that counts as worship without sacrifice or not, but I’m willing to live inside of that complexity

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063359/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/04.mp3

I confess I’ve never been a big fan of the concept of sacrifice. It’s always struck me as kind of punitive, like it’s morally superior to suffer than to enjoy life’s abundance. And the religious tradition of sacrifice, which is deeply engrained in a wide variety of religions around the world, strikes me as even more suspect. Why would God or gods want you to offer up something that surely a god has no use for? Why give up something so precious as a life, or even as trivial as a basket of fruit, for a god whose divine nature surely doesn’t run to eating or drinking? What kind of relationship is it when you are expected to give up something valuable for no reason other than to prove your love and devotion?

The quintessential religious story of sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac, from the Hebrew Scriptures. God tells Abraham that he must make a sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac—that he must take a knife and slaughter his own child as a way of proving his love for God. Now, when the time rolls around and Abraham raises the knife, he finds a ram caught in nearby bushes, and that ram becomes an acceptable sacrifice instead of his child. Yay.

Needless to say, this is a deeply disturbing story. Sometimes it is described as depicting human moral progress from sacrificing people to sacrificing animals, which is, you know, good. But isn’t this kind of a horrible way of God asking for proof of love and devotion? Where was Isaac’s choice in the whole thing? Where was Sarah, Isaac’s mother? Shouldn’t they both have gotten some say in whether taking Isaac’s life was an appropriate demonstration of Abraham’s love for God? For that matter, who gets to say whether God’s demand for Isaac’s life was a reasonable ask to begin with? What kind of a dreadful story is this?

Maybe it is a story that is both dreadful and true. The fact of the matter is that life continually demands sacrifices of us, some insignificant and some heartbreaking. Parenting, for starters, always involves sacrifices. Of course, there are the sacrifices that parents make for their children: the sleepless nights, the severe limitations on your freedom, the financial and emotional cost of being responsible for keeping another person safe and growing. Those are hard enough.

But there are also the sacrifices we make of our children. We walk away from a crying child to catch an airplane for a business trip. We shut down the endless barrage of questions and demands to get the ten minutes of quiet that we need to maintain our sanity. We send a child to school when another day to recover from illness might be better, because we simply can’t miss another day of work. We inevitably fail at the daily balancing act between what our kids want and what they need, or the ongoing push and pull between what we know society expects of them and the perfect freedom of expression that they deserve. And if all that
weren’t enough, we live with the knowledge that the choices of our generation deeply and inevitably affect the world that our children will inherit.

And there is just no way to do it right, let alone do it perfectly. The fact of the matter is that the world is continually making utterly outrageous demands. It isn’t nice or fair or right, but it is true. And the concept of sacrifice is one way of making sense of that painful reality. Sacrifice declares that in the face of all the impossible challenges that the world presents to us, we choose. Rather than just stumbling through whatever happens to be on our path, we try to remember what matters most.

Of course, what matters most changes from moment to moment. But the idea of sacrifice is that, at least some of the time, we are able to choose to give ourselves to what we most care about. We can give up what is lesser for the sake of what is greater. Maybe that looks like a choice to give up eating meat for the sake of the health of the planet. Maybe it looks like sitting through the raucous honking of a middle school band concert so that your child can see your loving witness. Maybe it looks like listening with soft eyes while someone berates you for a mistake you didn’t know you made.

Of course, not every loss is a sacrifice. Sometimes we really just get no choice. But the idea of sacrifice reminds us to consider when we do choose: Who or what is lost because of my decision? Who gains? What price will I pay and what will be the cost to others? What do I have the capacity to give so that someone else can thrive?

The choices, of course, are never entirely right and never entirely wrong. But the idea of sacrifice invites us to meet the challenges of the world with the crucial, ongoing question How do I serve love? and with its partner question Is there a larger love that I might serve? Maybe living in the rich and beautiful complexity of those questions is all that anyone, divine or human, has a right to ask.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063339/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/05.mp3

It been quite a month. A new article posted every day, and going back into August. But it’s not sustainable: making sure there’s something here every day keeps me from researching and writing deeper pieces, like that long promised connection between the Independent Sacramental Movement and Unitarianism. I’ve been reading less, too. There are more readers, but I’m not convinced that most of “them” aren’t bots indexing the new articles.

So, starting tomorrow I’ll post when I have something to say, perhaps in a longer format. Indeed, I have a sermon to write (and later post) for October 6. And for the human readers, thanks for coming by.

Our expectations — our prayers —  as a community often have vague and fuzzy ends. We think we know what we need, what we want, but we often wind up with something completely different: a different thing we didn’t know we needed. Sometimes, the answer to our prayers is not what we thought we hoped for, but is exactly what we need. How do we learn to embrace the unexpected answer?

I’m trying to understand the new Unitarian College, formerly a residential ministerial training college in Manchester and now (2019) a non-residential and broader training college for the General Assembly of Unitarians and Free Christian Churches, in Great Britain,  and perhaps others. My interest is in the ministerial training role, and in the institutional and economic sustainability of the venture.

This is not an analysis of it, but only my “open notebook” of details I’ve found: mainly their new website and notes taken from a video of an introductory lecture, given at the Unitarian and Free Christian annual meeting, back in April.

First, the website, but also the ministry training student handbook (PDF) and the list of thirty-two required competencies from the General Assembly website (PDF). Their application is also helpful (PDF).

I’m also referring to the video “Unitarian Ministry Training” presented by the National Unitarian Fellowship; I have not watched it in full; rather, I read the auto-generated transcript and made notes of what I think are the interesting parts.

• 8:45. Is non-geographical
• 9:09. There are residential lessons
• 11:42. Program will take two years full-time or up to five years part-time
• 11:55. There is a required academic theological qualification
• 12:02. Two required placements in Unitarian congregations
• 18:48. “Ministry Strategy Group” for the GA: how lay leaders are trained, which can build on the one before it
• 26:26. Dr. Rob Whiteman is helping with two modules: Unitarian history, and the other legal and government
• 28:15. “Placement assessor” to observe ministry students in their placements, perhaps a retired minister
• 33:32. £150,000 a year to run the college; more if it grows
• 33:54. Generous giving, “pump priming” from General Assembly; possible NSPCI students
• 34:34. Online history module based on Len Smith’s book
• 37:50. Training related to the National Youth Program
• 41:22. One-third of the churches in the GAUFCC have fewer than ten members and two-thirds have fewer than twenty
• 42:18. GA selects ministry trainees; growth is possible.

Looking back at the last two “what I’ll be writing about next” shows I’ve let some ideas slide. This is as much for me as you, the reader.

I’ll be focusing on

• Wrapping up (for now) the series on the Independent Sacramental Movement by looking at its historic intersections (plural) with Unitarianism
• Uncovering themes for those using the Revised Common Lectionary
• Looking back on Universalist non-geographic churches
• Revisiting by text workflow
• Reviewing Allin’s Christ Triumphant, which I have started reading

And, of course, preaching. I have a sermon to preach next week and in one in November. I’ll put those texts here, too.

It’s become an article of faith in mainline churches to declare that “all are welcome.” Sometimes there will be a rainbow flag to seal the deal, implying that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are welcome to attend services, become members and possibly engage in leadership. Maybe. Since it all depends on attitudes and policy, and if and where these differs from actual practice. Sometimes a vague welcome to skirt a denominational policy, or to manage internal conflict. But nothing objectively welcoming LGBT people, and for a long time that’s as good as it got. But it’s not the 90s and that’s not good enough any more.

I’ve disliked the formula “all are welcome” for years. The logic reads to me this way: that LGBT people are so outre, so exceptional, so horrible that everybody else has to be included before their needs are recognized. Um, thanks. In practice, some people are not welcome at any particular church, say, at the very least persons who are an immediate harm to other people should not be welcomed.  (If they’re welcome, their victims aren’t.) Other churches can pick up the slack for that abusive husband, thank you. “All are welcome” gently merges LGBT people and the truly despicable or dangerous.