If you think that drag is just about a man wearing false eyelashes and a pussycat wig, or it’s just a woman wearing a pair of glued-on sideburns and an Elvis jumpsuit, then you have not heard the Gospel of RuPaul.

If you’re a smart and sensitive soul, and your eyes are wide open to the ugly mediocrity and hypocrisy of this world, and you’re angry and bitter, then you have not heard the Gospel of RuPaul.

RuPaul’s Gospel takes the ordinary sense of what drag is and completely transforms it into a spiritual philosophy; and it heals the anger and bitterness. It “tickles the brain.” That’s how RuPaul himself puts it. “It gives people something to live for.” “When you become the image of your own imagination,” he says, “it’s the most powerful thing you could ever do.”

Now, even if you happen to be a Jesus or a Buddha, you just don’t invent your Gospel out of nothing. Others are always helping, others are always contributing to the Good News vision that’s going to be born through you. One of these folks was RuPaul’s tenth-grade drama teacher, Mr. Pannell. “At the time,” says RuPaul, “I was going through a teenage drama of my own. My bad grades had finally caught up with me, and I was being faced with expulsion from the only school I had ever really enjoyed going to. My teacher, seeing how shaken up I was, calmly pulled me to the side and said with an even tone, ‘The most important thing to remember, RuPaul, is to not take life too seriously.’” Hearing this, RuPaul said to himself “Excuse me? … I am about to get kicked out of the only school I ever loved, and your advice for me is ‘don’t take life to seriously’? Are you for real?” “Of course,” says RuPaul, “the truth and wisdom of his advice was lost on me then, but I never forgot it. In fact, over the next thirty years, it would become the creed I live my life by.” It was “The best advice I’ve ever gotten”

How many of you tend to take yourself too seriously? Why did I even ask that question?

Someone was telling me about how he has a running joke with a friend. From time to time they look at each other and declare, thunderously, “Do you have any idea how important I think I am?” And whatever real struggle they may be dealing with actually gets a bit smaller, in proportion to how much they laugh.

Our lives always get tangled up, but if you are taking things way too seriously, instead of finessing things so they get untangled, the opposite happens. A tangle becomes a hard knot.

Stressing out is the worst problem-solving strategy there is.

But we do take our lives way too seriously. In part, it’s because we’re traumatized, and traumas tend to lock a person down. You were born, you had natural human needs, but the people who were supposed to take care of you, for some reason, could not. Trauma. Or, in growing up, you tended to draw outside the lines, and you got punished for it. Like RuPaul, you’re a guy but you liked to run around the yard with a pink dress on. And you got punished for it. You still get punished.

Trauma makes us take our lives way too seriously. And so do our social roles. They just tend to take over, and we end up thinking that their limits define the limits of our total potentiality. You become your gender, your skin color, your job, your politics, your marital status. That is what you are, and you are nothing more than that. You’re stuck in a box.

Growing up, like the rest of us, RuPaul heard the message, learned it, knew it by heart.

But again and again, lessons contradicting it came.

One day, when RuPaul was five, his sister Renata put some chocolate chip cookies in a paper bag, grabbed a blanket, and then led him out into the back yard, spread out the blanket, opened up the paper bag and gave him a cookie, and said, “Ru, Ru, this is a picnic!” It taught him that you can turn something that is completely mundane into something magical. Take the situation too seriously and all you have is a blanket and a bag of cookies. But imagination, unleashed, reveals that there’s always more than meets the eye.

Beyond this, RuPaul happened to see African American comedian Flip Wilson on TV, in drag. Geraldine. Oh how funny it was to him, fabulous. He wanted to sing and dance and do like that. Extravaganza eleganza!

On TV he also saw Diana Ross. It was on the Ed Sullivan show and she’s singing “Baby Love” and she scrunches her shoulders up and he does that too, he’s imitating her, he’s practicing her big eyes and big smiles.

All this is happening in San Diego in the 1970s and it was very white and very conservative and people wanted him to take his gender and his race and all the other labels way too seriously. But for him, that meant playing dumb.

You see, there’s an equation forming in his mind. As in: taking yourself way too seriously, just like a lot of people want, is equivalent to playing dumb. It’s a kind of deprivation. It’s nothing less than a denial of the fundamental freedom, creativity, and playfulness that is at the core of human nature.

And he’s just too smart for that.

So was David Bowie. About him he says, “Everything that I felt on the outside he was doing on the inside.” David Bowie’s genderfluidity was a symbol of something way bigger than gay or straight or male or female or any of the other labels or traumas that tend to take people over and make them forget their essential selves.

Thus the Gospel of RuPaul: here it is: “Drag isn’t just a man wearing false eyelashes and a pussycat wig. Drag isn’t just a woman with a pair of glued on sideburns and an Elvis jumpsuit. Drag is everything. I don’t differentiate drag from dressing up or dressing down. Whatever you put on after you get out of the shower is your drag. Be it a three-piece suit or a Chanel suit, a McDonald’s uniform or a police uniform, the truth of who you really are is not defined by your clothes.”

Do you see my drag? It’s this stole, this suit, these colorful socks.

Look at your drag.

And now think: what more could there be? What more wants to be, through you? Perhaps all you think you’ve been given in life is a bag of cookies and a blanket in the back yard.

But are you taking that way too seriously? Could there be more? Could there be different?

“The biggest obstacle I ever faced,” RuPaul says, “was my own limited perception of myself.”

And he’s not alone in that.

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RuPaul says, “I do not impersonate females! How many women do you know who wear seven-inch heels, four-foot wigs, and skintight dresses?”

He also says, “I don’t dress like a woman; I dress like a drag queen!”

You see, drag is bigger than just dress considerations. At least for RuPaul, it’s trying to get at something far larger. “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag,” he says, which means that human nature is at the core fundamentally free, creative, and playful.

Which leads to the big question: what will do with all our freedom? If, in some grand sense, we are all drag queens, what are we going to do with our drag?

One thing is to mock culture, which is really about taking back freedom. Culture wants people to play dumb, but no, RuPaul is too smart for that. Thus, the mockery. “And it’s not only drag queens who have blown the lid of culture’s lunacy and hypocrisy,” he reminds us. “Comedians, rock stars, and even Bugs Bunny have built celebrated careers on irreverence and challenging the status quo…. [A]ncient cultures … relied on drag queens, shamans, and witch doctors to remind each individual member of the tribe of their duality as male and female, human and spirit, body and soul.”

This is a great connection to make. Shamans and witch doctors and drag queens all were, in ancient times, living symbols of the fluidity at the heart of all humanity. And they still are. And they wake up the sleepwalkers by poking at them. By making fun. Seven-inch heels, four-foot wigs, and skintight dresses are all about making fun. Names like Jinks Monsoon, Pearl Liaison, Trixie Mattel, Acid Betty, and others that I can’t mention in this rated G context but they are hilarious! They are making fun of what too many people take too seriously, seriously enough even to hurt others over, even kill.

Matthew Shepard.

Pulse.

What will we do with our drag? Besides mocking culture, another thing we get from RuPaul is the invitation to look back at ourselves growing up from a drag queen perspective. Remember the clip from earlier, when RuPaul invited Pearl Liaison to do this? “You were born naked,” RuPaul says, “but you’ve grown to become a fierce drag queen. Here’s a photo of you as a little bitty boy. Now if you could time travel what would Pearl have to say to little Matthew?”

And Pearl says, “Ahhh god, I’d have to start with a warning. You’re about to enter the toughest years of your life and it’s gonna suck really bad for a long time and people are going to [mess] you up and take advantage of you and people are going to be looking at you from across the room for so many years and you’re not going to understand why.” And Pearl cries and cries….

And then RuPaul asks, “Do you understand why now?” Pearl nods yes, yes, yes, and then RuPaul says, “You’re a star baby.”

Two quotes from RuPaul will help make sense of what’s happening here:

“When you become the image of your own imagination, it’s the most powerful thing you could ever do.”

And then this: “If you are trigger-happy and you’re looking for a reason to reinforce your own victimhood, your own perception of yourself as a victim, you’ll look for anything that will reinforce that.”

It all adds up to this: To look at yourself from a drag queen perspective is to remember the pain of your life and to feel the temptation to reinforce your own victimhood, but you don’t. You step back from that. You choose to become the image of your own imagination. It’s the most powerful thing you could ever do.

Today, I want each of you to look at yourself from that fierce powerful drag queen perspective. Because you are a star, baby.

And you are even more than that, according to RuPaul’s gospel. There is yet another level to all of this. The truth is that “You are an extension of the power that created the whole universe.” “The truth,” he says, “is that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. The human part of the experience is temporary. Think of it as a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Your spiritual being is not temporary. It is eternal. Think of it as the sun and the moon. That’s why the saying ‘You’re born naked and the rest is drag’ couldn’t be more true.”

And this is the full and entire Gospel. Our drag actually does not end with our nakedness but extends even to include our physical human body and our basic individuality that comes with a name and a history. Before all of that, you were. You are eternal.

A Vedanta Hindu would put it like this: Atman is Brahman.

But RuPaul just says: “You are God in drag.”

[Head exploding sound]

[More head exploding sound]

Perhaps you came this morning really thinking that drag is just about a man wearing false eyelashes and a pussycat wig, or it’s just a woman wearing a pair of glued-on sideburns and an Elvis jumpsuit. But now you’ve heard the Gospel of RuPaul.

Perhaps you came this morning with eyes are wide open to the ugly mediocrity and hypocrisy of this world, and you’re angry and bitter. But now you’ve heard the Gospel.

The biggest obstacle people ever face is their own limited perception of themselves.

Abundance is the truth of who you are. Extravaganza eleganza is you.

Don’t let anyone steal that.

Take that power back.

Did you know that, in ancient mid-East society, where Israel lay, it was common for military men to establish deep and faithful friendships with each other—friendships which were so deep that, in truth, the men were lovers?

Did you know that, in the ancient society out of which our Hebrew Bible emerged, women had their own world, separate from though dominated by men? And that, in this world, women often offered each other support and affection, including sexual intimacy?

Did you know that, in the ancient society out of which our Christian Bible emerged, Roman householders would regularly establish sexual relationships with their male slaves?

It was commonplace, and no one raised an eyebrow. It was what it was.

So now listen to 1 Samuel 18:1-4, which describes what happened when David first came to Court—David, who would go on to slay Goliath and become King of the Israelites. He met Jonathan, the current King’s son. And sparks flew. As the Bible says, “The soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David…. Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.” Clearly, Jonathan and David were military men, and an intense relationship between them started. A sexual one? Well, just listen to what David says in 2 Samuel 1:26 upon the death of Jonathan: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” There’s more going on here than simple friendship, folks…

Or now listen to the story of Ruth and Naomi, as Daniel Helminiak, Roman Catholic priest and biblical scholar, describes it: “The Book of Ruth relates the very unusual commitment between the Jewish woman Naomi and her Moabite daughter-in-law Ruth. After the death of Ruth’s husband, in contrast to the customs of the day and unlike her sister-in-law, widowed Ruth remains with Naomi. Ruth declares to Naomi, ‘Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there I will be buried.’” Here again: more is going on than simple friendship.

And then this: listen: In both the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we read of a Centurion at whose household a servant lies paralyzed and suffering. The Centurion goes before Jesus and begs him to come. He speaks of his authority over his servants and uses the word “doulos” which is the generic term for servant. But, very curiously, when he refers to the specific paralyzed and suffering servant for whom he’s going through all sorts of trouble, the word used is “pais” in combination with “entimos” meaning “my lover” who is “very valuable and dear.” “The most likely explanation of the Centurion’s behavior,” says Daniel Helminiak, “is that the young slave was the Centurion’s sexual partner. Undoubtedly,” he goes on, “Jesus was aware of such things. He was not dumb. He knew what was going on around him. So this seems to be a case where Jesus actually encountered a loving homosexual relationship.” And how did that encounter turn out? He praised the Centurion’s faith and he healed his young lover. No condemnation. Not one whiff of it.

Now, hold on to all of this on one hand while, on the other, we revisit Brian Murphy from our video today. His story of the first time he looked up homosexuality in the Bible. He grabbed his Bible off the bookshelf, he closed his bedroom door, he sat cross-legged on the floor and opened directly to the index. His finger traced down the page. He found the word. Homosexuality. He says, “Even looking at the word was terrifying. There were five pages listed. I flipped to the first one. It wasn’t a specific verse but rather a lesson box in my teen study Bible.” And that lesson box repeats the idea that homosexuality is a choice, and a sinful one at that. He keeps looking, “But it’s more of the same. Homosexuality is a sin. Gay people are choosing to live in sin.” He closes his Bible. He says, “I don’t know what to do. There it is written on the page. Crystal clear. […] Who I like is sinful, who I love is sinful. Who I am is sinful. Where could I possibly go from here?”

The underlying pain of that question is unbearable.

In response to such heartbreaking hurt, religious conservatives and fundamentalists often like to say, “Hate the sin and love the sinner.” They say that, to try to ease up on the judgmentalism. But it makes no sense at all when you’re talking about sexual orientation. Act and person are merged. Daniel Halminiak again: “Sexuality means much more than physical arousal and orgasm. Attached to a person’s sexuality is the capacity to feel affection, to delight in someone else, to get emotionally close to another person, to be passionately committed…. Sexuality is at the core… [So, to] have to be afraid to feel sexual … is to short-circuit human spontaneity in a whole array of expressions—creativity, motivation, passion, commitment, heroic achievement. It is to be afraid of part of one’s own deepest self.”

Brian Murphy knows exactly what I’m talking about. How many here know this as well: what it’s like to be afraid of your own deepest self? To say, in despair, “Where could I possibly go from here?”

All this is on the other hand. On one hand, we have Bible stories that, seen through the lens of history, tell of loving same-sex relationships without blinking an eye. But on the other hand, we have a Bible index that points to certain passages which are combined with lesson boxes, and in these lesson boxes are interpretations that converge on one idea: homosexuality is depraved. And because the Bible has such authority in our culture, the result is people like Brian Murphy who feel stuck in an evil that they can’t possibly escape because it’s who they are. The result is 30% of teenage suicides coming from the gay youth population. The result is a larger culture of hatred towards gays and lesbians (not to mention trans folks) which is NOT softened by statements like “hate the sin and love the sinner” and in fact relentlessly inflicts murder and terror and injustice and, in short, does the exact EXACT opposite of what Jesus did to the Centurion two thousand years ago.

How do we understand the existence of what’s on the two hands? How did that happen? Where do we go from here?

“I don’t know,” says Brian Murphy in the video today, “but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not seeing the whole story, that even though it seems so black and white on the page, there must be some shades of grey that I’m not seeing. There must be some explanation–there must be!”

And there is.

Let me start with some illustrations, which will take us to the explanation.

What if I were to describe a mutual friend—let’s call him Reggie—as a space cadet, and someone hearing that went on to conclude that Reggie must be a NASA astronaut?

But that’s not right—and so I try to clarify. I say, “Listen, what I’m trying to say is that Reggie is out there in left field!” But in reply, the person starts looking around for an actual field and for Reggie, who they think can be found standing on the left hand side of it.

What’s happening here? Simply this: our thinking goes haywire—our actions go off point—when our interpretation of words is literalistic. Things go wrong when we forget about colloquialism and culture and context. Being a space cadet has nothing to do with working at NASA and everything to do with loopiness. Being out in left field has nothing to do with where you are standing and everything to do with loopiness. I’m saying that Reggie is loopy—that and only that!

The reason why we have the existence of two hands—the Bible on both, but on the one homosexuality is affirmed and, on the other, it’s hated—is that lots of people still haven’t absorbed the message of one of our spiritual ancestors from almost 200 years ago: William Ellery Channing. In his sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity,” he said something new about how to read the Bible: take history and culture in consideration. Here’s how Channing put it: “We find,” he says, “that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application.” Maybe the Holy Spirit did breath inspiration into the writers of scripture, but Channing insisted that “a knowledge of their feelings, and of the influences under which they were placed, is one of the preparations for understanding their writings.” Without this, you just can’t be faithful to the Bible. The result is disaster. We apply Bible insights to our day recklessly, ignoring the fact that what the Bible writers are talking about may be very different or even absolutely different from the present concern on our minds. Or we overlay present meanings onto the past. We read into the Bible our own agendas and interests and standards and make it kill when its proper function is to give life.

Channing once said, “We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible.” It’s true.

And unfortunately, it’s the folks who write the lesson boxes in teen study Bibles who aren’t exercising their reason. They just spread ignorance and prejudice. They point out the seven or so passages an all the hundreds of pages of scripture which appear to condemn homosexuality, and they give them a literalistic interpretation. As in, being a space cadet is equivalent to being a NASA astronaut. As in, being out in left field is equivalent to actually standing in an actual field on the actual left hand side. But if you read scripture the way Channing described almost 200 years ago, what happens is all those passages fall apart. We find that none actually say anything about the homosexuality that we Americans talk about today. They talk about male temple prostitution instead; or the Israelite obsession against mixing the wrong kinds of things together; or violations of the ancient hospitality code; or abusive and exploitative relationships. They talk about that and not committed loving same-sex relationships. It’s actually astonishing. When the Biblical basis for hatred towards gays and lesbians is in reality so completely vacuous, it’s amazing to behold the staying power of that hate. It’s amazing to witness how Biblical literalists continue to thunder on.

It is a tragic aspect of our time that there is the one hand, and then there is the other, and it’s hard to know how they might come together. It is equally tragic, that human psychology can make it so hard to change an opposing point of view. Even if you tell me all the true facts about life in ancient Biblical times and how loving homosexual relationships were completely common and accepted, I still might not believe you. Depends on how threatened I feel by you. It depends. If your approach doesn’t meet my psychological needs, there’s going to be a backfire effect and I’m going to cling to my false beliefs even more!

But even if there is no easy solution to this, still, we must not forget the consolation of knowing that, rightly read, the Bible is no enemy to homosexuality. I want all the Brian Murphys in here and out there to know this. “There it is,” he says, “written on the page. Crystal clear. […] Who I like is sinful, who I love is sinful. Who I am is sinful. Where could I possibly go from here?”

And what I say is, it is NOT written on the page. You want to know what’s written on the page? Go to the story of Jonathan and David in the scriptures. Read how “The soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David.”

Go to the story of Ruth and Naomi, how Ruth said, “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there I will be buried.”

Go to the story of Jesus and the Centurion in the scriptures, the Centurion who was so worried about his sick lover. The Centurion went to Jesus and Jesus did nothing to shame him. Jesus did not say, “My Father created them Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.” No. Jesus praised the Centurion, and he healed his lover.

In the face of hatred, in the face of the fire-breathing Bible-thumpers who are 200 years behind the times on how to interpret scripture, just go to Jesus.

Go to where the love is, because I promise, it’s there for you.

The Living Tradition of Unitarian Universalism has a geography. At certain places on this earth, the finest things it stands for—and the incidents and people that embodied what was best in it—are made visible. We can touch and see and even smell them.

One of these places is most certainly New England—Boston and its environs—which was the cradle of American Unitarianism and Universalism. Another is the deep South where the Civil Rights movement began and so many of our leaders joined in the struggle, hand-in-hand-with others, and some even became martyrs.

And then there is Transylvania, a word that literally means “the land beyond the forests.” Before the French settled Canada in 1604; before the English established a colony in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607; before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620; before all of these, the Unitarians in Transylvania had already been proclaiming a Jesus who was not a God but a great teacher who affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of not some but all. They had already been proclaiming the political right to religious toleration, so that they could affirm Egy Az Isten (God is one) in security and in peace and others could affirm their own vision of the Divine in security and in peace as well. They had already been doing this for over half a century, before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth!

Don’t let visions of “I vaaant to suuuck your blooood” cloud over the amazing thing about our spiritual roots in Transylvania. It’s much, much more than that. I know it hits a funny bone. The Dracula connection is kind of funny, and folks in Transylvania tolerate it or even benefit from the T-shirt sales. But the historical truth is sobering: everywhere else in Europe in the 16th century, our ancestors were hunted down and killed mercilessly. Transylvania was the only place our people were safe. Poland too, but that’s another story.

It was the only safe place. And even that proved fragile….

It’s 1568. The brilliant Francis David has just returned to Kolozsvar (which is the Rome of Unitarian Universalism) after winning a debate with the leading Calvinist scholar of the time, and the townsfolk meet him at the gates. Today, that would happen to a sports team. But back then, the heroes were the religious leaders. They meet him at the gates and beg to know what happened. Francis David starts to go through the debate but you know what? The brilliant and charismatic man was also a short man. So they have him stand on a boulder so more people can hear him. He goes into impassioned oratory and inspires his countrymen and, that day, the town of Kolozsvar becomes Unitarian. The boulder marks the occasion.

We saw that boulder. It was in a room of the First Unitarian Church of Kolozsvar, and our pilgrimage guides ushered us there and we stood before it feeling a bit stunned because the great Francis David had been there. He had stood on that rock. We are face to face with history! I also loved it because I never knew that Francis David was short. He was just a mere mortal, proclaiming Love. It made me care for him even more. It reminded me of all our mere mortal limitations and failures, and yet our task today is to stand tall, no matter what.

A time like this is when you know you are on a pilgrimage. This is not mere tourism, where it’s all about entertainment. Pilgrimage is about understanding where your basic values come from; connecting with the stories of your faith tradition in direct ways; and even being transforming in who you are, reaching new depths of knowing….

One of those transforming moments was in the Homorod Valley. There, the communities are all small villages of farming families, and these families have been Unitarian for almost 500 years. They got the message from Francis David, and the message stuck.

So UUCA’s little band of nine pilgrims found their way to one the Homorod Valley villages called Homorodkaracsonyfalva. The evening we were there, dinner was at the parish house, and it consisted of a slug of polenka, sour cherry soup, mashed potatoes with meatballs, and dessert. During our walk back to the bed and breakfast, we saw cows returning home for the evening. Water buffalo also. Enormous moos. Excrement everywhere on the street, and the sour/rich smell blending in with everything. Clop-clop-clop of horses carrying wagons filled with hay. Sun-weathered farmers who could not possibly read William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson, never mind the scientists or postmodernists of current day. And I thought: who are we to say that only smart people or cultured people can “get” Unitarianism? Who are we to limit the forms it can take? A people almost 500 years old are proving all our preconceptions to be lies.

The next morning, we had a conversation with the minister’s wife Enikö Benedik. In this ancient village of 500 people, in an area more rural than you can imagine, she spoke about Match.com and how several village marriages had come out of it, but nevertheless there seemed in it to be a cheapening of the mystery of two people coming together. She spoke about email and Facebook and smart phones and the Internet but what does that do to family time together? What does that do to relationships?

What I heard in all this was the echo of our own worries 6000 miles away. We are so far apart but we are also right together in some of our concerns. More unites us than divides us.

It was crystallized in a T-shirt I saw someone wearing, while walking down a street in Kolozsvar: “Be with someone who makes you happy” but the word “with” was crossed out. The message was that no one else can make you happy. That’s for you to do yourself. “Be someone who makes you happy.”

More unites us than divides us.

It was a pilgrimage we were on. I wish it for you. I wish it for all of us.

And I will never forget. The sounds of place names:

Kolozsvar
Deva
Gyulafehervar
Sibiu
Sighisoara
Homorodkaracsonyfalva
Szekelyudvarhely

I will never forget:

The smells that only thousand-year-old places can have.
Egg yolks that are the color of Orange Crush.
The sharp taste of palenka, and the burning that goes all the way down.
The richness of the Hungarian language, as when to say “welcome” is literally to say, “God brought you.”
The weight of the robe that Rev. Kedei lent me, to wear during worship.

And also this: Utterly unexpected moments of grace, as when the father of my host family explained why his family didn’t eat out very much, and he didn’t speak English very well at all but the limitations of language didn’t matter. The message was heart-to-heart. There are more hungers at stake than just for food. There is a hunger for belonging, there is a hunger for the feeling of being together, there is hunger for family. Home cooking has far more nutritional value, on more levels, than anything from a restaurant….

All of this. All of this and more.

There is only one way to end my message today.

From your sister congregation 6000 miles away, there in Transylvania, I bring you greetings. Despite the distance, we are at one in heart:

Where there is faith, there is love;
Where there is love, there is peace;
Where there is peace, there is blessing;
Where there is blessing, there is God.
Where there is God, there is no need.

Amen.

My sermon today is in two parts. Part one is what I preached at our partner church in Székelyudvarhely, although there I had to pause every once and a while for Rev. Kedei to translate what I was saying into Hungarian. I want you to hear what I had to say to them. Here we go:

I bring you greetings from your sister congregation 6000 miles away. But despite the distance, we are at one in heart:

Where there is faith, there is love;
Where there is love, there is peace;
Where there is peace, there is blessing;
Where there is blessing, there is God.
Where there is God, there is no need.

Amen.

Now, I begin by noting something perennially tragic in human history. Always the haves and the have nots. Always insiders and always the rejected, the outcast. Two thousand years ago, Roman rulers spoke of this as a kind of peace. The peace of Rome was a way of life in which the Emperor was at the top of the pyramid, then wealthy men right below. Only these had inherent worth and dignity; everyone else was a tool to be used, controlled, subjugated, humiliated. No compassion for these people: women, poor men, slaves, and the conquered.

But this was the way of Rome, the way to a unified empire, the way to true peace. Fight Rome on this—serve any gods that contradict the Roman way—and it’s war.

And now begins our Living Tradition. It begins with the grungy followers of a discredited rabbi whose teachings were judged as treasonous and he was crucified. Pontius Pilate thought it would have been enough to crush the spiritual rebels but it was not to be so. The love of Rabbi Jesus was too powerful to die. Rabbi Jesus died but his spirit was resurrected in the lives of his followers, who refused the peace of Rome. They refused to be pacified. They resisted and it was all about Love. Justin Martyr, one of these early Christians, who lived around 70 years after Jesus’ death, said, “We who formerly valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possession, now bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to everyone in need; we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies.” That’s what the Jesus followers did. Religion wasn’t so much a matter of what you believed as what you did. To care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the poor, the sick. Subvert the perennial tragedy of human history. Resist the peace of Rome. No more have-nots.

Everyone get inside the circle.

So you can imagine how Rome felt about the apostle Paul when he said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”—which is to say that everyone has inherent worth and dignity and not just some. Teachings like this made Paul and every person who received them into their hearts criminals.

Suffering is no stranger to our Living Tradition. One of the greatest gifts that our Transylvanian Unitarian Churches have given the world was Francis David. Back in 1568, he was warned by a debater from the Calvinist persuasion, “If I win this debate you will be executed.” He replied, calmly, “If I win this debate, you will be given the freedom due to every son of God.” Because David knew: faith is the gift of God. A person’s faith is their secret way of being with the mystery, and it cannot be compelled by any external force, it can’t even be compelled by the person in question gritting their teeth and trying to force themselves to believe. It comes from a place within that’s deeper than trying, it comes from the soul, it comes from God.

For almost 500 years, this has been our tradition. Tolerance is synonymous with who we are.

But suffering is no stranger. We know how the story ended for David. Tolerance met with intolerance. The power of Rome reincarnated. Rome rearing its ugly head yet again. The last book David ever wrote was one line scratched upon the wall of a prison cell, as he was sick and pitifully weak: Egy Az Isten. God is one. He died of neglect on November 15, 1579. His body was thrown into an unmarked grave, and not one person, to this day, knows where he actually lies.

But now listen to something else about our Living Tradition. It does not quit. It does not quit! Does not matter that the grave of the great Francis David is unknown. Does not matter how he died. The last book he ever wrote—those precious three words scratched upon a prison wall—are above the door of every Unitarian church in this land. They hang on the wall of my home congregation, on a beautiful banner which was a gift from you.

The spirit of Francis David, just like his Master Jesus, can never die.

And neither can the spirit of love that Jesus magnified and his followers caught and taught, despite the opposing power of Rome and every reincarnation of Rome up to this point in time, including Communism, including the Donald Trumpism of my own country. Despite all their promises of peace…

When Rev. Kedei visited my congregation back in May of 1998, he said, “Through centuries of persecution, of depravation of our rights, we learned well the lesson of history: we could survive only if we help and love each other. It remained a proverb from those times: ‘They love each other like Unitarians.’”

As we together–you here in Romania and we in the United States—navigate the complexities of the 21st century, let us love each other like Unitarians. Our partnership has lasted for 26 years, since 1990, and let it last for untold years more. We are both religious minorities surrounded by majority upon majority. We can feel so small at times. But our shared Living Tradition transcends geography and transcends time. It is like a river with a far distant origin and purpose and we are at the forming edge of it and it goes beyond us too, on and on. Our Living Tradition. All our heroes. All the stories. And also this: the something that is universal. How we are all one in the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Love, which bears all things, hopes for all things, endures all things, is greater than faith, greater than hope, never ends.

I don’t care how powerful Rome was, or its current versions.

Let us love each other like Unitarians, and all will be well.

I’m on a pilgrimage to Transylvania! Hearing that you might say, Vaaaat? But Dracula vill suck your bloooood!

Actually, in Transylvania (which is a region of Romania, right below the Carpathian Mountains), we have 450 year-old Unitarian churches, which are the oldest in the world. These congregations were gathered around the same essential notion that today’s Unitarian Universalists are gathered around: religious liberty.

What turns laughter about vampires into a more sober mood is the knowledge that 450 years ago, Transylvania was the one of very few places in Europe where folks committed to religious liberty could gather without being murdered. Everywhere else, to be out of step with what the king believed or with what the head of the church believed (like the Pope or John Calvin or Martin Luther) meant torture and death. Not so in Transylvania…

So it’s a pilgrimage. I’m joined by eight congregants from the church I serve. It’s a big trip: two weeks long, 6000 miles away. A couple days in Budapest, Hungary, and then off to Transylvania we go.

Here are our guides: Csilla and John. They are completely wonderful, patient, and seemingly all-knowing. I say this last part without one trace of irony. Pretty much every question they get, they can answer. We are extremely lucky to share this adventure with them.

Thanks for checking out this blog. I’ll be writing as the Spirit moves me, about the historical foundations of Unitarian Universalism, about traveling, about life in lands far away, about my own life and history.

This is a pilgrimage: I am traveling 6000 miles, in both my outer and inner worlds…

Wednesday, 9pm, Budapest

Around 5pm, after having gotten off the bus that took us from the Hungarian National Gallery (where we saw a brilliantly designed exhibit of the works of Modigliani) to within walking distance of our hotel (the Hotel Belvedere), I ask one of my companions, June Lester, “What day is it?” I swear I felt like it was Thursday. The plane to Paris left Tuesday at 3:40pm and we arrived at Charles DeGaulle at 6:30am-ish Wednesday morning and we had just one hour to hustle through security and then a passport screening (which took so long that there was scuffling with police). But somehow we made the connecting flight to Budapest and THAT flight seemed even longer than the first (though it most certainly was not). So many hours of travel that the hours lost their hold on meaning. Just like what happens when you repeat a word over and over and over again. The word becomes mere sounds without sense. Thus: “What day is it?”

Go back to before the flight from Atlanta. It’s 1:53pm on Tuesday and I am sitting at the piano bar at the International Airport, with a glass of chardonnay. I realized that, in the past, I would just walk on by this sort of thing. I would smile at the music and just walk on by. Not today. Today I leave for two weeks in Eastern Europe. Today begins a new chapter in my life. Today I’m not going to walk on by. I’m going to sit and enjoy even if it part of me feels vaguely restless and unworthy of such pleasure…

During the flight to Paris I watch the map charting our progress. It’s a small plane arcing from ATLANTA on the North American continent to PARIS on the European continent. The  map is displayed on a screen on the back of the seat in front of me.

It zooms out to show almost the entire planet and how this journey crosses over an enormous global distance, and then it zooms in to show the cities and mountain ranges near by Paris. And then I search the map beyond Paris–beyond France, beyond Austria, beyond even Poland. I realize that I’ve never been to a country that was once communist. I also realize that where I’m going is a hop, skip, and a jump from the land that my Ukrainian ancestors originally came from: villages outside of Lviv. The Transylvania communities we are visiting are just below the Carpathian Mountains; Lviv is just right above. In other words: I am going to the general region of the world from where my DNA ultimately originated. I’m going to where my blood comes from.

This pilgrimage has personal reasons behind it, too.

Thursday, Sept. 1, 8:29am, Budapest

Back from breakfast, refreshed after a lovely meal in a sunroom. Even though there was an American loudmouth jerk windbag going on and on about a misadventure related to cappuccino. Apparently he asked for a cappuccino and the reply he got was, What flavor? His response was not curiosity but indignation. He was sitting at a table with his partner and another couple. His incessant complaining was like a fishnet dragging his table mates down deeper and deeper into a drowning sea….

Me too, sitting within earshot, although I would not let him, since I was busy thinking about what I’d write about in my blog today. Writing makes me buoyant. I had not intended to write a blog, but a friend suggested I do so, and I am grateful. Grateful for friends.

Last night after my blog post I closed up shop and, as is always the case with sleep, allowed myself to be taken away. Dreams, dreams. Also thoughts–one about clustering travel experiences around themes. So that’s what I’ll do.

One theme: “Look for the helpers.” It’s a phrase that comes from Mr. Rogers. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.'” It came to mind not so much because scary things have been happening but because helpers are real and they come in such surprising ways and forms. One came in the form of the face of an infant, sucking on her pacifier, suddenly popping up between the seats in front of me, eyes big with curiosity and mischief, looking at me in a way that adults rarely look. This was en route to Budapest. I was beyond tired but reached out with a finger and the baby did the same and it was like a moment in the movie E.T. “Phone home.”

Another theme: surprises. The dry heat here in Budapest, combined with cool winds, reminds me of summers where I grew up in Alberta. My hotel room: how the master switch for turning the electrical system on or off is my key card. Breakfast: Orange Crush-colored egg yolks, tomatoes, cucumbers, bacon…

Yet a third theme: traveling. Realizing that you live surrounded by wonders but you can’t see them until putting yourself in strange places, like 12,000 feet above earth. Studying and struggling with unfamiliar food menus. Fat fingers fumbling to reach credit cards through the tiny zippered mouth of a money belt (take that, pickpockets!). Surmounting the dizzying heights of the museum cupola and right there sitting on a chair is the museum guard but he is sleeping… You creep past him and go outside where you are opened up to the wide blue sky and the scene of Buda on one side and Pest on the other and there is the Danube and the rooftops are like waves spreading outwards in every direction and it’s mind-blowing… But you think of the sleeping guard, and then you think of yourself back in Atlanta (or wherever you happen to live) and assume that it’s the same for you–miracles all over–but you are sleeping on the job too…

Thursday, Sept. 1, 8:12pm, Budapest

Our fantastic tour guide today informed us that Hungarian is the second hardest language in the world to learn (#1 is Latvian). The linguistic family it hails from comes from Mars; English’s family of origin is from Venus. It means that Hungarian words are practically inaccessible to English speakers. It means that my Left brain was rather quiet today since it could not grab hold of any words it saw, or any parts of words, to make meaning. All the work was by the Right brain, trained as it is on images and symbols….

The tour began at 9:45 when our group met the gorgeous and brilliant Agnes. Super knowledgeable, super smart. We are each handed a earphone which will help us hear Agnes while we are touring popular sites. No one will mistake us for locals We get on the bus, and immediately she’s filling us up with history and politics and gossip and it is all so interesting–but how much will be remembered? No matter–it’s tasty in the now.

Her words are quicker than the bus. The traffic is so thick that it’s as if we need some Moses to part the waters. Finally, we are off. The real miracle is that no curses spring off the tongue of our bus driver.

At one point she says, “The Magyar settlers carried on the lifestyle of their Hun ancestors, raiding and killing. But it’s not like that anymore, unfortunately.” Did I hear her right?

Budapest, she says, is in the middle: to get anywhere you have to go through it. So: it is the most seized capitol city in Europe. I carry this in mind as I wander the streets hours later and watch tall beautiful Magyar women and stocky muscular Magyar men and wonder about the depths at which ancestral melancholy flows through them…

We go the the Square of the Holy Trinity. There is a famous cathedral next door, but who cares. This Unitarian is fascinated by the depiction of the Trinity, atop a tall pillar. A European-looking Jesus, with cross; a European-looking Father God sporting a beard that puts to shame all those currently worn by hipsters; and the Holy Spirit portrayed as as a sphere with rays bursting forth.

I smile at Agnes after she tells us all about it. “This is pretty ironic you know,” I say, “seeing we’re a bunch of Unitarians.”

We walk and walk. Cobblestones. We bake in the sun. My hot face and forehead.

We find ourselves looking out over and across the Danube River, to the Parliament Building in Pest. But not ONE building–THREE. Evidently the top three designs were built. The Hungarians evidently have a healthy sense of self….

We talk politics. Agnes uses phrases like “the authorities.” “The current regime.” She says that new developments echo 1930 trends–she’s referring to Naziism. Donald Trump is a favorite of the President. We all groan.

Later we talk about the “Bottle Opener”–that’s what people call the sculpture that the Communists built post-World War Two. Of course the Communists had a different name: “The Statue of Liberty.” Agnes readily agrees that for some people, the coming of the Communists was liberating (i.e., the Jews were saved from total annihilation by the Nazis). But the 45 years following were also another kind of occupation. I’m taking this to mean that few were really sad about the fall of Communism. Something like a 7th or 10th of the population spied upon everyone else, and 25 years later they still don’t know who the rats were/are–and of course this implicates the “authorities” themselves. The public knows who the rats are, and doesn’t, and does…

On to Hero Square, which we travelled to via the Champs Elysee of Budapest–a hugely wide street, designed after the one in Paris. Hero Square is immense. Everything in Budapest is immense. Everything is big and romantic. … (Remember THREE Parliament buildings, not one?)

Something else interesting about Hero Square. Among other things, it celebrates the conquerers of the Carpathian Basin from a thousand years ago. In truth, these conquerers looked Asian and were probably no more than five feet tall, but in the 19th century (when Hero Square was built) Hungarians wanted their heros to look like tall, square-jawed Finns. Everybody’s a historical revisionist, right?

The tour ended around 1:30, whereupon our group had a late lunch. And then I struck out on my own. It took something like three hours walking to get back to my hotel…

Friday, Sept. 2, 2:13am, Budapest

Uuuuggghhhhhh…. Can’t sleep.

gghhhhnnnnnnUUUUUUU

uuuggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhHHHH

Friday, Sept. 2, 8:25am, Budapest

Despite my bout of insomnia, I was very excited to get up and enjoy breakfast in the sunroom again. When I arrived and looked around me–saw once again the plenitude of breakfast items–I realized that there was no more need to take pictures. I had taken them all yesterday. I had already captured the sights. Today was just like yesterday, so why repeat?

The thought made me sad. And I went ahead and took more pictures anyway.

While I was reflecting on all this and sucking down coffee, in a magnificent sunroom, I was also paying attention to the family sitting across the way. The baby was going, “ma ma,” arms waving. She sported a pink headband with flower. Her mother was cooing French at her–it was a French family. The six-year-old son with straw yellow hair sat straight up in his chair and his nose was level with the table. There, a piece of toast waited for him and he was ignoring it. The dad was a big man, bald guy. Yesterday he wore a black shirt that shouted RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS. This morning his black shirt shouted RAMONES. Meanwhile his sweet baby daughter is banging away on her high chair, her mother sings sweetly back at her….

Friday, Sept. 2, 9:31pm, Budapest

Last night in this amazing city. Tomorrow, early, we are off to Romania. In the evening we will arrive in what the resident Hungarians call Kolozsvar but the ruling Romanians call Cluj. Aaaand immediately you get the politics of this trip. The Transylvanian Hungarians call themselves “Pathfinders” and identify as as indigenous to the region, unlike the Romanians, who came in later to settle. Thanks especially to the Treaty of Trianon (from World War I), the Romanians were granted rulership over the region, and ever since the Pathfinders have struggled to preserve their culture and traditions. The situation is somewhat analogous to Quebec’s relationship to Canada–except Quebec got what it wanted. The Pathfinders still struggle.

THIS is the political backdrop of the Unitarian Church in Transylvania. 450 years ago, Hungarians built our first Unitarian Churches around the vision of religious liberty; but except for three golden years, our spiritual Pathfinders have struggled to exist against the encroachments of the Catholic Church and others. The struggle still continues, but on social and political fronts. The struggle is for equal political rights to affirm Hungarian language and folkways, against “the authorities” who want to refuse them the right to name themselves (again, Kolozsvar vs. Cluj).

Talk about many layers, many wrinkles, to this 450 year old church.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We leave Budapest in the early morning, and I’ll miss it. Well, I won’t miss this:

But I will miss the friendly people, great food, amazing sights. The scale of the city is ridiculous–the width of the streets, the size of public squares, the span of monuments. A resilient people: despite being the most sieged city over the past 1000 years–despite the destruction of two world wars–it is beautifully alive.

Two stories: one has to do with the Shoe Memorial.

It’s mid- to late-1944. Up till that point, the Hungarian government has resisted colluding with the Nazis in exterminating the Jews. But finally they succeed in installing a puppet government and that fake government’s brownshirts (called “Aerocross”) raided the safe houses protecting the Jews. They are marched to the Danube River. It is night. “Take your shoes off.” Women, children, men do. They are shot and their bodies pushed into the dark waters below. They are swallowed up, they are gone, gone, gone. And they are NOT gone and never will be. The replica shoes are bronze and permanent. They testify. Some have candles in them, flowers, candy, coins.

Second story:

That’s the scene from my table tonight at Bocelli’s. A beautiful walkable street full of bars and restaurants and towered over by apartment homes. I walk through and see tons of people enjoying themselves, families together, lovers walking holding hands. I even see toddlers racing their tricycles.

I go back to the dark Danube waters, and the Shoe Memorial. Do they banish the right of the living to enjoy? The Bible says, “There is a time to laugh, and a time to mourn.” Can it be that such time is like a coin with two sides, and we are always both laughing and mourning simultaneously? Can the human heart be big enough for that?

Can a heart BE truly human unless it does exactly that?

Goodnight …

Saturday, Sept. 3, 6:13am, Budapest

Just needed to say that last night my dreams were in Hungarian. At least I think so: the music of the language of my dream figures seemed to match what I’ve been hearing the past several days. But my dream ego’s experience was precisely that of waking life: not understanding a word of it. The dreams unfolded as the complex dramas they always are, but my dream ego–closest thing to my waking self awareness–had no clue.

It was like I have a foreign TV channel within my own soul.

Saturday, Sept. 3, 6:02pm, Kolozsvar 

Arrived in Transylvania! I’ll be staying at the Hotel Victoria during the two nights we are in Kolozsvar. We need to regather downstairs for our evening events at 6:45. Not much time, but enough to have a mini-panic about there being no towels in the room since I didn’t see any in the bathroom but just before I was going to descend downstairs and give someone a piece of my mind I spot nice folded towels on the ends of the two single beds. I can be so silly. Someone give me a drink to calm down

I hang up my grey suit. It’s the nicest thing I’ll wear all two weeks. It’s for the Sunday right before we leave. I’ve been asked by the minister of the Szekelyudvarhely Unitarian Church (our Partner Church) to preach, and I’m honored beyond belief. My 12 minute piece has been translated to Hungarian, so it will be a paragraph or so of me, then the minister (Rev. Mozes Kedei) speaking the translated version, then me, then him, back and forth.

I want my suit to be as fresh as possible. So it’s one of the first things I do: hang it up. Allow the wrinkles to fall away…

I unpack my beloved UUCA stole and lay it down, let the wrinkles fall away too…

Back in Budapest, my last afternoon there, I was enjoying a beer and indexing a book by Rev. Kedei. Don Milton III had brought it to me from the 2012 choir trip but I had not read it until now. It was splendid. A compilation of voices of many Unitarian ministers, sharing stories about their journeys into ministry, how the churches have been invaluable in preserving Hungarian culture in an antagonistic time, the fall of Communism and its aftermath, and so on. I’m indexing it, regarding major topics and passages I want to be able to easily access. It’s a thing I do with books I suspect I’ll need to draw on down the road.

So, I’m drinking a beer and out of the corner of my eye I notice a blow up sex doll being held high and then thrown about. The blow up doll body was standard plastic pink, but a man’s face had been taped to the head. The woman brandishing it like a flag and grinning like a fiend was the bride, and she was followed by around 20 friends. They all streamed out of a hotel across the street, to where I was, a bar. Laughter, shouts. They were going to get really drunk. And they are British! I was witnessing a destination wedding! I found myself right in the middle of it!

I bring this up because, here I am hundreds of miles away in Kolozsvar, and as we weary travelers roll up to the front, we see a wedding party stream inside the hotel….

As I sit here writing this, hunting and pecking away like the eccentric typist I am, I hear a steady thump, thump, thump from somewhere within these walls. Is that a Michael Jackson song? Boom boom UH boom boom UH boom boom UH. Our guide told us, “It’s going to be loud until 11pm, folks.” Right in the middle, again!

I like life.

Saturday, Sept. 3, 9:52pm, Kolozsvar

Politics (William Butler Yeats)

HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

An hour or so outside of Budapest, the land has become as flat as Kansas. Our tour guide is telling us about the insurance system in Romania. Then the education system.

It’s interesting how tour conversation is so much about politics and policies and history and monuments and so on, but what about the more personal, vital aspect of life that Yeats addresses in his poem?

The issue of dress codes in Budapest culture is fascinating. Csilla tells me that she dresses in ways that feel inauthentic because Americans have a hard time tolerating a Hungarian woman’s more open sense of sexual expression. Women in Hungary feel comfortable with their sexuality and enjoy its strength and influence.

It means that I have totally related to the speaker in Yeats’ poem:

But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

Although in my case I have not gone to poetry but rather philosophy. I have been reflecting on the rather remarkable difference between “lusting after” and “taking pleasure in.”

Taking pleasure in: an act of curiosity, a willingness to experience with openness.
Lusting after: an act of narrow focus, an investment in only a narrow profile of features. The wrong look turns a person off. The wrong time and place turns a person off!

Taking pleasure in: can happen with every person, no matter how “ugly.” This act of curiosity is endlessly open to variety. Abundance.
Lusting after: happens with relatively few people. Scarcity.

Taking pleasure in: endlessness. There never needs to be an end to taking in pleasure. Wants to allow.
Lusting after: wants a conclusion as fast as possible. Wants to possess.

Taking pleasure in: appreciates meandering.
Lusting after: a straight line, an urgency, an arrow.

Taking pleasure in: hurt is never involved.
Lusting after: can hurt terribly, especially when unsatisfied.

Suddenly I’m realizing that there’s connections between what I’m saying here and James Carse’s interesting book Finite and Infinite Games.

Reader, I don’t know how far I can take all this. It’s fascinating to see the ideas unfold and gain clarity and definition. What do you think? Is this your experience when you take pleasure in something, and when you lust after something?

Sunday, Sept. 4, 8:44am, Kolozsvar

I’m off to worship services at First Unitarian, Kolozsvar, at 11am. But first, a little blogging….

Breakfast this morning at the Hotel Victoria. The first thing that happens is I get punched in the face by rock and roll. It’s 7am on a Sunday morning and I’m eating my egg with an Orange Crush-colored yolk and the radio is on and blaring “all the hits.” An officious man comes in the breakfast room and there’s no smile, just a serious question: what is my room number? I say “#217” and he checks me off his list and I feel like I am meeting Communism for the first time. He wears a white shirt and tie. All the men wear white shirts and ties. They rush around, serious.

Is my sense of communism a construct of all the movies I’ve seen, from James Bond onwards?

No sunroom here. Everything is carefully laid out.

[“I need you, I need you, I need you right now // Don’t let me down….”]

Ugh, the WiFi is spotty. It comes in and goes out. In and out. Out and in.

A lot of bus time yesterday–early 8am start. I’m sleepy. I sit in the middle, and conversations in front and behind wash over me, roll over me…. Traffic is light and the bus flies through Budapest and breaks out of the city, flies along winding roads, up hill, down hill. We speed through one community after another, through individual scenes that each have a story that shall remain a mystery to me forever. Two men cycling–where are they going? A woman in a field, wearing a pink two-piece bathing suit, scything her way through wheat–is this her life?

[Oh my God, is that 50cent? Are we really listening to 50cent?]

Approaching the border, our guides warn us to be polite, don’t make political jokes, this is not the time to test your language skills and risk insulting the police…. You would think this is obvious, but no. One story has to do with another congregation that came visiting on pilgrimage and it was the President of the Board who would not move her legs to allow the police to proceed down the aisle so he could check everyone’s passport. He asked three times politely, and she refused. One of our guides asked, and she refused. The police took our guide (Csilla) aside and said, “You stay in the air conditioning; I’m going to cook the rest.” He directed the bus to park in the hot sun, told the driver to turn it off, meaning no AC. Three hour later, he let them go.

That President of the Board: talk about anti-authoritarianism. And how ironic she was that congregation’s authority…

But we got through without incident…

[Disco disco disco disco disco disco disco]

At one point, I think about how many things this pilgrimage has taken me into, how many things I’ve seen, how much knowledge I’ve absorbed, how many thoughts I’ve thunk This is all so amazing, and I am filled with gratitude. And then it strikes me that what’s happening in this tour is analogous, on a small scale, to the much larger experience of being a part of the Unitarian Universalist community. How being Unitarian Universalist is itself a kind of pilgrimage and does not allow me to sit and do nothing but gets me up, gets me going, pushes and pulls me into engagement with life, opens me up in truly distinctive ways. My life would be so less rich without Unitarian Universalism….

Finally, we are in Transylvania–literally, “the land on the other side of the forest.” Green rolling hills. Hay bales built upon wooden structures, which poke out of the sides of the bale. At one point we pass immense houses with complexly-designed tin roofs: the houses of the Roma. Only few are actually occupied. They symbolize the immense wealth Roma gather via the efforts of organized child begging rings working in London and other major cities. They also symbolize the dream of entire families living together under one roof.

And finally–FINALLY–we are in the Boston of Romania: Kolozsvar. Boston, because it is the intellectual/educational center of the country. Back in 1568, in one day, Francis David inspired the entire populace to embrace Unitarianism…

The hotel Victoria:

[Boom UH UH boom UH UH boom UH UH UH]

Sunday, Sept. 4, 3:36pm, O’Peter’s Bar in Old Town Kolozsvar

Jackson Brown just finished on the radio; now it’s The Cars. Smoking happens furiously around me and it’s giving me a headache. I’m sitting just off a fairly narrow walkway where a couple holding hands walks past. Someone with ITALY splashed across his green T-shirt. Three teenagers. One tall guy and one short guy talking very loudly. A man walking slowly with his hands crossed behind his back and his lips pursed. A man with a shirt reading “I may not be perfect but parts of me are awesome.”

A stone’s throw away is a building that’s been around for so long that it’s hard to know what to call it. In the 16th century it was a Dominican monastery, and in its topmost, center room (because it was the warmest room) Queen Isabella nursed little John Sigismund, who would become the first and only Unitarian king in history. Later the building would become a theology school and here is where Francis David had his first job, as the school’s dean. Later it would become the music school, and now it is a Franciscan monastery which is leasing space to a Calvinist school.

How do you talk about something for which so many vivid and important reincarnations are known? It’s not JUST its current name or function….

From here we went to the massive St. Michael’s Church, which was originally Catholic and is now back to being Catholic. But in the 16th century, it was the church from which Unitarianism was originally preached. Francis David was the preacher. What I wanted to see most of all was the pulpit. I squinched my eyes and tries to perform magic and see not just across space but time, to witness his rhetorical magic…

Afterwards, we went out to the square and saw a marked off space. Close up, we looked down to see uncovered Roman dwellings and artifacts. They had been dug up, covered up with plexiglass so they would remain undisturbed. This is what the entire area of Cluj-Napoca would look like if 6 feet were suddenly removed.

I wonder what it is like to grow up in a place where, just a few feet below, there’s an entire Roman civilization. Roads, dwellings, artifacts, bones. And then the other civilizations in between….

Sunday, Sept. 4, 5:28pm, Karolina Augusta Pub in Old Town Kolozsvar

What? you ask. He’s at another bar? Well, in my defense, this is how I’m getting free WiFi. I also have free time before tonight’s educational events and there’s still so much more to process from this morning… … …

That’s me from this morning during worship at First Unitarian Church in Kolozsvar, together with some of the group. June (beside me) is giggling because I just made a crack about how, by taking a pic during worship, I have just demonstrated I have the manners of a Visigoth. UUCA people, do not do as I do!!

Worship started at 11am, but we came earlier to be welcomed by the Intern Minister there at First (Jùlia Jobbagy). Here she is, sharing a little about Unitarianism in Transylvania:

I liked how Jùlia articulated the 1568 Edict of Torda, in which King John Sigismund legalized religious liberty. The practice beforehand followed the rule of “whoever owns the land owns the religion.” THIS is what the Edict of Torda reversed, and it did so in a time when oceans of blood were being spilled over religious conflict…..

The thing that immediately jumped out at me about the interior (finished 1796) was the lack of visuals. It could have been a mosque.

Here’s what the worship was like:

About 15 minutes before 11am, the organ started up. The music is measured and slow and grave. People are gathering, of all ages. At 11pm, the three ministers in robes process up the aisle, to sit at the front.

At this point we all stand and sing a hymn. (I mean, everyone ELSE sings–the language here and throughout the entire service is in Hungarian.)

Then we sit. The organ continues playing its slow, sad song. Then it ends and the Senior Minister goes to the Communion Table at the front to greet people and share announcements. LOTS OF WORDS. Don Milton III, I know that this would be your favorite part of the service!

Actually, a nice part of the service was when the Senior Minister greeted us in English. It was like a little door opening, and a ray of light shining through. Then BAM, door is shut, and all the rest is Hungarian.

After announcements, the Senior Minister sits and the organ comes on again. We all sit. Then there’s  special music from the cantor–a singing piece by one voice.

The Intern Minister ascends to the pulpit. (I should say at this point that the pulpit is raised above the ground. It’s something like a little space ship, and the minister speaks out of the window to everyone else below. A unique aspect of Unitarian religious architecture is that the stairs heading up to the pulpit are hidden, so as he/she starts to climb, she disappears and then, POOF, she appears at the pulpit. M-A-A-G-I-C!)

She appears (POOF!) and we all stand there. There is quite a long, quiet pause at this point and I’m wondering what the heck is going on. But she’s praying! The people around me have closed their eyes, but … but … (and this is why I was confused) her eyes are open. But I see she is looking up, she is speaking to “Good Father God.” I can’t understand a word but I shift my focus from meaning to emotion. I close my eyes and sense moments of urgency that swoop and swell; I experience moments of letting go and vulnerability that are soft and sweet; I feel moments of resolve that are firm and strong.

Now she shifts her gaze downward, and she says AMEN. She leaves the pulpit (GONE!) but we are still standing, the organ comes on, and now it’s another hymn.

Throughout, the tone of the music is measured and slow and grave and deep.

Then the Assistant Minister appears in the pulpit (POOF!) and we are still standing! (All this standing, together with my complete inability to understand anything of what’s being said, take me back to my experiences as a kid in the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church.) She does a reading (later on I learn it’s from the Bible, and of course it would be–the Bible is read from in every Transylvanian Unitarian Church). The emotional tone is solemn solemn solemn.

Finally we sit. Is it the sermon now? It is! It is! And here is where the emotional range of the service finally expands beyond solemnity. Finally a bit of personality shines through, a bit of individuality. Everything else has been a full immersion into something collective that is old and deep and sobering and grand and sad. I realize that through the liturgy people are connecting with this collective something. But even during the sermon–this single foray into something more personal–there is NO LAUGHTER, NOT EVEN ONCE.

I look around me and some folks are listening, other folks have their eyes closed. There are families with three-year-olds and the kids are sitting very quietly through this. Not one peep from them.

The preacher says AMEN, we all stand (standing again!), she says a few more words, we continue standing and the organ comes on, very gently….

AMEN, again. The organ stops but she talks some more. is she praying? He eyes are closed. I look around and everyone’s head is down. We ARE praying! Yikes!

AMEN, once again. She holds her palms up and open to the people. Benediction. AMEN and AMEN.

Everyone else sits, but at this point our guides usher us out of the sanctuary. We have to begin our tour, but on the way, they take us to see this:

It’s 1568. The brilliant Francis David has just returned to Kolozsvar after winning a debate with the leading Calvinist scholar of the time, and the townsfolk meet him at the gates. Today, that would happen to a sports team. But back then, the heroes were the religious leaders.

They meet him at the gates and beg to know what happened. Francis David starts to go through the debate but you know what? The brilliant and charismatic man was also short. So they have him stand on a boulder so more people can hear him. He goes into impassioned oratory and inspires his countrymen and, that day, the town of Kolozsvar becomes Unitarian. The boulder marks the occasion.

I am delighted. I knew the story, of course. But I did not know he was short and that the boulder actually had a very practical use!

I like him even more now. Short people gotta stick together!

Monday, Sept. 5, 8:41PM at Hotel Sarmis in Deva, Part 1

Reader, it’s been a full FULL day. Also, WiFI sucked in Kolozsvar, so this installment is NOT about my adventures today but yesterday in Kolozsvar. Part 2 will focus on today.

Check out examples of Kolozsvar graffiti:

Monday, Sept. 5, 8:50PM at Hotel Sarmis in Deva, Part 2

First day it’s rained. I’m on the fourth floor of the hotel. A window is open and the sound of cars zooming past is like bacon sizzling in the pan.

I am overwhelmed. It was a day of visiting various important places for the Unitarian Universalist faith community. My heart is full.

The day started at Unitarian headquarters in Kolozsvar where we chatted with Maria Pap, Secretary of the Unitarian Church in Transylvania.

For me, the conversation was incredibly rich, and what I have to take away from it will go into a sermon. For now, check out these extremely cool pics:

After this, we hopped on our bus and drove to Torda, where King John Sigismund affirmed, in 1568,  the Edict of Torda, which was the first official statement of religious tolerance in the West. In part it says this:

In every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel, each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well; if not, no one shall compel them, for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the Superintendents (Bishops) or others shall annoy or abuse the preachers on account of their religion, … or allow any to be imprisoned or punished by removal from his post on account of his teachings, for faith is the gift of God.

In other words, a person’s faith is their secret way of being with the mystery, and it cannot be compelled by any external force, it can’t even be compelled by the person in question gritting their teeth and trying to force themselves to believe. It comes from a place within that’s deeper than trying, it comes from the soul, it comes from God.

Just to provide a bit of historical perspective: This is happening at the same time the Inquisition was trying to crush the Protestant Reformation in Wester Europe; Protestants were put to death by thousands in the Netherlands and in France; deniers of the Trinity were burned as heretics in Catholic and Protestant countries alike.

In other words, the Edict is an absolutely remarkable achievement for its time and place.

Here is where it happened, where King John Sigismund embraced the Edict as law 448 years ago, through this gate:

The marker at the site reads:

But I want you to see something very curious:

The church is Catholic. Am I being paranoid, but why is it that the statue is half-covering the plaque? Aesthetics would dictate that the statue should be in the other corner to balance things out. But instead, it crowds out the marker that affirms something the Catholic Church tried to murder off for hundreds of years. (Think of how the American government treated the Native Americans–that’s how Unitarians were treated after King John Sigismund died. I am not kidding you.)

Sigh and tears.

On to the next holy spot. To Gyulafehhervar [pronounced hu-la-hey-far, I think] which was the royal city, where King John Sigismund and his mother Queen Isabella reigned. Take a look at this church, which was built in 1009:

How do you enter such a place? How?

I come in, and this is what I see:

Francis David was the Court Preacher: 450 years ago, he was in that pulpit preaching Unitarianism. King John was seated somewhere. His mother too. Once again, I’m wishing I had magical sight to see him….

We wander around and eventually come to see this:

These are the resting places of Queen Isabella and her son. They are buried in this cathedral. But the moment is spoiled when I learn that there are no plaques to indicate to the viewer who these people are. Why they matter. The Catholics have plaques up to honor their folks. The Presbyterians do. Others do. But what about the Unitarians? I don’t know what the story is, why nothing has happened, but I vow to find out. I will find money to pay for the plaques. It is an outrage that no one gets the news about who lies here. Hopefully I’ll find out more of the story in a few days, when I meet with some Transylvanian Unitarian officials. I don’t want to be an obnoxious American. But it hurts that the story is not being told.

From here, we go on to Deva. Deva is where Francis David was imprisoned in a military facility high up. Can you tell that today was heavy with remembrance and grief?

When I say high up, I mean high up. It’s 1579. Francis David has been tried as guilty for “innovation.” In other words, the government found loophole in the Edict of Torda and used it as a way to persecute. So off to prison for him. They take him to Torda because, in all of Transylvania, it is the most remote from his Hungarian Unitarianism.

Francis David is ill. He had been at a theological debate around this time and he couldn’t even stand. He died in just six months. When we were up there, the winds cut through our clothes and to the bone. And it was just September. He died in November, 1579

Here’s the prison, closer up:

When I got to the top, I found myself reflecting on all the many highpoint of Francis David’s career. Literal highpoints: preaching from the pulpit in St. Micheal’s and as court preacher at the church in Gyulafehhervar. Or how about standing on the boulder right at the city gates of Kolozsvar, passionately preaching God’s love as he understood it? Lots of high points in his life, and now this moment in his life which is literally the highest of all…

In a small chapel there on the site, the minister of the Deva church, Zoli, leads a service. He sings a song written by Francis David, says a few words. I say a few words. We gather in a circle and I ask folks what they are feeling. The moment is prayer. I lead us in singing “Spirit of Life” and the room vibrates.

Once we are back down I take a selfie with Zoli:

Zoli takes us on a brief tour of his congregation. Here are some scenes from the sanctuary:

The evening ended with a magnificent dinner and this dessert:

Thank god for dessert (called Papanasi–“traditional baked donuts with cottage cheese”).

What a day.

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 8:22am at Hotel Sarmis in Deva

I look out my hotel room window and the day is moody. Rainy. Clouds drift low among the hills and distant mountains….

Before the day’s adventure begins, though, I want to double back to an event in Kolozsvar. During our last evening, we were treated to Hungarian music and folk dancing:

This was the best thing ever. The singer (to the right of the man playing violin) drove the dancing with a high-pitched voice sounding somewhat like yodeling. The male dancer’s athletic routine was fascinating by the way he slapped at his feet and thighs so that his movements were punctuated by sharp snaps. At times he was joined by a female partner, and her role was not athletic or showy at all. Just fluid, graceful.

After about an hour, we travelers were invited on the dance floor. Our job was to follow the steps of the dancers. Smiles, lots of laughter. Such things cross all borders with ease.

Later I thought about growing up in Canada, and how my parents wanted me to connect with my Ukrainian roots. They had us take Ukrainian language lessons and also dancing, and while I have forgotten anything I might have learned about the language, I still remember some dance moves.

I also thought, “How about that. My faith tradition is just like me. I am Canadian/American, but my family comes from the Old Country. The congregation I serve is in Atlanta, Georgia, but its larger family has Old Country roots, too.”

I never made this connection before.

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 9:03pm at Hotel Sarmis in Deva, Part 1

There’s just too many interesting sights! Here are just a few snaps that I think are interesting/funny/ironic. More about my day in Part 2.

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 9:21pm at Hotel Sarmis in Deva, Part 2

As of today, Tuesday, it’s been officially a week since I’ve left Atlanta. By now I’m sure the plants on my porch are dead, dead, dead. Sorry plants–I couldn’t find someone to take care of you….

I must say, I’m glad to take a break from my hummingbirds. At first, having a hummingbird feeder was the coolest thing. A little guy would speed up to it, hover like an alien spaceship, look left and right and up, and then dive right in. Pull out, look left/right/up, then feed again. Repeat until it’s done, and then go into warp. GONE. It would be sweet, it would be quiet.

Until recently.

Recently, what started to happen was several hummingbirds found out about my feeder and each of them wanted it all to itself. As it turns out, hummingbirds are insanely territorial and masculine. One would zoom up but then another would suddenly break out of warp and that’s when they’d start to bark at each other. There I am, drinking my morning coffee and wanting to enjoy the quiet but it’s not quiet anymore, I’ve got West Side Story happening on my porch, the Sharks and the Jets, and there’s lots of noise.

NOW I know why South American cultures symbolize the warrior spirit with the hummingbird.

So that’s how my romantic vision of sweet quiet hummingbird enjoying nectar at my feeder died. They are not sweet. They will CUT YOU.

But it’s been a long week since I’ve been on my porch, or since I’ve been in my house, or since I’ve been in the office, or since I’ve been coaching skating, and on and on. There’s a sense in which all of this is exoskeleton, and now that it’s gone, I’m feeling like I’m losing my shape. Feeling lumpy, wobbly.

But don’t think I’m complaining. Oh no, it’s all good. Things are happening. Connections are being formed…

So: today. We said goodbye to Deva and drove to Hunedoara, where the attraction is the amazing 13th century castle of Corvinilar. Apparently the folks who created the Harry Potter attraction in Florida visited here to get ideas. I mean, it’s the real deal.

But I was also caught up in the tension between this and the reality of the surrounding town. Hunedoara is a steel town without the steel–all the iron mills (except one) have been shut down. John (one of our guides) calls the area a “moonscape” because of all the sites where the earth is gashed. It is not pretty. “The Pittsburgh of Romania.”

So I am struck about how we drove straight through the poverty and the tragedy of the town to a sightseeing stop as only tourists can….

My Unitarian Universalist superego is showing

Afterwards, we stopped off at a children’s home founded and operated by a relative of one of my fellow group members. At one point, out of the corner of my eye, I saw our driver Istvan leaping at a tree. What is he doing? Our other guide, Csilla, was there with him. He leapt and leapt and it looked like he got something, which he promptly started to crush under his shoe. What? Turns out he was collecting walnuts! Peeling the skin, cracking them open, getting to the meat. Turns your fingertips greenish. Leaves a stain. Csilla shared a story about when she was a kid starting school, the expectation was that your hands would be clean, but she and her friends would go after the walnuts and they would fail all the expectations. I love stories like this. Growing up in a communist world, she said, meant having little to nothing….

Near Sibiu Csilla goes into the corruption of the Romanian government, during communism and post-communism. It’s the #1 corrupt government in Europe. I am nauseated, hearing all the stories.

But now we are in Sibiu, this town that was built out of the energies of German Saxons (whom, in this century, the Romanian government thoroughly screwed over)… I love it. Beautiful.

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 9:28pm at DoubleTree by Hilton in Sighisoara, Part 1 

We spent this morning exploring Sibiu and then at 2pm left for another adventure: the Saxon fortress church in Biertan (a UNESCO World Heritage site). Do you know what a 1000 years smells like? A very distinctive smell.

Some images for you:

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 9:47pm at DoubleTree by Hilton in Sighisoara, Part 2

Let’s talk about walking. Solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking.

Walking is something a tourist does a lot of, especially when they are a part of a group. Is something solved?

I think of all the kinds of walking I’ve engaged in over the past week: striding to some official place; hurrying up only to wait; wandering aimlessly; fast-walking, trying to fly somewhere; shuffling in some kind of queue; I will even include the lack of walking, as in my ass stuck in an airplane seat, or in the seat of a tour bus.

Don’t let me forget the kind of walking that’s in concert with a group, and we are following our guides like ducklings follow their mother. At times the group has used headsets, so as the guide speaks, his/her voice is in our ears, and we can even be ahead of the group and still be with it….

Perhaps the worst is the shuffling in some queue kind. Dehumanizing.

My favorite is wandering. I love walking for hours in a new place. Allowing a new world to wash over me. Feeling the energy.

Walking: carpet, brick, pavement, cobblestone, dirt, grass, linoleum.

The gentle agitation of the motion of walking, loosening things up.

One of the first words in the old Dick and Jane readers: LOOK. We are walking and looking. A whole new world pours into our senses.

Is something solved, or is it dissolved: one’s sense of certitude, one’s sense of complacency? The exoskeleton of habits that closes you off to something new?

Tomorrow: Vlad Dracul! Sighisoara is his birthplace!

Thursday, Sept. 8, 11:20am at Teresa Scara in Sighisoara, Part 1

Sighisoara turns out to be this amazing walled medieval city, and so very well preserved. Age oozes out of everything. Here, in fact, is the height of irony in this place:

I mean, any wall that does NOT have this on it is lying….

Thursday, Sept. 8, 11:23am at Teresa Scara in Sighisoara, Part 2

While I’m here drinking a latte and resting after running up 144 steps to the Biserica din Deal (the Church on the hill, built in the 13th century, with catacombs underneath and churchyard next door), I’ll say a few words about “you know who.” Yup, that guy: Dracula. His namesake, Vlad Dracul, was born here.

Only in two other places have I seen anything referencing that most famous Transylvanian:

I found the wine in Kolozsvar, and the cartoon Dracula was off the square in Sibiu.

But here in Sighisoara, all restraints are off. References everywhere:

Isn’t that something?

I suggest a quick read of Wikipedia’s article on Dracula. At one point, it says (and note especially the underlined portions):

Between 1879 and 1898, [Bram Stoker, author of Dracula] was a business manager for the world-famous Lyceum Theatre in London, where he supplemented his income by writing a large number of sensational novels, his most famous being the vampire tale Dracula published on 26 May 1897.[5]:269 Parts of it are set around the town of Whitby, where he spent summer holidays.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells wrote many tales in which fantastic creatures threatened the British Empire. Invasion literature was at a peak, and Stoker’s formula was very familiar by 1897 to readers of fantastic adventure stories, of an invasion of England by continental European influences. Victorian readers enjoyed Dracula as a good adventure story like many others, but it did not reach its iconic legendary status until later in the 20th century when film versions began to appear.[8]

Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent seven years researching European folklore and stories of vampires, being most influenced by Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay “Transylvania Superstitions”. Later he also claimed that he had a nightmare, caused by eating too much crab meat covered with mayonnaise sauce, about a “vampire king” rising from his grave.

The Dead Un-Dead was one of Stoker’s original titles for Dracula, and the manuscript was entitled simply The Un-Dead up until a few weeks before publication. Stoker’s notes for Dracula show that the name of the count was originally “Count Wampyr“, but Stoker became intrigued by the name “Dracula” while doing research, after reading William Wilkinson’s book An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them (London 1820),[10] which he found in the Whitby Library and consulted a number of times during visits to Whitby in the 1890s.[11] The name Dracula was the patronym (Drăculea) of the descendants of Vlad II of Wallachia, who took the name “Dracul” after being invested in the Order of the Dragon in 1431. In the Romanian language, the word dracul (Romanian drac “dragon” + -ul “the”) can mean either “the dragon” or, especially in the present day, “the devil”.[12]

This is all super interesting: the invasion literature bit, the last-minute name changes.

Also super interesting is the fact that “too much crabmeat covered with mayonnaise sauce” was the physical trigger for a story that has captured people’s imaginations for more than 100 years.

Crabmeat/mayo combo, anyone?

Friday, Sept. 9, 11:56am, Homorodkaracsonyfalva, part 1

We are in the Homorod Valley and it’s been years since I’ve been somewhere so remote. Internet access is very limited and I’ve just a small window of opportunity to post some items. Today we will travel to Szekelyudvarhely and begin our home stays–I don’t know if there will be internet access there either… Just know I am thinKing about you!

For now:

Unitarianism in the Homorod Valley: it is a religion of farmers. After dinner at the parish house in Homorodkaracsonyfalva (consisting of polenka, sour cherry soup, mashed potatoes with meatballs, and dessert), and during our walk back to the bed and breakfast, we saw cows returning home for the evening. Water buffalo also. Enormous moos. Shit everywhere on the street, and the sour/rich smell blended in with everything. Clop-clop-clop of horses carrying wagons filled with hay. Sun-weathered farmers who could not possibly read William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson, never mind the postmodernists of current day.

We American Unitarian Universalists completely underestimate the reach of our religion. It is far more adaptable than we know.

It is time we cease our judgmentalism and engage in more curiosity about what our faith might become, and who might be interested in it.

Friday, Sept. 9, 11:56am, Homorodkaracsonyfalva, part 2

My encounter with religion in Hungary and Romania has resulted in a fascinating discovery. Over and over again, I’ve heard that, here, “ethnicity trumps theology.” I’ve heard that “if you don’t like your church, you just stop going. You certainly don’t go elsewhere else, because giving up the ethnic ties is unimaginable.”

This suggests that the deep meaning-making of Transylvanian religious community is inextricably tied up with preserving and transmitting Hungarian ethnicity. And, as ethnicity is intersubjective by nature, religion is felt as a dynamism between/among people. The word “God” does not so much point to an individual’s private experience of something divine as it points to sacred architecture, music, prayer, scripture, stories, seasonal celebrations, ethnic traditions, and all the other ways that people publicly manifest divinity.

This, by the way, is why Communism’s attempt to erase religion was so thoroughly destructive. To erase public manifestations of the divine was to take both God and ethnic heritage from the people. It was a one-two punch. People felt erased to the depths of their being.

Another way of getting at all this is to ask, Where do people feel most real? A self-aware Transylvanian will say, In the dynamism of community. A self-aware American, on the other hand, will say, In the dynamism of my private self. For Americans, the locus of personal reality is INTRAsubjective. People in the land of “bowling alone” can easily give up ethnicity or heritage without feeling fundamentally diminished. They can easily give up certain public manifestations of divinity, as they see fit. That’s why, if they grow to dislike the church they grew up in, they can move on. They don’t leave anything critical to their identity behind them, as is what would happen for a Hungarian Transylvanian or a Romanian Orthodox.

My pilgrimage to Transylvania has taught me something important about the gospel of free religion: the very different ways it gets refracted through different cultural lenses. In Transylvania, people experience their freedom as they exist within a shared language of religion/ethnicity. In America, people experience their freedom as they engage individual feelings, thoughts, intuitions, and experiences and as they try to create a workable sense of self while also being in right/creative relationship with others.

A powerful illustration of this comes from a conversation with Maria Pap at Unitarian headquarters in Kolozsvar. She described an incident when she was at Starr King in California, our Unitarian Universalist seminary on the West Coast. She started to talk about the God of her Unitarian understanding, and various Starr King students pushed back at her, hard. “Don’t use that word,” they said. “That word triggers all sorts of hurt. People have suffered tremendously because of that word.” What trumps theology for Americans, in other words, is intrasubjective factors (feelings, thoughts, intuitions, and experiences). If God doesn’t agree with them, God goes.

Something is always trumping theology, right?

Maria’s response to the students was outrage. She said, “Love hurts like hell, too, but no one wants to remove that word from the language.” (What a mic drop of a statement!) But the reason why no American Unitarian Universalist would want to remove “love” from the language is because its intrasubjective reality is readily available to everyone. Everyone has felt love. Not so with God, if that word is pointing to a kind of inner experience. Only few people have experienced God directly, as the mystics do….

But for a Transylvanian Unitarian, this is missing the point! God is fundamentally known intersubjectively not intrasubjectively. God has as much energy and presence as the ethnic traditions, architecture, seasonal celebrations, sacred music, prayer, and all the other ways that people publicly manifest divinity. God, from this perspective, is not so easily kicked out….

Reader, where do you feel most real? Among people, or within your solitary self?

Reader, tell me: where is God?

Saturday, Sept. 10, 3:43pm, Székelyudvarhely

Listening to Nora and Samuel sing. Nora is the middle daughter of three in the Kosma household; Samuel is her boyfriend. I met them yesterday when our bus finally reached our partner church town of Székelyudvarhely. Kati Kosma is the President of the Board. She and her husband, Errno, own and operate a printing business. Their youngest daughter is named Kristina.

I am taking lessons in how to offer hospitality. The Bible is a great source for stories about hospitality, and so is this trip. The Kosma family is so very welcoming and warm. These are beautiful people.

Last night before d… <I am interrupted by the family. They want me to see a video of their family trip to Montenegro. I come and sit on the couch. Samuel (who will be starting film school in Koloszvar this fall) created the video. It’s just excellent. The family embraces him and loves him. It is a thoroughly surreal experience for me, as I remember my own family situation and how worlds apart it was.>

But as I was saying, last night before dinner, the family took me to go see Samuel perform traditional Hungarian folk dance with others from his school.

Watching this blows my mind. It’s the sort of thing I did growing up, except it was Ukrainian dancing, not Hungarian. I know this. I believe in this.

This was not on the itinerary. Not for this first time am I finding myself returned to my family. It was like this the day before, at the bed and breakfast in Homorodkaracsonyfalva, where the treated pine wood walls of my bedroom, glowing gold in the sunlight, took me right back to my Baba and Dido’s house, where the walls were identical.

I hadn’t seen something like this for 20+ years. This, as well as the down comforter. It brought me back to Baba’s down comforter which, I swear, was four feet tall at the center. It was full and soft like a huge marshmallow. You would nestle underneath it and it did not matter that the entirety of Canada wanted to freeze your bones. The down comforter won every time. How could I have ever forgotten it? But I did. Until Transylvania.

Sunday, Sept. 11, 7:55am, Székelyudvarhely, Part 1

Friday afternoon we were greeted at the Székelyudvarhely church. Rev. Moses Kadei and a group of congregants met us with wonderful warmth, and they ushered us into the church building, where we saw this:

The group then sang some songs for us:

And then we were ushered into Rev. Kedei’s study, where, among other things, we saw a great framed picture of Francis David, preaching Unitarianism at the Diet of Torda in 1568:

And it was underneath his gaze that we were offered a traditional greeting meal of bread and palenka (which is distilled fruit brandy, often clear but it can come in any number of colors–delicious but deadly). The bread was passed around, shot glasses of palenka were handed around. Mozes offered yet another greeting and then I said a few words. I said, “All throughout the world, the very basic things that people need to sustain life are symbolized by bread and water. But today you give us your special version of that, and we are honored and grateful to be here.” It got big laughter, and I’m glad.

This is one of the scenes around the table, after the first round:

To say “welcome” in Hungarian is literally to say, “God brought you.” It felt like that.

Sunday, Sept. 11, 7:55am, Székelyudvarhely, Part 2

Saturday morning before breakfast, Errno and I are in the kitchen. We are talking about Friday night’s meal at the restaurant and I ask him if the family goes out a lot. He does not speak very much English, but the meaning of what he’s trying to say is clear. There are more hungers at stake than just for food. There is a hunger for belonging, there is a hunger for the feeling of being together, there is hunger for family. That is why they don’t go out to restaurants very often. Something being made at home has far more nutritional value, on more levels, than anything from a restaurant….

Breakfast is eye-poppingly good. I find myself worrying that, from all the consistently excellent food I’ve been eating, together with a radical drop-off of my usual exercise regimen, Sunday morning will roll around and I’ll need to wear my suit (since I’m preaching) and the pants won’t fit!

Aaaand, I go ahead and take another bite! I guess the worries aren’t big enough to stop me

During breakfast, I find that I’m having a hell of a time cutting one of their delicious garden tomatoes. Errno gestures that I should use the other side of the blade. I had been using the side that curves, as we do in America. That’s the sharp one. But here, it’s the OTHER side of the blade that is the sharp one–the straight one that ends at a point. And that does the trick. Tomato, you are MINE!

But what’s funny is that I caught myself reverting back to the American side of the blade, and the entire family saw too, and we all laughed. Then I just decided to come clean about how goofy I felt about the whole thing and I turned the blade completely around and started cutting my tomato with the handle. A slapstick moment.

Sunday, Sept. 11, 5:44pm, Székelyudvarhely, Part 3

Worship this morning with the church in Székelyudvarhely. My heart is full:

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 3:05am, Victoria Hotel in Kolozsvar

Down in the lobby at 4am, we’ll call some taxis to take us to the airport. Our flight leaves at 6:15-ish. To Bucharest, to Munich, and then to Atlanta, with a scheduled arrival time of 3:30pm.

No more 7 hours ahead. Like entering into a time machine. We go back in time.

Endings and beginnings. Or, as I like to say, endBeginnings.

Our entrance into our partner church town, Székelyudvarhely, was interesting. From out of the Homorod Valley, we had taken some back roads, risky roads. Coming upon a bridge, we all got out because our driver Istvan was unsure about the bridge’s strength. We walked across, and then came the bus. Soon after this, a rock got stuck between the right double tires in the back and the sound of our passage was THUMP THUMP THUMP. Ivan got out with a hammer. BAM! BAM! BAM! The damn thing wouldn’t budge. Our beginning in Székelyudvarhely, our entry song, would sound like THUMP THUMP THUMP.

But it was not to be. Still a couple miles out, all the physical forces of our arrival were too much. The rock flew out and our sound was solid and clear.

And it continued to be so. The visit with our partner church families was amazing. More stories than I have time to tell right now. I was so sad to leave.

Monday morning my hosts Kati and Errno were both in the kitchen preparing breakfast:

Reader, you have no idea how good these breakfasts were…. And it was a busy morning, too. Nora and Kristina were starting another year of school that morning. Here is one of Nora’s notebooks:

I wish all these things for her, for Kristina as she begins her new year, for their parents, and for us all. GO FIND YOURSELF. GRAB THE CHANCE. LAUGH LOTS. BE CLASSY. STAY AWAKE.

Be bacK home soon–

When I was a college senior, I met the woman I would be married to for many years. It was not easy going. I was still very early in my process of just beginning to understand my birth family circumstances, just beginning to name it as dysfunction and trauma, just beginning to start the journey of recovery. Every day my heart hurt. You don’t emerge from a life-long chronically threatening environment in any other way. I was anxious, cranky, and judgmental. I never felt like I belonged, I always felt like a bother. I felt unworthy. I felt withered.

I was 22 years old.

I did have a friend, though, who never failed me. My journal. Writing was asbestos to my burning heart—it helped me handle the flames within. But it wasn’t enough. I wish it could have been. It would have made everything simpler. But the deep craving for live human contact persisted. I could not shake it. I was like Vincent Van Gogh when he said, “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.” I wanted someone to see beyond the wisps to the great fire! I longed for that! It did not matter that from my earliest years I had learned over and over again the lesson that people are dangerous and the ones you love and most depend on hurt you.

Still, I craved.

Invariably I’d find my way to busy places: entrances to buildings, or inside cafeterias. I would be alone, standing, sitting. Sounds of conversation washing over me, sounds of crowds and sounds of laughter. I was in it but not of it. And the one thing I rarely did was look people in the eye. I shied away from eye contact. I kept my face flat, I kept my face closed, I kept my face cold. Nothing to see here. Just walk on by. I don’t need you. Even though in truth I was like Vincent Van Gogh!

One day, Laura, the woman I was to be married to for 20+ years, found me in the cafeteria. She came up to me, and though I was scribbling furiously in my journal, eyes trained on the page, I could sense someone. She just stood there. I kept writing, hoping she’d go away. She didn’t. She just stayed there. I wondered what was happening. Finally I looked. Laura. Irritation flashed through me. Then I did what I normally didn’t do: look into her eyes. And what I saw was this: that she saw beyond the wisps of smoke, to the fire. She saw that! She saw me! I was seen!

It was the start of feeling like, after everything, I might yet belong to something actually good…

And THIS is how I come, today, to the question of belonging. Acknowledging that no one comes to it as a blank slate, tabula rasa. Acknowledging ambivalence. On the one hand, we have all been hurt before—to one degree or another. We’ve all been let down. But on the other hand, the deep craving for human contact persists. We cannot shake it.

But why? Let’s go a little deeper here. Exactly why is the longing for connection indestructible?

Now I want to point out that this is just not any congregation. This is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, which means that (among other things) we believe religion and science go hand-in-hand. The conversation going back and forth between them can be a positive one. So, to answer the question before us, we’re going to look to a scientific discipline known as “relational neuroscience.” In her book Four Ways to Click, Dr. Amy Banks M.D. says that relational neuroscience shows “that there is hardwiring throughout our brains and bodies designed to help us engage in satisfying emotional connections with others. This hardwiring [she says] includes four primary neural pathways…. [W]hen we are cut off from others, these neural pathways suffer. The result is a neurological cascade that can result in chronic irritability and anger, depression, addiction, and chronic physical illness.”

That’s it. The longing for connection is indestructible because it’s not a choice. It’s an intrinsic part of our design as human beings. We can’t NOT long as Vincent Van Gogh longed. OF COURSE I positioned myself at entrances to buildings and inside cafeterias so that I could be among people, even though I was also afraid of them…

Dr. Banks mentioned four neural pathways, and it would be good for us to get acquainted. Briefly, they are

• The smart vagus, which enables us to moderate stress through social connections (rather than through fighting or fleeing or freezing). It’s linked to some facial expression muscles, to hearing and speech, and to swallowing. When the smart vagus is working right, you are able to hear and see what people are actually saying and doing, and if people are friendly, you go calm.
• The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is a complex alarm system that tells you that you’re being left out and it’s dangerous! It’s been shown that the alarm system triggers the same sort of pain that real physical hurts cause. There’s nothing wimpy about the pain of being left out. When the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is working right, the alarm goes off when you really are being left out and not at any other time.
• The mirroring system, which allows us to feel a deep-in-the-bones connection with others. When it’s working right, you feel resonance with others–empathy. It allows our hands to feel warm when another person rubs theirs; it allows us to sense a friend’s sorrow before they even tell you about it.
• The dopamine pathway directly connected to relationships known as the mesolimbic pathway, which rewards experiences of growth-fostering relationships with a shot of positive energy and feelings of elation and zest. When it’s working right, the shot of dopamine is paired with positive human contact and not something else.

That’s the four neural pathways which give structure to the human instinct to belong. And did you notice that, with each of them, I said, “when it’s working right”? This takes us right back to ambivalence. Because when a neural pathway’s functioning is under or over or is in some other way compromised, as it was for me, given the circumstances I grew up in, belonging becomes a problem.

Relational neuroscience shows that when the smart vagus is underfunctioning (or has “poor tone”) what happens is that a person has a hard time seeing and hearing what is actually happening around them. They misinterpret neutrality and even friendliness as aggression! They also make things worse by avoiding eye contact and evincing other nonverbal behaviors that come across as uncaring and even hostile. They are chronic blamers. They are on a short fuse. The smart vagus is not so smart after all…

Or take the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Problems happen when it overfunctions and the “I’m being left out!!” alarm is constantly screaming. The endless alarm digs a deep hole in your heart until you could swear to God that you are completely unworthy of belonging and fated always to be left out. Often the result is living a paradox: you hide whatever parts of yourself you feel you need to so that you can be more attractive to others; but by hiding anything about yourself you just trigger more pain and also further reinforce the feeling of being unworthy. But (you counter) if I just let it all hang out, I’d drive people away, and that’s also pain. And there you have it: the insane paradox you get stuck in, because your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is messed up.

Equally troublesome things happen when the mirroring system and the mesolimbic pathway aren’t functioning right. With the former, you feel cut off from others; with the latter, your brain has learned to UNpair feeling good with belonging. Shots of dopamine are triggered by gambling instead, or drinking, or workaholism, or video gaming, or some other kind of addiction. The dopamine-based motivation to experience real, live human connection has gone underground.

Now at this point you might be wondering whether this is a sermon or a lecture in neuroscience! So let’s go straight to a big part of the sermon message: you are not to blame. You have a hard time recognizing the friendliness of friendly people and your nonverbals are so off-putting that you can make friendly people less friendly, even unfriendly. It’s not your fault. The soul crushing feeling of being unworthy and a bother never seems to stop, and hiding parts of yourself makes it better and makes it worse. It’s not your fault. You don’t feel the mirroring effect with others; you feel caught behind a stiff mask, and others appear the same way to you. It’s not your fault. Long ago you stopped relying on other people to be a source of pleasure, and you go elsewhere, maybe to unsavory elsewheres. It’s not your fault.

It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.

There are things to do to make it better, and I am about to get into that. But I really want you to hear what I’m saying right now. Some of you are survivors of family situations as bad as mine, or maybe even worse, and it’s not your fault that you bear the scars in nothing less than your neural pathways. But it’s about all of us too. All of us are members of a larger culture that force-feeds us a mythology of lone rangers and going it alone and heroic individualism and “you are mature to the degree you can stand isolated and alone.” That leaves a scar too. It is not your fault.

It means that when we’re struggling with belonging, don’t see yourself as pathetic and broken. Don’t blame. Reframe. Don’t blame. Reframe! One or more of your neural pathways is in a rut. We all know this: our brains are sculpted by the early environments we grew up in. But we also know or should know the genuine good gospel news of neuroplasticity, which means that old ruts are never permanent. They aren’t like sins which require supernatural blood of the lamb to erase, otherwise they persist into all eternity and condemn us to everlasting hell. No. Hear the gospel of neuroplasticity, which says that brains can change. It takes time, but they do change. Just work at it.

Work out your salvation with diligence!

To this end, Dr. Amy Banks and other relational neuroscientists offer any number of things to do. Here, I’ll suggest just a few, and they are all things we can do as part of our belonging to this Beloved Community.

One is to take our Covenant of Healthy Relationships seriously. The short form is right inside the front cover of the worship bulletin.

We will be mindful of how we communicate with and about others.
We will seek a peaceful and constructive resolution process when conflicts arise.
We will celebrate the diversity within our community.
We will build the common good.

This is just another way of saying, let’s hold dangerous people accountable for their actions. Let’s make this place less dangerous and more safe. And guess what the recipe is for strengthening the smart vagus? Exactly that!

Another solution is to get involved with a covenant group, where you can know others deeply, and be deeply known in return. The neuroscientists say that one of the ways of soothing a hyperactive dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is to start to unveil hidden parts of yourself, progressively—to take the risk of revealing who you really are, one piece at a time. Covenant groups are ideal places for that.

Yet another solution is to participate in worship rituals. You know when I ask you to put hand to heart in the Embracing Meditation? The neuroscientists say that such physical rituals also calm down a hyperactive dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that’s screaming you are unworthy, that’s screaming you don’t belong… But every time you put hand to heart and you say “I will love myself, I will love others, and that love will heal the world,” you are working to heal a neural pathway in your brain.

Also don’t forget the receiving line after worship. Hugs given and received—when they are safe—heal neural pathways. And they are absolutely safe. They come with simple love and no strings attached.

This is your Beloved Community. And I want you to know that the meaning of that is fundamental. Belonging to this place changes our brains for the better. You can’t do it all by yourself, all alone. Our bodies won’t allow for it. Only through belonging can we work out our salvation with diligence!

Look someone in the eye today. Let them know that you see beyond the wisps of smoke to their fire. Let them know you see them.

And let yourself be seen. Believe that you are worthy, and loved. Loved by a love larger than you can know. Believe, and then act.

Lift up your face,
look back at the person looking at you,
see and be seen.

AMEN

“Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged.” The immortal poet Rumi says that, and in so doing, he is at one with our Unitarian Universalist heart. He is at one with our history. In 1568, the first and only Unitarian King in history—King John Sigismund—declared, “In every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel, each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well; if not, no one shall compel them, for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the Superintendents (Bishops) or others shall annoy or abuse the preachers on account of their religion, … or allow any to be imprisoned or punished by removal from his post on account of his teachings, for faith is the gift of God.” A person’s faith is their secret way of being with the mystery, and it cannot be compelled by any external force, it can’t even be compelled by the person in question gritting their teeth and trying to force themselves to believe. It comes from a place within that’s deeper than trying, it comes from the soul, it comes from God.

For almost 500 years, this has been our tradition. Tolerance is synonymous with who we are.

But it’s nevertheless complicated. It’s confusing.

At times, it’s tolerance that leads us to allow bad behavior in our congregations. We don’t hold offenders accountable, because tolerance. A few years back, on a UU minister’s email chat, there was a thread on this topic, and one story had to do with a congregant who regularly laced the social hour beverage with LSD and the leadership tolerated it for almost an entire year. Another story had to do with a congregant who was known by a few folks as a sexual violator and he began preying on women in the congregation and leadership did nothing. Yet another story—all sorts of stories, actually—about individuals who would berate others viciously in person and by email and people sort of sighed and tolerated it.

Is this truly what tolerance requires of us?

Confusion can also hound us as we consider ideas and convictions. The Rev. Kathleen Korb says, “I once got in serious trouble with a fellow UU for what she considered my intolerance in religion. How dared I say that Unitarian Universalism is better in any way than other religions? Our truth is just as partial as that of others — as indeed, of course, it is. All I could legitimately say, she felt, is that Unitarian Universalism is better for me than other religions are.” But then Rev. Korb goes on to say, “It always seems strange to me that after saying this with all sincerity we get so upset when our children grow up and choose to become Roman Catholics or fundamentalist born-again Christians, or Scientologists….” Would this truly make King John Sigismund proud? No one disagreeing because disagreement feels too judgy? No one debating ideas about religion and human nature and politics because the whole idea of progress from error towards greater truth feels threatening?

What would our ancestors, who gave their very lives in service to their/our faith, say?

And what would they say about times we’ve been silent in the face of oppression? Offensiveness is one thing—offensiveness can be the atrocious table manners of kids, or that person who keeps on checking text messages while talking to you. Offensiveness makes you feel uncomfortable, hurts your feelings. But oppression reinforces the status of marginalized folks. Oppression is when someone tells a racist or sexist joke, and it’s not just about hurt feelings. It’s political. The humor acts like a drug on bystanders, it releases inhibitions, it makes it ok to go along with the discrimination, it solidifies it even further. It solidifies injustice.

Does tolerance extend even to such things? Might we even measure the degree of our virtue by how hard we work to shut up and say nothing and do nothing when, for example, he-who-shall-not-be-named recently told his supporters at a rally in North Carolina that “Second Amendment people” could deal with she-who-shall-not-be-named in case she’s elected President? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. That little assassination joke.

Does tolerance demand that we pretend nothing happened?

Now, I know I’m asking a lot of rhetorical questions, and some of the answers might seem obvious. But when we try to hold folks accountable for their bad behavior, we really can get called out as intolerant. When we stand up for what we believe, we really can get called out. We can even call ourselves out. We can fall into anxious hand-wringing when, for example, we sense our disgust and anger towards conservative evangelical Christians who condemn GLBTQ people as morally perverse and straight on the way to hell. We sense the disgust and anger in ourselves, which flows out of the very correct insight that conservative evangelical Christians reinforce larger cultural prejudices and give covert permission to those who are inclined to take their prejudices and translate them into violence. But when we sense that disgust and anger, we call ourselves out! We wring our hands and beat our chests! We say, “We need to be more tolerant!”

And you better believe, we get called out by conservatives. One popular meme goes, “I’m a tolerant liberal. Agree with me OR ELSE, you racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic, inbred, redneck, bible-thumping, NASCAR loving, gun-toting, America-loving bigots!” We are charged with liberal hypocrisy, and we may well wonder—are they right?

We seem so far away from the sweet pure insight of Rumi, according to which each of us has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged. We seem so far away from our beautiful Unitarian King whose Edict on Toleration was a watershed moment in the history of the West.

We’re lost, and we need to find the way home, and that’s the outrageous intent of this sermon in our remaining time together….

It starts by thinking through the paradox of tolerance, which can be expressed simply as, “If tolerant folks express intolerance, how then can they claim to be tolerant?” The implication here is that we have a moral duty to allow what is morally wrong … but that can’t be right, right? But the paradox seems to drive us into that corner!

Let’s think this thing through. Imagine an obnoxious person who, when others disagree, rails at them, insults them, hounds them, taunts them, and, in the end, is the only person talking, because everyone else is too afraid to peep. What has happened here is the collapse of a space of toleration in which free meaningful speech thrives. Speech is meaningful and free when many people get to talk and what’s expressed has genuine informational content. Speech is NOT free when only one person gets to talk and all the others have been browbeaten into silence. Speech is NOT meaningful when it’s laced with rudeness and insult. And so: to preserve the space of toleration here, we must expel the obnoxious person if they intend to persist in their obnoxiousness. Yes, from a distance it can appear like we are being bullies. But we are up close to it; we know the truth of what’s going on. We’re saying no to the bully in order preserve a tolerant space of meaningful free speech for everyone willing to participate. If we don’t say no, then intolerance becomes absolute.

This is what New York Times writer David Brooks is addressing in his fantastic article entitled “The Governing Cancer of Our Time,” where he’s grappling with the rising phenomenon of people who are “against politics.” He writes, “We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship.” David Brooks goes on to define “politics” in pretty much the same way I’ve defined the “space of tolerance that allows for free speech.” He says, “Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. […] The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. […] Disappointment is normal. But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own.”

But then David Brooks says, “Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want ‘outsiders.’ They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power. Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.”

That’s David Brooks, exploring a very real collision of two mutually exclusive ways of being. We feel this collision every day in America. And we can’t allow the paradox of toleration to confuse us. It’s just the way it is: to preserve politics, to preserve the space of toleration that enables meaningful and free speech for everyone who wants to participate, we must say no to the bully.

We must be gentle/angry people.

Which takes us to a second insight that can help clear up the confusion around tolerance and bring us home: disentangling from moments when we’re standing up to the bully, we’re being gentle/angry people, and the bully responds with outrage. With pushback. He invokes “liberal hypocrisy.” Or, better yet, he invokes “political correctness.”

Alyssa Rosenberg, in the Washington Post, offers something quite trenchant in a recent article entitled, ‘”Politically incorrect’ ideas are mostly rude, not brave.” She writes, “When Donald Trump took the podium in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention last month, he promised voters that ‘I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.’” She goes on to acknowledge that, indeed, Trump “claimed the Republican nomination by exploiting a preexisting sense that important truths were going unspoken in American public life and positioning himself as the only person daring enough to say them.” But now Alyssa Rosenberg gets to the heart of it: “But what if the things people have held themselves back from saying for fear of social censure aren’t inherently meaningful? The sad thing about so much supposed truth-telling is that their supposed transgressions aren’t remotely risky. They’re just rude. Presenting commonplace unpleasantness as an act of moral courage is a nifty bit of reframing. This formulation allows its practitioners to treat their own laziness, meanness and self-indulgence as ethically and politically meaningful, when in fact they’re anything but.”

In other words, when a bully charges others with being PC, they’re throwing down a red herring, they’re trying to get things off track. They don’t like how things are changing in the world, they don’t like the feeling of losing power, they don’t like how people who haven’t had very much power are starting to gain some. So they claim PC and make it sound like they’re the ones being victimized! “Important truths are going unspoken,” they warn in apocalyptic tones; but the only unspoken truth here—the only one—is the shameful truth of the bully’s sense of entitlement to keep on bullying. That’s all.

Saying no to the bully is just a good kind of intolerance, which is justice.

This is the final thing that needs to be said, and we are home. Not all kinds of intolerance are alike. It’s analogous to the situation with cholesterol. One kind is indeed bad, the LDL kind. But there’s another kind, called HDL, that’s actually good for you. The more, the better. Same thing goes for the body politic. There’s a certain kind of intolerance that strengthens the heart of the body politic, makes it healthier.

The justice kind.

Justice says no to LSD in the Sunday morning coffee and to all other bad behavior in congregations and elsewhere.

Justice says no to all the jokes that make bystanders think oppression is OK.

Justice says no to assassination jokes.

Justice calls conservative evangelical Christians out for their complicity in helping sustain a culture of violence towards GLBTQ people.

Justice doesn’t allow people who are against politics to have their way.

Justice doesn’t feel ashamed of itself when PC is invoked.

Justice says no to the bully.

Once we get clear on this, then, and only then, can we get clear on what tolerance truly asks of us.

Tolerance asks us to create spaces where people don’t have to think alike to love alike. It says, “Have opinions. Believe what you believe. Hold on to the faith that comes to you from a place within that’s deeper than trying. You really can tell another person, ‘I disagree.’ But be respectful. Be kind. If your faith is a gift of God, so is theirs. And be open to the possibility that they may have a piece of the truth you lack. Try walking in their shoes for a time, see what happens. See what you find.”

That’s what tolerance asks for, and it also asks this: to be supremely, resolutely clear on how terribly fragile it is, how easily overwhelmed by bullies of all kind.

Justice is the precondition of tolerance.

If there is no King John Sigismund, there is no Edict of Toleration.

Sustain justice. Do that, and the Christian and the Jew and the Muslim and the shaman and the Zoroastrian and the Unitarian Universalist and the stone, the ground, the mountain, the river, can each have its secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged.

Sustain justice, and history will not have to record, as Dr. King has said, “that the greatest tragedy … was not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Be gentle/angry people!

AMEN

@SideofLove #BlackLivesMatter in #HoCoMD & everywhere @UUApic.twitter.com/uKCh2loIVD

A month after I was divorced from my wife of almost 22 years, I was visiting with friends in Houston and we were at a very cool farm-to-table restaurant and the waitress came by and I saw the tattoo on her forearm: “In the end, everything will be ok. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.” The moment was lit up by something that felt transcendent.

How did the Universe know I needed to hear that, at that precise time?

These moments happen first-hand but can also happen upon the mere hearing of a story. Here’s one I ran into just a few days ago. Comes from a Mrs. Margie Anderson, from Abeline, Texas. She writes, “When my granddaughter Bethany was four years old, she visited my home for a few days. I gave her some crayons and pictures for coloring. When I looked down, I saw she had used a crayon to draw purple marks all over her legs. ‘Bethany,’ I asked, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘Why Grandma, you have such pretty purple lines up and down your legs, and I wanted mine to look just like yours.’ Since then, I’ve worn my varicose veins with pride, and they get prettier each year.”

Stories like this light us up. It feels like there’s more possibility in the world rather than less. Stories like

• The Little Engine That Could—about an underdog who never gives up
• Horton Hears a Who—about standing up for what you know even if others around you don’t believe
• The Ugly Ducking—about being deeply mistaken about who you are, and coming to learn the beautiful truth

You just feel lit up.

But some stories are too large to be captured in 50 words or a picture book. In particular I’m thinking about our collective Unitarian Universalist story which is 500+ years long, and which formally started in Transylvania and Poland—although we would need to go back 2000 years to do it full justice.

In this big story: all sorts of Ugly Ducklings and Hortons Hearing Whos and Little Engines That Could. All sorts of personalities and situations and themes.

But this is why we have our Seven Principles. They serve to remind us of the smaller stories that combine to make up the BIG story:

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Each one of these Principles could be illustrated by hundreds of smaller stories from our history. Each of these principles has been earned—blood, sweat, and tears behind every one….

As just one example, take the story of 19^th century reformer Susan B. Anthony, who, by the way, is to be featured on the back of America’s ten dollar bills come 2020. Not too shabby, huh? Her very last words were, “Failure Is Impossible.” She was a long-time member of the Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York and that congregation supported her in her work for women’s rights. In a time when women were not allowed to vote, she took matters into her own hands and, in 1872, went ahead and voted illegally in the presidential election. She was arrested as a criminal; she unsuccessfully fought the charges; she was fined $100; and she never paid.

We have “failure is impossible” in our blood; Susan B. Anthony is our spiritual kin. When you stand within our big 500+ year-long story, you stand with her and thousands like her.

But let’s see the degree to which she’s with us. Let me share a recent news item, about how the media is talking about female Olympians these days. I quote, from The Guardian:

The Chicago Tribune announced American trap shooter Corey Cogdell-Unrein’s medal win with the headline: “Wife of a Bears’ lineman wins a bronze medal today in Rio Olympics”, not even bothering to mention her name.

In the afterglow of Katinka Hosszu’s world-record-breaking swim, NBC sportscaster Dan Hicks pointed out Hosszu’s husband and gushed: “And there’s the man responsible.”

People Magazine called Simone Biles “the Michael Jordan of gymnastics”, as though we can’t possibly comprehend female greatness without a male proxy.

In a Twitter exchange that rapidly went viral, Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten lamented her injuries after a crash, inspiring some random man to explain to her how to ride a bike: “First lesson in bicycling, keep your bike steady … whether fast or slow.” [I think that’s what you would call “mansplaining,”right?]

Hearing all of this, can you feel the Susan B. Anthony inside you? Can you hear her? What is she saying?

This is the other thing we need to know about stories. They can fight each other. Our big 500+ year long Unitarian Universalist story fights others that push people out, dehumanize, degrade. Our story has power. Power to expose bias and hate. Power to liberate. Power to transform.

Susan B. Anthony’s jaw is set and squared, and she is saying, “Failure is impossible.”

Sexism is doomed. So are all the other –isms. It’s only a matter of time.

**

Why DO we gather in? Why DO we ingather?

The immediate reason is that school is back in session and summertime staycations and vacations are ending and we are beginning a new cycle of the seasons: fall to winter to spring to summer.

But the deeper reason is that we get to personally reconnect with and recommit to one of the greatest stories ever told, our 500+ year Unitarian Universalist story, which, says, ultimately:

Love is our one source.
Love is our one destiny.
No one left out.

Stand within our collective UU story, and power comes to you. Hands and hearts are joined across the years. A rich heritage is yours, and you are building a rich legacy for the future. You give, and you receive.

This is home. This is our spiritual home.

Let it light up our lives.

“Failure is impossible.”

This is why we gather in. This is why we ingather.

Several years ago, writer Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker shared the story of his four-year-old daughter’s imaginary friend. A very concerning story, because this was no usual childhood playmate who shares toys and dutifully takes orders. This childhood playmate, with the name of Charlie Ravioli, was always too busy to play. The parents would watch their little girl punch a number into her imaginary cell phone and put it to her ear and they’d hear her say, “Meet me at Starbucks in 25 minutes!” and then, after a few moments, see her crumple. “What happened, sweetie?” “He already had another appointment.”

Other times: “He cancelled lunch. Again.”

Still other times, his imaginary secretary Laurie would answer the imaginary phone, say, “He’s in a meeting.”

Charlie Ravioli was always too busy to play.

And this is how one four-year-old prepared herself for life in what journalist George Monbiot calls “The Age of Loneliness.” Down to the deepest part of her world—her imagination—she reconciled herself to being left out. She prepared herself to miss out on friendship and fun and also being known, being seen, being heard.

Because: people are too busy.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

For the authors of The Lonely American, Jacqueline Olds, M.D. and Richard Schwartz, M.D., a significant part of the answer is that loneliness emerges, ultimately, out of a push-pull social dynamic. “The push,” they say, “is the frenetic, overscheduled, hypernetworked intensity of modern life. The pull is the American pantheon of self-reliant heroes who stand apart from the crowd. As a culture, we all romanticize standing apart and long to have a destiny in our own hands. But as individuals, each of us hates feeling left out.”

One reason we hate it is because the feeling is literally a matter of physical pain in our bodies. Experiments have shown that there’s a portion of the brain deep in the frontal cortex—part of a complex alarm system—called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Stub your toe and it activates, and that’s the source of the pain you feel. Catch your fingers in a drawer, and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex howls, “MAKE THIS HORRIBLE FEELING STOP.” But what’s truly amazing is that scientists have shown that the howling also happens when one feels excluded. Experiments were set up that involved no physical harm at all, just feelings of being left out. It turns out that our brains have evolved in such a way as to want to preserve a sense of belonging to a larger group, because over millions of years that’s proven to be crucial to our wellbeing. So when the feeling of belonging is threatened, you bet an alarm signal is going to go off, and that pain—the pain of loneliness—is the same as pain from a physical injury or illness.

We hate feeling left out, this much. But the push-pull dynamic has us in its grip. Americans make a virtue out of busyness, for reasons of capitalism and competitiveness and “God helps those who help themselves” Calvinism. Did you know that in 2005, American workers gave back, or didn’t take advantage of, 574 million vacation days? Olds and Schwartz say that “that’s the equivalent of more than twenty thousand lifetimes.” They go on to say, “Surveys done by Gallup and the Conference Board indicate that Americans, who already take fewer vacation days then workers in any other industrial nation in the world, are cutting back even further.

And then there’s that myth of rugged individualism, standing apart from the crowd, doing it yourself, owning all your own appliances and tools and instruments and never having to borrow, self-reliance. “If we begin to forget,” say Olds and Schwartz, “we get a regular reminder at least every four years, when we see politicians desperately reworking their life stories to protect themselves from that most damning of labels—the Washington insider.” Yet another reminder is simply the stigma that’s put upon loneliness. To admit you are lonely is to risk being heard as whiny and needy—even though being honest about our loneliness is absolutely the first step towards healing.

No wonder Charlie Ravioli is everywhere.

We have conflicting wishes. There’s ambivalence in the human heart. Being Charlie Ravioli makes us feel virtuous, and it’s our way of enacting self-reliance. But we end up doing exactly the sort of things that take us into unhappiness and bitterness and potentially addictions of all sorts, impaired health, increased aggression, increased rates of crime, decreased lifespans. That’s what happens to organisms in constant pain.

“Being neighborly used to mean visiting people. Now being nice to your neighbors means not bothering them” (Olds and Schwartz).

No wonder it is the Age of Loneliness.

But we can do something about this. Stop giving all our life energy to busyness and lone rangerism. Redirect some of that energy so that life becomes more balanced. “In our advice to the lonely,” say Olds and Schwartz,” we often emphasize a time-honored approach: try to engineer into our life regular contact and shared projects with potentially interesting people. It’s the old ‘join a church choir’ strategy.” That’s the quote, and I assure you I am not making that last part up. The church choir part is literally in there. But I would add, equally, get involved in Religious Exploration. Get involved in this Beloved Community, in some way. Especially join a Covenant Group. These are groups of 6-10 or so folks who meet regularly, for the purpose of people being deeply valued and known, for fun and friendship, for learning and connection. UUCA currently has 13 of them, and we are starting SEVEN more, so now is the time to join. Get in on the ground floor!

I mean, don’t the folks around you look “potentially interesting”?

Let’s pick up the rest of the quote: “Shared commitments, shared obligations, continue to be the most reliable paths to friendship and sometimes more. In earlier times, […] there was no need to engineer social obligations into one’s life. It was there waiting, uninvited. People had to take care of one another, and social connections followed. Whether it was the burial societies of new immigrant groups who wished to avoid paupers’ graves or the quilting bees of women who merged necessary labor with socializing, a reliable social fabric was very hard to avoid.” That’s what Olds and Schwartz say, and it’s an important perspective to keep in mind. We have to be more intentional today, in our Age of Loneliness and push-pull, or else, we become Charlie Raviolis to each other, it just happens, and there’s never any opportunity to play, and it’s heart killing, it’s painful in a literal sense.

We’ve got to turn loneliness around.

But there’s another dimension to this that current events require us to address. Sometimes loneliness is not so much a matter of being left out as being forced out. You are forced out so often, and so completely, that the words of Langston Hughes’ poem about what happens to a dream deferred come true:

You dry up like a raisin in the sun.
You fester like a sore—and then run.
You stink like rotten meat.
You crust and sugar over.
You just sag.
Or you explode.

In this regard, today’s reading comes to mind, about a person of color coping in a space that is white-dominated. Having to put on a mask. “Instead of talking black,” says Camille Jackson, “I speak the Queen’s English. I don’t drop verb endings. I speak slowly, enunciate. I am extra clear. I don’t use the full range of facial expressions black folks rely on for meaning because my white co-workers won’t get it. I surprise myself with how well I wear it. Without it, I would have been fired many times over. I’m resentful. It hides my frustration at fearing that my white bosses think I never work hard or long enough.”

Now we all know the loneliness of feeling like you have to wear a mask. But the degree of loneliness is intensified astronomically when racism is at play. When you know that you are not being seen as an individual but as a representative of an entire race, and all the stereotypes are at play, and it’s a thing if you fit the stereotype, and it’s a thing if you don’t fit the stereotype, and you can never win.

This is not about Charlie Ravioli. This is about drying up like a raisin in the sun, or festering, or sagging, because you get so damn tired.

Or it’s about exploding. The “feeling forced out” kind of loneliness can leads to this, too.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt puts her finger on it precisely. In her book The Life of the Mind, she writes that profound loneliness (which she defines as “the experience of being abandoned by everyone, including one’s own self”) hardens a person, makes them shut down, and they can’t receive any new information, they can’t think rationally, so that finally, they are in the clutches of some tightly-wound ideology, and they are willing to commit acts of terror in its name.

The profound loneliness of African Americans these days, to see video after video of young black men doing nothing gunned down by police. Around three weeks ago: the death of Alton Sterling, who was the 184^th black person killed by police just this year; the death of Philando Castile, number 185. And then, on July 7: more deaths. Five police officers killed in Dallas by Micah Johnson, an ex-military African American. The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black Lives Matter” and “about the recent police shootings” and “was upset at white people” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

Soon afterwards ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani went on the offensive and said the cause was the whole Black Lives Matter movement. Which is ridiculous. A red herring if I ever saw one. Divisive. We need to talk about what happens to a dream deferred instead—deferred and deferred and deferred, until the resulting anguished loneliness leads to explosions.

Says New York Times writer Charles Blow, Since people have camera phones, we are actually seeing these deaths, live and in living color. Now a terrorist with a racist worldview has taken it upon himself to co-opt a cause and mow down innocent officers.

This is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations are tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause be able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to use each dead body as a societal wedge?

Will the people who see both the protests over police killings and the killings of police officers as fundamentally about the value of life rise above those who see political opportunity in this arms race of atrocities?

These are very serious questions—soul-of-a nation questions—that we dare not ignore.

Charles Blow is right. We dare not ignore them.

This is the time of testing.

Soul-of-a-nation questions.

And we are people who aspire to be of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause.

The “feeling forced out” kind of loneliness: we have to turn that around, and how it happens is through intentional and strategic acts of love and justice. It happens by engineering into our lives shared projects that dismantle racism, dismantle poverty, dismantle divisiveness, reject violence.

Don’t let hate motivate.

Don’t feed the fears.

Don’t build a wall. Build the opposite of a wall.

No one left out. That’s what we Unitarian Universalists believe. No one forced out of their fair share, their just due, what they deserve by virtue of simply being human. No one experiencing that profoundest kind of loneliness, which causes a dream to dry up or fester or stink or crust and sugar over or sag—or explode.

No one left out.

AMEN

#Rollingonthesideoflove at SF Pride. @SideofLove @eqUUAccess @DREDF @mduucpic.twitter.com/EF18ZCClTa

At this week’s General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, there was a moment where I found myself absorbed by the sight of the thousands of people streaming through the corridors of the Greater Columbus Convention Center and I fantasized that it was a human river, a river with a far distant origin and purpose and we are at the forming edge of it and it goes beyond us too, on and on.

That’s what I want to talk about. Our Living Tradition of Unitarian Universalism. The living stream that comes to us from long ago and far away and sweeps us up in its power and flow and carries us forward and does not stop, will not stop, goes on and on.

I’ll begin by noting something perennially tragic in human history. Always the haves and the have nots. Always insiders and always the rejected, the outcast. Two thousand years ago, Roman rulers spoke of this as a kind of peace. The peace of Rome was a way of life in which the Emperor was at the top of the pyramid, then wealthy men right below. Only these had inherent worth and dignity; everyone else was a tool to be used, controlled, subjugated, humiliated. No compassion for these people: women, poor men, slaves, and the conquered.

But this was the way of Rome, the way to a unified empire, the way to true peace. Fight Rome on this—serve any gods that contradict the Roman way—and it’s war.

And now begins our Living Tradition, with the grungy followers of a discredited rabbi whose teachings were judged as treasonous and he was crucified. Pontius Pilate thought that that would have been enough to crush the spiritual rebels but it was not to be so. The love of Rabbi Jesus was too powerful to die. Rabbi Jesus died but his spirit was resurrected in the lives of his followers, who refused the peace of Rome. They refused to be pacified. They resisted and it was all about Love. Justin Martyr, one of these early Christians, who lived around 70 years after Jesus’ death, said, “We who formerly valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possession, now bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to everyone in need; we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies.” That’s what the Jesus followers did. Religion wasn’t so much a matter of what you believed as what you did. To care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the poor, the sick. Subvert the perennial tragedy of human history. Resist the peace of Rome. No more have-nots.

Everyone get inside the circle.

So you can imagine what Rome felt about the apostle Paul when he said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”—which is to say that everyone has inherent worth and dignity and not just some. Teachings like this made Paul and every person who received them into their hearts criminals.

For hundreds of years, the Christians were persecuted, but the Love that refuses pacification would not die. And then a strange thing happened. The Emperor of Rome had a dream. It was the night before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 312AD. Emperor Constantine dreamed that Jesus visited him and showed him the first two letters of the Greek word “Christos,” and the dream Jesus said, “Under this sign, you will conquer.” It led Constantine to have a banner fashioned that featured the two Greek letters, and under that banner he fought, and he did conquer. He would go on to legalize Christianity, and more than that: he would never stop using Christianity as a military and political tool to solidify his reign.

All this is so strange, because how can the Love that Justin Martyr talked about, or Paul, be used as an instrument of conquest?

It can’t; but people can. People can think they are acting in the name of Rabbi Jesus but, in reality, they are caught in the Matrix. Rome is working through them. The only peace they’re spreading is Roman peace which is just more of the perennial human tragedy, not less.

So it was in 325AD that Constantine gathered up all the most important religious leaders of his day and charged them with defining the proper articles of proper Christian belief. “Unitarianism” (which originally meant “God is one”) was one of the candidate ideas being considered, and so was “Universalism” (which originally meant, “no hell”). Lot and lots of ideas: the Christians of this time were brimming with ideas, they were all over the place in what they believed—just like we are today! And that was ok; Christianity was fundamentally about Love. Love united the people. Which explains why Constantine saw the religious leaders endlessly dickering and dithering and multiplying distinctions and tiny differences. Clarity and uniformity of doctrine was not happening and wouldn’t ever happen in the natural course of free debate among creative minds. So Constantine made the course of events UNnatural: he threatened them with violence. He wanted dogma, sharp as a sword. Because that’s what you need, if you are all about conquest.

And he got it. He got his sharp-as-a-sword dogma. History calls this the Council of Nicea. The Nicene Creed.

Creed after creed that had no room for the ideas of “Unitarianism” and “Universalism” piled up, over the years, and all were used as instruments of control. “If at rare intervals,” says the great historian of Unitarianism, Earl Morse Wilbur, “heretics were rash enough to raise their voices and call into question an old doctrine, or proclaim a new one, they were soon put to silence. By this means Christian thought was kept nearly stagnant for over a thousand years.”

But then came enlightenment. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 scattered the Christian scholars living there, who were studying classical authors that had been long forgotten in the West. They came home and the result was the Renaissance: the beginnings of modern art, modern science, modern literature. Couple this with the invention of printing and people being able to read the fountainhead of their faith: the Bible. And then there was the discovery of the New World and heretofore unimaginable new horizons. This is what happened after all the years of stagnation and the shadow of the Dark Ages, and it lit people up. New thirst for freedom and reason and tolerance.

And here we have the next phase in our Living Tradition. The beginning, as we saw, was Love as Jesus the Rabbi taught and his immediate followers showed; and now it surged forth as independence of thought.

But Rome is never out of the picture, in some form or fashion. Here’s what I mean.

The Enlightenment sparked the Reformation, in which leaders like Luther in Germany and Calvin in Switzerland challenged the supremacy of the Catholic Church. Initially the hope was for a reformed Catholic Church; but the ultimate result was schism and an utterly new thing called Protestantism. Also new was the Bible’s elevated status. Whereas the Church used to be seen as the ultimate authority on all things, for the Protestant Reformers it became the Bible.

At least, it was supposed to be. But leaders like Luther and Calvin only went so far with that. Unlike the RADICAL Reformers who are our direct spiritual ancestors. Radical Reformers like Micheal Servetus who read the Bible very carefully, reasoned very thoroughly, and couldn’t help but conclude that the dogma of the Trinity was unbiblical and therefore false. And Calvin (acting just like a Roman Emperor would) had him burned at the stake.

Our Living Tradition over the years has seen immense tragedy and suffering. Religion had so thoroughly become an affair of the mind—people were so afraid of believing the wrong things and therefore being damned—that our spiritual ancestors risked life and limb in simply thinking for themselves. But they trusted that even from error people can learn; and that truth will always, eventually, emerge. Thus they called for tolerance. Listen to another Radical Reformer, Sebastian Castellio, who is responding to Servetus’ death: “To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine. It is to burn a man.” “Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we love one other? […] There are, I know, persons who insist that we should believe even against reason. It is, however, the worst of all errors, and it is laid on me to fight it…. Let no one think he is doing wrong in using his mental faculties. It is our proper way at arriving at the truth.” Sebastian Castellio, 1553.

What he is saying—freedom, reason, tolerance—we take for granted today. It is easy as pie. But to get from then to now, countless people suffered. Countless people were impoverished, tortured, imprisoned, killed, because they stood up for freedom. You know, I’m going to be the first to make vampire jokes when we speak of Transylvania and our Unitarian churches there. But did you know that, back in the 1500s, our spiritual ancestors were hounded out of Germany and Switzerland and practically everywhere else in the Continent and it was only in Poland and, yes, in Transylvania, where our folks were able to settle in SOME measure of safety and peace? 1564 in Transylvania and 1565 in Poland. (If you want concrete birthdates for our religion, here they are.) These are our very first congregations. And it is only in Transylvania that our congregations have survived to this very day, and that through hundreds of years of persecution. In Poland, in 1660, our people were banished by the government. Told to get out. So they went into exile. They wandered the face of the earth, miserable, like the undocumented immigrants of today.

But our people persisted. Ours is a Living Tradition that won’t die.

Earl Morse Wilbur tells how “a young Unitarian officer in Transylvania, upon being dismissed from his office on account of his religion, wrote to his father, ‘I will beg before I give up my religion.’” Earl Morse Wilbur goes on to say, “Such noble families as still remained were the most generous to their church. The fewer they became, the more they comforted and helped one another. Their persistence in hanging together, and their willingness to sacrifice for their faith, became proverbial. The result was that persecutions which had been intended to destroy them not only failed of their purpose, but left them instead a united band of heroes; and this quality has persisted to this day.”

Another story is told of the persevering Transylvanians who believed in freedom, reason, and tolerance as we do. The date is 1821. Our spiritual forbearers were just emerging out of a period of terrible persecution, in which (among other things) children were taken away from their parents by force to be educated as Catholics; Unitarian schools were closed; schools, churches, and parsonages were seized; and mobs terrorized congregations at worship. It was terrible. Now it wasn’t going to stop them. After all, these Unitarians in Transylvania—our folks—are nothing less than descendants of fighters from the army of that 5^th century scourge Attila the Hun. This is one tough people. But still, there was despair in the heart. They thought themselves to be all alone in the whole world, the only Unitarians. They used to have connections with their Polish brethren but Unitarianism in Poland had long been exterminated.

So it was thrilling when, in 1821, a certain book came upon them: The Unitarians in England: their Faith, History, and Present Condition briefly set forth. “It was,” says Earl Morse Wilbur, “like receiving powerful reinforcements at the end of a long and exhausting fight. An answer was sent in due time and communications have been kept up between the Unitarians of the two countries ever since. The Transylvanian brethren began to visit England, where they were most gladly received; a few years later two of them went to America, where they reported a yet more flourishing body as then sweeping all before it in Western Massachusetts. It was a great tonic to the weary strugglers, and a prophesy that the cause they had fought for so long was going to win at last. “

I felt a little bit of that myself this past week, there at General Assembly. It’s hard to be among thousands of Unitarian Universalists and not feel like we’re going to win. Never through conquest, never by the sharp sword of dogma. But through resisting the peace of Rome, which is the peace of a status quo that entrenches a system of haves and have-nots, saved and damned. Resisting that. Being free in our hearts and minds. Exercising reason and tolerance. Loving one another. Doing all this in the manner of our spiritual ancestors who showed us how. Who went before us. Who suffered and died so we might not have to.

That moment at General Assembly, where I found myself absorbed by the sight of the people streaming through the corridors of the Greater Columbus Convention Center and I fantasized that it was a human river, a river with a far distant origin and purpose and we are at the forming edge of it and it goes beyond us too, on and on. Our Living Tradition. All our heroes from Poland and Transylvania, England and America over the course of our 500 years. Faustus Socinus, Francis David, John Biddle, Theophilus Lindsay, Joseph Priestley, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I thought of that unnamed Unitarian officer and his letter to his father, saying he would not quit.

Then I went to the very source of our Living Tradition. I thought of Jesus the rabbi. I thought of Justin Martyr. I thought of Paul and his great saying, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”—and then, knowing Paul would not mind, I expanded on it like this: “there is neither gay nor straight, there is neither Christian nor Buddhist nor Muslim, there is neither atheist nor theist, there is neither black or brown or yellow or white, for all are one in the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Love, which bears all things, hopes for all things, endures all things, is greater than faith, greater than hope, never ends.”

I don’t care how powerful Rome was, or its current versions. Love like Jesus loved and like we love will never die.

That is why the Tradition Lives.

And now, I give it to you.

Make time for it!

Learn about it, know it!

Care for it!

Strengthen it, build it!

Give it to your children, give it to your friends!

Give it away as fast as you can!

Our tradition Lives!

It was dusk. The apartment was empty save for the two of them. As they lay entwined in warm embrace, this room/this bed was the universe. Aside from the faint sounds of their tranquil breathing, they were silent. She stroked the nape of his neck. He nuzzled her erect nipple first gently with his nose, then licked it, tasted, smelled and absorbed her body odor. It was a hot and humid August day, and they had been perspiring. Slowly he caressed her one breast as he softly rolled his face over the contours of the other. He pressed his body close against her, sighed, and fully spent, closed his eyes and soon fell into a deep satisfying sleep. Ever so slowly she slipped herself out from under him, lest she disturb him, cradled him in her arms, and moved him to his crib. Having completed his 6 o’clock feeding, the four-month old had also experienced one more minute contribution to his further sexual development.

And that’s one of the stories for reflection coming from the Our Whole Lives sexuality education curriculum (or OWL for short).

Did it get you reflecting? Yes?

What aspects of the story struck you as sexual in nature?

Did you think that the male was a teenager or adult? Did you leap to that conclusion instantly? If so, why?

Have you considered that sexual experience and development occur at all stages in life?

These are all fascinating and important questions taking a person deeper into one of the most powerful dimensions of human existence. No less than life and death consequences can stem from choices around sexuality, as when we consider STDs or the epidemic of suicides in GLBT teens.

And then there are the wounds to our sexual integrity (via shaming, misinformation, unintended pregnancy, exploitation, violence) that we can feel all our lives. As artist and writer Melinda Gebbie says, “We are delicate. We bring our damage to sexuality, we bring our hopes, we bring our self-image, we bring our world-image, we bring what we believe we are/what we believe we aren’t, our blind spots, our prejudices, our sadness. Everything comes out. A lot of people are left wanting, and confusing, and having the idea that their body is like an unloved apartment building; it’s up for grabs and it’s of absolutely no worth.”

“I say the word ‘vagina’,” writes Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, “because when I first started saying it I discovered how fragmented I was, how disconnected my body was from my mind.  My vagina was something over there, away in the distance.  I rarely lived inside it, or even visited.  I was busy working, writing; being a mother, a friend.  I did not see my vagina as my primary resource, a place of sustenance, humor, and creativity.  It was fraught there, full of fear.  I’d been raped as a little girl, and although I’d grown up, and done all the adult things one does with one’s vagina, I had never really reentered that part of my body after I’d been violated.  I had essentially lived most of my life without my motor, my center, my second heart.”

The wounds hurt. People feeling their bodies are like unloved apartment buildings, up for grabs. People living without their motor, their center, their second heart. People so distant from the sweetness of that story from a moment ago, in which we saw the child breastfeeding at dusk, the room/the bed as the whole universe….

And then, above all, we never want to let go of the fact that sexuality can be a blissfully joyful dimension to our days–that it can be had way beyond infancy and all through the stages of life. Listen to Melinda Gebbie again: “Sex is a metaphor for everything else and everything is a metaphor for sex as well. Because sex is a coming together of two weather patterns, two separate countries, two entities in a conscious state of potentially blissful crisis. Or chaos, or harmony. You’re not quite sure what’s going to happen, but it is the most catastrophic, exciting, and [beautifully] weakening thing that can happen to us.”

Oh!

How can we not want to reflect on all this? To become more wise about all this? To become less reactive and more proactive, more values-focused, values-driven?

And yet here is the reality in America today: it is a tremendously oversexualized society populated by millions and millions who don’t want to talk about sex in candid and informed ways. Too many parents can freak out if children are brought into honest and practical conversation about it; too many parents want their kids to remain perfectly innocent, even though those kids are bombarded by media-based sexual imagery and innuendo and innocence is a lost cause.

When innocence is a lost cause, what’s really needed is a capacity for self-defence. Not less talk but more. Not less information but more.

Kids need to know how to critically interrogate all the messages they’re receiving.

Side story: one grandmother tells about an in-the-car conversation with her grandson. Grandson surprises grandmother by stating very matter-of-factly that his brother came out of his mother’s vagina .. and then he goes on to share how he told his mom that she needs to put his brother back in there.

Kids know something’s going on. It’s on internet sites, phone apps, television, movies, magazines, music, and video games. Often they’re sources of unrealistic and sometimes dangerous messages about body image, gender roles, and promiscuity. A survey of 1,351 randomly selected TV shows by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that over the course of one week 56 percent of TV programs and 67 percent of prime-time shows contained sexual content in word or deed. Yet only one in ten such shows mentioned contraception, safe sex, or the possibility of delaying sexual activity.

Given this, one could only hope that public education might help us out here, but not really. Let me hit you with some statistics. Only slightly more than half of the states are legally required to provide some instruction about HIV/AIDS and slightly less than half actually require sex education in public schools. Of these states, less than forty percent require their curriculums to be “medically, factually or technically accurate.”

That’s right. As a teenager you are bombarded by sexual messages in the larger world and so you hope to be able to get things straightened out at school but it’s highly likely that, (a) your biology textbook will have a better explanation for how mosses and ferns reproduce than for your own species, and (b) if you do receive information, it might very well be wrong or misleading and for sure it will emphasize the risk-related and negative side of sex and nothing positive.

Many school districts requiring sex education choose to go the abstinence-only route. Doesn’t matter that abstinence-only has been an abject failure in every place it’s been tried. Doesn’t matter that study after study shows that comprehensive sexuality education like OWL actually decreases the likelihood of teens having sex. Millions of dollars are still spent on abstinence-only.

Writer Savannah Hemmig shares an experience she had with this in ninth grade. She says, “Each year my teachers reiterated the importance of postponing all sexual activity until marriage, followed by the benefits of adoption as a positive choice in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. In ninth grade, I remember a blushing girl who dared to interrupt our health teacher’s sermon about HIV rates with ‘But what about condoms?’ To which the teacher responded, ‘I am only allowed to tell you that condoms are not 100% effective’ before promptly moving on.” Savannah Hemmig goes on to say, “This brief exchange became the only contraception acknowledgement I can remember in six years of [public school] Family Life Education.”

And we wonder why there is so much sexual dysfunction in our world.

Unitarian Universalism says no to this. We’ve been saying it for more than 40 years.

For more than 40 years, originally through a program called About Your Sexuality and, now, Our Whole Lives, we’ve been providing up-to-date information and candid answers to questions; activities to help people clarify values and improve decision-making skills; effective group building to create a safe and supportive peer groups; education about sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment; opportunities to critique media messages about gender and sexuality; acceptance of diversity; and encouragement to act for justice.

For more than 40 years, we have been saying: all persons are sexual; sexuality is a good part of the human experience; sexuality includes much more than sexual behavior; human beings are sexual from the time they are born until they die; it is natural to express sexual feelings in a variety of ways; people engage in sexual behavior for a variety of healthy reasons–so as to express caring and love, or to experience intimacy and connection with another, or to share pleasure, or to bring new life into the world, or simply to experience fun and relaxation.

We’ve been saying: sexuality in our society is damaged by violence, exploitation, alienation, dishonesty, abuse of power, and the treatment of persons as objects. We’ve been saying: it’s healthier for young adolescents to postpone sexual intercourse, until (as one of UUCA’s OWL instructors, Jean Woodall, puts it) it happens “at the right time and place and with honor and respect for self and other.”

For 40 years, we’ve been saying this. Offering teaching that is tailored to the needs of different age groups. UUCA OWL teacher Katie Sadler-Stevenson says, “For young children it’s important to learn how to name the parts of their body (and how they work) and to be able to do that without feeling shame or embarrassment.  It also encourages children to be empowered about their own bodies – what those bodies are capable of and having body autonomy.  For older children and adults it helps people to make healthy decisions by being knowledgeable and hopefully having the opportunity to think about things before they happen in real life.”

But now, let me ask you: Do you think all this has happened without generating any controversy? Without coverage in the press? Allegations of violating obscenity statutes? Courtroom drama, and so on?

Oh yes. We cannot underestimate how counter-cultural the values are that animate Our Whole Lives, or its predecessor program, About Your Sexuality.

Just yesterday I was reading an article in The Atlantic—from April 28, 2016—and I found this statement from Sharon Slater, the president of the advocacy group Family Watch International who has a new documentary out entitled “The War on Children: Exposing the Comprehensive Sexuality Education Agenda.” Here’s her statement: “Comprehensive Sexuality Education encourages children to engage in sexual experimentation and high-risk sexual behaviors.” And then there’s Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist who regularly lectures on the topic of sex education, who argues that abstinence-based education is essential to protecting children from sexually irresponsible behavior.

But there’s nothing new about this sort of opposition to programs like OWL. Rev. Jennifer Hamlin-Navias tells the story of the time (about 18 years ago) when TV show 60 Minutes did an “expose.” “Originally,” she says, “the Unitarian Universalist Association had offered to have a male professor who taught in the area of human sexuality for the interview.  But 60 Minutes did not like him.  Rev. Makanah Morris [then the head of the UUA’s Religious Education Department] got the sense that 60 Minutes wanted to interview someone who would be easy to manipulate.  Eventually the UUA suggested Bobbie Nelson, a Director of Religious Education from Massachusetts who had worked with the development of our sexuality education.  60 Minutes agreed to her.  Bryant Gumbel, as the story goes, barely got a word in edgewise.  When the interview was over he said ‘Well that wasn’t so bad was it?’  That’s when Bobby Nelson shook her finger at him and said ‘You should be ashamed for what you just did.’” Rev. Hamlin-Navias ends the story by saying, “I think maybe 60 Minutes expected some sweet little church lady – they did not know how fierce our [religious educators] can be in helping to raise up our children. 60 Minutes’ sexism did not serve them well that day.”

That’s right. Unitarian Universalist religious educators are fierce. We are fierce for our children and we are fierce for people of all ages. We are fierce about the truth, which is that talking about sex in candid and factually-informed ways does not so much inspire irresponsibility as responsibility and respect. We are fierce about that. Fierce about helping people make wise decisions about their sexual health and behavior. Fierce about equipping people with accurate, age-appropriate information in human development, relationships, personal skills, sexual behavior, sexual health, and society and culture. Not just negative stuff but positive stuff too. Fierce about providing facts about anatomy and human development. Fierce about helping people clarify their values, build interpersonal skills, and understand the spiritual, emotional, social, and political aspects of sexuality as well.

Fierce.

And the ripple effects are amazing.

One has to do with Standing on the Side of Love. Rev. Hamlin-Navais rightly points out that “when AIDS activism started we UUs showed up. The Holly Near song that we now sing as our hymn ‘We are a Gentle Angry People’ is likely the first hymn published in an American church hymnal that used the word ‘gay’ (meaning homosexual, not happy).  We could do that, “she says, “because we did all this education.  We knew that sex and sexuality are important parts of each human being. When the movement for marriage equality came to the forefront of the American culture … we were already there standing, singing, chanting, demanding, voting, welcoming.  We could not have done that if it were not for About Your Sexuality, if it were not for Our Whole Lives, if it were not for our religious educators.”

Fierce, for 40 plus years.
Because it’s worth being fierce about the most important things in life.
Because the implications are life and death, or lifelong.
Because “Sex is a metaphor for everything else
and everything is a metaphor for sex as well.

Because sex is a coming together of two weather patterns,
two separate countries,
two entities in a conscious state of potentially blissful crisis.
Or chaos, or harmony.
You’re not quite sure what’s going to happen,
but it is the most catastrophic, exciting,
and [beautifully] weakening thing that can happen to us.”

We are fierce for that.
We are fierce for life, lived fully, and well.
We are fierce.

AMEN.

You might have heard that the great Muhammad Ali died this past Friday at the age of 74 years. This was a man who, besides being the world heavyweight boxing champion three times, transformed what it meant to be a sports hero. Before, it meant being the strong and silent type. After: something entirely different.

Listen to the sorts of things Ali used to say:

“If you even dream of beating me you’d better wake up and apologize.”

“I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.”   

“I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.”

But now listen to this one:

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

And then

“If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.”

In other words, although he loved to crow about his greatness, he never thought that others couldn’t find their own special form of greatness too.

I think our Unitarian Universalist spiritual ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson might have really liked him, for Emerson was also passionate about the depths of human potential and he, too, expressed his passion in controversial ways. His particular way was to deny godhood to Jesus. Emerson opposed how Christianity deified the person of Jesus because he believed that all people had the potential to be as good as Jesus. But if Jesus’ goodness came from his being an actual God, then what hope do mere mortals have? And so we give up. Which means we let ourselves off the hook. We sell ourselves short. We don’t do the hard work of curating the Jesus-like potentials that live within us and are just waiting to be released.

So people need to be educated out of that bad theology and educated into something better. “There is a time in every [person’s] education,” Emerson says, “when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Emerson is saying: Do the work. Get your hands dirty. The result is sweet.

But it is surprisingly hard to do. You would think that it should be easy to just stand there and shine, be the star that you are, but no. Unitarian Universalist poet May Sarton speaks to this:

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
‘Hurry, you will be dead before [long].”

That is the ultimate context: hurry. Death is coming. But hearing the call of one’s true life—fulfilling it—is a journey that takes as long as it takes. You are dissolved and shaken. The latest incident of sexism or racism or homophobia or some other –ism proves the point. You’ve worn other people’s faces. But what about your own? What does YOUR face look like? What are you afraid of?

Comedian Jim Carrey speaks about fear in connection with his father. He says, “My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could to survive.”

Jim Carrey’s dad wore another person’s face.

Fear about showing up to our lives is immense.

Sometimes the problem is that we’re already established in the world—we have cars and houses to pay for, we have relationships that have settled into predictable and comfortable patterns—and guess what? The heart balks at all of it; it wrestles, will not accept. Makes no sense to the mind, which knows that we have it made—the mind that knows we’ve achieved society’s vision of success. But the heart disagrees. The soul has its own truth to say. It feels in a deep and undeniable way that things are out of whack and that we are out of whack.

Nothing satisfies.

Waking up to the question of authenticity wakes us up to messiness. Dreams dry up, or fester and run, or stink, or crust and sugar over, or sag, or explode—anything but unfold naturally, as is their right. Or we can feel a global sense of dissatisfaction that others (and the inner critic) interpret as literal insanity. Or we can never seem to achieve stability and success, and so we get a slacker reputation.

Hearing the call of one’s true purpose is hard because it shakes us to the core. It becomes a fearful moment when it is clear that “the life I am living is not the life that wants to live in me.” Society defines a success path that goes one way, but you sense that you must go another way and follow the different drumbeat of your own heart.

But then, what is that mysterious way? And how to discern it?

“I learned many great lessons from my father,” says Jim Carrey, “not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

“Fear is going to be a player in your life,” he says, “but you get to decide how much. You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about your pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.”

“Your job,” Jim Carrey says, “is not to figure out how it’s going to happen for you, but to open the door in your head and when the doors open in real life, just walk through it. Don’t worry if you miss your cue. There will always be another door opening. They keep opening.”

Perhaps some volunteer opportunity here is just one of these doors that Jim Carrey’s talking about. Just walk through. See where it takes you.

It’s love over fear. You can’t curate anyone’s potentials, or your own, without this sort of love. Love that sees through the apparent poverty of the present to the reality which is another thing entirely.

A Sufi wisdom story puts it like this:

A man in prison receives a gift. It is the gift of a prayer rug. What he wanted of course was a file, a crowbar or a key. But he began using the rug, doing the five-times prayer at dawn, at noon, mid-afternoon, after sunset and before going to sleep. Bowing, sitting up, bowing again…after many days of prayer he notices an odd pattern in the weave of the rug at the point where his head touches. He studies and meditates on that pattern, gradually discovering that it is a diagram of the lock…a picture of the lock that confines him to his cell and it shows how it works. Studying the diagram, he is able to escape. Anything you do every day can open into the deepest spiritual place, which is freedom.

Never lose faith. Keep opening the door in your head. I don’t have “10 steps to curating human potential” for you today. I just have love. I just have faith.

The Rev. Robert Fulghum, Unitarian Universalist minister and author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, gets it. He tells the story of his friend Larry Walters. “Walters,” says Fulghum, “is a truck driver, thirty three years old.”

He is sitting in his lawn chair in his backyard, wishing he could fly. For as long as he could remember, he wanted to go up.  To be able to just rise right up in the air and see for a long way. 

 But the time, money, education, and opportunity to be a pilot were not his.  Hang gliding was too dangerous, and any good place for gliding was too far away.  So he spent a lot of summer afternoons sitting in his backyard in his ordinary old aluminum lawn chair—the kind with the webbing and rivets.  Just like the one you’ve got in your backyard.


 The next chapter in this story is carried by the newspapers and television.  There’s old Larry Walters up in the air over Los Angeles.  Flying at last.  Really getting UP there.  Still sitting in his aluminum lawn chair, but it’s hooked on to forty-five helium-filled surplus weather balloons.  Larry has a parachute on, a CB radio, a six-pack of beer, some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a BB gun to pop some of the balloons to come down.  And instead of being just a couple of hundred feet over his neighborhood, he shot up eleven thousand feet, right through the approach corridor to the Los Angeles International Airport.


 Walters is a taciturn man.  When asked by the press why he did it, he said, “You can’t just sit there.”  When asked if he was scared, he answered, “Wonderfully so.”  When asked if he would do it again, he said, “Nope.”  And asked if he was glad that he did it, he grinned from ear to ear and said, “Oh, yes.”
 

That’s the story. We all just wish we could fly! But so often, the form that our true freedom takes looks very different from what we (or the world) expects.

So what. It is freedom.

You can’t just sit there.

With love, with faith, we care for ourselves. Finally we are living the life that wishes to live through us.

Says Muhummad Ali, “Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

I’ll close with another story about Ali. Listen, and think on freedom:

It’s from Cal Fussman, writer for Esquire magazine:

Muhammad Ali came through the double doors into the living room of his hotel suite on slow, tender steps. [He’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s years ago, in 1980, and the disease had this once great athlete in its grip.] I held out my hand. He opened his arms. Ali lowered himself into a wide, soft chair, and I sat on an adjacent sofa. “I’ve come,” I said, “to ask about the wisdom you’ve taken from all you’ve been through.”

 Ali seemed preoccupied with his right hand, which was trembling over his right thigh, and he did not speak.

 “George Foreman told me that you were the most important man in the world. When I asked him why, he said that when you walked into a room, it didn’t matter who was there—presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, movie stars—everybody turned toward you. He said you were the most important man in the world because you made everybody else’s heart beat faster.”

 The shaking in Ali’s right hand seemed to creep above his elbow. Both of his arms were quivering now, and his breaths were short and quick.

 I leaned in awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do. Half a minute passed in silence. I wondered if I should call for his wife.

 Ali stooped over, and now his whole body was trembling and his breaths were almost gasps.

 “Champ! You okay? You okay?”

 Ali’s head lifted and slowly turned to me with the smile of an eight-year-old.

 “Scared ya, huh?”

 Freedom.

 AMEN

Kids ask parents over 300 questions a day. Every two minutes 36 seconds, on average. 105,120 questions a year. That’s the finding of a recent survey in Britain involving 1000 moms with children between ages two and ten.

Can you believe it? (I can hear weary voices out there agreeing….)

Questions like, “Why is water wet?”
“What are shadows made of?”
“Why do we have to go to school?”

Even: “Why are you so old?”

But perhaps the most awkward of all are religious questions. As in,

“How did the world come to be?”
“What will happen to us when we die?”
“Why are we here?”
“How should we behave?”

These are questions people have asked forever, and the answers go on to be the basic building blocks of all the great disciplines of culture.

But the questions are awkward because we might be wrestling with the very same ones ourselves. The kids want answers but we’re still thinking, we’re not done yet. Or, we’re not sure how to be honest about what we think and, at the same time, ensure that they have room to decide for themselves. Or, it’s not so much the kids we’re worried about as other conservative family members and their answers, which they would love to impose on us. And so on.

Thus today’s sermon: 10 commandments for talking about religion with kids. Now, I know we are Unitarian Universalists, so maybe it’s more “the 10 suggestions.” Whether commandments or suggestions, I believe they can provide helpful guidance in this awkward place in lots of people’s lives, all to the end of children learning how to engage the world more creatively and to not get stuck along the way, intellectually and emotionally.

We want them to be free.

So here is the first commandment: Thou shalt tell, because “don’t ask don’t tell” is a disaster.

Between 2005 and 2007, sociologist Christel J. Manning interviewed 60 couples on their parenting strategies around incorporating religion into the lives of their kids, and by far the most common approach was silence. Saying nothing. Nada. The result is the word “God” coming up all the time but that word never makes an appearance at home or, if it does, anxious silence descends and the message sent is that religion is scary, wrong, and bad. Another result is kids growing up not knowing (for example) that Easter is a religious holiday, but then they hit college and that’s when the scales fall from their eyes and they feel betrayed. Yet a third result is that kids simply go elsewhere for answers, and all of a sudden you have liberal parents whose kids have been religiously hijacked and are now are worshipping at the fundamentalist church.

Parents who practice “don’t ask don’t tell” have their reasons, of course. They’re too busy with other things. They don’t want to be put into a position to lie or verbalize things that might get them in trouble. Or maybe they think religion is no big deal, not worth the trouble.

But is that true? Religion not worth the trouble? Wendy Thomas Russell, in her wonderful book Relax, It’s Just God, says, “Religion is everywhere we want to be. It’s in our art and architecture, music and literature, plays, poetry, and movies. It fills our history books and guides our politics. It’s the reason we get our weekends off. It’s on our money.” Religion is everywhere. For so many bad things (wars, racism, sexism, and on and on), we can blame some kinds of religion. But then there are other kinds of religion, and from those kinds, down through the ages, we have received wonderful things, beautiful things.

Religion IS a big deal. That’s why it won’t serve kids’ health to grow up neurotic about it. Being left in the dark won’t serve them well. Wandering off to fundamentalisms to get their questions answered is not something we want.

Thou shalt tell. The first commandment.

But now the second: Thou shalt answer honestly.

It’s important for kids to know that, at home, people can talk openly and respectfully about tough subjects. But parents can struggle when it comes to religion. One reason has to do with the unrealistic expectation that the nonnegotiable requirement is already having all the answers to life, the universe, and everything. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut.

But don’t we want our kids to be good question-raisers, rather than quick answer-givers? It means that in a Unitarian Universalist household, here are some perfectly acceptable things to say when the child asks the parent a question like, “What is God?” and the parent doesn’t have an answer ready to go. Say this: “I too have wondered about that.” Or, “I’m still working on that question. Here’s what I think so far.” Or “I don’t know, but it’s important, let’s find out together.” What this honesty accomplishes, by the way, is far more than kids feeling like they can trust parents. It’s also kids learning that religion is a lifelong search for truth and meaning. Let them see the seeker in you, and they will be seekers all their days.

Which leads to the third commandment: Thou shalt draw out what is already in kids in seed form.

The impulse to seek is already in them. Parents and religious educators don’t have to stress about putting it in there. My colleague the Rev. Victoria Safford illustrates this. “When I was nine or ten,” she says, “I found a dead deer in the woods. I saw the flies feeding on her open eyes and felt the silky roughness of her coat, forgetting all those warnings to never, ever touch a dead animal, not even with a stick. A child is made for wonder, not for hygiene. I pressed my living hand against the stiff carcass, smelled the black blood, lifted up the heavy hooves. I thought about death and how deer run, how they stand among spring trees, glance up, and disappear. That afternoon I learned as much about the sacred as I did in all my later classes in theology.”

No one’s religious life starts at zero. Kids very naturally have a sense of the sacred and a sense of paradox, a sense of curiosity. Five year olds wondering, “But who made God?” So the focus is on drawing this out, not introducing obstacles and complications but extending it, giving it voice.

And so the fourth commandment: Thou shalt answer creatively.

One of the best ways to draw out the seeker in kids is through books like Horton Hears a Who. Remember that Dr. Seuss book? In it, we meet a kind-hearted elephant named Horton, who lives in the Jungle of Nool. Horton’s a totally easygoing guy. He’s open to all kinds of stuff, so when he hears a tiny voice calling out to him, he doesn’t freak out. Instead, he meets the Whos, a whole city of people that he can’t exactly see, but he can certainly hear them. (Those big ears are coming in handy.) Just one problem. The other animals can’t hear the Whos, so they think he’s gone completely cuckoo. They mock him endlessly and threaten to snatch up his clover puff and destroy it. Not okay. In the end, Horton stands up for the Whos; the Whos make a huge ruckus allowing the other animals to hear them; their existence is finally verified; and it’s a happy ending for all.

Read a book like this, and both your mind and that of your child are creatively engaged. That’s what we want. The opposite of boring. Books like Horton Hears a Who make key religious questions effortless. When you know something, how do you prove it to someone else? Can you (should you) believe something that you can’t see or touch or even hear? Do you believe something like that? Is it right for others to act in hurtful ways towards someone who believes something they don’t agree with?

Philosophy and theology don’t just belong in college classes. They can happen on the living room floor with the right book and a willingness to follow the questions. They absolutely can.

But now the fifth commandment: Thou shalt answer respectfully.

Here we want to consider yet another children’s picture book, entitled No! That’s Wrong! By Zhaohua Ji and Cui Xu. The book tells the tale of a bunny who finds a pair of underpants blowing in the wind and determines they must be a hat. After all, his ears fit perfectly through the little leg holes. He’s hopping around the animal kingdom, underpants on his head, and his animal kingdom friends think it’s great. But now he hears a voice: “No! That’s wrong!” And that voice comes from US, the readers, for in this book, there’s no wall dividing the fictional animal kingdom and the real world of the reader. Little bunny hears us and we peer pressure him into putting on the underpants correctly. His tail doesn’t fit, the underpants are uncomfortable. His animal kingdom friends think he’s getting it all wrong. After looking at himself in the glassy surface of a lake, the bunny takes off the underpants and puts them back on his head. “No, I was right!” he says, hopping merrily along. “It’s a wonderful hat!”

There can be significant reasons, in others words, that people hold different religious beliefs. Whatever those reasons happen to be, if the result is something irrational or hateful or harmful we are absolutely justified in speaking up and protecting ourselves and others. But beyond that—to namecall, degrade, dehumanize—this is when, as parents and religious educators, we stumble. For one thing, nasty language serves to indoctrinate our kids. They get the clear message that if they don’t believe as you do, they’re next. For another thing, they become agents of indoctrination themselves, bullies. This is not freedom. This is not true to our values as a freedom people.

Which leads us to commandment number six: Thou shalt teach a “no one left out” vision.

I love how Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief, articulates this through his focus on empathy education. “Empathy,” he says, “is the ability to understand how someone else feels — and, by implication, to care. It is the ultimate sign of maturity. Infants are, for their own adaptive good, entirely self-centered. But as we grow, our circle of concern and understanding enlarges, including first family, then one’s own community. But having developed empathy for those who are most like us, we too often stop cold, leaving the empathy boundary at the boundary of our own nation, race or creed – a recipe for disaster. […] Continually pushing out the empathy boundary is a life’s work. We can help our kids begin that critical work as early as possible not by preaching it but by embodying it. Allow your children to see poverty up close. Travel to other countries if you can, staying as long as possible until our shared humanity becomes unmistakable. Engage other cultures and races not just to value difference but to recognize sameness. It’s difficult to hate when you begin to see yourself in the other.” That’s Dale McGowan. His take on our “no one left out” vision as Unitarian Universalists, which is also our ARAOMC vision.

But even as we affirm that, we must also affirm the next commandment, Thou shalt teach boundaries.

“No one left out” is an ethical and compassionate stance that affirms the inherent worth and dignity of all people. But in no way should it be misinterpreted to mean that we cannot take active steps to get out of harm’s way. And what’s abundantly clear is that for too many of us, we experience harm in the form of family criticism. They are hardcore in their belief if you don’t believe as they do. So they say such things as “Why do you hate God?” or “You’ve broken your mother’s heart” or “What did we do wrong?”

Even if it doesn’t get that bad, it can still feel difficult when a relative discusses their belief with your child. Even if the discussion simply reflects the honesty our Commandment Number Two affirms.

Wendy Thomas Russell has some important pointers for us here, which emphasize both respect for the other and taking care of one’s needs. “Often,” she says, “we see religious exposure and treat it as religious indoctrination, or we hear words of faith and interpret them as acts of war. Shed your armor. Adopt a loving posture instead of a defensive one.”

Also this: “give your child a context in which to hear about Grandpa’s religion—or Cousin Suzie’s or Neighbor Bob’s. (An example: “Many people say that if you believe in Jesus, you will go to live with him in a place called heaven after you die. Grandpa believes that, which is part of the reason he wants you to believe what he does.”) Just be sure to encourage your child to share what he is learning with you; that way, you can keep track of what’s being said, correct misinformation, and balance things out as necessary.”

Wendy Thomas Russell also counsels parents to lower expectations; avoid religious debate (“especially when liquor is involved”), and, if all else fails, cut ties. It is regrettable, but sometimes it needs to happen. “No one left out” does not mean that you will allow yourself or those you love to be beat up. That’s not what “no one left out” means.

And now, we’re nearing the end of the commandments: number eight: Thou shalt show as well as tell.

Religion is caught more than taught. Light a candle and hold hands for a minute at night before bed. Have a moment of quiet or share something nice that happened that day. Rituals regularly engaged-in are so powerful in the spiritual nurture of children. So is walking in nature. I don’t know if you know how to pray. But when you say to your child, “Do you see that? Do you see the trees, the clouds, the flower, the animal, the lake, the sky, the sun? Do you see that, and isn’t it beautiful?”—when you say that, you are introducing your child to the age-old spiritual practice of praise, and by this all good things are magnified, and it IS a kind of prayer.

Commandment number nine: Thou shalt always bring it back to “does that make sense to you?”

We do want our kids to be good question-raisers, rather than quick answer-givers. And for the answers they do arrive at, we want those to be arrived at freely and thoughtfully.

So your kid comes home crying, saying that a so-called friend at school told her she was going to burn in hell for not believing such-and-so. After you hold your child, soothe her, and she’s ready to talk, this is what you say: “If someone is a nice person, and only does good things for other people, or tries to, do you think that person will go to some horrible place after he dies? Does that make sense to you?”

In critical thinking is freedom. Again and again, bring it back to “does that make sense to you?”

And now the final commandment, which is: Thou shalt always bring it back to Beloved Community.

Remember how kids ask parents over 300 questions a day? Every two minutes 36 seconds, on average? 105,120 questions a year? And lots of them religious questions?

That is overwhelming. No wonder the “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy is so tempting!

But the tenth and final commandment reminds us that we don’t have to go it alone in our parenting. There’s a larger WE possible, that supports us as we seek to follow the other nine commandments. That’s what sermons like this are for. That’s what religious education for all ages is for. That’s why we’re implementing the SuperCharged Sunday initiative starting in January of 2017, so we can expand our religious exploration offerings for adults.

We need the larger WE. Right here.

The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed puts it like this: “The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is to narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength is too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens, and our strength is renewed.”

Doesn’t matter what the questions turn out to be, or how many.

Together, we’re up to the task.

Just this past week, after winning five primaries, He Who Shall Not Be Named offered this jewel of wisdom: “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card.”

How many of you are bearers of such a card?

Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri is, and listen to what she has to say:

It is great. It entitles you to a sizable discount on your earnings everywhere you go (average 21 percent, but can be anywhere from 9 percent to 37 percent, depending on what study you’re reading and what edition of the Woman Card you have.) If you shop with the Woman Card at the grocery, you will get to pay 11 percent more for all the same products as men, but now they are pink.

Show the Woman Card to your health-care provider and you will enjoy new limits on your reproductive rights, depending on what the legislators of your state have decided is wise. Get ready to have a lot of things about your body explained to you!

Present the Woman Card to a man you have just met at a party and it is good for one detailed, patronizing explanation of the subject you literally got your PhD in.

Show off the Woman Card on your way to work and you will get free comments from total strangers, telling you to smile. Play it in the sciences and you will get to leave the sciences.

Take the Woman Card anywhere and you will instantly be surrounded by men who feel entitled to your time. Also, to your space. Do not take up too much space; the Woman Card does not cover that.

And so on.

This is just the latest high-profile instance of the sorts of things that our anti-racism, anti-oppression, multiculturalism resolution (ARAOMC, for short) puts its finger on and says, NO. Says, we can do better than that. Says, we—the UUCA congregation—are going to take a stand and be more intentional about fighting oppressions of all kinds and affirming the beauty and rightness of difference and diversity. We’re going to raise awareness. We’re going to add new words to our congregational vocabulary. We’re going to be the change we wish to see in the world. You bet this ARAOMC work is already part of our history and we are already doing some things, but it’s gut check time, a time to get clearer than ever before about intentions, it’s time to get strategic about our future as we inch towards our next Long Range Planning process.

Because the woman’s card is a violation of human rights. So is the differently-abled card. The immigrant card. The poverty card. The LGBTQ card. The race card.

All of them outrage our first Unitarian Universalist principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We saw that outrage in the video from a moment ago. As the holder of a race card, Joy Degruy got to enjoy all sorts of stresses simultaneously: (1) the stress of personal humiliation at the hands of a grocery store cashier; (2) the stress of the humiliation of her ten-year-old daughter, as well as her awareness of needing to be a role model and do the right thing; (3) the stress of having the right to be angry and yet being very aware of that old stereotype of the “angry black person” which others would use to dismiss her. All that stress, all that oppression.

Get rid of the race card. Get rid of all the cards.

But what’s interesting is what happens when we’re making progress in doing just that. Unitarian Universalist writer Doug Muder articulates this so well. He draws on the 1998 movie called Pleasantville to make his point. Movie character George Parker is a good 1950s TV-like father. “He never set out to be the bad guy,” says Doug Muder. “He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was. George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability.”

But then change happens. One day he comes home from work “and says the magic words ‘Honey, I’m home!’, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table. This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: ‘Where’s my dinner?’”

Doug Muder goes on to explain: “As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.”

Just listen to that. The George Parkers among us are awakening from the slumber of their privilege, and it’s not an easy awakening. They awaken to voices and stories that have been formerly invisible but are now all too visible, and it’s threatening. They awaken to the nuances of oppression and are introduced to words that help articulate those nuances, but the words to them feel negative and offputting. They, the George Parkers among us, experience all this and, in the end, can feel demonized and oppressed. They cry out, “Honey, I’m home!” but the only reply is cold silence.

Which brings us to the first emotional intelligence pointer of this sermon, as we do the work of ARAOMC and IF we want to stay united as a diverse community, IF we want to go far because we’re going together: Be aware that there is discomfort all around, but acknowledge and honor the fact that there’s different discomfort levels.

The George Parkers who are just starting the ARAOMC journey and are intellectually grappling with new terminology and are struggling with the concept of privilege—that’s us. That’s who’s in the room.

But also in the room are people whose very lives are threatened, people whose actual quality of life is being suffocated. UUCA member Dr. Tony Stringer spoke to this in a City post a couple of days ago when he said, “As a person of color and a resident of Stone Mountain, I am conscious of the planned [KKK] ‘rally for racists’ in Stone Mountain Park [which took place last Saturday]. This is less than 15 minutes from where I live and sleep.  This is where I took my daughter as a child to hike and play in the public playground.  This is where I kayak in the summer.  This is where I go every Sunday morning to sit by the lake, sip my coffee, and renew my connection to the spiritual essence I find in nature.  Speaking very personally, I don’t find anything overly intellectual about [the ARAOMC resolution] that welcomes me, stands with me against oppression, and values my cultural contribution.  It is possible that for some, racism and oppression are intellectual concepts.  For me they are real.  They are 15 minutes away from where I will go to sleep tonight.”

We are all in this space together. But there are different levels of distress among us. Writer Margaret Atwood, as she brings things back to the “woman card,” puts it like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” I know that’s not a pretty picture, but it’s honest. The way forward is compassion towards hurt feelings in the George Parkers among us and sympathy towards their distress (because first of all it’s the right thing to do and second of all we need the George Parkers to use their power for good)—this, and then, in the face of honest to God oppression, which is an entirely different universe of discomfort, how we respond is with JUSTICE. The two levels are not equal. “My straight-white-male sunburn,” says Doug Muder, “can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack.”

We’re feeling discomfort all around. Distress is in the room. But it’s not all on the same level.

And this is why (as a side note) it’s very painful for some to hear others pick apart the language of the ARAOMC resolution. To insist that the language be perfect before endorsing it. Now of course we want the language to be generally sound. I’m not saying we can’t raise issues about the language. But what I am saying is that exclusive focus on the language (rather than on the spirit and good intent) can feel, for some, like folks are wordsmithing a fire code when the actual building is actually burning down! We need to know this. We need to hold each other’s vulnerabilities gently, more gently than ever before.

We need to bring emotional intelligence to the ARAOMC work.

And now here is a second pointer for us. Most generally, it relates to something Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön speaks about. “Develop unconditional friendship with feelings,” she says, “which is not to condone them, but be able to hold disturbing thoughts and gently come back to the breath: ‘I see you. I know you. I’m not accepting you, but I am observing you.’ Pushing against one’s thoughts only makes them stronger,” she says. “Be patient. Impermanence happens. Allow thoughts to flow.”

And then she says this: “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

Did you know that the lifespan of any particular emotion is only 90 seconds, and after that, we have to revive it in order to get it going again? So when a thought arises and it’s disturbing and we push it away, the thought only persists and the emotion of disturbance only increases. So Buddhism says, soften the emotional energy. Soften the edges. Do not do fundamental harm to yourself. Breathe.

And really, that’s one way of describing the emotional and spiritual core of ARAOMC work. Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

But the knowledge of the truth is disturbing. It’s the truth of “unconscious bias” which sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called “racism without racists.” But these biases affect us all; we all have them about gender, disability, body size, age, economic status, and on and on. I don’t care how dedicated a religious liberal you are—how deeply committed you are to our Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles—you are also a human being shaped by evolution and part of your brain (the reptile brain) is constantly broadcasting survival fears that are probably way out of proportion to what’s actually happening but that doesn’t stop the inner reptile from shouting “Oh my God someone is taking something from me and I’m gonna die!” or “Oh my god did you see what they just did? I need to run away/I need to attack!”

Doesn’t matter that “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations” is your style. You are also a human being shaped by thousands of years of culture and history and what’s perennial is some system of haves and have nots, some system of who’s in and who’s out—and this cultural logic cranks away in our heads and we can’t help but divide the sheep from the goats. The thoughts happen, and they can feel so disturbing….

Doesn’t matter that “affirming inherent worth and dignity” is our number one principle as Unitarian Universalists. We are also Americans, and 400 years of slavery and its continuing legacy is woven into the fabric of our country. That legacy has an independent logic that plays out in our heads, and so, the most professed anti-racists among us can, in actual behavior, be unknowingly offensive—and it hurts so much to discover that. It hurts so much to know that we might be involved in microaggression. The shame is incredible. We’re UUs! But that doesn’t stop an entrenched system of bias that was put in place long before any of us ever emerged on the scene. A system which explains why employers are 50% more likely to call back job applicants with white names than those with black names. It explains why, when iPods are offered for sale online, and the photo shows the iPod held by a white hand, it receives 21 percent more offers than when held by a black hand. It explains why black babies reject black dolls in favor of white dolls. White dolls are pretty. White dolls are good.

It breaks the heart.

But we must be brave. We must do our emotional and spiritual work. We must remember Pema Chödrön’s inspired words: “Develop unconditional friendship with feelings, which is not to condone them, but be able to hold disturbing thoughts and gently come back to the breath: ‘I see you. I know you. I’m not accepting you, but I am observing you.’” “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves,” she says, “the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

It also limits the real possibilities of change. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof speaks to this. “A rigorous study by economists found,” he says “that even N.B.A. referees were more likely to call fouls on players of another race. Something similar happens in baseball, with researchers finding that umpires calling strikes are biased against black pitchers.” And then he asks the key question: “If even professional referees and umpires are biased, can there be any hope for you and me as we navigate our daily lives?” The answer? There is. He says, “The N.B.A. study caused a furor (the league denied the bias), and a few years later there was a follow-up by the same economists, and the bias had disappeared. It seems that when we humans realize our biases, we can adjust and act in ways that are more fair. As the study’s authors put it, ‘Awareness reduces racial bias.’” Nicholas Kristof concludes: “That’s why it’s so important for whites to engage in these uncomfortable discussions of race, because we are (unintentionally) so much a part of the problem. It’s not that we’re evil, but that we’re human. The challenge is to recognize that unconscious bias afflicts us all — but that we just may be able to overcome it if we face it.”

Face it, and do this with less defensiveness and more self-compassion. We are born into a system that’s way larger than any of us. But unconditional friendship with our feelings is the path to freedom. It changes things. That’s what emotional intelligence does.

It is a challenging time in the life of our nation. The phenomenon of He Who Shall Not Be Named is but symptomatic of how much pain is in this country. So is the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. People are feeling “the bern.” As writer David Brooks says, “Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.” And then he says, “I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer …, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.”

That’s what I hope for. And we need to grasp this moment in time, be a part of creating the new national story.

And we can do that, united, going far because we are going together, if we remember that ultimately the work is about loving our selves and loving eachother more deeply than we have ever believed possible. Loving ourselves and eachother beyond the shouts of our defensive reptilian brains, beyond our cultural training to divide the sheep from the goats, beyond the American legacy of slavery that continues to bind us all in a sickness of the spirit. There is no way out but through.

Love is calling, and we must go.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a spiritual perspective we affirm. We affirm (in part):

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

We affirm, we affirm.

But how might we understand these affirmations in light of Alzheimer’s? It is “one of the most cruel of diseases,” says the Rev. Eugene Picket, Minister Emeritus of this congregation, whom I contacted just recently by email. “Helen,” he replied, “the love of my life for 63 years, is now suffering from moderate to severe dementia. […] She has lost most of her ability to recognize those around her, even me at times, and our daughters. She will look at me and ask, ‘Where is my husband?’ I will respond, ‘I have been your husband for over 60 years.’ She will say with surprise in her voice, ‘Really!’”

And as for the person with Alzheimer’s themselves? One of the patients of a New York doctor, a Dr. Alan Dienstag, once said, “I feel like a picture that’s fading; every time I look, there is less of me here. I almost don’t recognize myself.”

Imagine your three-pound brain as a forest of 100 billion neurons, all interconnected through electrical discharges and chemical neurotransmitters. But the disease of Alzheimer’s disrupts this; Alzheimer’s pollutes the neuron forest and the brain goes haywire, the interconnections are gunked up, the brain literally shrinks. That’s the inner, physiological basis of what folks experience in terms of outer behavioral and personality changes. Family and friends see the same face and form, but, as the disease progresses, from mild to moderate to severe, the person becomes increasingly different from how they’ve always been known through the years.

It’s like a real-life version of that 1950’s science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It looks like him, but it’s not him. It looks like her, but it’s not her.

And the heart breaks, because where is he? Where is she? How can they possibly not know me anymore?

For the primary caregiver, 24 hours no longer seems enough to do all that must be done. From increased memory loss and confusion in their loved one; problems recognizing family and friends; continuously repeating stories, favorite wants, or motions; difficulty doing things that have multiple steps, 
like getting dressed; lack of concern for hygiene and appearance—from these moderate symptoms, to severe symptoms like inability to recognize oneself or family; inability to communicate; lack of control over bowel and bladder; groaning, moaning, or grunting; needing help with all activities of daily living. From these all the way to the loved one’s death: the prospect is completely overwhelming. How to not feel eaten alive by the responsibilities? How to survive this?

Alzheimer’s is a terrible, terrible place.

But listen to the witness of Anne Lamott, an amazing writer, who says two things we need to hear right now. One is: “Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.”

And then she says: “You can’t get to [spiritual] truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.”

This morning we are embracing life as we find it in a terrible place. We are avoiding snappy explanations. We are going into the abyss and we’re going to take it in and we’re going to find the voice that is our own and we’re going to find home.

So we go back to the Unitarian Universalist affirmations I mentioned earlier:

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• the free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

But the question at this point is, How can these affirmations possibly make sense, when it seems that Alzheimer’s strips everything of worth and dignity and freedom and responsibility away? This was certainly my question when I was a seminarian in Chicago almost 20 years ago, and I was working with Alzheimer’s patients as part of my pastoral care training. Wallace Rusterholtz, Erica Weinberg, Anna Viscount, Helen Rice, Eva Clark, Jean Bowman-Anderson. Assigned to me because all had been long-time Unitarian Universalists, all lovers of high culture and books and conversations. Folks like us: way too busy reading ahead in the hymnal to get into the spirit of the song, because they didn’t want to sing anything they didn’t intellectually understand. But when I saw them, everything had changed. Alzheimer’s. Some of them took to roaming the halls, rummaging around in other’s rooms, taking other people’s clothes and putting them on and also taking clothes off, stripping down, just anywhere. Boundaries of privacy and shame dissolving, boundaries of “mine” and “yours” dissolving, along with other aspects of the rational self. Dissolving. No hope in expecting them to learn to do otherwise, because without memory, new learning is impossible. All you have is the moment. A window of now that closes as soon as it’s opened. Now, now, now, now, now. That’s what happened to these people who had been brilliant Unitarian Universalists and had once loved their conversations and their books.

My colleague the Rev. Mike Morse once said, “If the meaning of life is intrinsically linked to our ability to think, to reason, to weigh differences rationally, and thus make decisions, then it is meaning that is slipping away.” That’s what I wondered long and hard about, as a seminarian in Chicago all those years ago, and we’re wondering about it together right now. Without a capacity for memory or rationality or learning, what gives life meaning?

Does our spiritual way of Unitarian Universalism survive the acid test of Alzheimer’s?

I believe the answer is most definitely YES. But the way to that answer requires something of us. It requires us to expose the assumption that meaning comes from only our individuality and self-reliance. Perhaps we lean hard on that assumption because it is so very American to do so. Yet America also teaches us “out of many, one.” It teaches us “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Individuality is balanced by community. Meaning comes from both aspects of human reality. If, in the case of Alzheimer’s, a person loses capacities that are more on the side of self-reliance, there is still a source of meaning left, and it is larger than any individual.

Yes, Alzheimer’s can feel like oblivion. But listen to what my colleague the Rev. Roger Jones says: “[I]n the unfolding of the universe, every good time, every act of goodness or beauty, becomes an everlasting part of the universe. [None] of our contributions is lost; they all become part of the unfolding of creation. They belong forever to the divine life in which we participate. Every gift of music or poetry, every meal cooked and enjoyed, every garden we tend, every kind word, every loving touch, every moment – these gifts are everlasting parts of creation. The fruits of one’s life extend beyond its conclusion. When we try to be of help, a kind word might seem pointless if the other person forgets it in a few minutes. Yet in words of the ancient storyteller, [Aesop]: ‘No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.’ In the unfolding of the divine life in which we participate, whatever we give, however we serve, such gifts are not lost.”

The Rev. Roger Jones is reminding us about our Seventh Principle as Unitarian Universalists, which complements the First. “We affirm respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence of which we are a part.” Even if the part feels lost, in the whole it is found. In the whole it is lighted up, lifted up, lightened. Our fragile human individuality need not bear the total burden of making life meaningful.

One of my personal prayers, which I pray every time I feel like I have fallen short, is this: I trust that no matter how flawed or limited my contribution, the Universe will eventually, in some way, turn it into some good. I give myself in trust to the Universe. My ego steps back from trying to be like God, and I don’t insist that I have to force meaning onto everything or be the total source of meaning. Meaning flows, meaning happens, meaning is larger than me.

A good thing to know in the face of Alzheimer’s.

But now that we have contextualized our individuality and remembered that it’s not the sole source of meaning, let’s double back and take a closer look at it. It’s true that Alzheimer’s strips away our self-reliance capacities for remembering, reasoning, learning new things, and taking responsibility for our actions. But is that equivalent to stripping away everything? Is nothing left that could also be a source of dignity and worth and meaning?

A clue comes from something that theologian Gisela Webb points out, whose academic training in comparative religion was enriched by her practical experience, over the course of 16 years, with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. “As nurses know, you do not avoid the word ‘no’ simply because it is not effective, but rather because the intuitive, feeling faculties are still intact. The ‘no’ does leave an impression…. I call Alzheimer’s the great unlearning,” she goes on to say, “because it is clearly an unraveling of mind, language, and former knowledge. But in my experience, there is a center, or centers, of apprehension and experience (such as humor, intuition, and emotion) clearly intact much longer than mind and language. The nature of Alzheimer’s decline suggests to me both the reality of the radical impermanence of life (as suggested in the many constantly shifting states and stages of the disease) and the reality of some deeper knowing/knower. Therefore, it supports the ethical mandate to honor that deep and abiding part, or ground, of the person…”

In other words, despite the “great unlearning,” still, we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We do this because there is a source of worth and dignity and meaning in people that is deeper than rationality, deeper than intellect….

I saw this unfolding before me when I would sing with my Alzheimer’s patients back in Montgomery Place.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a soul like me.
I once was lost, but now was found,
Was blind, but now I see.

It was like a dry flower being watered. Slack faces and blank stares went away, and life swept into the room. People who had forgotten everything singing along with me, dredging up those old words from who knows where. The emotion in the heart that is too deep for even the acid of Alzheimer’s to burn away.

“It was striking to me,” says Gisela Webb, “how my mother never forgot to go to noon mass every day, nor how to get there, nor what to do there. Attending mass was my mother’s last independent activity before we placed her in a nursing home, and this particular capacity for remembrance formed a significant part of my reflection on the importance of faith and ritual.” As it should for our reflection as well. When we sing “Amazing Grace” or our Unitarian Universalist version of that song called “Spirit of Life”; when we light our chalice, when we enter into the Engaging Meditation and the lights go down and I ask you to close your eyes and breath in deeply and then out, when I ask you to hold a hand against your heart and say a kind word to yourself, when we, in short, engage our religion bodily, in all the ways we do that, for all ages, we create memories that Alzheimer’s can’t touch. Our religion, not in its verbal form but in its bodily feeling, survives as a source of beautiful dignity and worth and meaning….

There is good reason why, when anti-racism activist and writer Tim Wise heard that Bruce Springsteen opened his recent Brooklyn concert with a rendition of “Purple Rain,’ he said, “Aside from what an amazing tribute this is, I think it speaks to something bigger than the tribute itself. It says something about the camaraderie of art… Regardless of musical genre, regardless of age, regardless of race, regardless of any of the bullshit that keeps us divided…art is always the thing that elicits our humanity. It is the only thing, I beg to remind you, that can save us in the end as well. Science can not do it. Politics sure as hell cannot do it. Only art stands even the remotest chance.”

Yes. Art touches the deepest inward springs that remain, even after “invasion of the body snatchers” has happened, even after the forest of 100 billion neurons in the brain is all gunked up and polluted and no longer working.

Let me close with a word about art, or the kind of art that is most relevant here. Rev. Pickett touched on it in his email to me when he said, “As a full-time caregiver, I have learned to be much more patient, flexible, and compassionate. While [Helen] cannot express herself verbally she is sensitive to the tone of my voice and the expression on my face.”

In other words, the way to affirming the inherent worth and dignity of a person with Alzheimer’s is through the art of compassion. “Compassionate speech,” as Gisela Webb puts it. “Compassionate speech,” she says, “is not simply an issue of not telling lies; it is a much broader concept. It is speech that does not create violence, speech that overcomes duality. As such it is a language that bridges the distance between self and other. It is an ethical mandate to speak/choose words in a way that knows/reflects how the patient hears them. Compassionate speech in an Alzheimer’s encounter does not mean asking about or explaining to the person the thing which they have forgotten or are perceiving incorrectly. That would be like getting my mom to conform to my reality. This approach causes so much suffering not only because it does not work, but because we cannot get that person — as we knew them — back.” It’s just like Julie Weisberg said in her reading from a moment ago: be in the reality of the Alzheimer’s patient, rather than insisting that they be in yours. Do this out of compassion.

Let anxious insistence on matters of verbal correctness fall away. Let matters of the heart shine through. “Once,” Gisela Webb says, “when I was ‘ambulating’ my mom, one of the women patients made eye contact with her, brightened up, and said to her with such care, ‘Oh Elizabeth (not my mother’s name), I’m so glad to see you. I heard you had been in the hospital — and with all your troubles.’ My mother heard the gesture and intention of compassion and allowed herself to receive/accept this gesture. Both women experienced in this moment of encounter a moment of right speech, and each received the essence of the message. I do not know what else this mutual gesture could have been other than the deepest expression of the essence of compassion.”

This is how we affirm inherent worth and dignity, and not just with folks with Alzheimer’s, but with everyone. Through speech that overcomes duality, speech that bridges the distance between self and other because it is kind speech, the tone is kind, the nonverbals are gracious and kind. As intelligent people we love our words to death, we love sharp exactitude, we want our reports and resolutions to be perfect. But Alzheimer’s is the acid test. It shows us what truly matters, and endures.

Love, kindness, a song in the heart, the spirit underneath the words, HOW something is said.

To the degree our spiritual way comes from this,
does justice to this,
it’s home,
fully home for the human spirit.

Alzheimer’s proves it.

It was 1917, and America was at war. Most Unitarians were for it, including the moderator of the American Unitarian Association, former U.S. president William Howard Taft. But some were not, and this minority included John Haynes Holmes, minister of one of our most prominent churches of the time. “War,” said the Rev. Holmes, “is never justifiable under any circumstances. And this means . . . for me—and for myself only can I speak—that never will I take up arms against a foe. And if, because of cowardice or madness, I do this awful thing, may God in his anger strike me dead, ere I strike dead some brother from another land!”

This was his anti-war activism. 100% anti. And he feared it would cost him his job, in his church where the majority was politically conservative. But he preached it from the pulpit nevertheless. On the Sunday morning he did that, the response was stunned silence. Could’ve heard a pin drop. He left the pulpit, thinking he’d never be able to return. The next day President Woodrow Wilson requested from Congress a declaration of war on Germany. That very evening the board of John Haynes Holmes’ church met to respond to their minister’s anti-war stance. They took two votes. One was to unanimously condemn his position, declaring it dangerous, “wrong-headed,” even treasonous. The other, also unanimous, was that, wrong-headed or not, their minister, John Haynes Holmes, had the obligation and the right to speak his mind. He was their minister, and their minister he would remain.

This is a beautiful moment in our history, a great example of our 500+ year old tradition of the freedom of the pulpit and the freedom of the pew.

It’s also a moment of high tension, suggestive of the many risks in preaching politics.

And not just in situations of the minister preaching to congregants, but also in situations of congregant-to-congregant-and-back-again preaching. You don’t have to be a minister to have something to say, for example, about the time He Who Shall Not Be Named tweeted, “It’s freezing outside, where the [heck] is global warming??” (Which is like saying, “I ate today, where the [heck] is world hunger??”)

Whoever is doing the preaching, when politics are at issue, it’s risky. That’s what I want to talk about today. And I trust that the reasons are already clear why we would take the risk to begin with. Despite the fact that politics for many people is a less popular topic than root canals or head lice, we take the risk and plunge headfirst because politics has to do with how communities give abstract concepts like freedom and justice concrete expression, in the form of practices and laws. The French writer Charles Peguy once said, “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” And it ought to be so. We can preach “inherent worth and dignity” mysticism all day long, for example, but if we aren’t addressing things like the Georgia Legislature’s recent so-called Liberty Bill (which was really an attempt to legalize discrimination against people who are LGBTQ), well, what good are we? “Justice is what love looks like in public,” says Cornel West. If we’re going to be Love people, we have to be Justice people.

So we take the risks in preaching politics.

Therefore, let us be wise. Forces are unleashed through political speech that is activist, aspirational, and individualist. Patterns are triggered, and if we are unaware of what’s going on, we can get sucked into something ugly.

Start with political speech that is activist. In the larger world we hear pro vs. anti- ways of framing things all the time. Pro stances are activist visions of where we want to go; whereas anti- stances are activist visions of what we want to abolish, visions of oppressive things that are preventing us from getting to a better place.

We hear both kinds of visions in political speech, and we can also hear a decided preference for one over the other, as in this quote from no less a figure than Mother Theresa: “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.” Anti- feels negative and therefore unhelpful. Focus on the anti- and the fear is that what comes back to you is just more anti-. But pro- gives us a path forward, a strategy, a plan.

This is the sort of argument another 20^th century saint heard all the time. I’m referring to Dr. King. He speaks to this at length in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. “I must confess,” he writes, “that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ ‘Councilor’ or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’”

Dr. King was decidedly anti-racist. He saw his anti-racist activism as “a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” and he argued for it against what he describes variously as “a devotion to order” and a “preference for a negative peace which is the absence of tension.” Clearly, Dr. King felt that an exclusively pro-position was vastly unhelpful and incomplete—“negative,” in fact.

But why?

Because it makes him an invisible man. Nothing of the real things he struggles with as a black person are included in the so-called pro- position which the white moderates favor. Just read the long passage that precedes his expression of frustration toward those white moderates. In that long passage, he itemizes all sorts of bad things that white people never experience but black people experience all the time. He says, “When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over.”

Dr. King was anti-racist because he wanted his political activism to reflect his real experience in the world, the bad things that he very definitely wanted to abolish and, unless he did so, he’d stay stuck in the mud and the muck and simply not be capable of stepping forward into a better life. This is the difference between his activism and that of the white moderates, for whom an exclusive pro- vision made perfect sense because (where racism is concerned) their lives were untouched, they weren’t the ones suffocating, they weren’t the ones being crushed.

But some things have to stop in order for other things to go.

And some of us know this more intimately and completely than others.

Unless we acknowledge this diversity in the room, the very same people that good-intentioned whites want to help will feel left out or talked down to. They will be rendered invisible—and this by the very folks who are supposed to be their friends! It’s a horrible pattern to get sucked into, and it creates ugliness everywhere it happens.

When someone’s activism is anti-, it’s helpful to assume that there’s a real story behind it. Pro- is of course important, but not everyone can take the same path to it. Yes to Mother Theresa. But let’s also remember Dr. King and his Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Oh, it’s risky preaching politics. Forces are unleashed, patterns are triggered.

Consider a second way of preaching politics. Here, the speech is not so much activist as aspirational. The speech is about being “a city on a hill” or “a light among nations.” Do you recognize such language? It’s what America has always said about itself. We have a special destiny to fulfill in the world. We are exceptional.

Which is why political writer E. J. Dionne says, “Fear of decline is one of the oldest American impulses.” It’s imposter syndrome fear. It’s everywhere around us, in this election season. Millions of people are wearing hats that say, “Make America Great Again.” Millions of people feel the country has fallen and they are rallying around that call to action.

Political speech that is aspirational has this shadow effect, and not just in the nation. The shadow can settle upon religious communities like ours as well, since we are deeply American in our aspirations.

I was reminded of the shadow effect several years ago at a Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. During the opening plenary, outgoing UUA President Bill Sinkford (this was a while ago!) reviewed the highlights of his administration’s achievements, and part of this included a recitation of injustice after injustice in the world, which he enjoined the Unitarian Universalist community to address. Then, during the opening worship that followed, he spoke of truth and reconciliation and formally apologized to representatives of local Indian tribes for what we did in the 19th century: our complicity (bumbling though it was) in the U. S. government’s initiative to “civilize” the indigenous tribes of Utah and elsewhere.

Now by no means do I think that such an apology was unnecessary. By no means do I think that the evils of the world should go unchecked. But something happened for me in that moment. The whole thing suddenly struck me as overly solemn, as overly earnest, as going overboard in the direction of self-critique and a sense of responsibility.

The fear, constantly, is that we are falling short and we must do more, we must do everything. It is America’s fear, and it is our fear as a deeply American faith.

So we must be overachievers, in the lead attacking every social ill. Theologically, it’s not enough to become familiar with one world religious tradition—we’ve got to know them all, in addition to every liberal art and every science. Our dreams have got to be the biggest.

And if we are going to do “diversity,” well, then, we’re going to do Noah’s Ark diversity. We’re going to gather two of every possible kind within our walls—two mosquitos, two polar bears, two jellyfish, two alligators—and when we look around and see something missing, well, we self-flagellate. How bad we are! Fact is, we are aspiring to do something only a God could do. Only a God could gather two mosquitos, two polar bears, two jellyfish, two alligators, and two of every other kind of thing in one place and make it work. This God I’m talking about is exactly the sort of God that most of us don’t even believe in. Yet, unconsciously, in all our aspirationalism, we are demanding that mere mortals like ourselves step up and perform like Him.

Now maybe this is my unpopular John Haynes Holmes message for the day. Yet every time I hear a key Unitarian Universalist voice reciting a litany of all the evils in the world, together with the message that we’ve just got to DO something, I feel the weight of what I want to call the Unitarian Universalist superego, which, ironically, can reduce our enthusiasm for bringing healing to the world rather than inspire it. Its effect can be counter-productive. Is does not help. It casts a shadow over our real desires to be a Justice people.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. That’s what I really want to say. Just bring awareness to it. The fear of falling short manifests when we are trying to do too many things. The imposter syndrome fear manifests when folks pick our Beloved Community apart and don’t see that the good things outnumber the bad 100 to 1.

I love this faith. We ARE a “city on a hill” religion, a “light among nations” religion. And I also believe, fervently, that we can be all this and still pace ourselves and still enjoy. I go back, again and again, to the surly waitress image that my colleague the Rev. Meg Barnhouse summons up, as a reminder to pick your battles: “In my life,” she says, “I have certain things to take care of: my children, my relationships, my work, myself, and one or two causes. That’s it. Other things are not my table. I would go nuts if I tried to take care of everyone, if I tried to make everybody do the right thing. If I went through my life without ever learning to say, ‘Sorry, that’s not my table, Hon,’ I would burn out and be no good to anybody. I need to have a surly waitress inside myself that I can call on when it seems that everyone in the world is waving an empty coffee cup in my direction. My Inner Waitress looks over at them, keeping her six plates balanced and her feet moving, and says, ‘Sorry, Hon, not my table.’”

How healing, to hear this. Makes for a saner way. Political speech that is aspirational can encourage hyper self-criticism and fear of failure, and the shadow pattern can emerge here in our midst. Patterns in the larger world are patterns here.

And now, a third and last pattern to be mindful of. Political speech that is individualistic, as in “Don’t tread on me.” Now this is language from a Revolutionary War flag, and it reflects an individualistic mentality that doesn’t want to feel the burden of other people’s opinions and other people’s needs. The mentality is “I go my way, and you go yours.”

It’s why Americans typically prefer to complain anonymously to police when troubled by neighbors rather than risk face-to-face confrontation. Face-to-face confrontation implies taking a superior attitude which breaks the 11th Commandment which is Thou Shalt Not Judge. But political conversations break the 11th Commandment all the time. Someone says something political, and if we disagree, the instant response is to feel tread upon. Or we may agree but imagine our neighbor’s disagreement, and the mere imagination of that makes us feel terribly uncomfortable….

If I have ever said something politics-related in this pulpit, and you felt I was being too pointed, too in-your-face….

If this congregation has ever tried to take a collective stand about something, and you felt that doing so was way out of line with Unitarian Universalism’s emphasis on freedom of individual conscience….

If so, then you are in touch with the libertarian “don’t tread on me” instinct that is deep in America and deep in our American faith.

Which is why I can’t possible say that your feelings are wrong. Can’t do that.

But what is fair to say is that to be an American is to live within the tension of competing impulses. On the one hand is “don’t tread on me”; on the other hand is “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” On the one hand is individualism; on the other hand is community. From the very beginning of this nation and of our own faith, values of individuality and community have both been in play—and in creative tension with each other.

Bill Clinton memorably illustrated this by asking people to take a penny out of their pocket. “On one side,” he’d say, “next to Lincoln’s portrait is a single word: “Liberty. On the other side is our national motto. It says ‘E Pluribus Unum’—‘Out of Many, One.’ It does not say ‘Every man for himself.’”

That’s the coin of our American realm, and it’s the coin of this Beloved Community realm as well. It means that as a country and as a faith tradition, we have to give “don’t tread on me” its due, and we also have to understand that that’s not the whole story. A competing value is equally important. Democracy. Our Fifth Principle as Unitarian Universalists.

That is why, in America, we form political parties, we form interest groups, we compromise on little things to get to the big things, no one gets their own way. That is why, in this congregation, we discuss and debate, we strive to hear different points of view and express our own, we take stands. Democracy is how we get things done as a people. And we get what we work for. As individuals, if we hang back, stay in our “don’t tread on me” shells and refuse to be a part of the process, well, it’s just like the situation with Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. It’s shameful. The whole system is jammed because some people don’t want to play by the rules of democratic governance.

I’m preaching politics today. We are preaching politics to each other. Doesn’t matter that root canals or head lice can be more popular topics. Justice is what Love looks like in public. We are a love and justice people. And America is in our blood. We Unitarian Universalists did not invent the language of pro- and anti- or “a city on a hill” or “don’t tread on me,” but they nevertheless affect us deeply and we must be careful.

The story of John Haynes Holmes, despite being intense, ended sweetly, and we want the same for ourselves.

Sex therapist and educator Marty Klein, Ph. D., says that people ask him all the time about what “normal” looks like. His reply? “I say forget the number of times people have sex per month, or how often someone masturbates, or how long it takes to climax. Those averages tell you nothing. Knowing that you don’t laugh during sex, are too embarrassed to use lubricant, or can’t tell your partner ‘No, not there, here,’ tells us much, much more.”

But what does it tell?

That the “… circle of lovers / Whose hands are joined in a dance” can often be a space of bad and hard feelings: shame, blame, intimidation, resentment, pessimism, loneliness. That for some people, says Marty Klein, “not failing is the best that sex ever gets.”

We want, he says (and he’s right), some combination of pleasure and comfort, but before, during, and after sex, our focus can be on the exact kind of things that kick pleasure and comfort out the door.

The reason why can be summed up in one word: noise. The music that moves a circle of lovers into sexual dancing—or, in less poetic and more physiological terms: the sexual signal that the brain sends down the spinal column to the pelvis where, as a result, vasocongestion leads to erection or lubrication—this music, this ecstatic music of sex positivity, is blocked, jammed, drowned out, depressed.

Noise does this to us.

Noise: the idea/feeling that sexual desire in general is something dark and dirty and secret and awful. A bias that is confirmed in so many ways by American culture, including, for example, its penchant to say no to sex but yes to violence. Back in 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled that a ban on selling violent video games was unconstitutional, but apparently unconstitutionality does not extend to banning depictions of sexual activity that is perfectly consensual and nonviolent. Show a head exploding, and that’s ok. Show a penis, erect or not, and OMG.

Or this noise: the idea/feeling that some specific kinds of sex are dark and dirty. Just ask the Georgia legislators in the House and the Senate about House Bill 757, the so-called “religious liberty” bill, which would have legalized open discrimination against LGBTQ people but which, thankfully, Governor Deal vetoed. Just ask the North Carolina legislators who framed a comparable bill called House Bill 2 but the governor there didn’t veto it and so now open discrimination in that state is the law.

Noise, noise, noise. It jams the sexual signal and stops the dance.

And more:

The noise that says, “Only some kinds of sex are good.”

One variation of this noise is that only sex with a partner counts. Masturbation is wrong, is not a valid way to generate pleasure, so especially if you are younger and you haven’t been with a partner yet, well, you better get on the sex train stat even though you might not be ready and doing it is risky. You can feel this way even though nature blows raspberries against this anti-masturbation bias. Apes and orangutans and capuchin monkeys are champion masturbators, and so are bottlenose dolphins and killer whales and elephants and walruses and squirrels and bats and iguanas and turtles and penguins and on and on. Masturbation is the norm in nature, not the exception. So why do humans create an alternate norm around this?

It’s noise, and so is this: the noise of the “normal.” Only normal sex is good. Normal-looking penises, vaginas, vulvas, all functioning in normal ways that drug companies approve, all erect or lubricated in normal fashion, and everything marching towards normal orgasms.

But normal can also mean a view of how enlightened men and empowered women look and feel and behave. In this sense, is Beyonce’s sexuality, for example, normal? Does it reflect genuine female-empowered sexual expression, or is it merely an internalization of male fantasy? (Your answer to this question says something, arguably, about which wave of feminism you belong to.)

And consider yet a third sense of normal, which assumes that people’s relationship with sex is fairly simple and straightforward. But what if you’ve been raped, or you’ve experienced some kind of sexual violence? Your partner’s sole focus is on orgasms, and he makes it sound like that’s normal, so what it means is that miles of who you are is left out of the sexual relationship. No room for your heart and your healing. The noise of the normal drowns your authenticity out…

But there’s still more noise to consider.

The noise that says, unless sex exhibits perfect genital functioning, it’s no good.

The noise that says, unless sex culminates in penetration with orgasm, it’s no good.

The noise that says, unless the sex I’m having is like the sex I had when I was in my 20s, it’s no good.

The noise that says, unless the conditions of my environment are perfect (no kids in the house; not a single chore to do; I went to the gym and flossed today, and so did my partner), the sex is no good.

The noise that says, unless my partner can read my mind—unless I can just say nothing or at least go no further than having to say “down there” or “it” or “you know”—the sex is no good.

Noise noise noise…

Ultimately, with all this noise, the experience of sex becomes one of policing, monitoring. Listen to Marty Klein on this: “Many people are watching themselves during sex more than they are experiencing sex…. We usually imagine, harshly judge, and worry about what our partner sees, smells, hears, and tastes. […] It’s like trying to enjoy dinner while wearing a brand-new expensive white suit.” Marty Klein goes on to say that we can also monitor our partners. “[T]hey take their partner’s functioning personally. Many people scrutinize their partner’s arousal and orgasm because they don’t want to be judged a failure… But,” he asks, “how can you relax when your partner is examining your sexual response—not in a joyful, attentive way, but with an eye for signs that he or she has failed?”

All the noise just makes for loneliness, where we feel that we are on the outside, looking in. Rather than experiencing in all our authenticity, we are watching and we are judging….

Yes we can learn much from knowing that way too many people don’t laugh during sex, are too embarrassed to use lubricant, or can’t tell their partner ‘No, not there, here.’…

And do you know what Unitarian Universalism has to say to all of this? Especially now, in this time of year when the plant world is in furious sexual heat and the pollen everywhere is the bold brash evidence of that?

What Unitarian Universalism has to say was confirmed at General Assembly in 2012, when Unitarian Universalists from across the world came together to choose “Reproductive Justice” as the UUA’s next Congregational/Action focus for 2012-2016. “Reproductive justice advocacy,” says official UUA literature, “is grounded in a vision where sex and bodies are not stigmatized and a diversity of truths are possible; where we can tell the truth about our lives and learn to hold each other in non-judgmental compassion.”

Unitarian Universalism says, Drown the noise out with Love. Subvert that noise, silence that noise. That noise is not true to the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. That noise is not true to what it means to live as part of the interdependent web of all existence. That noise is not true to Beloved Community, where there’s a place at the table not just for people who are young and people who are old and people who are black and people who are white and people who are brown and people who are theists and people who are atheists and people who are abled in one way and people who are abled in other ways and on and on—not just a place for people like that, but also a place for their bodies. Their bodies are as welcome as their minds. Beloved Community is embodied community. If Beloved Community can’t embrace sexuality, then it is not Beloved.

So Unitarian Universalist Beloved Community says, Enough with the noise! Give us music instead!

Or more specifically: give us “sexual intelligence.”

In his wonderful book with that as its title, Marty Klein defines it as “the set of internal resources that allows you to relax, be present, communicate, and respond to stimulation, and create physical and emotional connection with a partner. When you can do that, you’ll have enjoyable sexual experiences, regardless of what your body does.” Essentially, there are three kinds of internal resources: correct information about sex; emotional skills that enable a person to use the information effectively; and body awareness that brings it all together.

We don’t have time to explore all three resources, but we do have time to at least get a good start.

Our sexual intelligence grows, says Marty Klein, every time we let a piece of the noisiness go. Every time we turn a source of noise down.

Turn down the noise that sexual desire is something dark and dirty and secret and awful. Masturbation is just healthy and good; and as for sex with a partner, that is worthy to stand in the light if at least five conditions are met: (1) If a person is truly ready for it and it’s not just about peer pressure or showing a partner how much you care or something like that; (2) if a person is truly acting out of respect vs. using sex in manipulative, destructive, hurtful ways; (3) if a person is taking responsibility for protecting themselves and their partner against pregnancy (if that is the desire) and also against STDs; (4) if a person is fully aware of what’s happening (not drunk for example), and they can always say no; and (5) if a person is having sex with someone whose power is equal to theirs vs. there being a power differential between the two. Fulfill those five conditions and it doesn’t matter if it’s straight or gay, it doesn’t matter what the flavor of your kink is, the sex is worthy to stand in the light of day.

Turn down the noise of all that drowns out the beautiful music!

Turn down the noise of the “normal.” You know what’s truly normal in sex? “Normal,” says Marty Klein, “is worrying about being sexually normal. Normal is not talking about being worried about these things.” Turn down that noise, so the music of your authentic self can course down from your brain and through your spine and you become what Walt Whitman once called the “body electric” but in an utterly unique sexy way.

Also turn down the noise of moralists who want to tell you who you need to be to be a real man or woman or feminist. Sex-positivity affirms diversity. The blogger at Pervocracy says, “Some people are asexual. Some people are sexual but not all that into it.  Some people are monogamous, heterosexual, and not into kink.  Some people have physical or psychological issues that interfere with them having sex.  Trying to ‘free’ any of these people from their ‘repression’ is ignorant, presumptuous, and the very opposite of promoting sexual freedom.” And note how all this sexual freedom is within the moral bounds that I just defined; ethically permissible sexuality is as varied as nature is.

Turn down the noise, and allow for diversity.

Turn down the noise, and welcome your partner in all his or her fullness, including the hurts and scars. Let there be space for being honest about this, and for healing.

Turn down the noise, and imagine how your entire body could be an erogenous zone, not just your genitals.

Turn down the noise, and enjoy what’s happening without having to monitor “where it’s going.”

Turn down the noise, and accept what happens as your body ages and the sex changes accordingly: create space for that. Every age and stage of life has its unique worth and dignity.

Turn down the noise, and know that it’s ok not to pay attention to whatever would pull you out of the experience (the dishes in the sink, you didn’t floss today). For the moment, let it all go.

Turn down the noise, and acknowledge that a common sexual vocabulary is a part of good sex. Spontaneous fun happens during bike-riding or going on a picnic or having a lovely dinner, but to get to that spontaneity there’s got to be some preparation ahead of time. People have to plan. People have to talk. Take your partner’s hand and show them what you like and say, “Like this.” If something feels good, say so. If something doesn’t feel good, never ever lie. Just say, “no thanks.” Say, “Do this instead.”

Unitarian Universalism wants everyone to be free, and fully realized. Not on the outside looking in, but immersed in experience. Not lonely, but seen and known and held.

In this interdependent web of all existence, in this springtime when the pollen everywhere reminds us that the world is torrid with sexuality, Unitarian Universalism says, Love the sexuality that’s yours. Understand it, own it, take care of it.

Either just by yourself, or shared with another: let pleasure and comfort be yours.

I.

Several months ago, you might have heard the news about one of the most famous paintings in the world: Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The news is, there’s another portrait underneath, and in this hidden portrait, a different-looking woman gazes to the side rather than right at you, and she is unsmiling.

For 500 years, people have wondered what the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile is all about. Perhaps we finally have an answer.

She is not who we think she is.

As art historian, Andrew Graham-Dixon, says, “I think the new discoveries are like a huge stone thrown into the still waters of art history. They disturb everything that we thought we knew about the Mona Lisa … [T]here may be some reluctance on the part of the authorities at the Louvre to think about changing the title of the painting because that’s what we’re talking about. It’s ‘Goodbye, Mona Lisa.’ She is somebody else.”

Now, the French scientist who discovered the hidden portrait under the “Mona Lisa,” Pascal Cotte, uncovered it using reflective light technology. This morning, we’re going to do a similar sort of thing to Easter. We’re going to employ our own version of reflective light technology (the light of reason) to see what’s beneath.

But why should we do that? Why not just stay with what’s presented on the surface? Does this curiosity to go deeper (by using the reflective light technology of reason) merely betray Unitarian Universalist cantankerousness? Our historic heretical bent?

Well, you tell me. Let’s conjure up in our collective imagination what a painting of Easter might look like—what images would be in it that are faithful to this time of year as we know it.

Of course, the resurrection of Jesus story would be there. There would be a cave, representing where he was buried.

There would be a huge stone rolled away from the entrance. There would be several women, with lamps, entering with the purpose of retrieving the dead body. But what they find instead is a man clothed in a long white garment, telling them that Jesus has risen, and that they need to find the disciples and tell them the good news. But all this only serves to frighten the women terribly. Their eyes and mouths go round with fear, they drop their lamps, they run away as fast as they can.

And, happily, in their haste, they avoid tromping on the beautiful spring flowers and brightly colored eggs that also deserve to be a part of any Easter painting faithful to how we experience it today.

The women would completely ignore the Easter Bunny with his smart polka-dotted bow tie, holding an Easter basket full of goodies, because that simply does not compute. The women would (of course) be completely oblivious to the title of this painting we are conjuring up in our collective imagination, which is a word directly derived from the name of an ancient German spring fertility goddess who, the story goes, mates with a god to conceive a son who just happens to be born at Yule (which is suspiciously close to December 25^th and the birth of you know who). This fertility goddess, named Ostara or Eostra, is often portrayed as crowned with spring flowers, holding an egg in her hand, and surrounded by rabbits frolicking at her feet.

Some of these images are just not like the others. But all belong to any portrait that is faithful to the Easter we know. A huge stone rolled away from the entrance of a cave and a bunny wearing a bow tie; a man clothed in a long white garment and a goddess whose hair is wreathed in spring flowers; a dead body that’s been resurrected and a world once withered by winter now coming alive again, in spring.

That strange juxtaposition of elements—how can anyone look at it and not want to ask some serious questions? How can anyone resist turning on the reflective light technology of reason to see below the surface?

So that’s what we’re doing. That’s what so cool about being Unitarian Universalist. You get to ask questions.

And what we find will make us say, “Easter is not what we think it is.”

Below the surface, we find layer after layer after layer, and all these layers tell us of gods and goddesses who suffer and die and journey beneath the earth, only to be reborn as a source of fertility for the earth and new hope for their human followers.

Jesus is not the only one who resurrects.

There is also the Sumerian god of vegetation, Dumuzi, from 6000 years ago, who dies to spend part of every year beneath the earth, fertilizing it. In his absence, the rivers dry up and the desert grows parched. But upon his return, the earth once again bears fruit.

There is also the Egyptian god of the underworld and of vegetation, Osiris, thousands of years old as well, who is cut into pieces by his evil brother god Set. But the goddess Isis searches for his parts the world over and, once they are found, she breathes life back into him so that the crops might grow again. The annual flooding of the Nile was equated with Isis’ tears of mourning, as well as the outpouring of Osiris’ blood—more instances of the gods’ life-giving, fertility-giving power.

This is just so interesting. Layers and layers of resurrection stories that are all about fertility and new life. The layer that comes from the Roman era, just a few hundred years before the historical Jesus lived: how around the time of the spring equinox Romans would carry a statue of their Great Goddess Cybele and remember the death and resurrection of her consort, Attis. His death was on a Friday which they called Black Friday or the Day of Blood. There followed three days of lamentation, penance, and fasting; but on the third day, Sunday, he arose from his tomb. His followers, believing that his salvation from suffering assured theirs, celebrated with dancing and festivities, welcoming the new life that spring brings.

Easter is not what we think it is.

So what is it? Really?

II.

When we turn on the reflective light technology of reason to see below the surface of Easter, we lose some things and we gain some things.

What we lose is the kind of literalism that fundamentalism insists on. Fundamentalism wants the Jesus story to be the only story that counts. But once we see all the other stories below the surface, our focus shifts from certain names and individuals to the fact of resurrection itself.

Resurrection is bigger than Jesus. Jesus is only one way of telling that bigger story.

We lose literalism, and we also lose a distorted sense of self. Fact is, if our sense of Easter is exclusively tied up with the Christian story, then we are victims of historical amnesia and we end up imagining ourselves to be the only ones in the entirety of history who have wrestled with the reality that all that lives must die, but a life well spent nourishes the life that will follow. If we see the Jesus story as the only one that can validly tell this tale, then we cut ourselves off from the devotees of Dumuzi and Osiris and Attis and others down the ages who felt just as urgently as we do about matters of life and death and resiliency and courage and grace. It makes us feel like cosmic orphans, lonely—and the loneliness withers the spirit.

Let’s lose this, because it clears the way to all sorts of gains. Freed from captivity to parochial images, our minds are better able to appreciate the larger truth that’s trying to be known, that every resurrection story is trying to point to.

Another gain has to do with the stories and the images themselves. If we can see them together, then they play off each other and all are enriched immeasurably. Take Easter eggs. Eggs symbolize the miracle of life, they symbolize creation. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Anglo-Saxons would put eggs on the graves of their dead to ensure they would be reborn. So go back to the Christian story of the empty tomb, and the women are searching for Jesus body, but all they find is a man clothed in a long white garment, telling the women that he has risen—at that very moment, it would make all the sense in the world for him to hand those women eggs.

See the images together. Allow the larger resurrection truth to come forth.

Death is a part of life, but life never stops triumphing over death.

Listen to yet another story layer that’s below the surface of the Easter picture. Patricia Montley, in her wonderful book In Nature’s Honor: Myths and Rituals That Celebrate the Earth, offers us this version:

In the ancient time of eternal spring, Demeter, mother goddess of grain, makes all things grow. Her daughter Kore is much beloved of her mother. One day when Kore is gathering flowers with her friends, the earth trembles and from a great gaping hole bursts the chariot of Hades, ruler of the Underworld. Kore screams with fright, but Hades thrusts her into his chariot and urges the immortal horses back to his Underworld domain. The distraught Kore shouts to her father Zeus for help, but he turns a deaf ear to her cries.

Mad with grief, Demeter tears the veil from her hair and the cloak from her shoulders, and like a wild, lonely bird, searches over land and sea for her lost daughter. When she discovers that Zeus had granted Kore to the Lord of the Underworld, the raging, grieving mother withdraws from Olympus, the home of the gods. In her absence, nothing grows on the earth, not the grain in the fields, not the fruit in the orchard, not the flowers in the meadows, not the young in the wombs of animals or humans. Snow covers the earth and famine haunts the people.

Finally Zeus sends a messenger to Demeter, bearing gifts and promises of honors to come if only she will return to Olympus. But the goddess is a rock of resistance. Nothing can move her to save the recovery of her daughter. Zeus relents.

Kore returns from the Underworld and is restored to her mother, whose joy knows no bounds. At their reunion, the flowers bloom, the grain grows, the trees bear fruit.

But Kore has eaten the seeds of the pomegranate that Hades gave her in the Underworld. She has gone from innocent to knowing. Having eaten food from the land of the dead, she is destined to return there for part of each year and fulfill her role as Persephone, Comforter of the Dead.

So every fall Kore descends deep into the earth, and in her absence, her mourning mother weeps the world into winter. But every spring, Persephone rises up again. Overcome with delight at the return of her beloved daughter, Demeter fills the world with green and growing things.

And that’s one of the many story layers right below the surface of Easter.

Why do bad things happen to good people? The best man of all, Jesus, is crucified; and an innocent girl, Kore, is captured against her will and taken into the Underworld. The disciples of Jesus, including the women, weep at his death; and Demeter becomes mad with grief. With Jesus’ death, the disciples scatter and all hope feels lost; with Kore deep in the Underworld, Demeter’s hope is lost as well and the earth feels the sting: nothing grows, not the grain in the fields, not the fruit in the orchard, not the flowers in the meadows, not the young in the wombs of animals or humans. Jesus dies, but after three days he rises and his face shines with the light of his salvation from suffering; Kore is torn from her mother and descends into the Underworld, but there she discovers her individual destiny as Comforter of the Dead and she rises up again with a new name, Persephone. Every year at this time we remember Jesus dying but his resurrection announces that despair can never be the last word, that hope is perennial; and every year at this time, we remember Kore stolen away but Persephone rises up again and Demeter is overcome with delight, Demeter the mother fills the world with green and growing things, and it is springtime, springtime in the earth and springtime in the soul.

See the stories together, and the larger resurrection truth emerges.

And then do this: see yourself in the stories. This past week, this past year, have you felt crucified? Have you felt captured against your will and dragged down into some kind of Underworld? Have you felt hopeless like the disciples, or like Demeter whose grief withers everything because someone you love is in trouble or hurting and you can’t take that away? Or perhaps you have endured the valley of the shadow of death and come through to the other side. There is a new light in your eyes; you have a new name and a clearer understanding of your destiny. You know first hand what despair feels like, but you also know that despair has a false bottom, and you can break through to something better.

Like the nature surrounding us, your soul fills with green and growing things. Ostara, the ancient German fertility goddess, after whom Easter is named, whose hair is crowned with spring flowers, who is surrounded by rabbits frolicking at her feet, hands you something.

An egg.

Come run the hidden pine trails of the forest
Come taste the sunsweet berries of the Earth
Come roll in all the riches all around you
And for once never wonder what they’re worth
The rainstorm and the river are my brothers
The heron and the otter are my friends
And we are all connected to each other
In a circle, in a hoop that never ends.

Pocahontas sings this, in the 1995 Disney movie named after her which grossed $346 million worldwide. Just the year before it had been yet another Disney movie, The Lion King, which grossed even more worldwide–$987 million—and in it we hear Mufasa (Simba’s Dad) say, “Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.” “You must,” he says, “take your place in the Circle of Life.”

This is the earth-centered message: humanity de-centered and brought into right relationship with the rest of nature. In 1995 millions of people saw it on the big screen played out.

1995 also happened to be the year that the earth-centered sensibility of Pocahontas’ “Colors of the Wind” song received official expression in our Unitarian Universalist faith community. That was the year that General Assembly delegates from congregations everywhere voted to add a Sixth Source: “Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.” Now it’s an integral part of our living faith. Hard to imagine our faith without it.

But 1995 has yet another fascinating coincidence for us to consider: it was the year that a social science researcher, Richard Wayne Lee of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, finished writing his seminal paper entitled “Strained Bedfellows: Pagans, New Agers, and ‘Starchy Humanists’ in Unitarian Universalism.” Published the following year, the paper would describe the spread of earth-centered spirituality in our congregations and also the resistance it encountered. Why some folks balked, even as General Assembly delegates were officially confirming the validity of earth-centered spirituality as a valid source for us and millions of children around the world were singing “Colors of the Wind” from the Disney movie.

1995 was a revelatory year. In today’s message, I want to explore the story in more detail. What is earth-centered spirituality, first of all? Why did some people balk at it, and still do? And where are we now—where do we go from here? Let’s ask these questions and see where they take us this morning.

Begin with the insight that earth-centered spirituality is a big family of traditions. Besides Native American spirituality, we’re talking modern witchcraft/Wicca and Neo-Paganism. We’re talking contemporary feminist theology and neo-shamanistic groups and certain ‘New Age’ movements. We’re talking the spiritual perspectives of the environmental/sustainability movement like Deep Ecology. It’s a big family. Lots of member traditions which at times can seem profoundly different. But, even so, key similarities are there to prove they all belong to the same family.

One of these key similarities is the conviction that nature is the truest Bible. Natural cycles and processes are sources of spiritual truth. In the West, a key voice here comes from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18^th century, who made it an epistemological first principle to go to nature to find one’s true happiness and authentic heart.

That’s why we hear Pocahontas sing,

Come run the hidden pine trails of the forest
Come taste the sunsweet berries of the Earth
Come roll in all the riches all around you
And for once never wonder what they’re worth

Come run, come taste, come roll… Do that because of the second key similarity: the experience of animism, and the explanation of that through pantheism.

There’s a scene in the movie when John Smith has a very interesting experience, and he says to Pocahontas, “Pocahontas, that tree is talking to me.”

Pocahontas: Then you should talk back.
Grandmother Willow: Don’t be frightened, young man. My bark is worse than my bite.
Pocahontas: Say something.
John Smith: What do you say to a tree?
Pocahontas: Anything you want.

Animism attributes consciousness and intent to all the forms that AIR, FIRE, WATER, and EARTH take. Henry David Thoreau, one of our Unitarian Universalist ancestors, professed animism when he once said, “I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person or a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.”

Have you ever experienced trees listening? Animism says they do. You can indeed tell Grandmother Willow anything you want.

And pantheism helps to explain why. Pantheism says that the Divine is nature and nature is the Divine. All things are animated by the same Sacredness, and Sacredness is in all things (not just human beings). Ralph Waldo Emerson, yet another Unitarian Universalist ancestor, proclaims pantheism when he says, “Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

Which leads to the third family resemblance that helps us to identify various disparate traditions as earth-centered: polytheism: belief in many gods not just one; belief in male and female gods both and not just male. Wikipedia (which here focuses on polytheism in a Pagan context) gives us a taste of the nuances involved: “One view in the Pagan community is that these polytheistic deities are not viewed as literal entities, but as Jungian archetypes or other psychological constructs that exist in the human psyche. Others adopt the belief that the deities have both a psychological and external existence. Many Pagans believe adoption of a polytheistic world-view would be beneficial for western society – replacing the dominant monotheism they see as innately repressive. In fact, many American neopagans first came to their adopted faiths because it allowed a greater freedom, diversity, and tolerance of worship among the community. […] Most Pagans adopt an ethos of “unity in diversity” regarding their religious beliefs.”

Besides these beliefs, additional family resemblances between differing earth-centered traditions can be found in such things as the employment of magic and spells, an emphasis on ritual (like our calling the quarters ritual from a moment ago), and an enjoyment of festivals that are seasonal in nature, such as Wicca’s Wheel of the Year: Beltane, Midsummer, Lammas, Mabon, Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, and the festival right around the corner, Ostara, which happens to be a time of great fertility and is celebrated by the ritual of egg decorating. Bunnies are also popular.

Ostara. Where the word Easter happens to come from. Which is very interesting…. But that leads to a completely different sermon, which we’ll hear March 27.

For now, having laid out some of the essentials of earth-centered spirituality, let’s turn to the focus of Richard Wayne Lee’s mid-1990s paper entitled “Strained Bedfellows: Pagans, New Agers, and ‘Starchy Humanists’ in Unitarian Universalism.” A picturesque title, right? Diversity in the Unitarian Universalist bed, and it’s not feeling good.

One way he illustrates this is through articles in the World, our denominational magazine, together with letters to the editor. For example, a 1992 article about a UU witch and another titled “Celebrating the Goddess Within” provoked the following reader responses:

Once I was proud to be an Unitarian Universalist, and I could not understand why others thought us silly. But after reading the articles on [a] self-proclaimed witch, and a commentary on worshipping the goddess within, I not only understand, I agree….I am disturbed by the increase in mysticism and “new age” philosophy in our churches….There are limits to tolerance.

And:

….I am concerned about a revival of witches and witchcraft, even in the earliest meaning of wise woman/healer…. UUs are often considered a far-out sect; let’s not give our critics a chance to level more derision our way.

Now, these are voices from awhile ago. What’s valuable to me about the “Strained Bedfellows” article is that it preserves them in a kind of literary amber. The struggle of what an evolving religious movement looks like is preserved.

Why is there the feeling that an earth-centered tradition like Wicca is silliness? Why the shame? The concern?

Perhaps it comes from a sense that the “earth-centered” focus is faddish. Flighty. One of my colleagues, Rev. Roberta Finkelstein, admits that when the proposal to add the Sixth Source initially came up, she voted against it, thinking, “You can’t add a sentence for every fad that comes along.” Our Sources statement “is a carefully crafted consensus statement,” after all; “it ought not to be messed with casually.”

In addition to this concern about faddishness comes the larger concern that earth-centered traditions are regressive. As Richard Wayne Lee himself says, “Oriented to scientific-technical rationality, UU humanists naturally reacted with particular hostility to … movements associated with pre-modernity and including occult elements (i.e. neopaganism and new age).”

Is the earth-centered focus faddish? Are its related traditions regressive and out-of-sync with what we know about human psychology the world in general?

The Richard Wayne Lee article doesn’t offer any answers here, but it does remind us that, as a religious movement, we’ve had “strained bedfellows” moments before.

“Leading transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson,” he reminds us, “resigned from the Unitarian ministry in 1832, complaining that the denomination’s excessive emphasis on reason had turned it into a ‘religion of dry bones,’ and a ‘thin porridge [of] pale negations.’” Emerson wanted to bring the Unitarians of his day into something far richer and juicier, which was his pantheism, his sense of the divine permeating the universe, revealing itself in nature and in the human soul.

And now, here we are again. “Known for decades as a ‘haven of starchy humanists,’” says Richard Wayne Lee, “UU has in recent years assimilated a set of new … movements. These include, most visibly, American Zen, new age, Native American spirituality, and neopaganism (the latter subsuming goddess spirituality and witchcraft).” Richard Wayne Lee goes on to say, “This analysis of UU’s remarkable turn toward ‘spirituality’ is based mainly on secondary data gathered by the author during and after a two-year study of a UU church in Atlanta, Georgia (1990-92).”

Which UU church do you think he’s talking about?

The vision he’s putting out there is this: dry bones and starchiness, on the one hand; and juicy spirituality on the other. The two colliding.

That was back in 1995. But where are we now, do you think, twenty-one years later? Are the two still colliding?

Now and into the future, I’d like to shift metaphors. “Dry bones” vs. “juicy spirituality” feels bad to me. One’s wrong and the other’s right. I don’t like that. I think both are valid. Something that is more cerebral, more internal, more quiet can very well be spiritual. Just as an energetic AIR, FIRE, WATER, and EARTH ritual can be spiritual—but spiritual in a different key.

Now and into the future, I say it’s far better to think in terms of vegetarians and carnivores. The spiritual hungers are equally strong, but the desired foods differ tremendously. Some people have experienced the efficacy of magick; some people have really felt called by the Goddess; some people really do speak to trees and the trees answer back.

And then there are others for whom a walk in the woods is enough, or reading the nature poetry of Mary Oliver.

People are different and in some cases wildly so. As Unitarian Universalists we have “strange bedfellows” experiences because we fling our doors wide open to them. We are curious! We want to pursue truth wherever truth comes from! And then truth comes! Something truly diverse actually unfolds—and we go HOLY MOLY! We go, WHAT THE HECK JUST HAPPENED?

1995 doesn’t feel so far away, after all.

It just takes time to process and integrate. As with individuals, so with institutions.

I will say this. There is nothing faddish about earth-centered spirituality and the need for humanity to be in right relationship with the rest of nature. There is nothing faddish about Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson or that 20^th century saint Rachel Carson (about whom I spoke this past January). There is nothing faddish about ancient pre-Christian traditions that folks today are drawing from because nothing they’re finding in Christian times is feeding their souls. There is nothing faddish about the Native American sensibility that sings

The rainstorm and the river are my brothers
The heron and the otter are my friends
And we are all connected to each other
In a circle, in a hoop that never ends.

Nothing faddish about that at all.

Our Sixth Source is perennial, and needed.

You’ve heard it said that people don’t like to talk about money.

But what about the kind of person who ties up his or her sense of self-esteem with how much they have? These “money status” people tend to affirm statements like:

Money is what gives life meaning.
Your self-worth equals your net worth.
If something is not considered the “best,” it is not worth buying.
People are only as successful as the amount of money they earn.
Rich people have no reason to be unhappy.
If others have more, I’m less.

They affirm such ideas, and they can also behave in certain characteristic ways. Money status people tend to take bigger financial risks because they want to have stories of H_U_G_E gains to show off. Or, whether we’re talking diamond rings or donuts, this sort of person will try to bargain with the salesperson for the best possible deal—and will be so focused on how powerful this makes them feel that they’re oblivious to the fact that they’re acting like jerks.

Money status people like to talk about money.

So do “money worship” people. Now this second kind of person believes that, whatever the problem is, having more money is the solution. The sort of things they tend to affirm include:

It is hard to be poor and happy.
You can never have enough money.
Money is power.
I will never be able to afford the things I really want in life.
Money buys freedom.

Because of such convictions, money worship people can tend to be spenders. Since money is their security and love substitute, the act of purchasing becomes instant pleasure, instant gratification. To save and prioritize for the future is especially hard because that represents denial of urgent here and now hungers to feel good and worthwhile. Saving and prioritizing takes away all the fun.

So let’s talk about money, say money worship people. They want to tell you all about the things they got at the various places and how good they’re going to look wearing them or how improved their home will be or whatever. The whole experience was a rush and they want to tell you all about it.

And perhaps by now you see my point. There are different personality types around money, or different kinds of scripts that people live out. I’m not claiming that this typology system is 100% neat and tidy; in some places different types overlap; sometimes people can combine scripts that appear to contradict each other. But in general people tend to emphasize one over the others, as reflected by their most abiding attitudes and behaviors.

To money status people and money worship people, let’s add two other types which, as it turns out, DO hate to talk about money. Number three is the “money avoidance” person. Just listen to what they tend to affirm, which is in sharp contrast to the first two types:

Good people should not care about money.
It is hard to be rich and be a good person.
The less money you have, the better life is.
Being rich means you no longer fit in with old friends and family.
Money is a necessary evil.
Money doesn’t count. I’m above it all.
Someone will rescue me. God will provide.
I do not deserve money.

As for characteristic behaviors of money avoiders, one involves what might be called “the bill basket,” which is usually stored in some out-of-sight place. You get a bill, you toss it in the bill basket, and you walk away, and pretty soon the bill basket is overflowing. Which is when you get another bill basket.

Money avoiders can also act like “money monks,” which is a phrase that comes from Maggie Baker in her book Crazy About Money. The money monk takes great satisfaction in feeling superior to money and those who seek it out. The primary focus is what’s on the inside, together with disdain for externals. Money monks can also get into the habit of doing without—as in neglecting basic needs like dental care, car repairs, or insurance. Or they can find themselves just making do, in ways that are akin to purchasing a pair of shoes that are a size too small because they’re on sale and therefore affordable. Doesn’t matter that the shoes are going to kill your feet. You are making do.

Does any of this ring bells for you? Do you know money status people, either personally or in the news? What about money worshippers? Or money avoiders?

Or what about the fourth and last type of person: the “money vigilance” type? This fourth type is never going to get into the same kind of money troubles as the other three because, well, they are vigilant. What they tend to affirm is the following:

It is important to save for a rainy day.
If you cannot pay cash for something, you should not buy it.
Don’t spend money on yourself or others.
People should work hard for their money and not be given handouts.
I need to keep track of every dime, but don’t ask me to talk about it.
It is not polite to talk about money.
People only want you for your money.
I would be a nervous wreck if I did not have money saved for an emergency.

You bet these “money vigilance” folks will probably never feel crushed by debt, hounded by creditors, or advised by attorneys that their last best hope is declaring bankruptcy. They probably won’t ever experience that sort of hellishness. But these types can tend to be excessive and unreasonable in avoiding risks that could bring in a great infusion of vitality. Money worries can fill their hearts and minds until there’s room for nothing else. They can be the sort of person who drives hours to save a dollar—anything to get the best value for the money—even though they’re somehow unaware of all the resources they’ve wasted to save that measly dollar.

And that’s the four types of money people. The typology comes from a study done over the course of a decade by Brad Klontz, a research associate professor at Kansas State University who also happens to be a “financial therapist”—which is actually a fairly new thing. It’s meant to fill the vacuum between psychologists who are unsophisticated about money and financial advisors who focus on the mechanics of planning without the deeper awareness that it does not matter how clear a person might be on what they ought to do—they can still find themselves doing the opposite. People can be their own worst enemies. And so the aim of financial therapy: “to find out,” as Brad Klontz says, “what aspects of your upbringing, your money beliefs, or your relationship with money are causing you distress, sabotaging you, or keeping you stuck.”

And the distress potentials go way beyond the ways in which each of the money types can fall into extremes—as in, money status people becoming gambling addicts, or money worship people amassing crushing credit card debt, or money avoidance people accepting way less for their work than they deserve, or money vigilance people being perfect obnoxious Scrooges.

In addition to all that, consider what happens when the different types start to interact. Just imagine: the moment a money vigilance-type person discovers a money avoider’s bill basket overflowing with unpaid bills. The outrage. The waves of nausea.

It’s not pretty.

Maggie Baker in her book Crazy About Money tells the story of a financial planner asking a client couple about how much they need to meet basic expenses. “One spouse says $4,000 a month; the other spouse says $7,000 a month. When the planner asks how much they saved in the past year, the one says, ‘Not much,’ and the other says, ‘We did pretty well.’”

Now does THAT ring any bells?

Money fights: the #1 cause of divorce in the early years of marriage. “Drive by” conversations, in which one spouse shoots a dart at the other because they’re frustrated and resentful about the latest incident.

One spouse is all about money status, and the other is into money vigilance: a terrible combination. How possibly could they have gotten married without knowing this? But it’s the magical thinking mentioned in the Wall Street Journal video we saw moments ago, which goes like this: “Our love automatically means we see eye to eye in all ways including money ways.”

No one who has ever fallen in love is a stranger to that kind of thinking. And then the real world happens. Rude wake-up call.

We are back again to the idea that people don’t like to talk about money. When it creates such waves in relationships, why do it? Even money status and money worship folks could agree to this, in situations when they’re talking to people who are into money avoidance and money vigilance….

So let’s just stop talking about it already.

No more money talk.

Zip it.

[lock lips and throw away the key]

But we just can’t go there, as much as we might like to.

As says Karen McCall says in her book Financial Recovery: Developing a Healthy Relationships With Money, “absolutely everyone has a relationship with money—whether they want to or not, and whether they know it or not. The relationship may be harmonious or it may be acrimonious, distant or obsessive. It may be conscious or unconscious, supportive or abusive.” It’s all these things, she says, and even more. That’s when she goes on to quote a friend and colleague (David Krueger) who likes to say that our relationship with money is “the longest-running relationship in our life.” Now listen to that. “Even before we are born, our parents’ financial circumstances and attitudes lay the groundwork for our first experiences of the world, influencing what kind of prenatal care our mothers receive and what our resources, education, and opportunities will be as we grow. Similarly, after we die, our estate (or lack thereof) lives on. Our children will likely be influenced throughout their lives—consciously or not—by whatever we teach them, intentionally or unintentionally, about money. They may pass on those lessons to their children, giving our relationship with money a multigenerational impact.”

In other words, when you are talking about a relationship as central and influential as the one we have with money, we don’t dare zip it. Too much is at stake for ourselves and for the ones we love.

We have to talk about money.

And the good news is that we can do that in ways which are much more productive than usual if we do at least two things.

First: surround it with compassion. Whatever the money issue is which is causing distress, sabotaging you, or keeping you stuck.

You know, what’s interesting about Brad Klontz’ typology of the four money scripts is that he found the links between who held what belief and their family background, race, gender, education level, or income to be weak. The strong links were altogether different. The strong links were between beliefs and certain kinds of financially traumatic moments growing up. Say, for example, that you are seven and you find out that you’re about to lose the house you live in. Your parents are over their heads in debt. They tell you that you are going to be ok, but you still feel paralyzed by fear. Now, what kind of beliefs about money do you think you, the seven year old, will form if the rest of the story is that your family figured out a way to keep the house on its own? By contrast, what if the rest of the story was that grandma bailed you guys out? Says Brad Klontz, “If grandma swoops in and saves the day, you could walk away from that thinking that you don’t need to worry about money. Or where there was lots of talk about losing the house, that could impact you so you live your life afraid of losing everything.”

This is exactly why we want to surround money issues with compassion. Because there’s always more to them than meets the eye. Most of what’s really going on is unconscious, invisible, underneath. The problem is not lack of character, a shortage of hard work, an inability to solve problems. The problem is rooted in what happened when you were seven and scared out of your mind.

(As a side note: I wish there was time to expand on the unconscious depths of economics. It’s just fascinating, what light the discipline of behavioral economics sheds on the many irrational things people do in order to avoid loss. Neuroeconomics actually peers into our brains and shows us the irrationality.)

Point is, we just have to have compassion for this, for ourselves and for others, when, once again, we’re in a money tailspin or embroiled in yet another money argument.

We are only human.

Which naturally sets us up to do the second thing which enables more productive money conversations: go deeper. Go deeper than, for example, what your preferred money script allows. Money status folks like to brag; money worship folks love to talk about what fun they are having; money avoiders think money talk is irrelevant; and money vigilance folks think talking about money is rude and takes away energy from the real work of tracking every penny. But go deeper than this. Get underneath your money script and get to the stories that ultimately made you the way you are. Share those stories with the people you are building a household with, or the people of this Beloved Community.

Not for the first time do I wish my father was still alive, so I could ask him what it was like to be so close to completing his training as a surgeon, but then he and Mom had their second child (me) and he ran out of money, and so he asked his Dad to help, and his Dad said no. Because his Dad was a strict money vigilance kind of guy who came to Canada from the Old Country and was a completely self-made Man who simply could not comprehend the finances involved in medical school. So my father had to start work prematurely as a family practitioner and he forever felt the loss of a brighter career as a surgeon. What was that like for him? How was that related to the money patterns we ended up living out in our household, which were analogous to what a person with borderline personality disorder lives out. One moment the money is flowing, then next it’s a source of high anxiety—and I never really knew what tipped the scale. All I knew is that I felt I was always walking on eggshells. There wasn’t regularity or rationale. Sometimes they were very generous when I needed things; other times when I needed things there were explosions, and they made me feel terribly guilty. Oftentimes money flowed into wants and not needs. Oftentimes we spent money in completely irresponsible ways, like constant eating at restaurants, or Mom’s money worship pattern of buying jewelry and clothing and tchotchkes for the house but when we got home she wouldn’t even take the stuff out of their original boxes and wrappers. They would go straight to storage. And she would continue to buy new things, money worshipper she was. Meanwhile, my Dad loved to say to his kids, angrily, “Do you think money grows on trees?”

I bring all this up merely a spirit of curiosity. I’m going deeper. It’s not about judgment. It’s not about anyone being bad. It’s just about trying to understand, and to heal.

We try to remember the old hurts and tell the old stories because that’s how healing works.

What are your stories? What were your parents or parental figures like? What financially traumatic moments can you remember? What happened next? Is that why you might be a money worshipper? Or something else?

I would wish that everyone here goes deeper like this. Do this with your small groups. Do this with friends. Talk about this with loved ones.

It’s not more money that solves problems. It’s more emotional insight, more emotional intelligence. You can win the lottery, but if you are emotionally stuck, all that extra money is going to feel like a curse, I guarantee you.

Money talk CAN be productive talk. Surround the money issues with compassion, and go deeper. It leads to a healthier relationship with money, and that means greater likelihood for following all the sound advice that financial planners are bursting at the seams with.

But first our hearts have to be ready to receive. The emotional work needs to take place, first.

Step by step by step, we are on our way to a better place.

“Painting is easy,” said the immortal Impressionist Edgar Degas, ”when you don’t know how. But when you do know how, it’s very difficult.”

Lucky for me that I didn’t know how. Because

a spring was breaking
out in my heart.

These are words from an Antonio Machado poem, and he says,

Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

This was what I was feeling at 22 years of age—a turning point in my life. I was about to graduate from college; I was in a serious relationship with someone I eventually married and shared life with for many years; and I was gulping philosophical and psychological wisdom like my life depended on it.

Among the things I was reading was a book by Strephon Kaplan-Williams on Jungian-Senoi dream work, and so dreams were flooding my world every night, like this one: An elephant is trapped in a glass bottle, and it is MY elephant. I need to let him out. I do, and I’m amazed to discover that he’s like soap. I soap up my body with him and, all of a sudden, I feel power coursing through me. I can skate with the best of the Olympians. I can even do a quad lutz.

A spring was breaking out in my heart. Water of a new life, coming to me.

Lucky for me I did not know how to paint. Because painting is what I did, to manage the overflow, to give it form. Painting, because I was just curious about it and wanted to see what it was like; and also because other forms of visual art (like sculpture, printmaking, photography, and film) appeared to require machines and other complicated instruments and I wanted means that were simpler and more direct. Heart to brush to page.

This is perhaps the very first piece I ever did. I just went for it. Paint on the paper, following instinct and intuition. Red, white, blue, green, black: allowing whatever was meant to emerge, to emerge. In the end what seemed to come out was a water buffalo. Do you see it?

A head full of blood. Well, that’s what things felt like.

Then there was this painting:

I had been listening to U2’s Joshua Tree album, cranked up. Songs like “Where The Streets Have No Name,” “Running To Stand Still,” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The intense music was magnifying my heart. At that time in my life I was a smoker and so while my one hand was working in the brown tones and the green tones my other hand held the smoke and then something happened—I remember the moment clearly—I felt curious about what it would be like to get into things even more viscerally and so what I did was take used cigarette butts and move the paint around with them, apply such deep pressure that I was literally scratching the surface of the painting.

Maybe it was true on one level, that “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Maybe the power and despair of the U2 album was true, on one level. But on another level, look at the image that surfaced, look at what I had inside me: turbulence, yes, but three resilient trees swaying gracefully. Over the years, in fact, I have toyed with calling it “The Three Graces.”

It never stops reassuring me. Grace inside me, a green forest inside….

There was this amazing burst of visual creativity centered around painting, when I was around 22, a turning point in my life. Secret images of my soul disclosed through swirling colors on a page, which I’d introduce by paintbrush or fingers or even cigarette butts. More paint here, less there, until it felt intuitively right to stop and an image had arrived, it had come home.

It was another form of sleep and dreams. Water of a new life, coming to me.

Since then, I have gone to painting only infrequently. Around eight years ago I took an oil painting class at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center and that’s when I learned the truth of Degas’ statement. When you know how to paint, absolutely, that’s when it’s very difficult.

And this is exactly the time to hear writer Sherwood Anderson’s advice to his son (the aspiring painter):

The object drawn doesn’t matter so much. It’s what you feel about it, what it means to you.

A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.

Draw, draw hundreds of drawings.

Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

This is as much true of visual arts as it is of other forms: music, theater, dance, and other performing arts; literature; and whatever else kind of art there is. And note how each form has two sides to it: the process involved in producing specific artworks, and the experience of being an audience engaging those artworks. Creation and reception. Both integrally involved in art’s salvific power.

But before I go on to explain why, exactly what do I mean, “salvation”? Am I dredging up that old theological term in all its questionable glory? Listen to lyrics from that 1969 hit “Spirit in the Sky”:

Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that’s the best
Prepare yourself you know it’s a must
Gotta have a friend in Jesus
So you know that when you die
He’s gonna recommend you
To the spirit in the sky

Is that how art saves? What do you think?

If you were here last week, I suggested a definition of “salvation” that, I believe, is far more relevant. It’s fundamentally about deliverance from bad or difficult situations; it’s about resilience, strength to face harm and come through with dignity intact. Salvation sustains hopefulness; salvation keeps us fluid and flowing no matter what life brings our way. And then I said, “As Unitarian Universalists, it’s our privilege to choose the words and ways that energize us to keep on showing up. For some of us, a word like God energizes and brings us into a feeling of a larger life. For others, the word takes all the oxygen out of the room, oxygen that comes right back in when they talk instead of mindfulness meditation, or of the Goddess, or of being in nature.”

Today, I add “art” to the list of what might oxygenate.

Each of us has an elephant trapped in a glass bottle, not just me. Art can release it—all that power it represents.

And with this said, let’s get back to the two sides of it: creation and reception, starting with creation.

“What art offers,” said the great novelist John Updike, “is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit.” Put away the smartness which kills everything. Let the big voice of ego which huffs and puffs and dominates everything soften and allow the little voices at the margins to finally be heard. Experiment. Play. “The artist,” said Picasso, “is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”

Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching says it this way:

The Tao is like an empty bowl
Which in being used can never be filled up.
Fathomless, it seems to be the origin of things.

Whatever metaphor you prefer—space, receptacle, empty bowl—the creative act that’s alive and not killed through smartness puts you into sync with the origin of things. You yourself get to be an origin, “which in being used can never be filled up.”

That is an inherently spiritual feeling. At-one-ness with the Tao.

And once you assume that position of humility, that openness, what you begin to discover—through the artistic process—are the deep roots of yourself, the enduring themes of your being, the objects of your most intense struggle and care.

A great example of this is the art of Marc Chagall.

Born 1887, died 1985, Chagall was one of the very greatest. A pioneer of modernism and a major Jewish artist. “When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.”

In the painting before you, entitled “Over the Town” (which is so appropriate and sweet for Valentine’s Day), just look at that crystalline color, the deep greens and blues. The lovers are high overhead, wrapped in each other’s warmth; and then, below, there is the city, built mostly of wood, filled with churches and synagogues. That city in some form or fashion appears in many of his paintings. It is the city he grew up in, Vitebsk, which later in life he moved far away from. “Why did I leave you so many years ago?” he says. “I did not live with you, but I didn’t have one single painting that didn’t breathe with your spirit and reflection.”

Another of his paintings is “Time is a River Without Banks.” There’s Vitebsk again, in the background. The open space of the canvas allows his identity (fused with the city of his birth) to be seen and known. And not just this, but seemingly strange symbols in deep blue, in shimmering red and gold. A flying fish, a pendulum clock, a fiddle fiddling away all by itself, lovers embracing. The painting is all about celebration and mourning. In Chagall’s village, the fiddler made music at cross-points of life (birth, marriage, death); and Chagall’s father worked tirelessly in a fish factory, so the fish commemorates him. Time is a river; time flows forward and brings with it sweetness but also pain. But the particular thing to sense here is how intensely Chagall is able to express this, through scenes of childhood repeatedly invoked, invested with intense energy. Every painting augments his being. Every painting reminds him who he is and what he cares about.

That is salvation art, on the creative side.

But what about the reception side? What salvific things happen when we engage with artworks already made?

The writer Marcel Proust has said, “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discover what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says in the proof of its veracity.” That’s what Proust says, and note the paradox he lifts up. The novel “puts a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own” (Alain de Botton).

But why can’t we formulate the perceptions on our own?

Because we are just moving too fast through life, trying to do too much. Because we’re snubbing the world in favor of our mobile phones, or what’s called “phubbing.” Because we are caught up in habits of heart and mind that have hardened and so we’re cut off from a wealth of other possibilities and we don’t even know that. Because we’re stressed and tired. Because because because.

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” (Stella Adler).

Therefore, says Proust, read. Go to the theater, go to the movies, absorb the art that adorns the walls of this building. Be reminded that you have a soul. In particular, recognize perceptions that you have not formulated on your own but they are in fact possible for you and, in the having of them, your world is expanded, your world is renewed….

As a German proverb says, “Art holds fast when all else is lost.”

This is one of the last paintings I did at 22 years of age, at that turning point in my life, and I have loved it ever since. Like all my paintings, it started with simple curiosity about what would happen if I put a blob of paint there and then spread it. What felt good to do? Go straight, or curve it? What textures? What colors? Just making a space for play, just letting that dream elephant out, just being the empty bowl of the Tao … and what came up was a scene with lilting curves, all against a backdrop of translucent blue. And in the foreground, in a way reminiscent of that other painting of mine we saw earlier, The Three Graces, here are three figures in white, and they look like they are in graceful motion, swaying, dancing—and by this I am reminded of who I am, by this my being is enlarged, by this I am saved from a life that can beat down and crush.

May art lead you, too, into the truth.

Five hundred years ago, it was Faustus Socinus, a Polish theologian widely considered to be the architect of modern liberal religion, who said that yes, Jesus saves, but not by virtue of his death. None of this “blood of the lamb” stuff. Jesus saves by virtue of his life and the moral and spiritual example we get from that. If we live like he lived and loved, then we are on the right path.

Furthermore, God’s goodness consists in allowing no soul to endure eternal torment and hellfire. The Christian Bible says, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” To this Faustus Socinus adds: everyone will experience this, not just some.

Salvation has meant this to religious liberals (to US), historically. Following Jesus’ example in our own lives, through works of justice and love. Trusting ultimately in God’s goodness to bring everyone into an afterlife of sweetness despite any failings and mistakes. Salvation as a here-and-now process, and salvation as an afterlife end-state.

But that was five hundred years ago. Where do things stand now?

At first glance, the answer is not easy. I mean, salvation talk is rare in these parts. Just how many times in this space in the past 50 years do you think people have been asked, seriously, Are you saved?

Are you saved, brother? Are you saved, sister?

The closest we might come to talking about it is in a humorous vein. One of my clergy colleagues likes to say, “I believe in Original Sin. The more original the better.” Another tells the story of receiving a certain gift from a member of her congregation: “Wash Away Your Sins” towelettes. The general instructions on the package read:

1. Carry towelettes with you at all times;
2. Cleanse thyself before saving others;
3. Stay alert to sins as they happen;
4. Approach sinner;
5. Offer-up a Wash-Away Your Sins towelette;
6. Remain focused and ready to do-it-again.

We laugh about all that earnest sin and sinner and salvation talk.

And what would Faustus Socinus have to say? How would we explain ourselves?

Well, part of the explanation would point to Faustus Socinus’ own theology and that of the long line of successors following him. It’s taught us something about God and something about ourselves: that God’s not a bully waiting for people to mess up so he can swoop in and crush us, and also that all people have inherent worth and dignity. Both insights are things we can’t be untaught. So of course we Unitarian Universalists are not going to be sweating bullets about our mistakes. Of course we are not going to be overly anxious about the eternal state of our souls. Why would we?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the originator of the Wash-Away-Your-Sins towelette idea was one of us.

Faustus Socinus, it’s your fault! (THANK YOU!)

But another part of the explanation must be the distance we’ve traveled in five-hundred years, from a culture that rested in the certainty of one religious vision to our culture which knows many visions and has no collective certainty or common language. Five-hundred years ago, Christendom reigned. Yes, there were varieties of Christianity, but everyone still bowed the knee to Jesus Christ and the Bible. Now, the scene is firmly and thoroughly pluralistic. Many religions are known, and side-by-side with this is 23% of the American population who doesn’t identify with anything. Sociologists call them “nones” (not “n-u-n-s” but “n-o-n-e-s”).

Let me dwell on this last point at length. Once geographical borders were defeated by technologies of travel and communication, all sorts of ideas of salvation came up for grabs, from India and China and elsewhere. All sorts of visions emerged, together with terminologies that are intriguing to our ears. Here are just some of them:

From Hinduism, we learn that salvation is release from samsara, or the seemingly endless round of reincarnations that individual souls experience. Samsara remains firmly in place because of something called karma, which is an impersonal and universal moral law which states: Make a mistake, and you must pay. Karma ties us to earth; and so the way of liberation is to loosen the ties. Do that by pursuing one of the four yogas or spiritual paths; which one depends on your personality type: the path of knowledge, the path of love and devotion, the path of selfless action, and the path of psychophysical exercise.

For roughly 800 million people, this is salvation.

But now consider Buddhism and its Four Noble Truths teaching: (1) life is suffering, (2) suffering is caused by self-centered craving, (3) the nirvana experience extinguishes self-centered craving and thus suffering, (4) the way to nirvana is the Eightfold Path, which is a middle way between the two extremities of asceticism and hedonism. Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. Follow the Eightfold Path, and it will take you into Nirvana.

For roughly 400 million people, this is salvation.

But now consider yet another vision: it comes from Taoism. The Tao in Taoism is the order and harmony of nature, and it is far more stable and enduring than the power of the state or the civilized institutions constructed by human ingenuity. Suffering happens when people are out of sync with the Tao, and life is like swimming upstream; but when we are in sync, all is flow, we flourish, we are effortlessly beautiful, energy (or chi) pulses through us. Taoists call this state of being wu-wei (which means no-action, or action modeled on nature).

This is salvation, for 20 million people. Actually, for probably hundreds of millions more because the vision of the Jedi Knight that comes from the movie Star Wars echoes the Taoist wu-wei idea. Salvation is when you move through the world like a Jedi master.

This is just a sampling of alternate visions of salvation, coming from religions around the world. And then there are alternate visions coming from closer to home. In 1859 we saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Darwin’s thought in itself was complex and he saw room enough for God, but the main impression made on the public was a vision of reality that was stripped of anything supernatural. The purpose of life was survival of the species through procreation and also adaptation to a changing environment. Life is amazing in its diversity, but the struggle for existence is brutal and death is real and final. If salvation is anything, it is about living fully and richly in the here-and-now as well as leaving a generous legacy for future generations. The only immortality is an immortality of influence.

But this is not the only vision we get from science. Even science produces alternate visions. One of the ironic consequences of improved medical technology is a steady increase in reports of near-death experiences. Modern resuscitation techniques have improved to the point where you have increasing numbers of people who’ve been to the brink of death and then come back to tell an amazing story of detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, total serenity, security, warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of a light which is intelligent and compassionate and emphasizes that the purpose of life is love and learning. Study after study shows that these near-death experience elements are similar world-wide, irrespective of age, sex, ethnic origin, religion, or degree of religious belief. Studies also show that, following the experience, people go through a transformational process that encompasses life-changing insight, heightened intuition, and disappearance of the fear of death.

As for explanations of all this? Some scientists bank on purely physiological explanations. Cerebral anoxia, for example. Others, however, argue that these reductionistic explanations do an injustice to all the evidence, and they go on to affirm ideas that were pitched out with Darwin. These scientists are saying that there really is more to existence than our physical, body-focused struggle. That the body is like a TV, and when it is well-functioning, it channels the soul’s signal. When it breaks down, there is nothing, the screen is blank. Of course. But that doesn’t mean there’s no more signal. The signal still persists in a realm of existence too fine for our physical senses to detect. And that realm of existence says: the purpose of life is love and learning.

This is how far we’ve traveled in five-hundred years, since Faustus Socinus. Things like “Wash Away Your Sins” towelettes make us laugh, but for good reason. The singleness of Christendom has disappeared and has been replaced by a manyness of visions. Hinduism tells us that, yes, there’s such a thing as an afterlife but we actually don’t want that. We want to stop reincarnation and, through moksha, lose our unique selfhood and merge with Brahman. Buddhism and Taoism, on the other hand, have a more humanistic focus. Don’t wait for some afterlife to experience salvation. Here and now, learn how enter into the life divine. And then there’s science which, for the most part, has emphasized that humanistic focus; but then it’s also been a surprising source of evidence for a view of reality that echoes more traditional teachings about the afterlife.

Five-hundred years, and this is where we are. And what I want to say this morning is that, as Unitarian Universalists, all this diversity can be an opportunity for us. We can get beyond bewilderment. We can even get beyond the cynicism and apathy that multiple competing visions can lead to, a sense of “what’s the use?,” a sheer lack of caring about our spiritual welfare. What we can do instead, as Unitarian Universalists, is to simply indulge our intellectual curiosity. We take a balcony-view of the diversity—we just step back and look at it all from a larger perspective, and wonder about what we’re seeing.

And what we’ll discover is this. Names will vary (moksha, nirvana, wu-wei, Jesus) and ways will vary (the Four Yogas, the Noble Eightfold Path), but the constant and abiding theme is deliverance from a bad or difficult place and security/protection from harm. Deliverance and security. “Though I walk through the valley of death, You are with me. Your rod and staff, they protect me.” It’s in the 23^rd Psalm and it’s everywhere: salvation sustains hopefulness; salvation keeps us fluid and flowing no matter what life brings our way. It’s even in football. It’s the great Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, who said, “It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.”

Salvation is that: what keeps you getting up.

And we need THAT now more than ever. When you have thousands of children in Flint, Michigan suffering from lead poisoning because bureaucrats wanted to save money; when you have United Nations peacekeepers in the Central African Republic raping and sexually exploiting the women and girls that they are supposed to be helping; when you have evil and suffering all up and down the scale (from the personal suffering we hold in our hearts to the collective suffering of a group or a city or a nation or a world or a polluted earth), there is no question about the need for salvation.

“It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.”

As Unitarian Universalists, it’s our privilege to choose the words and ways that energize us to keep on getting up. For some of us, a word like God energizes and brings us into a feeling of a larger life. For others, the word takes all the oxygen out of the room, oxygen that comes right back in when they talk instead of mindfulness meditation, or of the Goddess, or of being in nature. Religiously speaking, some of us are vegetarians; others of us are carnivores; and some are even omnivores. But we all know the sharpness of our spiritual hungers. We all know that. So our responsibility to our spiritual wellbeing is to pay attention to what fills us up and feels good and to partake in that. And, as citizens of a shared Beloved Community, our responsibility is to respect the hungers of others. To know that there’s enough to go around. If a plate comes around and it contains meat and you are a strict vegetarian, don’t fret. It’s your turn next.

And now here is a plate of soul food for you to taste and eat: a salvation story I’m going to end with.

It’s about admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was tortured more than twenty times by his captors, and never had much reason to believe he would survive the prison camp and someday get to see his wife again. But he believed anyway.

The story comes out in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. In the book Collins and the admiral are taking a walk together, and the admiral says, “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Says Collins, “I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

 “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

 “The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

 “The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘ We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

 Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

 That’s the story from admiral Jim Stockdale. Listen to the lesson. Salvation is both works and faith. Discipline to confront brutal facts head on; faith that you will prevail in the end.

Salvation keeps us fluid and flowing, no matter what. “It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.” This is what Faustus Socinus was saying five hundred years ago, in essence, and we need to keep saying it today.

Recently I came across a video message by Jamaican writer Marlon James where he talks about the difference between being non-racist and anti-racist. It’s magnificent and worth hearing in its entirety. But it’s also pointed and might bring up some difficult feelings. Please allow those feelings to be, and as far as possible, just stay with this message, stay with me during this sermon step by step and to the very end.

Several months ago [he writes] in response to Ferguson, Baltimore, the killings of Freddie Gray and Tamir Rice, my friend Caitlyn put up a Facebook post breaking down the difference between non-racism and anti-racism. Most of us are non-racist. Because racism is looked upon as some moral lapse, we feel quite self-assured by simply not being racist. ‘I’m not a bigot. I don’t sing that ’N’ word when my favorite rap jam comes on. I didn’t vote for that guy. I’m not burning any crosses. I’m not a skinhead.’

‘I don’t. I won’t. I’m not. I’ve never. I can’t.’

What you end up with is an entire moral stance, an entire code for living your life and dealing with all the injustice in the world by not doing a damn thing. That’s the great thing about “non-”: you can put it off by simply rolling over in your bed and going to sleep.

So why are you sitting at home and watching things unfold on TV instead of doing something about it? Because you’re a non-racist, not an anti-racist.

Now, do this for me: take the “c” out of racist and replace it with a “p”. ‘I’m not a rapist. I’m not friends with any rapist. I didn’t buy that rapist’s last album.’ All these things that you’re not doing.

Meanwhile, people are still getting raped, and black boys are being killed. It’s not enough that you don’t do these things. Your going to bed with a clear conscience is not going to stop college students from getting assaulted. You thinking climate change is terrible is not going to stop climate change. You being so assured that you’re not anti-Black, anti-Muslim, won’t stop the next hate crime. And it’s wonderful that you recognize how brave gay people are when they’re facing persecution. But they aren’t the ones who need to be brave. We need to get active. We need to hold people accountable. We need to accept that what hurts one of us hurts all of us. And we need to stop thinking that injustice going on in the world isn’t to an extent our fault.

We need to stop being “non-” and start being “anti-”.

This is what anti-racism, anti-oppression, multi-culturalism is all about. ARAOMC, for short. It’s not that UUCA is doing nothing. Far from that. But it’s one thing to be accidental and casual in our approach (where we waver between moments of non-racism and anti-racism) and another thing to be intentional and systematic and focused. Where the proposed Congregational Resolution says, “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that UUCA specifically commits to…”—that’s where a more intentional and systematic approach is described, in detail.

We need to stop being “non-” and start being “anti-”.

And the need is a legitimate one. That’s the main thing I want to say today. The need is authentic. It grows out of our identity as a Beloved Community. It grows out of:

WE ARE

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS WHO WANT TO BE BRIGHTER!

Each of those lines of WE ARE is a powerful reason for taking a stand.

WE ARE: by that I mean we are a religious organization. Now some people will stop me right there and say, Yes, that IS what we are, Mr. Senior Minister Man, therefore why are you bringing up such difficult and painful stuff in our midst? After all, life out there is brutal and what I need on Sunday morning is relief from all that, I need distraction, I need chicken soup for the soul. So don’t bring up politics! Don’t mention he who must not be named! Don’t bring the strife and struggle that’s out there in here! Don’t do it!

And absolutely, there are times when we need our congregations to comfort the afflicted and provide spaces where we can just feel safe. But to envision a congregation as responsible for doing just that and only that is simply untrue to the church’s grander purpose of equipping people for life. I like to see church as a place where we aspire to model the kinds of behaviors we want to see in our relationships, in our places of work, in our political processes, and elsewhere. We’re trying to be Beloved Community so we can take that love and increase it, extend it.

Congregations are not hermetically sealed-off from the larger world. Problems in the larger world are going to be problems here. Any and all of those problems, including problems of prejudice and white supremacy bias that’s of course unconscious but it doesn’t make it any less real. We congregants didn’t start that fire. But if, here, we can ourselves be transformed as we work in it, if we can increase awareness and learn solutions, it means that our church matters. It’s doing its job of changing lives.

WE ARE. One reason for taking a stand.

Another is: WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE.

Now once again, I could be stopped right there. If we’re majority white, why do we have to talk about race?

It’s a question that a colleague of mine in the United Church of Christ fielded recently. The United Church of Christ has a membership that is 87% white, close to where we are as a faith community. And as for the Rev. Dominique C. Atchison’s answer: I’ll bet you can guess. But listen to her reasons why.

First of all, unless white people affirm that whiteness is a race like any other—unless they talk about it, wonder about it, appreciate it, trouble it—then the tendency to see whiteness as standard or default stays entrenched. That’s the white supremacy problem we’re trying to fight. Comedian Louis C. K. hits the nail on the head: “I read something in the paper,” he says, “that really confused me the other day. It said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities… Shouldn’t you not call them minorities when they get to be 80 percent of the population? That’s a very white attitude, don’t you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he’d be like ‘Look at all the minorities around here! I’m the only majority.’”

The second reason is this: how whites have a special role in dealing with other whites. Rev. Atchison writes, “some of the white supremacy that still plagues our culture can only be defeated by the work and commitment of progressive white people. We have been watching Donald Trump,” she says, “gain traction as a candidate for presidency by spewing racist, sexist and ableist rhetoric. His words seem to be appealing to a segment of mostly white Americans who feel offended and somehow suppressed by movements for justice and equality. While their mob-like presence is frightening to people of color, I believe it is also scary and disheartening for most white people. And there is only so much we can do as people of color when it comes to stopping this sort of hate speech and behavior. The hands-on work of dismantling this level of hatred falls upon white people who remember history, who see the danger and want to see an end.”

That’s the Rev. Atchison. So good. And let’s take a moment with her comment about white Americans feeling offended or suppressed by movements for justice and equality. Working with such feelings is central. I turned a small corner in my own mind the other day when someone questioned some language I was using, and at first I went to a place of feeling offended and inside I could hear myself shouting PC! PC! But then I realized how I HATE it when I introduce myself to another person as Anthony Makar and the person goes, “Nice to meet you, Tony.” But who gave them power to name me, against my very own wishes? If I wanted to be called Tony, I’d have introduced myself like that. How dare they presume to have that power? But what would happen, do you suppose, if I were to be bluntly honest with this presumptuous person and let him know how used I felt. What would he feel? I’ll bet offended. I am just asserting my right to name myself, but he thinks I’m taking things too far…. He thinks I’m being kind of PC.

Point is, significant work happens when white folks get inside the feeling of being offended and can see it for what it really is: what it feels like for others to be claiming their rightful power. Less privileged people simply catching up, the playing field leveled. This is not a bad thing. Therefore white folks must reframe the feeling. Don’t allow it to fester into resentment, or guilt. Instead, channel it into curiosity. Someone has come before you, and they are wholly themselves. See them with new eyes. See them as beings with the power to name themselves.

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE in no way excuses us from facing the ARAOMAC challenge and becoming fully anti-racist. No. It’s just yet another compelling reason for taking a stand.

But perhaps the biggest is this one: WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS. ARAOMAC flows out of our religious nature.

Part of it has to do with freedom. How we are a freedom people. 2000 years ago, our people didn’t believe that Jesus was God; they believed in a direct free connection without any intermediary. 1500 years ago, our people didn’t believe that church traditions were equivalent with God; they believed that the freedom way to the Source was the Bible alone. 200 years ago, our people didn’t believe that Christianity with its Bible was the only way to the Sacred; they believed that the freedom way to truth could be found in all the religions of the world. And now, right now, we are saying that white culture is not the only form of freedom through which to reach out and touch God; there are lots of other cultural ways to reach out and touch God, too.

I’ve spoken of this before, but now here is something else you need to know about Unitarian Universalism’s essence. That what it means to be religiously liberal—which is what we are—is to be in active engagement with the culture around us. As theologian Paul Rasor says, “Liberal theology starts with the premise that religion should be oriented toward the present, taking fully into account modern knowledge and experience. As a result,“ he continues, “Unitarian Universalists and other liberals are not likely to feel their faith threatened by new scientific discoveries, for example. Rather than resist new developments, liberals tend to embrace them and incorporate them into their religious worldviews. This is how religious liberals have sought to keep their religious commitments culturally relevant and intellectually credible.” It means that as America becomes more multicultural, so must we. It’s what a Unitarian Universalist would do. WWUUD. A pluralism not just of the head, but of the heart.

WE ARE

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS

And finally….

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS WHO WANT TO BE BRIGHTER!

This last reason is so cool. From researchers Sheen S. Levine and David Stark comes the finding that “Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions.” Here’s the story, from The New York Times:

“To study the effects of ethnic and racial diversity,” say researchers Levine and Stark, “we conducted a series of experiments in which participants competed in groups to find accurate answers to problems. In a situation much like a classroom, we started by presenting each participant individually with information and a task: to calculate accurate prices for simulated stocks. First, we collected individual answers, and then (to see how committed participants were to their answers), we let them buy and sell those stocks to the others, using real money. Participants got to keep any profit they made.

“We assigned each participant to a group that was either homogeneous or diverse (meaning that it included at least one participant of another ethnicity or race). To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans. In Singapore, we studied people who were Chinese, Indian and Malay. […]

“The findings were striking. When participants were in diverse company, their answers were 58 percent more accurate. The prices they chose were much closer to the true values of the stocks. As they spent time interacting in diverse groups, their performance improved.

“In homogeneous groups, whether in the United States or in Asia, the opposite happened. When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.

The researchers concluded: “When surrounded by people “like ourselves,” we are easily influenced, more likely to fall for wrong ideas. Diversity prompts better, critical thinking. It contributes to error detection. It keeps us from drifting toward miscalculation.”

What do you think about that?

Someone was telling me that he and a friend were just alike, which on the one hand is great. But on the other, in their alikeness it’s as if they’re both looking right, which means they won’t notice the bus that’s coming at them from the left.

Not everyone is comfortable with anti-based language. They want a more positive vision. Anti-racism and anti-oppression, yes, but tell me more about multiculturalism. Tell me more about that vision.

And we have one:

WE ARE MAJORITY WHITE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS WHO WANT TO BE BRIGHTER!
MEANING: WE ARE GOING BEYOND A MAJORITY WHITE WE
TO A WE
THAT’S MULTICOLORED AND DIVERSE AND EXTRAORDINARY
AND NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE,
YOU GET TO BE A PART OF THAT WE,
AND THAT WE FEELS LIKE HOME.

So many good reasons for entering in to the Taking a Stand journey. Yes, risks as well. Everybody loves Dr. King now for taking a stand, but back when he actually did it? Not so much. We risk opening ourselves to that. We risk problems, misunderstandings, complications, snags.

But let the good reasons carry us forward. Let’s get into this thing. Let’s get carried away.

Let us listen to what needs to be said in a spirit of compassion,
let us dry the tears of those who are weeping.
Let us not be skeptical that renewal can come,
that we will see things in this space we have never seen before.
I charge us:
Let us not forget to be grateful.
Let us do our best to stir in each other hope, courage and faith.

**

Nancy and Candi, I’m wondering if you will come down and show us the banner right now.

This is our Black Lives Matter banner, which will accompany me and all who will march with me in tomorrow’s Dr. King parade. I will plainly say that it’s on me that we are marching with this banner. Under this banner, we march unofficially, because only the congregation through a democratic process can authorize statements made in its name.

But I hope for a time when posting a banner like this on our building, making it a 100% official statement of this institution, will be something we can just do, because we have taken an official congregational stand. Because we know who we are.

That’s just it. WHO WE ARE. That’s what the whole thing boils down to.

ARAOMC isn’t the name for some exotic food, or a word from a foreign tongue. ARAOMC is what happens when we are just more deeply who we are.

This past December, thousands of delegates—representatives of 195 nations, including our President, Barack Obama—erupted in cheers and ovations. They had just accomplished a historic breakthrough on an issue central to nothing less than the survival of the human race—an issue that had foiled decades of international efforts. The issue of climate change. Ensuring a livable planet for future generations. Every country on the face of the earth, committed to lowering greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change. Beginning the great transformation towards sustainability.

The Paris Accords put us on this path.

And you know what? There was near-silence among Republican candidates in response.

But we’ve heard them on this issue before, together with other climate change deniers who are in cahoots with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates and libertarian think tanks.

When President Obama, in his 2015 State of the Union address, said that no issue poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee shot back with this pearl of wisdom: “A beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.” Sometime later he would tweet that what America needs is “a commander-in-chief NOT a meteorologist-in-chief.”

Then there’s Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who described climate change as “the perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big-government politician who wants more power.”

And don’t let us forget the Donald. He thinks climate change was invented by the Chinese to hurt American manufacturing.

This is our present moment. The joy of the Paris Accords and President Obama’s leadership—together with Pope Francis and others. The woe of the willful spread of ignorance similar to what we saw with tobacco manufacturers who kept on insisting that smoking was fine even as they were well aware of what the science showed. Joy and woe woven finely in our present moment…

Which makes this moment precisely the time to recall history. History is uniquely suited to help us appreciate how far we’ve actually come and to give us strength to face what’s ahead. I can’t think of any story more inspiring than that of environmental scientist Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring, published in 1962. Let’s take a look and be encouraged in our affirmation of our Unitarian Universalist 7th Principle of the Interdependent Web of All Existence, Of Which We are a Part.

Let’s begin by just allowing some of the powerful language of Silent Spring to wash over us. Rachel Carson writes:

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes — nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good” and the “bad,” to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil — all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”

Rachel Carson writes:

For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology.

Rachel Carson’s prophetic environmentalism addressed the wholesale and indiscriminate use of chemicals aimed at pest and disease control, like DDT—the detrimental effects reaching far beyond the intended targets, particularly on birds whose song is silenced and thus one can reasonably imagine a nightmare springtime in which no birds sing, there is just silence, silent spring….

The book exemplified the best in science writing: explanations that ordinary readers could understand, claims grounded in meticulous research that is (from a rational standpoint) unimpeachable, and, always, language that soars.

It was a disaster for the chemical industry. To mention one company, Monsanto: it earned $10 million from DDT sales in 1940, but by 1950 those sales had reached $100 million, and the sky was the limit. Rachel Carson threatened all of that. The industry wasn’t going to take it sitting down. It—and its crony scientists—came after her from all sides. Some targeted the fact she was a woman and this somehow disqualified her from doing legitimate science. She’s a “bunny hugger,” a bleeding-heart sentimentalist prone to “hysteria.” She’s a “fanatical defender of the cult of the balance of nature.”

Other attacks portrayed her as anti-progress and anti-American. One chemical industry scientist, Robert White Stevens, wrote, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” The general counsel for another chemical company suggested that Carson was a front for “sinister influences” intent on restricting pesticide use in order to reduce American food supplies to the levels of the Eastern bloc. A former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture was quoted as saying that because she was unmarried despite being physically attractive, she was “probably a Communist.”

At one point, the chemical industry commissioned a book called A Desolate Year, which imagined the horrors of life without chemicals (which is something Rachel Carson never called for). In other words, on top of smearing her gender, her patriotism, and her credibility, the chemical industry counter-attack also spread outright lies and misinformation….

Now, to be fair, this chemical industry bombast was not purely a matter of wanting to preserve profit margins. It wasn’t just sheer cynicism at work. To be fair, we can also say that it expressed the genuine shock of folks who lived in a 1950s’ kind of world who were hearing something completely new. Author Margaret Atwood puts it like this: “It was like being told that orange juice – then being proclaimed as the sunshine key to ultra-health – was actually poisoning you.” She says, “The general public believed the pitch: the stuff [DDT] was safe for people, unless you drank it. One of the delights of our 40s childhood was to be allowed to wield the Flit gun – a spray pump with a barrel containing a DDT preparation that did indeed slay any insect you sprayed with it. We kids breathed in clouds of it as we stalked around assassinating houseflies and squirting each other for a joke.” Atwood goes on to say, “Such carefree attitudes towards the new chemicals were common throughout the next decade. When I worked as a camp counsellor in the late 50s, the premises were routinely fogged for mosquitoes, as were campgrounds and whole towns in many parts of the world. After the fogging, rabbits would appear, running around in circles, jerking spasmodically, then falling over. Might it be the pesticides? Surely not.”

It was a 1950s’ kind of world. People generally trusted institutions like the government and industry. The American way of life was, without question, good and right. Scientists in their white coats were creating new technologies and new innovations and it was always progress, it was always the opposite of ignorance and superstition, it was always good. So—who did Rachel Carson think she was, impugning the reputation of the chemical industry which was one of those institutions that people with their 1950s mindset just trusted? How dare she? And how dare she criticize the technological progress that was “better living through chemistry?”

But above all, the 1950s mindset saw nature as a thing to be used as humanity saw fit. It did not matter what writers like Henry David Thoreau said to the contrary; their vision was way woo woo for the 1950s. Nature was to be tamed, subdued, exploited—and even as this might create ugliness and chaos, well, that ugliness and chaos stays out there. The human realm is a higher order realm, set apart, and we can breathe in clouds of DDT as much as we want and we are going to be just fine. So—what’s with Rachel Carson and all the talk about ecology, interrelationships, interdependence?

“It was like being told that orange juice … was actually poisoning you.” The message of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was as shocking and as powerful as anything the old Hebrew prophets might have preached.

But the message was received—despite the chemical industry’s blunt force counterattack. People heard her. The media picked it up. Public pressure forced Congress to review pesticide use. Congressional and White House studies confirmed Rachel Carson’s findings. Tragically, soon after Silent Spring came out, she died of cancer. But her legacy kept on. Her vision of the interdependent web of all existence became contagious; for increasing numbers of people the paradigm shifted and you couldn’t go back to that old mindset according to which nature is over there and you are here. We are knit together, we are indivisible, we are one.

The vision took institutional form, for the sake of getting things done. In 1967, the Environmental Defense Fund formed, in reaction to the DDT problem. In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency began operations, and we had our first ever Earth Day. In 1972, DDT was banned and a Clean Water Act was passed. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed. When people talk about the modern environmental movement, this is it. And Rachel Carson started it.

Once, naturalist Sir David Attenborough was asked which book, other than the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, had changed the scientific world the most. His answer was Silent Spring.

Then there’s a cartoon from the 1960s, portraying a praying mantis with its front legs folded up, praying, saying “God bless momma and poppa…and Rachel Carson!”

I would even argue that without her, we don’t have our Seventh Principle of the Interdependent Web of All Existence. I’ve always been curious why it took so long for UUs to take a corporate stand on the issue, which we did at a General Assembly in 1984. I think it’s because, in the early 1960s, when we adopted the Six Principles, we were not unaffected by the 1950s mindset and the environment had not yet become the priority that it is now. But Rachel Carson changed everything. Her spirit is in our 7th Principle words. Her spirit lives on.

And now our calling is to carry this spirit forward. She once wrote, “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind — that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.” This is our legacy too. The environmental movement needs to keep moving, through Paris but past Paris and beyond.

In our day and time, part of that has to do with seeing climate change denial and post-truth politics as a kind of DDT pesticide in its own right. The effects of denial and misinformation pollute our information environment as much as real DDT does to the physical environment. When Ted Cruz says that climate change is a “perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big-government politician who wants more power,” and a lie like that goes unchecked, it pollutes innocent minds, minds who take up the cause. “Like the constant dripping of water that in turn wears away the hardest stone,” says Rachel Carson, “this birth-to death contact with dangerous chemicals may in the end prove disastrous…. No person is immune to contact with this spreading contamination.”

I call for a return to truth. No more post-truth. Did you know that in 1994, when Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House, one of his first acts was to get rid of the highly professional, nonpartisan Office of Technology Assessment, which housed Congress’ scientists whose job it was to inform lawmakers and adjudicate differences based on scientific fact and data? Norm Ornstein talks about this in his recent article in The Atlantic, entitled “The Eight Causes of Trumpism.” He writes, “The elimination of OTA was the death knell for nonpartisan respect for science in the political arena, both changing the debate and discourse on issues like climate change, and also helping [bring] in the contemporary era of “truthiness,” in which repeated assertion trumps facts.”

These days, environmentalism can’t forget that information is a part of the environment too, and when we pollute it and pollute it and pollute it, it’s a nightmare springtime where no birds sing, it’s silent as death…. We must fight to keep it clean. We must find ways to hold people accountable for what they say.

The environmental movement needs to keep moving.

It moves through our own personal commitments to live sustainably. It moves through collective commitments to live sustainably.

And it moves through continued hopefulness.

Silent Spring teaches us that it’s not too late. By the time that book came out, the dispersal of pesticide through ecosystems was far and wide. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and other bird populations were driven to the brink of extinction. No one could be sure if any degree of action would make things better. But people acted anyway. Regulations were put into place. Resolve led to innovation. New breeding methods were pioneered. “In the mid-1960s,” says National Geographic, “fewer than 500 nesting pairs of bald eagles existed in the continental U.S.; today, thanks to the DDT ban and other conservation efforts, some 10,000 pairs of bald eagles inhabit the Lower 48—that’s a 20-fold population increase in just four decades!”

No matter how desperate things seem, it’s not too late.

Like the praying mantis says: “God bless momma and poppa…and Rachel Carson!”

The person who walks amidst the songs of birds
and thinks only of what he will have for dinner
hears–but does not really hear.

People who hear the sound of the Shofar
and do not feel the need to change their ways
hear–but do not really hear.

As the new year begins,
strengthen our ability to hear.

That’s the prime purpose of holy days. People will do with them what they will. But if we engage holy days as they want to be engaged, our ability to hear what needs to be heard is strengthened. That’s what the piercing sound of the shofar is about. And the sweetness of apples dipped in honey. And also the annual re-telling of the Torah story of Sarah giving birth to Isaac.

Now, you would think that the Torah story to be retold on Rosh Hashanah would be the one from Genesis, the creation story, majestic with lines like, “And God said, let there be light…” Brilliant with refrain after refrain of, “And God saw that it was good.” Yet Rosh Hashanah, even as it commemorates the birthday of the world, puts particular and special emphasis on the birthday of the HUMAN world, the birthday of HISTORY, which is what Sarah’s giving birth to Isaac is about. So that’s the Bible story that gets the annual re-telling this time of year…

The context is this: Long after the Flood and Noah, God spoke to a faithful man named Abram and said, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.”

I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.

Abram was supposed to have been 75 years old when God said all this to him, and God kept on saying it, in one place and then in another, throughout his and Sarai’s long journey. But despite all the assurances, Sarai—equally aged—remained infertile. The infertility wouldn’t budge.

It goes on like this for around 25 years! And then look who steps into their lives again: God. Like a broken record, God repeats the promise—and to make the deal even more earnest he renames Sarai Sarah and Abram Abraham, names we know them better by today. “This is my covenant to you,“ God intones… “This is my covenant to you…”

Abraham counters with silent laughter. After all the long years and all the promises, what else could he do? As the Bible puts it: “Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, ‘Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’” How possibly can the birth of anything new come from parents so completely worn out?

This story of promise and perplexity continues with the appearance, one day, of three visitors near Abraham’s tent. It’s hot outside, and Abraham is moved by the sacred law of hospitality to refresh the visitors with food and drink and rest. The dialogue between them, as the Bible captures it, appears a bit confused, since sometimes it seems to be conversation between Abraham and human beings and other times it seems to be Abraham and the Lord talking together. Here’s what we read in the Torah:

“Where is your wife Sarah?” the visitors asked Abraham.

“There, in the tent,” he said.

Then the LORD said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”

Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed out loud as she thought, “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?”

Then the LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the LORD? I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.”

Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.”

But the LORD said, “Yes, you did laugh.”

And that’s the story from the Torah.

At this point you may be asking why the LORD is giving Sarah such a hard time about laughing when Abraham laughed too. Feels just a little patriarchal … but, on the other hand, Abraham’s laughter was way more modest than Sarah’s. Nothing modest about Sarah’s laughter at all. It was loud enough to be heard outside of the tent and, as I hear it in my imagination, it’s buzz-saw loud, it’s snorted-out loud, it’s uppity loud, it’s no-holds-barred loud, it’s loud in a way that basically thumbs the nose at the God of all creation….

HAH!

And why not? It’s Sarah’s body that’s at issue here, and she gets to have a clear opinion about that. It’s her body! She lives with it every day and knows it intimately. So she is downright skeptical. The whole idea of her worn out, infertile flesh giving birth is a cruel joke. She’s just in despair and bone-tired of all the promises she’d heard, yada yada yada, over all the long years….

And here’s where the story might touch our own. Ask yourself: Is there something happening in your life right now that feels just like Sarah’s body, and you’re seeing things just as Sarah saw them? Overlay the story on your life: is there resonance? Can you relate?

Promises are set before us. Promises that justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Promises of happiness and wellbeing in our families. Promises that we can be happy and healthy in our own lives. Rosh Hashanah itself is one of these promises, that hope can be reborn to us in the new year! But we have heard all the promises before, and we well know all the times the promises didn’t come true. We also well know how we can be our own worst enemies. The renewal doesn’t come because we don’t do the soul searching necessary to make way for it. We are not honest with ourselves. In a time for truth, we do not ask ourselves hard questions.

This is why, at the thought of new birth–at the thought of renewal in a new year—all we might want to do is laugh. Just like Sarah. Be buzz-saw loud, snort-it-out loud, uppity loud, no-holds-barred loud, just like her. And say, in a way that fits our own unique situation, “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?”

Give me a great big Sarah laugh, right now!

[HAH!]

Yet we look ahead with hope,
giving thanks for the daily miracle of renewal,
for the promise of good to come.

Rosh Hashanah wants to strengthen our capacity to hear our inner Sarah—and then to hear beyond that, to the renewal that did and does happen against all odds. Don’t get me wrong. I love Sarah. I am Sarah, and so are we all. All that grit, all that spunk. Keeps us grounded. Keeps us real. But don’t stop there. We must never forget how the story ends for Sarah, and how it can end for us…

Years of infertility—year after grinding, hopeless year—can’t stop the miracle. God makes the seemingly infertile fertile. Isaac is born. And through him comes an entire nation, a great nation. And even if the story never really happened as told, but is a sheer mythology of the race, still, the greatness of Israel is real. The greatness of the Jewish spirit. Here and now, we celebrate it. The birthday of a people and a history, against all odds.

If Isaac’s birth means anything, that’s it.

Clearly, we don’t have the benefit or the challenge of Abraham’s God stepping directly into our stories, visiting our tents for food and drink and rest. But for those of us who are God-believers of some sort, we know that God is an ever-present source of renewal that is always available to tap into if only we stop long enough to focus and to listen. And for all of us, God-believer or not, we are healed and made whole by the power of friendship, the energy of compassion and kindness, the grace of the world’s beauty, the wisdom of teachers around us and those who have gone before us, the gifts of traditions like Judaism which our precious Unitarian Universalist religion opens us up to.

Rosh Hashanah says, new birth can happen. What that’s going to look like, exactly, may very well end up very different from what’s expected. This is something important to acknowledge. A dear friend puts it like this: the universe is a fantastic gift giver but a terrible, terrible gift wrapper….

Right now, life might feel as dry and infertile as Sarah’s body; and your mind might be just as jaded and cynical and despairing as hers. But that’s how renewal begins, in the places which feel the most impossibly stuck. So stay in the game. Stay curious about what happens next. Stay patient for the time when the birth will happen, and the child’s cry will pierce the deadening silence, and you will have just come through the valley of the shadow of death, and you will enter into sweetness, the very life of life, the life that is more than you could have ever imagined.

That’s where you will be! Be patient for it. Believe.

The name “Isaac”: do you know what it literally means? It literally means “Laughter.” Laughter that begins in surprise, laughter that turns cynical and buzz-saw loud, laughter that ends up sweet and joy-filled and deep.

May the laughter of Isaac be yours and mine and everyone’s.

L’shana tovah!

This morning we begin with an insight from writer Jeremy Dowsett that stems from his experience as a bicyclist. He rides a bike, and that’s taught him something. “Sometimes it’s dangerous for me,” he says, “because people in cars are just blatantly [rude]. If I am in the road—where I legally belong—people will yell at me to get on the sidewalk. If I am on the sidewalk—which is sometimes the safest place to be—people will yell at me to get on the road. People in cars think it’s funny to roll down their window and yell something right when they get beside me. Or to splash me on purpose.”

He continues, “Now most people in cars are not intentionally aggressive toward me. But even if all the jerks had their licenses revoked tomorrow, the road would still be a dangerous place for me. Because the whole transportation infrastructure privileges the automobile. It is born out of a history rooted in the auto industry that took for granted that everyone should use a car as their mode of transportation. It was not built to be convenient or economical or safe for me.”

“And so people in cars—nice, non-aggressive people—put me in danger all the time because they see the road from the privileged perspective of a car. E.g., I ride on the right side of the right lane. Some people fail to change lanes to pass me (as they would for another car) or even give me a wide berth. Some people fly by just inches from me not realizing how scary/dangerous that is for me (like if I were to swerve to miss some roadkill just as they pass). These folks aren’t aggressive or hostile to-ward me, but they don’t realize that a pothole or a build up of gravel or a broken bottle, which they haven’t given me enough room to avoid–because in a car they don’t need to be aware of these things–could send me flying from my bike or cost me a bent rim or a flat tire.”

How many of you ride a bike and can immediately relate? How many of you don’t ride a bike and this is all news to you?

But Jeremy Dowsett’s main point goes way beyond this.

“I can imagine,” he says, “that for people of color, life in a white-majority context feels a bit like being on a bicycle in midst of traffic. They have the right to be on the road, and laws on the books to make it equitable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are on a bike in a world made for cars. Experiencing this when I’m on my bike in traffic has helped me to understand what privilege talk is really about.”

Above all, what white privilege talk is about is NOT shaming anyone. It’s NOT about saying anyone is bad. It’s simply about understanding why James Baldwin could write, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time.” It’s also about understanding why what James Baldwin wrote might thoroughly shake up nice, non-aggressive whites—catch them completely off guard; or why we’ve seen “Black Lives Matter” banners around the country defaced—the word “Black” cut out and replaced by the word “All.”

White privilege talk is simply about UNDERSTANDING. There is a systemic imbalance. To have to proclaim that Black Lives Matter says something very bad about the state of our world.

And it’s just unacceptable.

And we’ve got to keep talking.

Scientist and author Margaret Wheatley says, “I’ve seen that there’s no more powerful way to initiate significant change than to convene a conversation. When a community of people discovers that they share a concern, change begins. There is no power equal to a community discovering what it cares about.”

Change happens through conversation. People share stories and memories and hopes. Ideas meander and circle and explore. Some folks are way ahead of the curve; they’re ready to rush ahead yesterday. But if the engine unhooks from the train cars, guess where the train is going? Nowhere.

An African proverb says it like this: you want to go fast, go alone. You want to go go far, go deep, go broad, go total—go together.

That’s what I want to talk about today. Share some thoughts about our “go far, go together” strategy this program year regarding our Great Journey into antiracism, anti-oppression, and multiculturalism.

And I’ll begin with why this is a congregational priority—why your Board voted to give it top priority, and why I’m right there with them.

Part of it is our Unitarian Universalist theology. Who we are, what we stand for.

Take our historic affirmation that everyone belongs to Love and no one should be left out, neither in the now or for eternity. It means that we have to talk about race. Kids are not colorblind. Adults not talking about something that is so obvious means it’s bad. That’s how kids interpret the silence. When they don’t see different races interacting and getting along—when they are familiar with only one race (theirs)—the default conclusion is, I can’t trust people who have a different skin color. Not good. Stay away.

This is not where we want things to be—as New York Magazine writer Lisa Miller says, “a nation of fellow citizens who are foreigners to each other, mute xenophobes whose hearts rush to their throats when a racially charged comment or conflict, or even curiosity, arises.” But this is where things go unless we take a stand. Unless we become the change we wish to see in the world.

Unless we are rigorously honest with ourselves about how Unitarian Universalist congregations have been, historically, white spaces. Again, I say this not to condemn but simply to say that the automobile is privileged here, and if you ride a bike, it’s harder going for you.

It’s in the fabric of our community. Communication style, sense of time, approach to knowing. In Unitarian Universalist congregations, public communication generally needs to be toned down and not emotional if it’s to be taken seriously; physical gestures need to be in medium range and not large or frequent; money talk needs to be toned down or else it’s considered completely gauche; time needs to be saved and conserved, everything needs to be on time and God forbid you go over; the way to truth needs to emphasize the rational and the cerebral or it’s a suspicious way.

Our congregations are endlessly fascinating by how they invariably reproduce the New England culture of the ancestors—the William Ellery Channings, the Ralph Waldo Emersons—even though New England might be far removed geographically and historically…

But again and again, I’m saying all this not to shame or blame. Just to make it very clear that, however lovely New England congregationalism might be, it leaves a lot of people out. People who love the Seven Principles, but you have to check your race and ethnicity at the door in order to come in.

It’s a betrayal of our history as a freedom people. We have always sought out the ways of freedom. 2000 years ago, our people didn’t believe that Jesus was God; they believed in a direct free connection without any intermediary. 1500 years ago, our people didn’t believe that church traditions were equivalent with God; they believed that the freedom way to the Source was the Bible alone. 200 years ago, our people didn’t believe that Christianity with its Bible was the only way to the Sacred; they believed that the freedom way to truth could be found in all the religions of the world. And now, right now, we need to take a stand and say that European American culture—specifically the Yankee variety—is not the only form of freedom through which to reach out and touch God; there are lots of other ways to reach out and touch God, too.

We want this new reach of freedom. We want it for ourselves and we want it for all the people who love Unitarian Universalism’s Seven Principles and who love what we stand for but they come into our midst and realize, to their sadness and dismay, that they have to give up who they are in order to fit in.

That is not right.

The betrayal is especially deep when we think about the history of this specific Unitarian Universalist congregation. How, in the early 1950s, it died and was born again in the cleansing fires of racial integration. How we protested lunch counter segregationism at Rich’s Department Store. Clashes with the Ku Klux Klan. People losing friends and jobs because they were Unitarian Universalists and affirmed that EVERYONE has inherent worth and dignity. Dr. King in our pulpit, preaching his Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution message. The intentionally African American Unitarian Universalist church we helped plant—Thurman Hamer Ellington Church. Our many years of the Hope-Hill School Project. How, since I begin my ministry here, our way of worship has diversified beyond the standard Unitarian Universalist New England style and has explored other styles and ways … and it feels good.

Can I hear an AMEN?

Our UUCA history positively cries out that this is a priority for us. Asking ourselves who we really are, what our hearts break for here and now, so that, as a community, we can understand how to be the best Beloved Community we can be.

So what will this look like?

Our “go far, go together” strategy will be based on the “Taking A Public Stand Policy” that our Board approved back in January, with ultimate authorization coming from the congregation. In accordance with that process, UUCA’s Inclusivity Team, EnterCulture, will draft a resolution that voices commitment to antiracism, anti-oppression, and multiculturalism and will submit it to the congregation in the form of a petition. If at least 15% of the congregation signs, then EnterCulture will share the results with the Board, and, once the Board validates the results, the whole process moves into a second phase, which is to last no longer than 90 days. It will be 90 days of events and activities of all sorts that will turn UUCA into the intentional learning space that the General Assembly Black Lives Matter Resolution calls for. After the 90 days, the entire congregation at an official meeting will vote to approve taking a collective stand, or not. I’m recommending that things be timed so that the vote takes place at our regular May meeting time. May 2016.

So this is the year. I hope your ears are perked up. Last year it was plenty of sermons and the EnterCulture workshops and our Remembering Selma event, but this year we are asking for dedicated par-ticipation from everyone—a Great Journey.

And I have some hopes for this I want to share.

One is suggested by a remarkable finding reported in National Geographic late last year. “A study of brain activity at the University of Colorado at Boulder showed that subjects register race in about one-tenth of a second, even before they discern gender.” I mention this simply to underscore the primal quality of what we’re dealing with. Any work we do with it gets to the bottom of things, goes deep. We already know that race intersects with class and gender and all sorts of other social identities, and this is certainly one way talking about race gets to the bottom of things. But it’s also an existential botom we dive into. The muck and mud of our humanity….

So I hope we enter into our congregational conversations knowing this, how deep the work is.

Which immediately suggests my second hope: that the character of our conversations is different from what we’d experience in an ethics class or a social policy class. My hope is that we resist this intellectualization of the topic, because it skates above the real issues which are more about the lived experience of race, the reflexive reactions to difference that we all experience: fear, disgust, mistrust, anxiety but also curiosity, eagerness, attraction, admiration. If our conversations can get to this level, that’s when they truly become life-changing.

If we can do this, then something else I hope is that we can live up to our covenantal promises to eachother, to love and respect each other even though we are going to hear things coming out of our mouths that might be Donald Trump worthy. Which is inevitable when the material at hand is the irrational goopy stuff of our reflexive reactions to difference.

And not just that, but also because of all the pain that surrounds the topic. To people who are privileged, equity can feel like oppression and so they say things…. They want to insist that All Lives Matter is the better mantra. They wonder why we have such a thing as Gay Pride Month but what about Straight Pride Month? What about that? And to this, the folks who experience real systemic oppression say things….

Like New York Times writer Charles Blow, who says, “some immunity must be granted. Assuming that the conversational engagement is honest and earnest, we must be able to hear and say things that some might find offensive as we stumble toward interpersonal empathy and understanding.”

I hope, I hope, I hope.

Above all, I hope that we achieve much more than a majority of yes votes or even a supermajority on our collective resolution to go deeper into the work of anti-racism, anti-oppression, and multiculturalism. Because all that a majority or supermajority vote does for us as a democratic people is open the door. But we could step through gingerly, cautiously, with only a “lowest common denominator” mentality that, in the end, changes nothing. That’s not the Great Journey I hope for us. Of course, we’re wanting a majority of yes votes in May 2016 to open the door, but then let’s combine that with a congregation-wide clarity of purpose that compels us to jump through. A sense of purpose that is so clear that we know who we are, we jump through that door singing and laughing and alive and willing to take risks.

That’s what I hope we accomplish through our Great Journey.

Go far, go together.

Face down the steel and concrete infrastructure of the automobile complex and refuse despair, refuse defeat, and get to work.

Never stop affirming that everyone belongs to love, and no one is left out.

Did you know that, at the heart of Selma, Alabama is a big monument to Dr. King? It memorializes the historic March to Birmingham. But on it we read, “I HAD a Dream.”

He HAD a Dream—as if it’s all but past tense? Something lost?

I say nothing about the Dream is past tense or lost, if we’re living into it now and resolve never to stop living into it.

He HAS a Dream, and so do we.

The Power of Myth features some of Joseph Campbell’s most profound sayings about the hero’s journey. One of them is this: “A hero is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself. That’s the central message of the myth. You as you know yourself are not the final term of your being.”

That is so good. Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi agrees and says it this way: “One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.”

What’s exciting for me this morning is to see this idea about the hero literally encoded in our Seven Unitarian Universalist Principles, especially in the way they are numbered and laid out. Listen:

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Every Principle beyond the First represents a bigger thing and a something greater that the hero gives himself or herself to. If “The inherent worth and dignity of every person” is ME, then “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations” is YOU, and “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations” is US, “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large” is the NATION, “The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all” is the WORLD, and, finally, “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part” is the ALL.

From ME to YOU to US to NATION to WORLD to ALL.

That is our Unitarian Universalist hero journey.

And that’s what I want to talk about today—what needs to be in our backpacks to help us stay on track with the task of giving ourselves to increasingly bigger and greater things. What needs to be in there to help us stay focused and fight forgetfulness, fight complacency.

As a side note: if you are listening carefully and you know your Seven Principles, you are wondering where the Fourth Principle of the “Free and responsible search for truth and meaning” fits in. I’ll explain in a bit. You’ll see.

So: what’s in our Unitarian Universalist backpack?

The first thing is a map of the hero’s journey, its basic phases. Call to adventure, threshold, challenges and temptations, transformation, return. Think Odysseus, think Bilbo Baggins, think Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Katniss Everdeen. The map is there in our Unitarian Universalist backpack to remind us that inherent worth and dignity is fundamentally dynamic in nature. It’s not just some kind of lumpish thing. It’s energy, it wants to move from potential to actual, it ‘s got places to go and things to do!

It means that when the Principles tell us to “affirm and promote,” what we’re really being asked to do is take the map out of the backpack and, for each individual, including ourselves, find out where they are in their hero’s journey. Every individual is on that map, somewhere. Odysseus in process, Harry Potter in process. That’s the reality of every individual. That’s the reality of ME.

But now, what happens when the focus shifts to that of the other, to YOU? Here is where we move to a slightly “bigger” thing, and what helps us do that is the next item in our backpack:

It’s a travel-sized version of Monopoly. Pull that out of your backpack and start playing, and all sorts of learnings related to justice, equity, and compassion in human relationships start to unfold. For one thing, games in general are great teachers of the arts of civilization. Play can provide a safe outlet for releasing aggressive impulses. Play teaches people how to follow rules. Play teaches people how to take turns. You want kids to learn justice, equity, and compassion? Have them play games.

I remember playing games with my older brother Rob. Not Monopoly, but chess. Once, he got so frustrated, he swept the entire board with his arm and sent all our pieces flying. I was outraged! Mostly because I was finally going to beat him. Victory was taken from me—a thing I deserved! And when you don’t get what you deserve—that’s injustice.

But I’m recommending not a chess set but Monopoly for our Unitarian Universalist backpack precisely because so much of justice, equity, and compassion relate to privilege and oppression. The haves and the have nots. You can learn a lot about justice if you play the game like it gets played in real life. Different rules for different players. Player #1 receives $350 for passing Go (well above the standard $200) and is permitted to buy houses and hotels two for one. Player #2 has rules like “You can only move half the amount you roll” and “You can only buy property priced less than $150.” Player #3 has rules such as “You will go directly to jail for rolling a number higher than 7—meaning that he’s in jail most of the time, or police tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Player #4 is the only one who gets to play by the actual rules in the rulebook and his privilege—the privilege of not being interfered with—is invisible to him….

If the ME—the individual—is on a hero’s journey, then surely the heroic thing to do when ME meets YOU is to play a fair game. Repair the one that’s rigged and wrong.

But this is a daunting task, so, happily, ME meets YOU is not all there is to it.

The next thing we pull out of the backpack is this picture. It reminds us that there’s no way to get to the beauty of a rainbow if you are but one color standing alone. A rainbow is way more than just the sum of parts. If the separate colors can learn how to stand together, what an amazing thing comes to life!

It’s the power of community, the power of WE which is larger than just ME and YOU. “We build on foundations we did not lay,” says the Rev. Peter Raible:

We warm ourselves by fires we did not light
We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant
We drink from wells we did not dig
We profit from persons we did not know

This is as it should be.
Together we are more than any one person could be.
Together we can build across the generations.
Together we can renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold.
Together we can heed the call to a ministry of care and justice.

ME and YOU are just not enough. Each of us needs to plug into the power of US in order to keep the hero journey going. One hero journey killer for sure is shame, which absolutely depends on people thinking they are alone. But, says shame researcher Brene Brown, “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.” Love destroys shame. Together we ARE more than any one person can be. Together we CAN renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold…

But now I’d ask you to shift gears and listen very carefully to these quotes from a famous piece of hero literature:

1.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

2.
“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.”

“I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

3.
“Sorry! I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not Today. Good morning! But please come to tea -any time you like! Why not tomorrow? Good bye!”

That’s the voice of Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit. And right here is demonstrated the shadow side of US. Communities can hunker down in their hobbit holes and get complacent. Groupthink can take over. “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures.” Why search for truth and meaning when it’s already in our possession? We don’t know that we don’t know.

Which is exactly when we want to pull this out of our Unitarian Universalist backpack:

It’s a Gandalf action figure. Everyone needs one in their backpack. Henry David Thoreau, our great spiritual ancestor, knew this. He once said, “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake” and he sounded the alarm again and again because he knew that sleepwalking through life is a constant temptation—especially when we are sleepwalking in unison, sleepwalking in community. “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures.”

But along comes Gandalf. Gandalf won’t allow for complacency. Gandalf plucks us from our cozy home and plunges us into adventures. We learn that true JUSTICE is way more than JUST US. We learn that “the road runs ever on,” towards higher levels of knowing and being…

And so we pull this next item out of our Unitarian Universalist backpacks:

It’s another action figure: a John Stewart action figure.

The fact is, ME and YOU and US don’t live hermetically sealed off from our NATION. Where the NATION goes, we go. And so we have to pay attention to what’s happening in our democracy. We have to learn citizenship that makes a difference. And we have to do it in this day and age, in which we see an ascendency of truthiness and one schlocky pundit after another whose mantra is, basically, “Truth is that which can be boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.” “There is,” said Isaac Asimov, “a cult of ignorance in the United States… The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Therefore, What Would John Stewart do? He is no patron saint of liberal smugness. Again and again he called out liberals as well as conservatives. When his mind reached out to another point of view and discovered it devoid of anything to satisfy a reasonable person—anything at all—well, out came his hilarious and delicious irony. Made us laugh for five seconds and then think for fifteen minutes.

If truthiness is Voldemort, then John Stewart is Harry Potter, and he shows us a way to re-engage the political process and stay engaged….

But there are two more items in our Unitarian Universalist backpack. The next is …

… a vial of water. Water reminds us of a level of being that is far greater than ME or YOU or US or the NATION. We all come from water: not just as mammals who float in amniotic fluid as we are readied for birth; not just as species on a planet where all life began in the ocean; but also as beings who (in the here and now) simply cannot survive unless there is drinkable water to drink. Water is a symbol that reminds us of a reality that transcends all divisions and unites us all in one human family.

And yet, almost three-quarters of a billion people around the world lack clean drinking water. The United Nations has reported that more people now die from contaminated water than from all forms of violence. The human right to water—access to safe, sufficient, and affordable water for everyone—is more important than ever.

And as I say this, it feels like we are David facing down Goliath, or Odysseus in battle with the Cyclops….

How can communities of US change a complex system like the WORLD?

But it’s said that “The most common way people give up their power is thinking they don’t have any” (Alice Walker). It’s said that “Nothing great was ever achieved by being realistic” (Tom Venuto).

Death Stars HAVE been known to blow up…

And now, the last item in our Unitarian Universalist backpack:

It’s a prism. A prism demonstrates that appearances are deceptive where light is concerned, and reveals an underlying harmony and beauty. So, too, can we heroes accomplish our largest task of all and give ourselves to the ALL. Bring to the ALL a mind that operates like a prism. Look beneath and beyond surface appearances, to the reality. Align ourselves with that reality, despite appearances.

Years ago, I sat in a darkened theater and it was the start of the movie and these are the words that scrolled down the screen:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy…

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … and also right here and now. No evil Galactic Empire per se, or Death Star, but agents of evil every bit as bad. And ME and YOU and US and the NATION and the WORLD are racing and rushing around, just like Princess Leia. But I am struck by the movie’s ultimate message that what really brings healing to the universe at all levels is the hero’s discovery of the ALL. First Obi Wan Kenobi and then Yoda teach Luke Skywalker to bring the prism of his mind to reality and what is revealed is The Force. Says Yoda, “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.”

“Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part” is not just a nice sentiment. It wants to make us nothing less than Jedi Knights who serve a vision of the Force and out of this heal the WORLD, the NATION, the community of US, YOU and ME. Doesn’t matter what your size is!

That’s what’s in our Unitarian Universalist backpack. Seven items representing Seven Principles all adding up to a hero’s journey through life. “Follow your bliss,” says Joseph Campbell, and here are the people of your bliss. Here is the track you have been waiting for. “Follow your bliss,” he says, “and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Right here and right now.

Wedding Day at UUCA was a holy time. Together with other Atlanta-area Unitarian Universalist ministers, I officiated the marriage ceremony of six same-sex couples. What follows is the script that I wrote for the beautiful occasion.

OPENING WORDS Rev. Makar

It is written that the greatest of all things—the most wonderful experience in the world—is love. Into your lives has entered a deep and nurturing love, and you have asked us as Unitarian Universalist ministers to help you celebrate and affirm that love by joining you together in marriage.

The ceremony in which we are all now participating is a bold, even revolutionary act. Even as the Supreme Court has recognized the validity and worth of the marriages that we are today celebrating and affirming, many are still openly or covertly hostile to LGBTQ couples who decide to commit their lives to one another. We pray for their hearts. We pray that the same kind of love that brings us here today breaks open their hearts, and brings them to a greater sense of the possibilities of life.

The journey of true equality and justice is ongoing. More work is to be done. But we will not let the continuing need to save the world interfere with our purpose here and now of savoring this amazing, sweet moment.

With Melissa Etheridge, we say today:

Mother, tell your children
Be quick, you must be strong
Life is full of wonder
Love is never wrong
Remember how they taught you
How much of it was fear
Refuse to hand it down
The legacy stops here

Let us prepare our spirits for rejoicing! Let us do that with bubbles, and I’m going to ask the LGBTQ folks among us to blow some bubbles…. Just a little bit—-just a preview of the BIG bubble blast waiting for us at the end of the service, when we’ll all get to it…

[bubbles]

We give thanks for all those who have shared love and wisdom with us, and have renewed our faith in the power of love, which holds us and nurtures us and makes us one in spite of time, death, and the space between the stars.

We light this chalice with reverence for that spirit of love and wholeness.

CHALICE LIGHTING

Chalice to be lit by Joetta Prost and Kathy Shell

PRAYER Rev. Taddeo

Let us pray.

Spirit of Life, God of Love….

We pray for the couples in this room,
those whose marriage vows made elsewhere now have national recognition
and those who will be entering into sacred matrimony, in our midst.
May they live according to their promises, each to the other.
May they create a marriage that is filled with joy and tenderness.

Inspire them to enter into the deepest mysteries and wonders of love
and therein create a safe haven in their hearts for each other.
Strengthen them to know the peace
that comes from truly being received
and known and accepted by another.

May their love for each other
enrich them as individuals
and provide a safe and loving environment
for the family they are creating through this union.
We pray that they find the balance and harmony
of their individuality and their shared life.
Guide them and bless them, Beloved,
that they may know that there is nothing more priceless
than the gift of loving one another
as they journey through life side by side.

We also know that they do not love in a vacuum.
Let their love be strong in a world that can at times feel unsafe.
Soften the hearts of those who misunderstand, or lack compassion, or hate.
Be with this nation as it journeys towards greater equality and justice.
Let each of hearing these words find ways to be the change we wish to see….

Spirit of Life, God of Love, we feel your presence in this room, in our hearts.
Bless these couples to be married today.
We also ask for a blessing of renewal and devotion
for those already married or in committed relationships.
May we comfort each other with our love today and every day.

God bless us all.

Amen….

REMEMBRANCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Rev. Teague

At this time, we honor the memory of all those leaders and heroes
who have made moments like this possible.
Heros like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon
Harvey Milk
Sylvia Rivera
Bayard Rustin
Harry Hay—
Heros of the larger movement in quest of equality and justice
like the 200 courageous same-sex couples and their families – the plaintiffs in cases all over the country – who stood up for marriage equality and played a defining role in the historic Supreme Court decision on the freedom to marry.

We take a moment of silence now in honor of them….

[pause]

We also take this moment to remember and honor
The heros we have known close at hand,
Family and friends who have nurtured us
And helped bring us to this moment in time…
We take another moment of silence to honor them…

[pause]

These are the ones who have taught us how to love.
These are the ones who have planted a seed of courage, and hope, and faith.
We go forward in our lives with gratitude.

RESPONSIVE READING Rev. Keller

Minister: And now, please join me for the responsive reading in your order of service.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.

Congregation: And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

Minister: If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Congregation: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth.

Minister: It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Prophecies will come to an end. Tongues will cease. Knowledge will come to an end. We know in part, we prophesy in part. But when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

Congregation: When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child;

Minister: When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. Now, we see in a mirror, in a riddle.

Congregation: Then we will see face to face. Now I know in part. Then I will know fully.

Minister: Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

HYMN

“Standing on the Side of Love”

READING Rev. Davis

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has written:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

It is so ordered, and therefore–we are here celebrating!

MUSIC

HOMILY Rev. Makar

Love is not some accident we fall into.
If we learn to grow in love, then there is the possibility
that our tomorrows will be even more joyous and more life-nourishing and inspiring.
Love has the capacity for that magic.
Perhaps only love has such capacity.

We are saying YES to love today, and as we do so,
we listen carefully to the wisdom of the Bible writer
who spoke about gifts of the spirit
in our responsive reading from a moment ago.
Faith, hope, and love.

Marriage is indeed an act of FAITH.
To enter into union with another requires trust and confidence,
in yourself, and in your beloved.
The risk is that of vulnerability.
The risk is letting the other glimpse you in your humanity.
There is no guarantee that being married will make your lives easier;
marriage is often very complicated,
and being married requires that you accept significant responsibilities.
There is no guarantee that marriage will make your lives happier;
when you open your heart to trust and love,
worries and sorrows may come in through the same door.

This is why the commitment to marriage must also be made in HOPE.
Hope is a great gift, if you don’t get it mixed up with romantic wishful thinking.
Hope has nothing to do with the romantic assumption
that once you are married, the two of you will live happily ever after.
A wise married couple once said:
“Marriage does not work automatically at all, it has to be learned.
Just as it is difficult to be civilized,
so it is difficult to be married.” (Muriel and A. Powell Davies)
And the poet Ranier Maria Rilke once wrote to a friend:
“To love is good too–love being difficult.
For one human being to love another,
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other is but preparation.“

Hope is what encourages us to cheerfully take up this most difficult path,
because we believe in where it’s going,
and perhaps, because we value the challenge and the joy of the journey as well.
IF all the couples here today believe that life is inherently good,
that we experience life more deeply and fully
when we can share our experience and understanding of life
with a loved and trusted partner,
THEN it makes sense to open your heart and soul to another in love and trust.
You are carrying the kind of hope that can sustain a marriage.

LOVE is the third, and the greatest gift, that the Bible writer recommends to us.
The kind of love which sustains a marriage
is a way of purposefully responding to, and believing in,
the inherent and sacred goodness that is woven through all of life,
that is kindled in each human spirit,
and which you make accessible to your partner in marriage.
Such love is rooted in mutual respect,
for each of you is created in the image of God.

As spouses, you will each have, and will continue to have, different ideas,
different hopes, and interests, different strengths, different needs.
You are each enriched, not diminished, by the different insights and perspectives
you bring to one another.
The blessing and strength of your marriage will unfold
as you grow in understanding of yourselves and of each other,
so that you can nourish each other’s true growing.
Allow your love to stimulate and challenge each other
and enlarge each other’s world.
Attend to those things that nourish and sustain your love for one another
and for life.

So may your lives, ever nourished by the gifts of faith, hope, and love,
be a blessing to all others whose lives touch yours.

DECLARATION OF SUPPORT Rev. Thickstun

I ask those of you who have gathered here today this: do you who know and care for these couples give them your blessings now as they enter into marriage, and do you promise (in the days and years ahead) to give them your deepest love, understanding, and support during both good times and bad?

If so, say “We do.”

(Congregation responds in unison)

READING Rev. Rogers

A reading from Rabindranath Tagore:

It is for the union of you and me
that there is light in the sky.
It is for the union of you and me
that the earth is decked in dusky green.

It is for the union of you and me
that night sits motionless with the world in her
arms;
dawn appears opening the eastern door
with sweet murmurs in her voice.

The boat of hope sails along on the currents of
eternity towards that union,
flowers of the ages are being gathered together
for its welcoming ritual.

It is for the union of you and me
that this heart of mine, in the garb of a bride,
has proceeded from birth to birth
upon the surface of this ever-turning world
to choose the Beloved.

MARRIAGE VOWS Rev. Makar

And now it is time to say the vows that will affirm your love. Please take each other’s hands and face each other. Listen carefully, listen soulfully, and in the end, I will ask each of you separately to affirm your vows with a single YES.

Will you have each other as equal partners?
Will you share with each other your love, honesty, caring and trust?
Will you keep each other warm and close with affection and kindness?
Will you seek to make your marriage a committed relationship in which you can each grow independently at the same time you grow together as a couple and share the many adventures of life?
Will you promise each other your heart, your mind, and your body to honor and cherish each other from this day forward?

If so, then will one partner in the couple say clearly and proudly YES

And now, will the other partner in the couple say clearly and proudly YES

RINGS/TOKENS Rev. Makar

At this time, all our couples are invited to come down to the floor. A minister will join you as you exchange rings or tokens of love and affection with each other. the minister will also offer up a private blessing on your union.

DECLARATION Rev. Makar

And now, will the congregation stand:

By the authority of Life Itself
and the state of Georgia
and the Constitution of the United States of America

By the authority of the day given to us to live
and the cycle of seasons through which our lives must pass

By the authority of the love of friends that honors and supports this loving relationship and the hurts and pain through which your lives have passed alone,

By the authority of the long and sometimes lonely struggle of our people for the freedom to love,
and by the delight and hope you have found in each other

We declare you to be married and proclaim it holy and good.
In the eyes of God and of humanity.
let all respect the threshold of your home.

Let the congregation say, AMEN.

Please be seated…

BENEDICTION Rev. Makar

“Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no loneliness for you, now there is no more loneliness. Now you are two persons but there is only one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place, to enter into the days of your togetherness, and may your days be good and long upon the earth.” (Apache prayer)

KISS AND PRESENTATION Rev. Makar

May the couples now seal their unions with a kiss.

Let me read aloud the names of the couple, say final words, and then I will ask you to raise the roof with shouts of joy and cheer—and also EVERYONE blow your bubbles….

[Names]

Family and friends, we present to you the Spirit of Love and Wholeness. It shines in the faces and forms of these children of God you see before you.

[Blow bubbles and invite the congregation to join along!]

RECESSIONAL

Once upon a time there was a famous writer named Antoine de Saint-Exupery whose country was being devoured by war and he fled to America, and there he felt helpless and lonely. Besides this, he was struggling with his marriage and also with the memory of the near-fatal crash of his airplane years earlier in the Sahara desert. A friend of his noticed his unhappiness and the agitation that seemed to possess him entirely, and she suggested that perhaps he consider writing a children’s story. Maybe that would help.

And so:

Once upon a time there was a sweet little person—a little prince—who lived far away from our planet, on an asteroid. There, in the depths of space, he was very clear about several things. One of them was the quiet pleasure of looking at the sunset, which, given the size of his asteroid, he could enjoy as many times as he liked.

He was clear on that, and he was also very clear on the need for what might be called planetary hygiene. “They sleep deep in the heart of the earth’s darkness,” the little prince says of seeds, “and some one among them is seized with the desire to awaken. Then this little seed will stretch itself and begin—timidly at first—to push a charming little sprig inoffensively upward toward the sun. If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wherever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as possible, the very first instant that one recognizes it.” Note the tone of urgency here. It’s because the bad plant he’s talking about is the baobab, which “is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces…” It is “a question of discipline,” he says. “When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care.”

No wonder the issue of the sheep was so pressing to him. Sheep eat the shoots, sheep are part of the discipline….

The little prince was very clear on some things. But on other things: not so much. One day a seed sprouted and it was unlike any other small sprouts on his planet. At first he worried that perhaps it was a new kind of baobab, but it wasn’t. She was a rose. She was stunning in her loveliness. “Oh, how beautiful you are,” breathed the little prince when she bloomed. Her fragrance perfumed his entire planet. But she did not feel solid in herself. She did not feel her beauty as an intrinsic part of her. That insecurity led her to play games with the little prince, and it frustrated him. It disturbed him. He did not know how to love her, even though he wanted to, and he was so unhappy….

That is why he left his asteroid. That is what spurred him on to take a journey into the unknown…

And the first leg of it involved encounter after encounter with people he ended up not liking. At all.

One was a narcissist. Everybody else became an extension of his own self-centered personal drama. It was outrageous to him if people did things that he didn’t like, because how dare they spoil his plans? That other people have an actual independent existence—he just couldn’t imagine that.

Then there was the businessman, and the little prince disturbed his furious counting because naturally the little prince wanted to know exactly what it was he was counting so furiously but the businessman didn’t care, all that mattered was owning it, whatever it was, and knowing how many.

Then there was the lamplighter, whose life was reduced to utter absurdity because the orders he was given years before no longer made any sense to his radically changed world but he refused to deviate from them because “orders are orders.” It did not matter how miserable the orders made things. “Orders are orders.”

The little prince met these people and others as well, and every time, he went away saying something along the lines of “The grown-ups are very strange,” or “They always need to have things explained,” or “They are like that. One must not hold it against them.”

What this leg of the little prince’s journey did for him is add greater clarity to his life. He was already very clear about the value of sunsets and planetary hygiene, and now he was clear on the kind of person he couldn’t admire, which is the person whose life has been utterly taken over by some kind of narrow purpose. Something has taken firm root inside them, and what was once a whole round personality has been split into pieces and now compulsively mistakes what is inessential for what is essential.

They have become less-than-human, inhumane.

All of this is trying to shine a light into the shadow places of our lives. We know people who act exactly like narcissists and businessmen and lamplighters. We have been to their asteroids too.

There is a reason why The Little Prince story is the 3rd most-translated book in the world and one of the best-selling books ever published….

**
**

When The Little Prince was published in 1943, people didn’t get it. They were flummoxed. It was a children’s story they were expecting, which for them meant something sweet and simple addressed to a certain chronological age. Yet here was a story that spoke to the youth in adults, even as it spoke to children. It was multilayered and nuanced and disturbing at times and full of the struggle and pain Saint-Exupery was feeling….

Perhaps this is exactly parallel to the opening discussion of the book, where the narrator speaks of his Drawing Number One, which was that of a boa constrictor which had swallowed an elephant whole, and he’d show the picture to grown-ups, and all they’d see is what they were prepared to see, which was a picture of a big hat that tended to flop to one side.

The Little Prince is like Drawing Number One. The essential stuff is invisible to the naked eye. You have to read it with your imagination and your heart.

For example, the baobab seeds. “Children,” says the book, “Watch out for the baobabs!” “It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots.”

Concern about this is what motivates the little prince’s very first words: “If you please—draw me a sheep…” Sheep eat the baobab shoots.

But why this intense and unrelenting insistence on planetary hygiene?

It’s Saint-Exupery’s way of touching on the great tragedy of his era. Nazism sweeping over Europe, and his beloved country of France falling so quickly in the form of the Vichy state and the Occupation. This sort of this happens because people are of a certain type. They are strange grown-ups. They are narcissists, or businessmen, or lamplighters. They have lost something essential that would cause them to resist evil. Instead, they don’t blink an eye at it. Something tragic has happened to their minds and hearts. A baobab seed has sprouted there. Not so much a physical seed as a spiritual one.

Consider Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who was responsible for transporting millions of Jews to the death camps. He was a major organizer of the Holocaust and yet he was not fanatical, he was not bloodthirsty, his was not mentally ill, anti-Semitism was not a choice but just something that he grew up with and carried forward as a part of his heritage. He had little more on his mind than following orders. Orders are orders. Making the trains run on time was his priority and it didn’t matter whose lives he made miserable.

What a strange grown-up. Remarkably similar to the lamplighter character…

He didn’t pluck out the baobab seed sprouting in his heart. There was no sheep to chew it up. The sweet child he had once been: gone.

I think it can be safely said: every character that the little prince encounters on an asteroid can be seen as someone whose heart has been ripped apart.

Now, a quick side note: the final version of The Little Prince is miniscule compared to the initial draft which was hundreds of pages. If you go to the Morgan Library in Manhattan, you can see how the draft pages are covered with fine lines of handwriting, and much has been crossed out. There are pages where only a single sentence stands out because every other word has been scribbled through. Most of what he wrote never made the final cut.

When I came to learn this—and specifically, when I came to learn that Saint-Exupery had put many more asteroids and many more strange characters into the draft version of the story than we meet up with in the final, it got me thinking…. There’s a lot of people today that would make perfect asteroid inhabitants whose hearts are ripped up. And we are not so different from the little prince, in the way we might encounter them and then walk away, remarking on how strange the grown-ups are….

For example, the TV news anchor. On his asteroid, we encounter him wearing a shiny suit, sporting a $200 haircut, and he’s lily white. He’s reflecting on the shooting last week at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. “It’s more likely,” he says, “a matter of rising hostility against Christians in this country because of our biblical views. A sick act by someone who was mentally ill. That’s what we really have here. Why are people talking about a hate crime, or even terrorism? That’s crazy liberal talk. Besides,” the TV news anchor says, “no less than the entire Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees. Here’s what they had to say (and the news anchor pulls out the paper and reads): ‘Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists. What causes young men such as Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity. It is no small solace that in committing such an act today, he stands alone.’ That’s what the editorial says. It’s the act of a lone shooter, in other words. Not racism. Racism no longer exists.”

That’s the TV news anchor on his asteroid. How strange the grown-ups are.

Or consider yet another asteroid inhabitant. He is a Supreme Court Justice. We encounter him shrouded in his black justice robes, and he’s frowning. His colleagues—the majority of them—just did something that has changed the course of American history. A watershed moment in all our lives. Marriage equality. Love wins. But this is his rebuttal. He says, “[H]uman dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. […] The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.” This is what the Supreme Court Justice says.

And it is astonishing logic. Of course human dignity is innate, but it can most certainly be prevented from flourishing by inequitable policies. People are vulnerable; brutality gets underneath the skin. How possibly can the Supreme Court Justice, whose own personal heritage bears the scars of slavery, demonstrate such thorough tone-deafness towards another people who cry out against oppression?

So many baobab seeds sprouting, even in this time of triumph. So many strange, strange grown-ups.

Even as we celebrate, we must continue the work. Planetary hygiene. Spiritual hygiene.

Where is a sheep when you need one?

**
**

We are now at a critical point in The Little Prince story. He has encountered plenty of strange asteroid characters through his journey, and now he has come to our earth. There, he happens upon a garden full of roses. Listen:

“Who are you?” he demanded, thunderstruck.

“We are roses,” the roses said.

And he was overcome with sadness. His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in all the universe. And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden!

[To himself he said,]”I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in all the world; and all I had was a common rose… that doesn’t make me a very great prince…”

And he lay down in the grass and cried.

This is when the story goes to an even deeper level. Because this is where it’s fully revealed: evidence of a baobab seed growing in the little prince’s own heart, growing towards the point where it would rip apart his capacity to love. Now, we have seen how great a critic he is towards the grown-ups, and why not? It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. So, how completely ironic that Saint-Exupery would reveal the little prince to be a kind of grown-up in his own right. The kind of grown-up who is overwhelmed by all the beautiful people in the world and can’t seem to rest in the love of one beautiful person. Or, to shift metaphors, the kind of grown-up who is homeless because gorgeous house after gorgeous house entrances them and they can’t commit to living in any one in particular.

Do you know grown-ups like this?

Saint-Exupery was certainly one of these, thus his struggles in his marriage. “I was too young to know how to love her,” the little prince says, and Saint-Exupery says it with him, and maybe we do as well. He had not yet learned the lesson that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

This is the insight that no baobab seed can survive.

And this is the insight that the fox gives him. Sheep merely eat, but foxes are wise. Listen:

“Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”

“I am a fox,” said the fox.

“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince. “I am so unhappy.”

“I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince.

But, after some thought, he added:

“What does that mean– ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower… I think that she has tamed me…”

Some time after this, the little prince returns to the garden of roses, and listen to what he has to say:

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he [says to the roses]. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you– the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”

The spiritual baobab seed wants to rip apart our capacity for love, but the medicine that the fox gives the little prince is the insight that establishing ties with another being—the taming process—changes everything. A concrete example: the proportion of Americans who reported knowing someone gay increased from 25 percent in 1985 to 74 percent in 2000, and the percentage is even higher today, and you have to know, this has been a major factor in our achievement of marriage equality in this nation. Knowing gay people strongly predicts support for gay rights. Knowing people of a different color and culture predicts support for antiracism and multiculturalism. Friendship makes for justice.

The result of taming and being tamed, at whatever level of life, cannot be overestimated. You know whose you are. There are people you really would die for. “My life is very monotonous,” says the fox:

“I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”

Listen to that: “I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…” Everything serves to remind you of the one who’s tamed you. Whenever I eat pretzel M&M’s or make grilled cheese sandwiches, the presence of a loved one is summoned up for me, and it is wonderful, the sun has indeed come to shine in my life. The whole world carries signs of the ones you love. Monotony is replaced by richness. The whole world becomes personalized with the ones you love. It does not matter that passersby can’t see what you see. The richness of your life is still valid and real. You are seeing with the eyes of the heart. What is essential is invisible to the physical eye.

“Grown-ups are mushrooms,” says the little prince. Thanks to the fox, he will escape this fate. Now he knows what love means. Now he can return to his rose and he can do so with clarity. Now he is completely clear. Now he can go home.

And this is the children’s story that the famous writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, once upon a time, when his country was being devoured by war, and he was an expat in America, feeling helpless and lonely. This is the story he wrote, once upon a time, to process his near-disastrous airplane crash in the Sahara and the way his marriage was also crashing. He took his friend’s advice. Write a children’s story.

Did it help? Does it help?

I think it did. I think it does.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has written:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

It is so ordered, and therefore–let the “pop-up” weddings commence!

Here are some pictures of me on the Fulton County Courthouse Steps today, June 26, officiating at the wedding of people who love each other and want that love to be consecrated through marriage.

Dear Maya,

How strange it will seem to my hearers and readers that I am writing a letter to one who can never literally receive it. You died just a little over a year ago.

And yet, you seem very much alive to me. Once you said, “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” But you have always been frank about your changes, across a span of almost 90 years, and I have loved reading about them. So powerful and poignant. How deeply and frequently you’ve moved me to laughter and tears.

I do believe your spirit lives on—I do believe that the death of anyone’s body is best compared to a fatally damaged TV set which can no longer transmit the vital signal anymore, even though the vital signal is still around and in the air. Others in my Beloved Community will see things differently. But one thing we can all agree on is how the influence of your seven autobiographies and books of essays and poetry and plays and movies and TV shows (in addition to everything else!) has been nothing less than part of the world’s endless creation. You’ve set your mark upon us. Your immortality is your influence, and it goes on and on, like starshine.

It has reached straight into my heart, in ways small and large.

Here’s one of the small ways.

In your amazing book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, you remember the Rev. Howard Thomas who was the presiding church elder over an area of Arkansas which included the town you grew up in, Stamps. He’d come to Stamps every three months to stay in your home, and when your paternal grandmother (whom you called Momma because you grew up with her) opened the door to him, first thing he’d do was spread his arms and call out for you and your brother Bailey, saying “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He wanted a hug.

Suffer the little children indeed. You thought he was ugly and fat, and that he “laughed like a hog with the colic.” You thought his arms were awful. You didn’t want a hug. But your Momma made you.

Just like my Baba made me. HIS name was Ivan, and I had no clue what he did or what his purpose was, just that he was a dear friend of the family from way back. He’d always come over when he’d heard that my family had made the long trek from Northern Alberta to spend time in Edmonton to visit. His face was shiny and flabby and his breath smelled like onions and he spoke very haltingly and, strangest of all, his forehead (near the scalp) featured a quarter-sized caved-in part that no one ever mentioned, ever, but it was so obvious something was wrong that I wanted to shout. He’d look at me with his bug eyes and hold out his octopus arms for a hug and I just wanted to run, but Baba made me go to him, sit on his lap, and he would squeeze me and go heh heh heh and I would laugh out of embarrassment and then finally it was over and he’d release me from his tentacles and I booked it out of there, to everyone’s vast amusement.

Adults think children are simpletons, tabula rasa, but Maya, you remind us that it’s completely otherwise. Children have their own thoughts to think, they are already complicated little worlds. And to them, the motives and behaviors of adults can be incomprehensible at times….

But the main point is that you have brought me back to the memory. It feels like something long lost in me has been found, and that feels so good, even if it but a small memory about a particularly weird moment.

On the other hand, you tell stories that find no echo in my own world, and they break my heart wide open….

Many of the stories are about the harshness of Southern life and the experience of blackness as told from the inside, and you were one of the first to ever share like this…

“Another day was over,” you say. “In the soft dark the cotton truck slipped the pickers out and roared out of the yard with a sound like a giant’s fart. The workers stepped around in circles for a few seconds as if they had found themselves unexpectedly in an unfamiliar place. Their minds sagged. In [my Momma’s merchandise store] the men’s faces were the most painful to watch, but I seemed to have no choice. When they tried to smile to carry off their tiredness as if it was nothing, the body [told a different story.] Their shoulders drooped even as they laughed, and when they put their hands on their hips in a show of jauntiness, the palms slipped the thighs as if the pants were waxed. […] The women’s feet had swollen the discarded men’s shoes they wore, and they washed their arms at the well to dislodge dirt and splinters that had accrued to them as part of the day’s pickings. I thought them all hateful to have allowed themselves to be worked like oxen, and even more shameful to try to pretend that things were not as bad as they were.”

You tell this story, and then you tell another. How your Momma, on pain of punishment, had taught you and your brother Bailey to be impeccable in the way you addressed your elders and your betters. Show respect. Don’t bring shame on your parents and your family. But as for what you have called “powhitetrash”: they’d call your Momma by her first name, despite the fact that she owned the very land they lived on! “If there was any justice in the world,” you say in Caged Bird, “God should strike them dumb at once!” But God never did. God just watched, when one time a group of these powhitetrash girls came to your front door and your strong proud Momma was there and they surrounded her with mocking laughter and tongues stuck out and crossed eyes and all your Momma did was hum church hymns, never looked at those girls, just kept humming tunes to Jesus. You were watching it all from inside the house, and you say, “I wanted to throw a handful of black pepper in their faces, to throw lye on them, to scream that they were dirty, scummy peckerwoods, but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confined to their roles.”

You tell these stories, Maya, that break my heart wide open.

And this one too, which is not so much about Black Southern life as it is about the kind of personal tragedy that could happen to anyone, Black or white, poor or rich.

It happened when you were eight years old. Your biological mother, who had sent you to live with your grandmother, wanted you back. So you went to live with her in St. Louis, but it lasted only a short time because you were raped by your mom’s boyfriend and, when word got out, he was killed. “I thought I had caused his death,” you say, “because I told his name to the family. Out of guilt, I stopped talking to everyone except Bailey. I decided that my voice was so powerful that it could kill people, but it could not harm my brother because we loved each other so much.”

You stayed mute for almost five years.

Maya, Maya.

Several years ago, one of my colleagues (Rev. Wayne Robinson) was lucky enough to have met you at a writer’s conference in Santa Barbara. He says you were a powerful presence. Six feet tall, strong deep voice, a force to be reckoned with. There at the conference, you were sharing some of the same stories I’m bringing up here, stories of abuse, poverty, racism and sexism. When you finished, you opened the floor for questions and my colleague asked, “Ms. Angelou, how did you go through all of that without becoming bitter and angry?” And you answered, “Oh young man, you’ve confused two very different things. I’m still angry—very angry—at the kind of things that happened to me and are still happening to too many others. But my anger is part of the drive I have to change things. But I’m not bitter, for bitterness is corrosive. Bitterness doesn’t motivate you to try to do something to change the wrong. It causes you to sit and stew, and let the bitterness eat away at your soul. I’m not bitter,” you said. “But I’m angry, yes.”

“My mission in life,” you have said, “is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

And then in a poem, you sing,

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Maya, how did you learn to be phenomenal like this? When the harshness of your life constantly threatened to crush you, what gave you the reach in your arms, the span of your step, the curl of your lips?

Tell me about the changes that made you into a butterfly….

Perhaps we are back to the ancient nature vs. nurture question. How much of your resilience is something you were simply born with, and how much of it came from aspects of your environment… Definitely in Caged Bird you make the Ubuntu principle plain, that “I am because we are.”

Oh, you could have grown so bitter, but here’s something your grandmother would do for you, at least twice a year. She would see a whiner, a complainer come down the hill. And she would call you in to the store. She’d say, “Sister, Sister, come out here.” The man or woman would come into the store, and my grandmother would ask, “How you feel today?” “Ah, Sister Henderson, I tell you I just hate the winter. It makes my face crack and my shins burn.” And Momma’d just say, “Uh-huh,” and then look at you. And as soon as the person would leave, your grandmother would say, “Sister, come here.” You’d stand right in front of her. She’d say, “There are people all over the world who went to sleep last night who did not wake again. Their beds have become their cooling boards, their blankets have become their winding sheets. They would give anything for just five minutes of what she was complaining about.”

Maya, you could have grown so bitter. But people like your Momma didn’t want your soul to get lost. You were a phenomenal woman because they were phenomenal for you.

Same goes for your biological mom. Now, you would agree heartily she was a terrible mother for young children. She had abandoned you and your brother—simple as that. But you distinguish between two kinds of parents. “There is the person who can be a great parent of small children,” you say. “They dress the children in these sweet little things with bows in their hair and beads on their shoestrings and nice, lovely little socks. But when those same children get to be 14 or 15, the parents don’t know what to say to them as they grow breasts and testosterone hits the boy.”

That’s exactly when your mother stepped up. When you became a young adult. And she was phenomenal for you then. You tell the story of the time she found out you were pregnant. You were just 17. I can’t imagine a more vulnerable moment, where everything depends on what is said next. And what she said next was, “All right. Run me a bath, please.” In your family, that was really a very nice thing for somebody to ask you to do. And in all your life, she had asked this of you only two or three times. So you ran her a bath and then she invited you in the bathroom. She sat down in the bathtub. She asked you, “Do you love the boy?” You said no. “Does he love you?” You said no. “Well, there’s no point in ruining three lives. We’re going to have us a baby.”

Your mother—who was so bad in your early years—came through with flying colors in your later ones. You have said that throughout her life she liberated you. Liberated you constantly. Respected you, respected what you tried to do, believed in you.

Phenomenal woman.

And so you became phenomenal yourself. Beautiful butterfly. In a life of many high points, perhaps the highest was in 1993 when you recited your poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. And this is part of what you said:

History despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.

Maya, we need these words now. So much going on to make us bitter. The harshness of life. The racism, the sexism, the poverty, the abuse which still goes on today. But help us face it all with courage. Help us be angry in a way that burns for a better world for all. Clean anger, not dirty with resentment.

Help us to be angry like that.

Lift up our eyes upon
The day breaking for us.
Give birth again
To the dream.

History despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Let our mission in life be yours: not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

For myself, I know I can’t be a phenomenal woman, but let me be a phenomenal man.

“Here on the pulse of this new day,” you write,

You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

Good morning to you Maya. Good morning, beautiful butterfly. Good morning, always, always…

Sincerely, and with much love,

Anthony

Last week I’m driving on 285 towards my home in Dunwoody and I see a police car on the far right flash on its strobe lights, launch itself into the stream of traffic, hone in on a car, lock on. The unhappy car slows to a stop, and just as I’m passing by (thanking my lucky stars I’m not him), I see that the driver is a young black man, maybe 25 years old. Instantly: surge of anger. Anger towards a country in which I really can’t be sure why that man was stopped—whether it was for a truly legitimate reason or just because he was driving while black. Anger, too, because the rest of us just kept to our lanes, eyes forward, minds focused on our private destinations and oblivious to the common good and how injustice to one never fails to be injustice to all…

It’s the poem by William Butler Yeats coming alive:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Obviously on 285 all of us in our cars were going too fast to stop; to stop on a dime would be disastrous. But it struck me as a symbol of general disengagement while things are falling part and the center’s not holding. People keeping to their lanes and nothing else matters. People keeping to their narrow lives and no one else matters.

We need passionate intensity not from the worst but from the best.

We need that passionate intensity right now, in the face of injustices of all kinds.

The ceremony of innocence is being drowned.

**

There is a word that comes from the Akan people of Ghana: SANKOFA. Often it is symbolized by a bird that turns around and reaches for the egg on its back, so as to bring it forward. Sankofa means we take what’s good from the past and bring it into our present, because it will heal us. It will show us the way.

And so today we reach back to the Transcendentalists. In our spiritual tradition, passionate intensity comes from them, who were instigators of what historians call the American Renaissance. People like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, and, of course, Henry David Thoreau. It was the 1830s and 1840s, and they too felt that the ceremony of innocence was being drowned. In their day it was the full-blown institution of slavery, despite the unequivocal human rights affirmation of the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” America declared this against England, saw itself as taking the moral high ground, but guess which one of them would abolish slavery first? England, in 1834. As for America? In the 1840s, it would find itself fighting an illegal war—the Mexican-American War—in order to EXPAND slavery.

Shameful.

To our Transcendentalist ancestors, it really did feel like the center wasn’t holding and things were falling apart. Economic meltdown that rivals our more recent Great Recession frayed the fabric of society, and so did the radical changes spurred on by technological and economic innovation. Before 1830, everything had been primarily local, from one’s sense of identity to working conditions and the manufacture of goods. It took time for messages to go from point A to point B. It took time to get anywhere. But all this came to an end. The invention of the telegraph allowed for news to cross far distances instantly. Then there was the railroad, newly built tracks crisscrossing the land, bringing with it a new sense of national identity. Also new economic opportunity, allowing sons and daughters to leave home to find wage-earning jobs in the cities or in the also new textile mills of New England. Leading to the transient population in cities rising at an alarming rate. Unregulated working conditions becoming worse and worse, even as more and more money was being made. Old ways lost, one by one. Old traditions and comforts and securities lost, and new ways needed to be found…

Transcendentalism comes out chaos like this. THIS is the reason for their passionate intensity. Everything was at stake.

And so: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Thoreau said that. Unless the sleeper wakes up, there can be no morning, just a perpetual midnight of ethical schizophrenia and materialism and social confusion. The sleeper must awaken to the abundant truths and powers of the soul. This is how we become free in our minds and hearts even if we find ourselves surrounded with unfreedom on all sides. This is what powers us to do the right thing in an unethical age of slavery and warmongering; this is what keeps us poised and flowing when everything around us feels disorienting and strange. There is a dawning day that we can experience here and now—we can join the sun in its new morning—but only if the sleeper wakes up.

**

Another way of saying this is, Only if a person learns how to live deliberately. “I wished to live deliberately,” says Thoreau, in language that sings, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear….” In an immoral, confusing age, he had to get clear on who he was, and whose he was. Identity was the solution. And to achieve that, on July 4, 1845, he went to Walden Pond to more fully immerse himself in the cycles and rhythms of the natural world. “I feel,” he says, “that I draw nearest to understanding the great secret of my life in my closest intercourse with nature.” But Walden was just on the edge of the town of Concord, meaning that Thoreau wasn’t completely isolated and immersed in wilderness. So an equally important part of his Walden experience was conversation with folks back in Concord like Emerson, which would allow him to share and integrate his discoveries in nature—put the pieces together, see what is implied about his sense of self and identity, his relationships, and larger social conditions. The Transcendentalism of our spiritual ancestors was never isolationism. Retreats to nature were always preludes to rich conversations with soul friends, and always, the aim was getting clear on WHO we are and WHOSE we are.

One thing Thoreau learned from his Walden experience was to simplify. “Simplify, simplify,” he says. Part of this means refusing to fill yourself up with things that feel urgent but are in fact draining and demoralizing, so that you end up having no room for that which truly vitalizes. Refuse to endlessly ruminate on experiences of futility and cruelty and loneliness and disappointment so that there’s no room for anything else. Refuse to be like the shortsighted man in a museum who studies Van Gogh’s Starry Night or some other take-your-breath-away painting from two inches away, and intellectually he has clearly and accurately identified 12 different kinds of blobs of color and 7 different shapes, but he can’t see the whole thing, he misses out on the big picture, he is starving for meaning and purpose. Our lives, says Thoreau, are “frittered away by detail.” We live too up-close to things, shortsighted, and this is a form of spiritual sleepwalking. But to simplify is to make room for abundance. It is to empty ourselves of the nonessential, so that we can be filled with the essential.

Walden taught him this, and it also taught him to aspire. “We must,” Thoreau says, “learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.” “That man,” he says, “who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.” As I think on what this means, a story comes to mind from the work of Abraham Maslow, founder of humanistic psychology and one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. I’ve shared this story before but it’s provocative enough to share again and again and again. Maslow’s focus was on self-actualization or, as we Unitarian Universalists might say, people giving full expression to the worth and dignity that is inherently theirs. In the course of his studies, he determined that self-actualizing people very naturally have spiritual experiences—profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world; more aware of truth, justice, harmony, and goodness. But now here is the story. When Maslow’s students began to talk to each other about their peak experiences, they began having them all the time. It was as if the simple act of being reminded of their existence was enough to make them happen. Talking and thinking about moments of people being saved every day makes it more likely that we will have such moments ourselves. Conversely, if we do not talk and think about such things, we may block their happening.

Thus we are to aspire, says Thoreau. Talking about God evokes God energy. Talking about heaven brings heaven closer. Hold fast to an infinite expectation of the dawn, hold it close, since (as he says), it “does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.” It goes with us, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. When facing some kind of scarcity in life, you say to yourself like a mantra, over and over, “I trust that everything I need is inside me and near me, and it will become available to me as I need it.” If our lives are frittered away by detail, this will seem like a load of baloney, and nonsense. But in reality it is the largest thing imaginable, a hope, a peace, a vision of Life Abundant, and it requires us to prepare tremendous room in our hearts. We must prepare the way to receive it.

Simplify, so we can aspire.

**

I want to go back to 285, my experience on that road last week. Back to my anger as I passed that young man and wondered if this was yet another instance of driving while black. Back to my anger as I saw all the other cars speeding forward in their narrow lanes towards self-centered ends, uncaring towards what was happening in plain sight. Back to my horrible vision which is so well captured by the words of the poet:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I am grateful to say that this was not the whole story. Because I was in one of those other cars speeding forward, and I saw what was happening, and I cared. I proved the poet wrong. I had conviction. I was full of passionate intensity.

And this was so because I belonged to a Beloved Community that would allow nothing less from me.

It wasn’t always so. Unitarian Universalism used to be something that I left behind when my car exited the church parking lot. I had grown up isolationist and it was a hard habit to break. A sad habit, because it’s what made me and makes so many of us lonely. The words of Carl Jung come to mind: “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself….” I was unable to communicate what was important to me, and therefore I was unknown to others and unknown to myself. I was lonely.

But Unitarian Universalism has always been persistent. It wanted only one thing from me, and it wants only one thing from all of us: to live into the truth of who we are. To be ourselves, to live deliberately.

All the sermons, all the music, all the service groups and projects, all the fun and fellowship, all the special events: all of it is like Walden to our souls. A 21st century version.

Especially when it asks us to give.

I realized this the other day when I was preparing a talk for the volunteers who are part of our Year-Round Stewardship process. By now you have all received a snail mail letter describing the details. The congregation divided up into twelve “Generosity Circles,” one for each month of the year. Folks in each generosity circle being informed about what’s going on at UUCA and what our aspirations are, and also being thanked for greening this place with their dollars. But what I said to the volunteers was not so much about technical details but about the why, the meaning behind it all. I talked about how problems in the larger world are problems here in our midst. Our UUCA community is not hermetically sealed off. So what makes this place so valuable is that here in Beloved Community we seek to be the change we wish to see in the world. If we can’t find solutions in Beloved Community, then where?

That’s why we aspire to be an anti-racist, anti-oppressive, multicultural institution. If Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, well, we need to turn that right around and it starts here. Healing starts here, and we can take that healing everywhere else we go.

Another problem in the larger world is that of too many alternatives, too many choices, too many ways to spend our money, too many things to give to. It’s confusing, it’s disorienting, and in fact way too often we are dupes of the merely good enough. We choose or we buy the merely mediocre and that’s what takes up room in our lives. That’s what it looks like for a life to be frittered away…

But Beloved Community, I said to those stewardship volunteers, is part of the solution. Don’t feel bad about calling people and reminding them that it’s their month to review their pledge. Don’t feel bad about sharing the awesome things going on at UUCA and asking people to consider upping their pledge. Don’t feel bad! Because what you’re doing is helping people solve the problem of too many choices. The only way to solve that is people getting clear on who they are. That’s what stewardship conversations are fundamentally about. Who am I? Whose am I? Do we see ourselves as the inheritors of what others, like Thoreau, have built up? Are we committed to passing this on to our friends and family and children and grandchildren? Are we committed to building the world be dream about?

What we have right here are some of the basics of Transcendentalism. Conversation helping us to simplify, to get down to the essentials. Simplifying so that there’s room to aspire. So don’t feel bad about making the call. And I’m saying this to all of us: don’t be taken aback when you receive such a call. Of course talking about money is uncomfortable, but that’s because we’re not necessarily clear on our values, and the effort to get clear feels like struggling through muck, mud threatening to suck our boots off. That doesn’t feel good. But understand what’s trying to happen. Beloved Community is doing a good thing. Beloved Community is trying to help you get clear on who you are and what really counts for you, and this clarity will help you everywhere you go, way beyond the walls of this place.

We are being the change we wish to see in the world.

We need the best people to have convictions.

We need the best people passionately intense.

It happens here, in this 21st century version of Walden, which will never settle for less. Through the power of our combined efforts, we need to make sure we live in a country where, if someone is pulled over by the police, we can know with confidence it’s for reasonable cause, and reasonable cause only.

Future generations rely on the good we accomplish now, even as, like the Sakofa bird, we reach back to our spiritual ancestors and receive from them a blessing for the present.

Let’s build the world we dream about, starting right here!

You are the best, so be passionately intense!

Be passionately intense!

I want to tell you about a meeting that happened recently at UUCA. Five people and myself in the conference room, meeting with the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Director of Ministerial Transitions, the Rev. Keith Kron. He came all the way from Headquarters in Boston, because it was important. We were talking about our next settled Associate Minister, the person who will succeed Rev. Thickstun and hopefully stay for years, stay with us and grow with us for a good long while.

With me in the room: people all well-respected in this congregation, representative of key diversities relevant to the nature of the position, and keenly committed to our vibrancy: Rebecca Kaye, Chair of the Children’s Ministry Team and also a Lay Minister. Tony Stringer, Lay Minister and member of UUCA’s Inclusivity Ministry called EnterCulture. Mary Ann Oakley, Lead Lay Minister and Chair of the recent Long Range Plan Task Force. Karen Martin, current Board member and a go-to lay leader in our Religious Exploration program for something like 15 years. Lyn Conley, two-term Board President, who likes to call herself a “church lady” and what it means is that her heart is big for this place and she knows practically everything and still has a sense of humor. All these people, which I called together to partner with me in the search (because I’m not going to do it alone, top-down—not my style); all these awesome people, me, and Keith Kron in the room, and the room is buzzing, we are energized, we are talking possibilities, we are filling up the whiteboard with lists and charts and arrows, we are talking timeline, we are talking what needs to happen now, what needs to happen next, as we enter into this exciting time of search.

Exciting especially because of the kind of minister for whom we go in search: The Associate Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth. The express purpose of the job is to “hold and fulfill the vision of a congregation that nurtures people’s spiritual health, growth, and healing from cradle to grave.” This language is from the formal job description, and here’s a little more: “The Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth is fully conversant in the psychological, developmental, interpersonal, and spiritual issues and challenges of people across the lifespan. Based on this, the Associate Minister works with staff and volunteers in sustaining and enhancing our Pastoral Care and Religious Exploration programs which, combined, support people’s wellness and wholeness in holistic, integrated, and innovative fashion.”

That’s a lot of words. I know it. But they are also aspiring words which leap up off the page and become a vision in our minds. A compelling vision. A vision of our collective future and where it’s taking us, why it’s so important we go, why we want to do all we can to make it happen.

That’s what I want to talk about today. The vision. The spirit of Unitarian Universalism alive and well and stirring among us.

One place we can feel that Spirit is in our UUCA Ends Statements and Long Range Plan Aspirations (which are both readily available on UUCA.org). Through such statements, the congregation has spoken. What it sees this Unitarian Universalist community creating in Atlanta. And as your Senior Minister, I’m listening very carefully.

A vibrant faith community for spiritual seekers that worship together, embracing lifelong religious learning and respecting different spiritual journeys.

A loving community that provides support and care for others through both the best and the most difficult of times.

A safe and welcoming community where all are valued.

Children and youth, centered in the values of our religious community and nurtured in love, who are compassionate leaders in seeking justice and peace.

That’s not all of the UUCA Ends Statements, but these are the ones that the work of the Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth is most in alignment with, most in sync with. The very name of the position borrows from the language of the first Ends statement: “A vibrant faith community for spiritual seekers that worship together, embracing lifelong religious learning…”

Your Senior Minister is listening. Also to a more recent expression of the wisdom and will of this congregation: the Vision 2016 Long Range Plan. “We will be among the most engaging and enriching congregations in Atlanta,” says the first of four main aspirations; and underneath it, we have several more specific goals areas including these:

EXTENDING educational offerings for congregants and the larger community;

NURTURING fellowship among congregants and providing pastoral care; and

OFFERING opportunities and experiences that nurture the spiritual growth of each congregant.

Again and again, I am hearing the hope for—the commitment to—people’s spiritual health, growth, and healing. Again and again, I hear how we want the span of this to be lifelong, from cradle to grave.

And so comes the basic vision for the Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth. It comes from us.

So we should not be surprised when I say that, like the overachievers we tend to be, this position will shine a bright light on some places where the escalator is broken, and we need to get off and move on to something better. It’s going to challenge us to be bold.

Here’s what I mean.

Take the “cradle to grave” focus of the position. It flies in the face of what the current pattern in UU congregations is, says Karen Bellavance-Grace, the 2013 Fahs Fellow for Innovation in Multigenerational Faith Formation. Some of you might have come out to hear her speak when our Interim Director of Religious Exploration, Mr. Barb Greve, invited her to Atlanta. I was there. She’s one of the wisest and most respected voices in Religious Exploration today, and she said, “Our curricula and Religious Education ministries have been largely created and supported with a goal of helping children and youth grow into Unitarian Universalist adults. At the same time, we know that an excellent indicator of youth and young adult religiosity is the consistent religious practice of their parents.” Which would imply that, at the very least, for the sake of the kids, we want our adults to be on the religious exploration journey too. But we are not set up for that, not really. Says Karen Bellevance-Grace, “Most of the explicit Adult Faith Formation opportunities favor a traditional teach/learn paradigm, and privilege academic learning styles and preferences. By and large, we have not treated the faith formation of parents and other adults with the same priority as the faith formation of children and youth.”

I am particularly struck by how Karen Bellevance-Grace puts her finger on the “traditional teach/learn” paradigm of our usual adult religious exploration fare. In other words, adult RE classes are very often structured like graduate school seminars. This is exactly what another UU leader, concerned about the state of adult faith formation in our movement, picks up on: the Rev. Christine Robinson, Senior Minister of the UU Congregation of Albuquerque, a sister large congregation. Listen to what she says: “We have to help people understand that the tools of college debate teams and scientific laboratories are fine for those enterprises, but they are problematic around matters of faith and spirit. It’s hard enough to put the largely wordless spiritual life into words. The shy, wild soul doesn’t respond well to being chased, questioned, hounded, and there is still too much scorn in our discourse about faith.” Isn’t that interesting? How can we create adult learning spaces that are more welcoming to the shy, wild soul? If we did better at that, would more adults participate more regularly?

It’s critical that they do. Most if not all of us know the procedure on an airplane. If it’s a time of distress and the oxygen masks appear, adults need to put their masks on before helping children or others in their care. If the caregiver runs out of oxygen, he or she cannot assist others. If the caregiver is exhausted, hungry, anxious, or spiritually empty and depleted, they suffer and the children suffer.

This is just one reason why the “cradle to grave” vision is key. Religious exploration programs that focus mainly on the children and youth aren’t effective. But the tendency is nevertheless to focus just on the children and youth. Adults don’t think it’s relevant to them. The programming for adults is not where it needs to be.

It’s just like the video.

We’re on the escalator, things seem to be moving on and up.

But then we come across the statistic of the high percentage of adults who grew up Unitarian Universalist but eventually left because they didn’t feel Unitarian Universalism in their heart and soul…

That’s when the escalator goes GLNK!

“Whoa,” we say, “that’s not good”

We say, “Oh, I don’t need this! I’m already late”

We say, “Anybody out there!”

“Somebody!”

“Hello!”

“There are two people stuck on the escalator, and we need help. Now, would somebody please do something!”

Well, we are doing something. We’re getting off that stuck escalator. The Associate Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth is going to be a part of the solution, with the focus on “cradle to grave.” Lifespan. Challenging the sense that adults don’t need to be integrally involved as learners themselves. Increasing the different kinds of opportunity for being involved; ensuring that it’s easy to get involved; ensuring care for our shy, wild souls.

The elevator is stuck, and we need to get off.

Here’s another stuck place. Keeping Pastoral Care and Religious Exploration programs separate, siloed off from each other.

Now to me, conceptually, that makes no sense. To me, Pastoral Care is about spiritual health in the crisis care mode, whereas Religious Exploration is also about spiritual health, but in the prevention mode. What I have in mind here is the public health model, which the Centers for Disease Control folks in the room will immediately get. Religious exploration is about growing in Unitarian Universalist faith which is about growing in spiritual resilience which is ultimately about the prevention of pastoral care crises, as far as possible. Don’t wait until you’re sick to seek help. Far less expensive, far less trouble, to practice all the good things that keep your soul healthy and resistant to all the yucky spiritual bacteria out there. That’s what our Religious Exploration programs are doing when they support our natural spiritual feelings and teach us how to celebrate our lives and help us understand our religious heritage and help us develop and act on our values and help us affirm our differences and help us affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all. They help us. They naturally partner with Pastoral Care programs, which cover the other side of things, when we’re not feeling so good, and we need crisis care.

But, again, this is not the way things are now. As far as I know, the two programs have never been led by the same person. What I’ve seen is that a great deal of the pastoral care for children, youth, and families has been provided within the RE program, whereas pastoral care for the rest of the congregation has happened through our Lay Ministry program. When Pat Kahn was our Director of Religious Exploration, just a little under three years ago, I saw her out there pastoring all the time. It just goes together. You can’t keep Pastoral Care and Religious Exploration separate.

So why not bring them together more intentionally, more intelligently? A Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth represents an opportunity for UUCA to improve Pastoral Care support for its children, youth, and families while, at the same time, enriching its Religious Exploration programs by grounding them more fully in an understanding of the psychological, developmental, interpersonal, and spiritual issues and challenges people across the lifespan face.

When congregations don’t have that in place, people fall through the cracks. Listen to the voice of one person for whom this is true, as she speaks about her struggle with her Mom’s mental illness and how church didn’t help, made things harder. “My family,” she says, “has always been very involved in church … but we did not receive the help and support we needed…. Like other families, we were affected by stigma and a sense of shame that kept us mostly silent about our problems. And church leaders who wanted to help us, for the most part, didn’t know how to help. I don’t blame them for this; they must have been as confused and uncertain as most people are when it comes to mental illness. In my own experience, what churches have done wrong is mostly remain silent—just ignore mental illness altogether. As a young teenager, I would have been helped tremendously by discussion of mental illness within the church and even within the context of my youth group. My whole family would have benefited from extensions of friendship and offers to help when we were at our lowest. Instead, we felt pressure to pretend as if everything were fine and to put on our best face at church” (Amy Simpson)

Let me say it like this: Robin Williams is here among us, and are we able to love him and his family the way they all need? Of course we want to; but can we? Are staff configured in such a way to support programs and people who could provide real help? Religious Exploration programs are key places where the needs of the children and the family will be most evident, but do we have the kind of leadership and vision in place that can meet this need and so many others?

The escalator is stuck.

“Anybody out there!”

“Somebody!”

“Hello!”

And we’re answering back. Getting off, and moving on.

You know, when an escalator breaks down, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. But when things break down in more complex systems, or are close to breaking down, you don’t necessarily know. Frogs in slow-boiling kettles don’t know. The signs can seem ambiguous. Or we interpret them through biased lenses and bend the meaning in a way that satisfies our agenda but is not faithful to the truth. How else to explain the millions of people who have been witnessing the event of Ferguson, Missouri and they still don’t see the racism, they still don’t get it. How else to explain that?

Perhaps the most controversial claim coming from Karen Bellevance-Grace—that wise and respected voice in UU Religious Exploration circles—is that with the changing patterns of family life today, the amped up speed and stress and time crunch, we may need to reimagine in radical ways how we do Religious Exploration. What the programs will need to look like if they are to thrive.

The status quo is an experience focused around Sunday morning. In sheer terms of exposure time to classroom activities and discussions and crafts and whatever else is going on, we are talking a maximum of 30-40 touch points per year. Factor in absences for illness and other family obligations, and what our religious educators end up with is around 40 hours of opportunity, per year, to impact the spiritual growth and development of our children.

40 hours out of a total possible 5,110 waking hours per year.

Eight to eighteen-year-olds spend on average seven hours a day, seven days a week plugged in to their smart phones, the Internet, video games, TV, music, and other forms of media. That’s 2,555 hours per year.

The picture is this: 40 hours of dedicated soul-deepening experiences vs. 2,555 hours of who knows what.

Just that is enough to make us pause. Is the standard way of doing Religious Exploration like the stuck elevator? Is it?

Karen Bellevance-Grace says yes. She is by no means alone.

Listen to this—a rather extended quote but all good:

“We know from research,” she says, “that family religiosity can be a powerful predictor for youth to remain religious themselves as they enter adulthood. We know that Unitarian Universalists who come to our churches as adults have had little, if any, exposure to our religious education curricula, theology, or history. We know that a number of writers in the mainstream Christian community identify a focus on Family Ministry as one faithful response to 21st century realities. In light of all this, incorporating an intentional strengthening of family ministry seems a faithful direction to lean.”

“Family Ministry identifies the role of the church as a chief support in the spiritual development of congregants of all ages. With particular respect to children and youth, the congregation’s role is to provide support and partnership to parents, who own the primary responsibility for their children’s spiritual growth. It requires us to live into a belief that our religious education programs are supplemental faith formation programs and not intended to be the sole system of delivery.” And then she says, “Changing the Sunday School-centric model of religious education creates space for our churches and religious professionals to intentionally and explicitly equip parents to be their children’s first and most consistent religious educators all week long.“

The question essentially is: How do you make a house into a home?

How do you infuse bare walls and spaces it with love and hope and forgiveness and courage?

This is just not about parents. This is about all of us, trying to keep on showing up to our lives with an open heart, with continued curiosity and hopefulness no matter what. But we know that kids are going to struggle if the adults aren’t modeling this. Religion is a thing more caught than taught. So how do we support our parents in their awesome task? How to help them put the oxygen mask on themselves, first? The parents, who on average are with their kids 3000 hours each year, and so they have plenty more opportunity to influence their children than the 40 hours per year of church classes. So how can congregations like ours truly prove their relevance and worth by guiding and strengthening the adults for their awesome work?

I want us to collectively wonder about this. Is more of the same truly going to take us in the direction of UUCA’s Ends Statements and Long Range Plan priorities? Or does more of the same amount to staying put on the broken escalator?

Saying, “Anybody out there!”

“Somebody!”

“Hello!”

“There are two people stuck on the escalator, and we need help. Now, would somebody please do something!”

But WE are the somebody we’ve been waiting for…

All I know is that I see the Associate Minister of Lifelong Learning and Growth ministering with and among us as we figure out what’s next. What’s next, friends, is critical. We cannot afford a sagging, lagging, sappy, unhappy Religious Exploration program. In the wake of that, everything becomes saggy and laggy and sappy and unhappy.

So join me and join the Task Force I’m partnering with in our excitement and resolve. Stay tuned to our progress—we’re going to keep you regularly informed. And when stewardship time rolls around and you are asked to make your annual pledge, go above and beyond. We must be able to afford the best. You can’t build a bold and bright future on the cheap.

On of my favorite poets, Rumi, says,

Why do we stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Why indeed.

Let’s walk on through.

Pro Infirmis is a Swiss organization for people with disabilities, and as today’s video shows, part of their work is expanding a sense of acceptance in society for difference, as well as for self-acceptance in people who carry the weight of such differences. One has scoliosis, another is in a wheelchair, a third lacks a limb, and so on. All had mannequins made to perfectly reflect their body shape, which would then be displayed in a major department store on Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich’s main shopping street. Passers-by were intrigued, delighted—getting the message that there is no one ideal body shape, that all belong to our world, all have their own kind of beauty.

Lots of amazing moments in that video. In particular I’m thinking about the moment when each person returns to the warehouse to see the mannequin that mirrors his or her own body shape. The mannequins are hidden under a sheet. The person approaches, they circle, the sheet comes off, and can you just imagine what it must have felt like? Shock, astonishment, admiration. They had no idea. One of them says, “It’s special to see yourself like this, when you usually can’t look at yourself in the mirror.”

I watch this video, and it is instant happiness. I find myself taken to a place where I am more open and relaxed, I find myself more aware of the positive possibilities of life, and maybe you too. More beauty, more justice, more hope, more pleasure, more laughter, more love, more forgiveness, more energy, more creativity, more connection.

Happiness is a good orderly direction.

And the opportunities to go there instantly are endless. One reason why is because we each come to the present moment bearing a lifetime of experience. Then something in the moment happens—we smell a certain unforgettable smell or something tastes a certain way or feels a certain way or looks a certain way or sounds a certain way—and it’s like, eureka! You feel plugged in. You feel it all coming together.

The other day I was making a dinner of pork tenderloin, and while it was baking away in the oven, I was preparing a vegetable side dish of mirepoix which is a mixture of chopped celery, carrots, and onions. Mirepoix is often the flavor base for soups and stews and sauces but I like it just in itself. Colorful to look at and very tasty.

I like to start with sautéing the chopped onion, and here’s where the real story unfolds. In my frying pan, the little white cubes of onion deliciousness are sizzling away in butter and the heat causes a release of this most amazing aroma. Ohhhh it makes me happy. Instantly. Not just because the aroma tends to lift me several inches above the ground, but also because the smell takes me back to a time long ago. Doesn’t smell do that for us? This most powerful physical sense of ours? The smell takes me back to memories of my grandmother on my mom’s side. Baba cooking Christmas Eve dinner. She’s like Captain Kirk and her kitchen is the Starship Enterprise. In one memory scene, I’m just trying to stay out of everyone’s way. Baba is calmly issuing commands to her husband (my grandfather) and her daughters (my mother and my aunt). The actual dinner, when the house will be overrun with a horde of hungry people ready to gobble up traditional Ukrainian fare, is just hours away. She’s at the stove and I smell that lovely onion smell. I also see her flabby arms flapping away as she’s agitating whatever’s in the pan, and I am not seeing her through the cruel eyes of a society that will not let women rest unless they have a certain body shape. She is my Baba and I love that her flabby arms flap away as she stirs the pot. She is part of my family. I am part of her family. I belong.

The smell of sautéing onions is: I belong.

Instant happiness.

We’re talking about this today because it opens up the door to what I take to be the essence of any truly meaningful religious way: how it connects us to thoughts and behaviors and people and history and whatever other resources that help keep us fluid and flowing through all the changes and challenges of our lives. This is the direction we want to be going in. Staying curious, because every moment the Mystery unfolds. No matter what, never ceasing to show up with an open, compassionate heart because we don’t want to miss a thing.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Wings can be broken. But we can still learn to fly.

Let me tell you another story. It’s about the trench warfare of World War 1. Did you know that the emperors and generals who ordered their men to war in August 1914 thought in terms of weeks, not months, let alone years? “You will be home before the leaves have fallen off the trees,” said the German Kaiser to his troops in early August…. But he was wrong. The leaves would fall off the trees four times before the war would be done. Four times, four long years. The grinding, catastrophic, cruel years of World War I.

So there they are, the soldiers, in the cold, in the muck, mud sucking at their boots, miserable in trenches…. It’s Christmas Eve, the darkness of night surrounds them. And then suddenly, along various areas of the British-German front, it happens without forethought, without any central planning: love takes human form: Christmas trees go up, a spontaneous upsurge of singing: Silent Night, Oh Christmas Tree, O Come All Ye Faithful. Something other than cruelty and death and madness happening across No Man’s Land. Harmonizing! Harmony. All this happening independently, mind you, in various areas of the British-German front, as much as two-thirds of it, thousands of soldiers singing, each side singing to the other instead of shooting.

It led the soldiers to actually get out of the safety of their trenches, to finally meet face to face. The Christmas Truce of 1914. It’s one of the most remarkable incidents of World War I, perhaps in all of military history.

Now, one hundred years later, trench warfare of a sort is still with us. Today’s headlines scream

Israel Strikes Gaza After Militants Resume Rocket Fire
How Israel Brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe
Lines in the Sand: Deadly Times in the West Bank and Gaza
Why Are the Arab Gulf Countries Silent on Gaza?
Everything You Need to Know About the Israel-Gaza Conflict

One thing we DO need to know is that this conflict is longstanding and messy beyond belief. In my detailed exploration of this from March 25, 2012 entitled “The Bronze Bull: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” I wrote: “The solution is courage which is restraint in the presence of shrill voices from people and from the press and from leaders who perceive an enemy and push for a fight by any means necessary. The solution is a willingness to be genuinely curious about the supposed enemy, willingness to walk in their shoes for a time, willingness to start over, begin again. The solution is refusal to label this kind of empathizing as anti-Israel or anti-Palestinian.” That’s a piece of what I wrote then, and it is all so general. Nothing specific. Sounds good, but how to make it happen? How do we make it happen internationally when, right at home, we can be stuck in the trenches of our own private, individual wars? How to let go, how to forgive?

The Christmas Truce of 1914 comes as instant happiness to me, and maybe to you, because it suggests how even the most desperate situation can shift. Not in planned ways, nothing that is foreseen. But the possibility is always there. We never stop working towards a solution, for sure: but we also know that the world is a Mystery and there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. I know: nothing in this mere attitude can now directly prevent further deaths. But this does not mean it is impractical. Show me a statesman or stateswoman who is hopeless and I’ll show you a conflict that keeps grinding and grinding away.

Never let go of hope. Whatever helps us stay hopeful and engaged: give us more of that! Whatever helps us stay in the game.

Sometimes it’s just plain silliness. You may already be aware of the story told about Dr. King in the hours before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. Do you know what he was doing? Pillow fight. Civil rights icons like Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy: smacking each other upside the head. Dr. King being smacked and smacking away.

The world must not be allowed to take our silliness away. Save the world, yes, but savor it too. Let your soul be large enough for both. That is our Unitarian Universalist spiritual way.

So go on out there and watch some cat videos on the interwebs.

One word: karaoke.

Have you heard about the new movie Guardians of the Galaxy? How many of you have already seen it? “I am Groot.”

Maybe you have Braves Fever, or Falcons Fever, or Fever for some other sports team. Go for it!
(For myself, I have crazy figure skating fever—don’t get me started!)

All of these things, and more: they get us excited, they get us laughing, they get us pumped up, they keep us sane in a world that can be way too heavy sometimes….

Consider yet another example of blessed silliness. Here are some foreign words with no direct English equivalent:

Kummerspeck (German):
It means, excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, it means “grief bacon.”

Shemomedjamo (Georgian):
When you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it. The word literally means, “I accidentally ate the whole thing.”

Tartle (Scots):
The word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

Iktsuarpok (Inuit):
That feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet.

Gigil (Filipino):
The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is irresistibly cute.

Do you feel it? Instant happiness!

You know, silly doesn’t need a reason. But there’s still depths there to know. The foreign words name behaviors that come out of our fragility and humanity and remind me I am and none of us are divine beings and that the perfectionism of our cruel inner (and outer) critics completely misses the point of living. The word “human” shares the same root with humus, humility, humor. It fills me with relief: the insight that they all go together, and I’m a part of it, with all my grief bacon eating and the times I tartle and the moments when I want to gigil something.

It’s happiness. Instant.

Even more instant happiness can come from the ideas we choose to dwell on. Some ideas make us clench up inside, others make us relax. Let’s try an experiment with idea pairs: each idea in the pair should send you in different directions. Close your eyes, allow the words I am about to say to wash over you, and pay close attention to your physical reaction to them. Ready? Here we go:

Idea pair number one:
The unpleasant situation you are in right now will last forever.
Now redirect your focus on a different idea: this too shall pass.

Next idea pair:
You are completely and utterly alone in what you are experiencing.
And now to redirect: the way you are on has been travelled by others; you are NOT alone.

How’s it going? Are you experiencing how the different ideas send you in different energy directions?

Try this next idea pair:
When other people hurt me, they know exactly what they are doing. They have it all figured out. The impact of what they’ve done to me was something they actually calculated ahead of time down to the details and they still gave their actions the go-ahead. What they did had everything to do with me and nothing whatsoever to do with their own lack of awareness or issues or problems or whatever.
Now redirect: Other people have good intentions. It’s not personal.

Is it not a source of instant happiness to know that the ideas we habitually dwell on are ultimately up to us? That even our mental ruts can, with consistent mental effort and focus, be reshaped to reflect something more positive and more accurate and truthful about the real world we live in?

Several weeks ago, I attended the memorial service of a child who was just a little over one year old. She had been born with spinal muscular atrophy and it is a fatal genetic disease. From the moment the diagnosis was made, the parents knew that their child would never grow up. They would never have the “traditional” parenting experience.

Just imagine yourself in their shoes.

Before the actual memorial service started, when picture after picture of the child was being projected onto the screen in the sanctuary, I found myself thinking unworthy thoughts but insistent thoughts nonetheless. What good can come from such a flawed life? What value can there be in such a temporary relationship? In all the pictures, the child is just lying there. She was never able to use her limbs, as far as I know, or even move her head. A big tube snaking out of her nose, down and away. Machines, wires.

And then the memorial service began, and I heard some things. I heard her caretaker saying that she had one of the biggest personalities she’s ever known. Personality booming out of wide-open, very intelligent and aware eyes. Red cheeks and huge smiles and squeals of laughter. How she loved being outside. How she had “eyelashes reaching all the way up to heaven.”

This is what her parents had decided to do. They had decided to live life to the fullest while they had her. Her mother regularly painted her fingernails and toenails, always dressed her up beautifully. They took her all sorts of places. They took her to the swimming pool and gave her the delicious experience of being in the water. They took her to the aquarium to see the whales and the sea lions and the sharks. There were pictures from these trips, and some were taken from the child’s perspective, as a way of trying to get into her world and see it how she might be seeing it. They were curious. They cared.

Lots of pictures of cuddling, of holding her close, kissing her.

The parents said that they had never loved more deeply or been loved more deeply, than with this child who lived just a little over a year. And that was the substance of their nontraditional parenting experience.

I left the memorial service knowing that not everything truly valuable has to last forever, or even for a while.

I left that place knowing that not everything truly valuable needs to be without flaws or complications or shortcomings or endings.

I left that place knowing that life despite all is good, and that sweetness is everywhere, if we but have eyes to see it.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

MOM upside-down is WOW. Or WoWoWoWoWoWoW.

But what DOES that mean, other than sounding awesome?

For me, the WOW is all about mother energy. Mother energy is like sunlight, and it fills the green leaves of our lives with joy, and we are filled with the juice of joy, and all we can do in response is grow. We grow, and it feels right. We grow in confidence and there is no apology. We are soothed in our pains, we are increased in our gladness. We know who we are, because the sunlight has streamed through our green leaves and it has known us more intimately than anything else and we are shining together, we shine together, we shine together, we shine.

That’s what I call WOW. WoWoWoWoWoWoW.

Some of us got this in full measure while growing up. If it was with our biological mother, maybe we got it from her. This sunlight. Or maybe it was a father who loved you like this, with maternal affection. Maybe you have two dads. Maybe it is a mom, but she adopted you at some point, or she’s a stepmom. Fact is, mother love is not tied to any specific biology or family structure. No one owns sunlight. Sunlight shines free. And if you got this in full measure growing up, today’s a day you want to stand up and cheer.

Unless you’re grieving. She or he is lost to you somehow, through death or dementia or in some other way.

Or perhaps the one you imprinted as “mother” was not sunlight to you. She was a complex mixture of sun and shadow, or perhaps nothing at all but shadows….

There is a picture on the wall of my older brother’s home, of me smiling, and one of my teeth is missing because I’m six, and my hair is blond, and it’s carefully combed. Unless you are me, you would never know how deeply that boy in the picture felt like an orphan, felt awkward in his life, had gotten used to grim sadness and loneliness. You would never know that he lived a compromised life in which a part of him still hoped to be cherished by his mom but another part of him, a harder part, knew he needed to be practical and needed to acknowledge reality. So he went to school everyday, he went through the motions, he allowed himself to get caught up in his life, and gradually, over the years, he lost his feeling for the other part of him that was soft and soaring and never stopped hoping for cherishment and was full of tears, tears like an ocean….

She was all shadow to him. To me.

Mom died in 2007, while I was interviewing for my job here. Lots of grieving, lots of healing since then. I have come to know directly how deeply a child yearns for mother love—perhaps the only mystical experience I have ever had. To realize that an infant’s body may be tiny, but inside that tiny body is an entire universe of need for sunlight because otherwise it is all complete darkness and despair and the feeling that you are being annihilated.

But mother love saves.

I have also come to know how fragile real moms are, as channels of WOW. My mother. Sexual abuse, mental illness, drug addiction. She wanted to stand up in her life but could never see a way to get up off of her knees.

Some of us today just don’t want to cheer. We want to boo. I completely get that. But I don’t want to boo. I feel gratitude that my mom was the door through which my spirit and my body entered this world, and she has been a profound teacher to me. Hard lessons.

Maybe all this is why my colleague the Rev. Becky Edminston-Lange says that “the minister who thinks she or he can deliver the perfect Mothers Day sermon probably needs their medications adjusted.” The issue of mothers is complex. Cheers. Boos. And everything in between.

And moms themselves know it. Do they ever.

From almost 4000 years ago–ancient Egypt–we hear this ode to mothers: “Thou shalt never forget thy mother and what she has done for thee… For She carried thee long beneath her heart as a heavy burden, and after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her shoulder and gave thee her breast to thy mouth, and as thy size increased her heart never once allowed her to say, ‘Why should I do this?’” Clearly a man wrote that. Because, yes, mothers can feel ambivalent about mothering. You get pregnant and it’s like an alien force has taken over your body and it’s upsetting, at the very least. And then you feel guilty for feeling upset, because a “good mother” would never have anything but good feelings about her kid, no matter what.

Above all, mothers know full well the profound need for mother love and how fragile a vessel they are for that.

Listen to this story that comes from blogger Renee Trudeau. “I have a visceral recollection,” she says, “of the day, ten years ago, when my husband returned to work after being home with me and our newborn for two weeks. Sitting in our dark, quiet kitchen, holding my baby boy, listening to the kitchen clock tick, and blanketed in a postpartum haze, I thought, ‘This is it. I’m all alone.’ It was a frightening and devastating realization, and I have never felt the absence of maternal nurturing more than I did then. But then, I heard a comforting voice whisper from within, ‘Renee, it’s time to start mothering yourself.’ That moment was a catalyst for me and the beginning of my journey to learning to both nurture and nourish myself.”

This is why, today, we are turning MOM upside-down to get to the WOW. Whatever your history has been, however full of shadows, whether or not you are yourself a mom, we all need mother love.

Green leaves never stop yearning for the sun.

And while an infant experiences the vast universe inside its skin as devoid of light and cries out to be nourished by a mother’s closeness, as adults, our experience can be totally different. Inside each of us is our own sun. The infant does not know that but we can know that. We can generate mother love for ourselves. We can nourish ourselves.

At first, when I realized this, it made me sad. It just felt like more of having to slog through my lonely life. More of always having to work so hard because all I got from my mom was shadows.

But then I thought about the literal kind of eating. As a baby, your arms just aren’t capable of lifting spoon to mouth. You really do need someone to feed you. But physical growth always takes a baby beyond this to a place where they can feed themselves and so they become responsible for monitoring their own hunger and then satisfying it. It’s a good thing. Who knows us best but ourselves? So if this is the case with our physical hungers, why not our emotional hungers? There is no shame, I said to myself, in taking care of one’s own heart. It’s not a sign of abandonment, in the same way that feeding yourself is not a sign of abandonment.

And so yesterday I was trying to get to my daughter’s college graduation, held at the Georgia Dome. I’m on 285 and running late and it’s Saturday morning, you’d think traffic on a Saturday morning is going to go smoothly, but no, we’re slowing down, now I see the sign, the two left lanes are closed ahead for construction, and now I see another sign saying that the far right lane is closed for construction too, and I need to get to the Avondale Estates Marta station and I’m coming in all the way from Dunwoody, and I’m supposed to meet up with everyone at 11:30am, and I don’t know if I’m going to make it, and my heart is pumping like crazy in my chest because I’m silly like that, and I’m starting to think and say un-pastor-like things to the people in the other cars, and it’s not pretty. But then I stop myself. Suddenly I see how I’m just like a child about to have a temper tantrum. I need some mother love to comfort me, calm me down. I put my hand on my heart, rub it for a while. Take some big deep breaths. It felt good. And the rest of the story is that I had hurried up—risked life and limb–only so that I could be at the Marta station with the family, milling about, waiting an hour for the train to arrive…

Such is life. So it goes.

But it goes better if you know how to tap into the inner sun, experience some of that WOW power for yourself.

Do it yourself. Feed yourself. Learn how to soothe difficult feelings without relying on anything that’s destructive, like alcohol, or shopaholism, or workaholism, or other kinds of addictions that distract you, take away the pain, yes, but they steal from you too. Self-mothering soothes without stealing anything. It’s just sunlight on green leaves…

Other ways of self-soothing come from life coach Cheryl Richardson:

You give yourself a nap or put yourself to bed before you feel overtired.
You prevent stomachaches (and negative self-talk) by stopping yourself from overeating when you feel full.
You take a “time out” when you feel frustrated, angry, or impatient so you can settle down and think clearly.
You speak gently to yourself when you’ve made a mistake.
You reassure yourself that everything will be okay when you get scared or when you feel lonely.
You remind yourself to be kind, not only to others, but also more importantly, to yourself.

Somehow, many of us got the idea that self-criticism is an effective motivator. It was BAD mothering. BAD fathering. So we come to believe that harshness towards ourselves gets the job done. Really?

Fearing failure and losing faith in yourself: YAY!

Maybe you do accomplish great things, but you feel completely miserable. HOORAY!

Self-compassion is the better way.

That’s part of what self-mothering is all about. Another part is learning how to generate good feelings for oneself. It’s about having a life, doing things that give you rich experiences, being OK in yourself no matter what else might be happening in your world.

“In my own worst seasons,” writes Barbara Kingsolver, “I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.”

This is what I mean by good self-mothering, in the mode of generating good feelings for yourself. Not waiting for it to be done unto you. Do it yourself.

And, yes, at times we have to force ourselves to look hard at a single glorious thing. There are so many ways to get caught up in suffering. A classic newspaper cartoon suggests one way that families well know. “For Better or for Worse.” In one episode, the first three segments show a mother tossing and turning in her bed, worrying about her ten-year-old son, Michael. She says, “Are we too tough on Michael? Are we not tough enough? Do we give in too often? Too seldom? Do we listen? Do we understand? Maybe I nag too much. Am I a good parent? Where are the answers? How does one know what to do?” In the last segment, there is the child that the mother has been angsting over. He lies in his bed and he’s awake too. Except this is what’s going through his mind: “The trouble with grown-ups is they think they know everything.”

FACT! Water can be chemically synthesized by burning rocket fuel!
FACT! Water is one of the primary ingredients in herbicides and pesticides.
FACT! Over consumption of water can cause excessive sweating, urination and even death.
FACT! Water is the leading cause of drowning.
FACT! 100 percent of all serial killers, rapist and drug dealers have admitted to drinking water.
FACT! 100 percent of all people exposed to water will die.

What is your focus today? Because of your focus, do you make a perfectly innocent thing like water guilty?

But it can be otherwise. Just as Barbara Kingsolver says, “Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.” We can do that too. Send yourself outside to play in the fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis. Give yourself regular treats like an afternoon movie or a game with friends. Pay attention to what inspires your enthusiasm and generates vitality, and do more of that.

Play in the water, rather than blame it.

Whatever your history has been, however full of shadows, whether or not you are yourself a mom, we all need mother love. We all need to feel soothed in our pains and increased in our gladness. And we can do it ourselves.

Sunlight streaming through our green leaves.
Sunlight, that knows us more intimately than anything else.
We shine together, we shine together, we shine together, we shine.

WoWoWoWoWoWoW.

Less is more. AMEN. [sit down.]

Blame Leslie Freymann—she put me up to that. She’s the UUCA member who won the Sermon-of-Your-Choice item at the Fun For Funds Auction this past November, and her passion is minimalism. She says, “I’ve always been into having a clean, mostly clutter-free house (from outward appearance anyways) but a year or so ago I learned there was a name for how I was feeling and a community of thousands already doing it and I started to read blog posts about it, with tips and suggestions and inspirations for taking it to the next level….”

This sermon is for Leslie, but it’s for all of us too because minimalism preaches.

**

Just consider the timing. What’s happening as this sermon takes flight.

With Nepal’s earthquake we have thousands dead and thousands more suffering. With the events in Baltimore and the murder of yet another African American man by police, we are painfully reminded of how far we have to go in fighting racism. With the Supreme Court hearing arguments for and against same-sex marriage, we hold our collective breath and hope the cause of justice will prevail. With the United States Senate this past Wednesday voting to reject the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change, we are rolling our eyeballs so far up into our heads they may get stuck there. There is just so much in this wide world to save, and the question is: Are we free enough that we are able to show up, do the saving work that is ours to do?

On the other hand, this afternoon at 4pm is UUCA’s lovely Floralia Farm Dinner which celebrates good food and good friendship all in interdependency with the earth. It is not by accident that it happens close to May 1 and the pagan celebration of Beltane, which in agricultural times affirmed the fertility of the fields and the promise of a bountiful harvest. As the UUCA website says, “Chef Philip Meeker of Bright Seed (and formerly of Kimball House) will cook a meal to reflect his holistic approach to cuisine that will wow omnivores and vegetarians alike.” There is so much in this wide world to savor, and again the question: Are we free enough that we are able to show up, to be foodies, to enjoy things, to take pleasure in the cycles and rhythms of a sensuous earth—work (of a sorts) which is also ours to do?

For what is a good life anyway, but one which balances savoring the world with saving it? And always the question is: Are we free enough to show up? Or does clutter of one sort or other get in the way?

This question about clutter is particularly hot for me right now, right this very instant, because I am in process of moving from my current apartment to another one. The big burly movers come tomorrow. I look upon my things, and the clutter literally pains me. The Ouija board from the 1950s that I bought for five dollars 15 years ago because I thought it was tres cool, but through several moves it’s always lived in a dark places, shoved underneath other stuff. The ten shirts that I don’t feel great in but they aren’t horrible so I keep them but I never wear them. The extra set of dishes that are stacked like a crazy ziggurat and I struggle taking them to Goodwill because I say to myself, “I could use them.” That’s the minimalist’s forbidden phrase, you should know, which justifies never throwing or giving anything away. I have become infamous with local liquor store clerks because I’ve been haunting them, asking for boxes, boxes which are ideal for books because they are durable and not too big. How many do I have now? 60? 70? Because I can’t get rid of books. I can always use a book, if not for a sermon now, then for some sermon later…

What I’m saying is that there’s nothing like a move to get someone thinking seriously about minimalism.

To all my crapola I’m saying: good riddance!

**

It’s the signature battle-cry of our times. Pamela Druckerman in The New York Times writes, “Clutter is having its moment in part because we’ve accumulated a critical mass of it. The cascade began 25 years ago, when China started to export huge amounts of cheap clothes, toys and electronics. Cut-rate retailers and big-box stores encouraged us to stockpile it all. And we did.” So now, she says, “Everyone I meet seems to be waging a passionate, private battle against their own stuff, and they perk up as soon as you mention it. […] A New Yorker on a de-cluttering bender explained: ‘There’s too much in my head, there’s too much stuff in my house, too.’ Another friend said that when his girlfriend got angry, she called him the clutter of her life.”

Clutter is not just about material objects. It’s also about people you bring into your life, images and information you invite into your mind, emotions that you let live in your heart. To this kind of clutter, writer Edward Hallowell speaks powerfully. In his book entitled Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap, he says, “Living life today can seem like riding a bike no-handed while reading a book and juggling six eggs…” “This world,” he says, “is a new mother lode…. We can now mine a volume of accessible information that gives to every individual mind the power of what it used to take hundreds of minds to do. We can work with an ease and speed of communication that makes the dead time called ‘waiting’ obsolete, or at least unnecessary.” “The energy that flashes through our electronics,” says Edward Hallowell, “has leapt into most of our bloodstreams and brains.”

But does this energy charge us up, or does it burn us out?

Try this experiment: Watch CNN for 24 hours straight. Get your Wolf Blitzer on. Is this going to help us live out our Seven Unitarian Universalist Principles in saving the world? What do you think? It just burns us to a crisp. Trouble and pain from all parts of the world, sucking us dry like an energy vampire. Powerful images—but hopefully we are savvy enough to know that the media loves controversy and highlights the 100 people in Baltimore who rioted and completely ignores the thousands who protested peacefully and also cleaned the mess up afterwards. Hopefully we know this, which means that in addition to being brought low by the suffering of an entire world, we feel sick to our very souls because of mistrust and cynicism.

And again, in all this sturm und drang, nothing gets saved. We want to make a difference, but it’s hard to find the work that’s ours to do when we feel depressed, frazzled, ineffective.

But minimalism preaches. Minimalism is about less life energy tied up with what drains us and more life energy available for the work of saving and savoring. Leslie Freymann puts it like this: “It doesn’t mean you can’t have nice things and spend money on luxuries and things you love. In fact, to me it is about quality vs. quantity. It is about being very conscious of what I bring into my life and continually evaluating whether items, events and people are truly worthy of the space they consume – either in my house or in my schedule or even just in my brain. It is also about letting go of the past and not holding on to ‘stuff’ simply because you don’t want to deal with it. Minimalism can help you start your own therapeutic journey; it can free you and give you the space and time to think and reflect—and that freedom can be scary, which is why many people never even get started.”

I found this last insight to be especially profound. It brings me back to something my therapist Shirley once said. Preserving all confidentiality, of course, Shirley had mentioned a client from years past whom she’d invited into a visualization exercise. “Visualize the hurt that you’ve not yet forgiven as heavy in your heart, a tar-like mass. Reach your hand in and pull it out, pull all of it out.” She did, and she reported feeling amazed at the difference, how all the heaviness was gone, replaced by a lightness and a fluidity of feeling. But soon enough, her smile faded. Things felt too good, she didn’t know what to do with that, she didn’t know who she was anymore. And so she went back to the visualizing. She imagined herself reaching for that heavy tar-like gunk, and she re-inserted it into in her heart. She couldn’t tolerate the freedom.

All I can say to this is that I’d rather carry the pain of ambiguity than the pain of clutter. “And the day came,” says writer Anais Nin, “when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

The pain of clutter is the pain of living an absurd life. Columnist Ellen Goodman hits the nail on the head when she calls it “normal,” and says, “’Normal’ is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, the car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”

The pain of clutter is the pain of living a mediocre life. Very often, we are choosing not between “absolutely vile” and “wonderful” but between “just good” and “wonderful.” Opportunities that are just good knock on our doors all the time—and unless we are clear about who we are and what feeds our souls, we’ll marry them and pass over the ones that make our hearts sing, that feel like home, that charge us up to be all that we are called to be. So we’ll end up not singing but mumbling; not at home but drifting; not called to be all we can be, but restless. We did not choose what was wonderful—we chose what was just good instead.

That is what I call painful—so give me the pain of ambiguity instead. The pain of emptiness that is absolutely necessary because room must be available for what is different and better. For truly wonderful, worthy things, there must be space.

So how do we do it? How to become minimalist?

Short answer: be willing to be transformed. That happens to be the worship theme of the month and, as you may know, with each worship theme comes a “happiness challenge.” Take a look at your worship bulletin. Below the “Order of Service,” below the “Supporting Community Today,” we see it: “Theme-Based Worship + Happiness Challenge = Fun.” There you will find seven beginner steps for living more lightly upon the earth.

Write it down
Discard the duplicates
Declare a clutter-free zone
Travel lightly
Dress with less
Eat similar meals
Save $1000.

Take the worship bulletin home with you, try these minimalist life hacks out, as a way to get started…

As Leslie Freymann suggested earlier, there’s lots of folks practicing minimalism, there’s tips and suggestions and inspirations galore for taking it to the next level. Josh Becker is someone to look into. Check out his blogsite at becomingminimalist.com. Also look into Lara Blair’s blogsite at theextraordinarysimplelife.com. “I’m not going to covet other minimalists’ lives anymore,” she writes. “I don’t travel the world with a single backpack. I haven’t packed up my family to travel across the country in an RV for a year. I am not a single woman with a futon, a suitcase and a laptop. I didn’t choose 600 square feet of dwelling space with a hobby farm ‘round back.” Then she says that while all these extraordinary people and situations have things to teach, there’s just not “one formula for choosing a simple life…it is not a one-size-fits all T-shirt.”

Absolutely so. But when you practice minimalism, you will most likely experience certain things that other minimalists will immediately resonate with. Leslie swears that there is instant, positive karma in giving away the stuff that clutters your house. You are constantly surprised by all the amazing things that find their way to you, just because you opened up a space to receive.

Minimalists experience instant positive karma, and also this: people’s incredulity. Brooke McAlary illustrates with a blog post entitled “The Problem With Free,” in which she basically says that freebies are not free. They cost money to produce, first of all, and second of all, do we really need the beer glasses and the key rings and the pens and the T-shirts and on and on? “At some point,” she says, “you will have to pick [that stuff] up and decide where to store it or how to rid yourself of it. And to be honest, I think your time is more important than that. So next time you’re offered something for free,” she says, “try saying no. See how it feels. That’s what I did recently when I was buying some make up, and the result was… interesting.” Here’s the exchange she found herself in with a shop assistant:

Shop Assistant: “And you get a really nice tote bag for free.”
Brooke McAlary: “Oh, no thanks. I don’t need another bag.”
Shop Assistant: “But…it’s free.”
Brooke: “Oh, I know. But I don’t need it. Thanks though.”
Shop Assistant: “But… it doesn’t cost you anything. I can give it to you right now. You could give it to someone for a gift. It’s actually really nice. And it’s free.”
Brooke: “Uh, no, thanks.”
Shop Assistant: [Stunned silence]
Brooke: “Can I have my make-up now?”

In addition to receiving instant positive karma and other people’s incredulity, minimalists commonly report having leaps of innovative thought. It was Albert Einstein who once said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” It means that if we’re living Edward Hallowell’s book entitled Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap, the solution will not be found in learning how to go faster but, rather, in knowing who we are, what our values are, and in saying no to what’s out of line with all of that.

It means that if we are drowning in possessions, the solution will not be found in bigger containers or through silver bullet organizational tips and tricks but, rather, in de-owning. “At its heart,” says Josh Becker, “organizing is simply rearranging.” Organizing stays at the same level of thinking that created the original problem. We have to go to the next level. We need higher insight.

Lots of experiences that minimalists share, as they seek out ways to liberate energy for abundant living. The last one I’ll mention here is just an attitude of being done with impoverishment. Accepting fool’s gold and pretending it’s real. Listen to how writer Adrienne Pieroth puts this, speaking for women everywhere and I say this can speak for men too:

She was done not fully being herself.

She realized she was the only self she could be—and not being unapologetically true to herself was a disservice to her soul and the world.

She was done listening to the noise of the world. She realized the quiet voice of her own soul was the most beautiful sound.

She was done questioning her motives, her intentions, the call of her soul. She realized questions seek answers, and maybe she already knew the answers.

She was done striving, forcing, pushing through and staying on the hard path. She realized toughing things out might be a sign to pick another path.

She was done with friends that admonished her to be more light and breezy. She realized they didn’t understand she swam in the deep waters of life, she felt at home in their dark depths and died if she lived on the surface.

She was done with the distractions, the denials, the small addictions that pulled her away from the true desires of her soul. She realized that strength of character came from focus and commitment.

She was done not following the desires that yelled out in her soul every day. She realized if she did nothing about them, they died a quiet death that took a piece of her soul with them.

She was done
We are done
I am done

As I pack all my worldly possessions, and transition from old apartment to new, I will make it a kind of meditation. The Ouija board from the 1950s, the ten shirts that are just eh, the extra set of dishes stacked like a crazy ziggurat, even my beloved books: to keep before me the resolve that I am done with clutter, that it’s not enough that I could perhaps maybe possibly use a thing (even though I haven’t for years). To de-own such things as an act worthy in itself but also symbolic of something larger: how I am done with all the self-undermining habits and unhelpful attitudes and distorted ideas that clutter my heart and mind and soul and are untrue to me and cut me off from abundant living….

Let that be my meditation
Let that be our meditation

Muslims say, “Take one step towards God and God takes seven steps towards you.”

Becoming minimalist can be that one step.

It’s just like what happens in Flatland. You are a square, a circle, a triangle, and what you know is how to scurry about doing your flat business in your flat world. You know left-right and you know forward-back. What you DON’T know—what you can’t even imagine—is up-down. Until a sphere comes, crashes your life. Wake-up call from the third dimension. From that moment forward, nothing can ever be as it was….

And so it was for me when I was in high school and early college. Faith—which is and shall always be a positive activity of trusting that the world is meaningful and worthwhile—had, at that time in my life, a particular style to it. Faith for me then was a matter of relationships, of fitting in. That’s what my church community taught: power in unity. Preachers laid down the law and I accepted it; authority was outside me. If you asked me why I believed as I did, I would have experienced this as a threat, not a friendly attempt to engage.

Left-right, forward-back. Flat business in a flat world. But then, one evening in the library of my church, I had a Bible shoot-out with a Disciples of Christ believer who was all of ten years older than me. He had a beard and I did not. He had a car and a girlfriend and I did not. But what I had was the truth as my Church of Christ preacher preached it, and I laid it on thick. One verse after another proving to him why, if you weren’t Church of Christ, you weren’t going to heaven. But he was laying it on thick too. He was giving as good as he got. At one point, while I was gabbing away, a part of me stepped back to survey the big picture unfolding and I was just disgusted. This is true religion? This is “love one another”?

A sphere was crashing my Flatland naivete…

Although I don’t want to give the impression that the transformation of my faith style into a different one—my progress towards greater spiritual maturity—was instantaneous. Other stuff nudged at me too, over the course of years. How my Church of Christ preacher said that my beloved Baba was going to hell because she had been baptized through sprinkling rather than full immersion. Really? God is that much of a ritualistic stickler—the God of Jesus, who happened to flout ritual and purity laws all the time?

That was another huge nudge, and so was reading the Koran and the Tao Te Ching and the atheistic work of Albert Camus, The Plague. So were the entire religion and psychology and occult sections of my neighborhood used book store. I was that irritating customer who sits right in front of the shelf you’re trying to look at and hogs the space with his nose stuck in a book. I read about quantum mechanics and complexity theory. I read about Esalen and transpersonal therapies. I read about shamanism and Tarot and witchcraft. I read everything by Alan Watts and felt so good swimming in Zen.

All of these, nudging me to a place where faith was not so much an experience of unity with other like-minded folks as it was an experience of integrity. I had been a spiritual conformist; now I was a critic. I would come home to my parents during the weekend and announce that God was dead. At least the God I used to believe in. That God was dead and so was the Bible and so was Jesus. There was just so much to reject, and it felt GOOD. It felt like I was finally coming into my own.

This was around the time I switched my college major to philosophy and entered the stream of that tradition. I took a graduate degree in it and then taught college myself. But the experience that most reinforced my integrity-based faith stance was the Unitarian Universalist congregation that I started going to soon after my daughter was born. My wife at the time and I wanted Sophia to grow up in a community that practiced positive values like the Seven Principles. We wanted her to grow up in a community that drew wisdom from all lands and all times. Above all, we wanted her to grow up in a community that used its communal power to nurture not conformism but individuality. Don’t just give me left-right or forward-back for my spiritual life. Give me up-down too. Open up a third dimension.

Open things up!

And I thought that things were incredibly opened up! Until I went to Unitarian Universalist seminary and realized, for one thing, that I was incredibly rigid in my attitude towards Christianity. I mean, give me shamanism and Tarot and quantum mysticism but NOT the Bible! I was still a Biblical literalist but in reverse: all the claims which, when taken literally, are absurd, I took as evidence of the Bible’s worthlessness. I was apparently unable, at the time, to understand that you can take something seriously without having to take it literally. I was apparently unable to see as the mystic sees: beneath appearances to the essence, where all the different images and stories from all the different world religious traditions (including Christianity) come together as one core teaching about LOVE.

It was in Unitarian Universalist seminary when I discovered that there was more transformation in store for my faith style. Spiritual maturity didn’t end with integrity. There was more than left-right, back-forward, and even up-down.

I realized this in spades during a worship service at the mother of all contemporary Christian megachurches: Willow Creek Community Church, right outside of Chicago. I was there doing homework. I had been hired right out of seminary by the Unitarian Universalist Association to do a new thing: to create a new kind of Unitarian Universalist congregation for a new day. They wanted me to take an especially close look at what was going on with megachurches. How do they get so big? What are they doing that we could do too, without compromising our values?

It was there when I realized the extent to which the Unitarian Universalists I had known up to that point in time read ahead in the hymnal while they sang, just to be sure nothing was sung that violated personal integrity. I started seeing how this reflects a scrupulosity that gives too much value to surface appearances and misses the Spirit that is just waiting to be unleashed. That day, 12 years ago, I felt a Spirit wash over me in that worship space which I had never before felt in a Unitarian Universalist setting. I felt something real that day, and guess what? I didn’t feel one whit less a Unitarian Universalist for liking it, even though I was not in control of it or could not command it rationally.

In fact, it was then I realized how the faith stance of integrity, which is aggressively critical, works against an experience of the Spirit. It’s just as Parker Palmer says. The Spirit is like a wild animal. It is “tough, resilient, resourceful, … and self- sufficient.” Yet the Spirit is also shy: “Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially if other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth… the wild creature … might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eye—but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.”

That visit to the Christian megachurch—it made me one hungry Unitarian Universalist, hungry for the Spirit.

From there I went on to found Pathways in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and from the start, the mission was to invite people into the Mystery. Our emphasis was to draw on (in radically open fashion) all Six Sources of Unitarian Universalist faith (including Christianity) not just because diversity is cool but because a diversity of perspectives is simply what it takes to get as much of a sense of the Mystery as possible. Every tradition (including that of science) is limited in certain ways, yes; but this doesn’t mean worthless. From every tradition, understood in context and within its proper sphere, good things can be learned.

I had become less a critic and more a mystic. And the kind of community power I wanted to harness through my new UU congregation for a new day affirmed integrity, you bet, but even more so it affirmed wisdom. It affirmed both head and heart. Don’t just read books, but practice meditation, practice prayer, practice generosity. Embody your faith. If your faith does not make you laugh or cry beyond just understanding something, if it does not connect you in a real and visceral way to the Life that is larger than any of us can know, it is falling short.

Do you know what the word “maturity” comes from? It comes from the Latin word maturus meaning “ripe, timely, early,” and this is related to mane meaning “early, of the morning.” All of this is to show how maturity comes as a result of waking up, but it’s not a one-time waking up. That’s one of the real findings in my personal spiritual growth story. The road runs ever on. Faith as unity became faith as integrity and then faith as integrity became faith as wisdom. Faith–which is and shall always be a positive activity of trusting that the world is meaningful and worthwhile—occurs in stages, and each moment of transformation is like a sphere crashing Flatland. Every time, the wake-up call feels just like that.

From another perspective, however, the whole progression is predictable. It’s not unique to me but descriptive of just what happens as any human spirit ripens. This is affirmed by the scholarly work of Dr. James Fowler, who was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University before he retired in 2005. Looking back at my life through the lens of his theory, what seemed chaotic in up-close mode is actually quite orderly.

If you should look back at your life through this same lens, what would you see?

Let’s briefly recap his theory. The way people make meaning in their lives runs through discernable stages. Children 2-7 years of age demonstrate a faith style that is innocent, magical, unrestrained by logical thought. Feelings are more powerful than reasoning could ever be, and children in this faith stage fantasize unendingly. But children grow, and as they do, they move into a second kind of faith style that is no longer fuzzy. It’s sharp-edged, dependent as it is upon authority figures who define the rules and then the rules are upheld literally. “My teacher says….” “If I am good, God will give me what I want…”

Beyond this, you have stage 3 faith, which is the stage I was in during high school and early college. It’s the stage in which meaning-making is tied up with a sense of belonging to a community. You believe what the community believes. Power in unity. James Fowler once said that many adults never transition out of this faith stage and that, in fact, traditional churches work best if most of the folks in the pews stay in this stage! Megachurches are primarily made out of stage 3 folks…

Now, before I say anything about stages 4, 5, and 6, you want to know that, on the one hand, Fowler’s theory is descriptive. It’s not leveling judgment against any of the stages. It’s exactly as the Hindu teacher Vivekananda once taught. “Would it be right,” he asks, “for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth is a sin?” The answer is of course NO, and then Vivekananda says, “To the Hindu, man is not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth.” And that’s what’s on the other hand of Fowler’s theory. The higher the faith stage, the more effective and more inclusive it is in incarnating Love. Love our one source; Love our one destiny; no one left out. That’s the mission; and the higher the faith stage, the more of the mission we can accomplish.

So on to stage 4 faith, faith as integrity, faith as taking a personal stand against what one doesn’t believe. James Fowler says that most people never get there, which is hard to imagine when you think of all the inconsistencies that trouble traditional/conservative religion, or when you just think of mid-life crisis and how it turns everything upside down. Nevertheless, that’s what Fowler has found, and maybe you too—maybe you feel like an ugly duckling with all your questions and doubts and you feel surrounded by people who just can’t join you there.

But here is where you find your people. That’s right: lots of Unitarian Universalists are in stage 4. Here, you are no ugly duckling. You are a swan.

But the road runs ever on, and this is one big reason for the creative ferment in our congregations. You may remember my sermon called “Soul Foodie” where I talked about how some of us are spiritual omnivores and we will eat veggies, we will eat steak, we will eat anything? On the other hand, others of us are stricter in our spiritual diet; we are vegetarian, we are vegan. Put a juicy steak on our plate and it makes us gag. And yet, as Unitarian Universalists we dare to believe that, amid all our diversities, we can sit at the same soul food table. We can worship together and we can serve together. “We need not think alike to love alike.”

It’s very much a stage 5 ideal. At stage 4, people are solidly rooted in integrity. “I can’t participate unless I understand it or like it.” But at stage 5, the wisdom stage, you realize that yes you can participate even if you don’t understand it or like it, because you don’t get stuck on surface appearances, you have a mystic sensibility, you know that the Love that unites us is deeper than all that. You can sing the heck out of all those Easter hymns that go on and on about Jesus’ literal physical resurrection from the dead even though that couldn’t have possibly happened because you realize it to be symbolic, and powerfully symbolic at that. Physically dead people stay dead. But dead hearts and dead communities can rise again, and they do. A mythological creature like the Phoenix doesn’t have to literally exist for us to appreciate what it means and even welcome it as the symbol of this very congregation….

Let me tell you a story about this congregation, and with this I’ll close. When I first came here, bringing my stage 5 faith, I encountered a story that was pure faith stage 6. You see, every faith stage has a growing edge. Faith stage 4, the integrity stage, can be rigid and struggles to be emotionally open and receptive to the Mystery. As for faith stage 5, the wisdom stage, here the struggle is showing up and putting your life on the line for justice. Stage 5 folks are painfully aware of the gap between reality and the vision of a world made fair with all her people one. They are painfully aware of the gap, and they can feel overwhelmed, they can feel so vulnerable to what justice demands.

And this is where the three-dimensional sphere descends, once again, upon Flatland. The wake-up call this time is an opportunity to put your wellbeing on the line, in sacrifice to the greater good. Do that, and you are at the Boddhisattva faith stage, and Dr. King is right there with you, and so is Ghandi, and so is Jesus. Every time you give and it’s scary but you give anyhow, the Boddhisattva heart within you strengthens and you are living into stage 6 faith. Every time.

Here is the faith stage 6 story I encountered, back in 2007. It begins with death. This congregation died in 1951 because it refused to accept an African American into membership. The Board voted no. Why? Probably because of fear. Fear can cause nice people to turn their backs on justice. So the vote was no, and immediately, the minister at the time resigned. The national bodies with which the church was affiliated—the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America—blacklisted the congregation and urged that no minister step in to serve while it was segregationist. Then, in 1951, the American Unitarian Association, which owned the building and practically everything else because the congregation was a cheap bunch, sold the building out from under them—to the Bible Research Foundation, headed by Finis J. Dake, a fundamentalist preacher. Add insult to injury.

The United Liberal Church (what this congregation was called back then) died. And it had to happen, because the church turned its back on justice.

But just one year later, in 1952, the American Unitarian Association commissioned the Rev. Glenn Canfield to create a Phoenix miracle and bring back the United Liberal Church. The commitment, unequivocal and right from the start, was to human and civil rights. “Our fellowship includes all people, regardless of race, color, nationality, or station of life. We believe in the essential unity of humanity and that only together can we work out successful ways of living in happiness and peace.” That is what you would read in the congregation’s order of service.

And this makes history. The United Liberal Church, reborn, is Atlanta’s very first integrated congregation. Says Jesus, “No one can see the Kingdom of God, unless they are born again.” We know the truth of that directly.

So it’s the early 1960s, and Coretta Scott King is the leader of the youth group at Ebenezer. Our congregation and theirs have a joint Sunday evening program, alternating back and forth between them, so young people, black and white, can get to know one another and learn with each other. But one day the Klan calls. It threatens violence at the next Sunday evening meeting. Congregation officials consult with Mrs. King regarding the options and she says to go ahead with the meeting. All the parents are called to give them the option of keeping their children home. Not one parent holds back. And then, that evening, while inside the church the youth are building up Beloved Community, outside are the fathers, who ring the building, they are forming a visible wall of protection, they are part of the power to make a way out of no way, which is a Boddhisattva power, a power that evil can never overcome.

How can I know I am growing? How can you know?

Bring awareness to the faith stage you are currently at.

Interpret what irritates you not as a statement about someone else’s stupidity but your own strengths and limitations.

Strive to stretch yourself. The mission of “love our one source, love our one destiny, no one left out” urges you never to be satisfied with where you are and to crash every Flatland you find yourself in.

Life is constantly challenging us to make a way out of no way.
The need to put our bodies on the line and ring the building is not just a 1960s thing. It is a today and tomorrow thing.

Live in gratitude.
Live in wonder.
Live in love and courage.

This is how you can know you are growing.

He has a lullaby voice and a great booming laugh.

He carries a French horn case instead of a briefcase.

At motels he sometimes registers as “representing” Mother Earth or the Cutting Edge of Reality.

If a Seventh Day Adventist comes to the door, he whips out his stopwatch and says “O.K., but I get equal time.”

As the minister of Edmonds Unitarian Church, in Seattle, where he served 19 years, from 1966 until 1985, he presided at hundreds of weddings, funerals, hospital rooms and mortuaries—he saw a lot of life and a lot of death. Once, while distributing someone’s remains from 2,000 feet over Bellingham Bay, Wash., in a Cessna, he had the ashes fly back in his face. “How do you brush off those ashes?” he asks. “Do you go like this?” (polite dusting gestures) “Or like this?” (frantic pawing).

These days, as a bestselling author of eight books—16 million copies of them, published in 27 languages in 103 countries—you have to be careful when you ask for his autograph. Once, at lunch in Seattle, several people came up and asked for it. One man said the autograph was for his wife, Susan. ”Hi Susan!” the famous author wrote. ”Met your husband at this porno movie house. Nice man!”

He has written a parody of his most famous book, which was immediately suppressed by his publisher, and he called it ”All I Really Wanted to Know I Learned in the Alley Behind My House.’’

Robert Fulghum.

He is like drinking the wine of life.

He has described All I Really Wanted to Know I Learned in Kindergarten as a highly condensed version of a 300-page credo statement, written many years earlier while he was a seminarian—and I have been one of those too. As a seminarian, you enter into the vineyard of Unitarian Universalist tradition and for three or four years basically what you do is pick grapes off the living vine, you gather to yourself the heros of the faith: Faustus Socinus and Hosea Ballou and John Murray and William Ellery Channing and Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker and Olympia Brown and Ralph Waldo Emerson and so many more. You gather all these beautiful grapes because you want to make your own wine of faith and so you crush them with your hands and you stomp on them with your feet and you filter out the dross and you bottle the juice and you let the magic happen through your thinking and feeling and living.

That’s how the wine of his faith happened, which we now taste whenever we read his books or hear him speak.

It is so sweet. Wine of Unitarian Universalist faith, Robert Fulghum-style.

Why this is important is suggested by a fascinating fact: how his books bridge traditional publishing categories. They can be found next to I’m O.K., You’re O.K. in the self-help section, or in “inspirational” with Rabbi Harold Kushner (of Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People fame). You can find them in Christian bookstores and in New Age natural-food co-ops.

The message is precious and universal. It can speak volumes to anyone. Therefore, how tragic if we are not ourselves evangelists of this message. How tragic, also, to lose sight of the specific origins of the message which people had to fight and even die for. How tragic, above all, to take in the message superficially and not see the essential radicalism in it that would most assuredly shake people up if only it was spelled out explicitly for them.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Get explicit.

The world is sacred Mystery.
The sources of truth are many.
Spirituality is a life-long journey in which we never stop learning.

These are three distinctively Unitarian Universalist beliefs, and Robert Fulghum’s faith—which is our faith—trusts in their truth.

Start with the world as sacred Mystery.

Millions of people have believed otherwise. They have affirmed a sharp dualism of sacred vs. profane, filled with God vs. empty of God, inherent worth vs. inherent evil or just inherent nothing.

Emerson spoke of this in his “Divinity School Address” from back in 1838, which Fulghum would have thoroughly absorbed in his studies. Jesus, says Emerson, “spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.” Emerson here is sharply critical of the conservative Christian view that sees Jesus as uniquely God and the sacred as something strange that has to break into our world from the outside and jar the natural course of events. He is adamant that Jesus’ true teaching about himself was that he was a man God-inspired, as much as any person could be ”as their character ascends.” He was insistent that nature is already full of miracles and we would know that if we could learn how to see. Keep our eyes closed, and what happens instead is a focus on things like virgin births and the parting of the Red Sea and that’s what’s monstrous.

“That is always best which gives me to myself,” Emerson says. “That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.” (A “wen” is a painful cyst on one’s face or scalp.)

Emerson says all this—and he paves the way for Robert Fulghum who says, almost 200 years later, “Be aware of wonder.” “Remember the little seed in the plastic cup? The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why. We are like that.”

“And then remember,” he says, “that book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK! Everything you need to know is there somewhere.”

“Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be, I learned in kindergarten.”

Do you see the connection? The biggest word of all is LOOK because the world is sacred Mystery with sacred endless depths and therefore there is something to look at and something to find. You can learn all the essentials in kindergarten because all the essentials are there already; it is as sacred a site as the peak of the highest holy mountain.

On the other hand, if someone says that the world is empty of God and needs to be filled up, then why LOOK? What is there to look at? The last place you’d go looking for wisdom is a kindergarten—far better to go to your chosen guru or chosen set of sacred scriptures which you insist contains all the God power that ever was, ever is, and ever will be. Ugh. This line of belief makes of us all warts and wens.

Miracle becomes monster.

Only certain beliefs keep the monster away and support wonder. Only certain beliefs make it sensible to remember the little seed in the plastic cup, and to say of this miraculous thing, “We are like that.”

Beliefs matter.

Here is the next: The sources of truth are many. This is very different from saying, There is one and only one source, which millions of people say.

But not us. Not Fulghum. And not Emerson. Here’s how Emerson lays it out, and again, we are drawing from his “Divinity School Address,” where he describes the “capital secret” of the minister’s profession: “namely, to convert life into truth.” “The true preacher can be known by this,” says Emerson, “that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography.”

This is what got pounded into my head in seminary, and the same thing goes for Fulghum; and it is, in fact, something that all of us need to be engaged in, preacher or not. “I’m sorry,” says Fulghum, “but I think we have a lot better, richer lives that we often think we do. It’s just a matter of saying, ‘Did you ever notice this?’ and if you did notice this then you wouldn’t feel your life was so poverty stricken.”

We can be just like bad preachers if we don’t LOOK at the experiences coming into our lives and mine them for the truth and wisdom that’s there. All we need is eyes to see and ears to hear.

The true preacher and the true Unitarian Universalist can be known by this, that they pass the raw materials of their lives through the fire of thought.

That’s why, when we read Fulghum, we see him extracting philosophy from such subjects as the shoe repairman who leaves cookies in the shoes he can’t fix, the homely Indian who becomes beautiful when he dances, in the small deaf boy who wants to rake leaves.

That’s why Fulghum sometimes hops into his car, sets the odometer at 100 miles and drives. When it dwindles to zero, he steps out and talks to anyone he encounters. Because he has faith that whatever happens, God is in it and there are depths of meaning to discern and it’s going to be one of countless sources of truth and meaning in his life.

He’s a good preacher. He shows the way to being a good Unitarian Universalist.

The third and final belief we look at today is, Spirituality is a life-long journey in which we never stop learning. Here again, millions think otherwise. They think God is just waiting for a soul to screw up, so He can throw that soul into Hell. There’s no room for experimentation, there’s no room for trial-and-error, there’s no room for mistakes in a spiritual universe like this, so your salvation is belief in a way of life that has everything figured out ahead of time. Certainty up front.

That’s not us.

We don’t live in that kind of punishing universe.

Listen to Fulghum:

“The first time I went tango dancing I was too intimidated to get out on the floor. I remembered another time I had stayed on the sidelines, when the dancing began after a village wedding on the Greek island of Crete. The fancy footwork confused me. ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself,’ I thought. ‘Just watch.’ Reading my mind, an older woman dropped out of the dance, sat down beside me, and said, ‘If you join the dancing, you will feel foolish. If you do not, you will also feel foolish. So, why not dance?’ And, she said she had a secret for me. She whispered, ‘If you do not dance, we will know you are a fool. But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying.’”

The way to richness in life is risky. Sometimes we must disappoint others in order to come alive ourselves; sometimes we must do the thing that scares us to death. We just don’t want to make fools of ourselves. Yet, life leads us to the sort of tango dance Fulghum talks about again and again. Because life wants abundance for us. Life wants to be felt and known fully. Life wants us to LOOK.

This is the world we live in. Not an evil one, but a complex one, a confusing one, one that can hurt us terribly, one that can feel like the depths of winter—but never forget the invincible summer that lies within our hearts. With what we have, we must do the best we can.

Part of the best we can: to stop trying so hard. “Think,” Fulghum says, “of what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about 3 o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap.”

Part of the best we can is also about how we treat each other. “Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you are sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush.” “No matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”

All I Really Wanted to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I really did. You too.

Do you know the story of how this publishing phenomenon came to be?

Bi-weekly church columns, mostly written between 1960 and 1984. Columns, mimeographed and sent by church members to out-of-town friends and relatives. In 1984, Republican Senator Daniel J. Evans got a hold of a copy and had it read into the Congressional Record. The Kansas City Times printed “Kindergarten” in November 1985. It was picked up by the radio commentator Paul Harvey, the Rev. Robert Schuller, former Representative Barbara Jordan and the singer-activist Pete Seeger. Dear Abby and Reader’s Digest published abridged versions.

Then, one day in 1987, a Connecticut kindergarten teacher tucked “Kindergarten” into the children’s knapsacks to take home. One mother it reached also happened to be a New York literary agent. Patricia Van der Leun tracked down the mysterious minister, who said, “I’ve been writing this stuff for 20 years—how many boxes do you want?”

Van der Leun sold “Kindergarten” to Villard Books for $60,000 and within three weeks it was on The New York Times best-seller list.

But listen to this. “The story of my books is unique,” says Fulghum. “I was sort of shutting down my life. It was like being at a poker game at 11:30 at night and I’m about ready to go home. And all of a sudden I get four aces, and I figure God’s on my side, so I can’t go home. And now it’s about 3:30 in the morning and I’m still at the table, and the cards are still coming up and I’d be a fool not to take this as far as it goes.”

Don’t ever say you have it all figured out. Don’t ever say you’re shutting things down because you’ve seen it all and there’s no more surprises in the world for you.

The world will prove you wrong.

This world is a sacred Mystery.
This world is full of sources of truth.
The spiritual journey goes on and on and never stops.
So LOOK and LOOK and keep on LOOKING.

That’s our sweet UU faith, Robert Fulghum-style, the sweetest-tasting wine.

We’re talking Easter this morning, and right off the bat I want to say that the essential story is bigger than Christian tradition can contain. The essential story, larger than Christianity and longer-lasting than any religious tradition, is that of the underdog triumphing. It’s crabgrass bursting through concrete. It’s the lily blooming out from a foot of snow. It’s the ugly duckling who turns out beautiful. It’s the little engine that not just could but does.

We already know this story. And it’s so good, every time.

Tell it again and again.

Easter is this essential human story—told in concentrated form.

And perhaps the concentrated nature of it is the reason why it’s an especially challenging variant of the “underdog triumphs” motif. Some stories are fairly mild, like your basic Publix variety green pepper. But then you have stories which scorch like the pepper called Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, one of the hottest peppers on the planet, with a Scoville rating of 1,463,700 SHUs. I’m not even going to explain what an SHU is. I think you get the picture.

The Easter story is like that, for Unitarian Universalists.

It’s why the Rev. Steve Cook says, “It’s a tough holiday for UUs, probably the toughest.” The Rev. Forrest Church calls it “an awkward holiday.” “UU churches just can’t win on Easter,” says the Rev. Jane Rzepka. And religious educator Michelle Richards titles a recent article, “What’s a UU Family to Do On Easter?”

There’s an old joke that says if you drive through town on Easter Sunday you can always tell the UU church apart. All the other churches have signs proclaiming “Hallelujah! Jesus is Risen!” The Unitarian Universalist sign, on the other hand, announces, “Hooray! Flowers are pretty!”

If you are new among us this morning, or new to Unitarian Universalism, I know. It sounds like a whole lot of hand-wringing.

In part, it’s because UUs tend to be overachievers. We tend to be perfectionistic. The Universalist side of us reassures us that God loves us just as we are, warts and all, but the Unitarian side of us has long spoken of “salvation by character” and encourages us to max out our potentials, be all we can be. Shun complacency.

On the Unitarian side of the spiritual family, there are no couch potatoes.

So we can be hard on ourselves. Where this connects with Easter is simply the fact that Easter is challenging for everyone. For everyone, it’s like a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper. Doesn’t matter what tradition you’re from. Christmas is easy. Everybody loves babies. Everybody loves Christmas gifts and the star of Bethlehem. But Easter? There is no Easter without Good Friday, first of all, and that means crucifixion. There’s nothing cute about crucifixion, just a whole lot of excruciating violence and blood. Then there’s the part of the story when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome go to the tomb where Jesus’ body is supposed to be, but it’s not there, no one knows what’s happened, perhaps some kind of miracle called “resurrection” but no one’s sure, and it is all so terrifying that the women flee from the area because (as the Gospel of Mark says) they are “seized with trembling and bewilderment.” They talk to no one because “they were afraid.”

Yay Easter. Gimme some excruciating violence and blood, with a side of trembling and bewilderment and fear. Gimme something called “resurrection” that stretches credulity to the point of breaking.

Wee!

No wonder millions of people have pretty much secularized the holiday, and for them it’s just an occasion to dress up and be a family together at church (but it’s more about FAMILY TOGETHERNESS than church), then, afterwards, a nice meal, then the kids running around the yard hunting for Easter eggs, some of which have been stuffed with chocolate, others stuffed with single dollar bills, and then the prize egg stuffed with a $50 dollar bill, and before you know it, the Easter egg hunt has devolved into the Easter egg melee and then the Easter egg war and this is all miles away from the crucifixion and the women who loved Jesus fleeing the tomb in sheer fright.

Easter is just tough.

But on top of this, yes, there really is additional toughness for Unitarian Universalists. There is rhyme and reason behind all the hand-wringing.

Part of this has to do with our diversity as a religious community. “Our UU churches just can’t win on Easter,” writes the Rev. Jane Rzepka, because of the mutually exclusive desires of the people who come to services. They come, she says, “To hear familiar, traditional, Easter music. To not hear familiar, traditional, Easter music. To be reminded of the newness of the spring, the pagan symbols of the season, and the lengthening days, without a lot of talk about Jesus and resurrection. To be reminded of Jesus and His resurrection, without a lot of talk about the newness of spring, the pagan symbols of the season, and the lengthening of days. To participate in a family service, where children delight in discovering the many roots of our religious tradition. To participate in a dignified service, where adults celebrate the undeniably Christian holiday, Easter…”

In the quantum world, particles are waves and waves, particles. But worship is not a quantum world. When we have mutually exclusive desires, some are met and some are not met. And then what?

We love our diversity—we believe that there’s nothing else like diverse community to support a search for truth and meaning that is free and creative and open and, ultimately, one characterized by integrity. But, clearly, diversity poses its own challenges.

As for the other reason why Easter is especially tough for Unitarian Universalists. It’s because UUs take the Bible seriously without taking it literally. For us, the resurrection is figurative in significance only. It wasn’t ever a concrete historical happening. It never WAS, but (as a metaphorical reality of the human condition) it always IS. Pain and suffering and evil need never be the last word. Addiction can give rise to sobriety. Bitterness can give rise to blessing. Tragedy can give rise to wisdom. The phoenix will rise from the ashes….

But our specific spin on the resurrection puts us at odds with a great deal of Christian America, which believes that Jesus was literally, physically resurrected. It’s “an awkward holiday,” writes the Rev. Forrest Church, because “the trumpets sound, we all sing, and Jesus is not [literally] resurrected. […] So what are we doing here? Why even bother?”

“What’s a UU Family to Do On Easter?” says religious educator Michelle Richards because she knows full well that the kids at school are having conversations during recess and the Unitarian Universalist kids are trying to explain their point of view which is way subtler than the conservative black and white views of their friends.

“It’s a tough holiday for UUs, probably the toughest,” says the Rev. Steve Cook, because, ironically, Easter can cause us to doubt ourselves and our communal wisdom. Taking the Bible seriously and not literally does not lead to the same sort of black and white certainties that our conservative religionists bandy about so obnoxiously—and we can envy their swagger. We can envy their “old time religion.” What is such a strength for us, we can see as a weakness. We are too much in our heads, we say. Too much head, not enough heart.

Oh Easter.

What ARE we doing here? Why bother?

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Here’s why Unitarian Universalists should bother with Easter, even though it can taste like a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper…

If Easter is special in the way it brings out mutually exclusive desires in people, as the Rev. Jane Rzepka says—and I think she’s exactly right—then Easter invites us to think more carefully about what Unitarian Universalist diversity means and how to manage it well.

Easter comes, and you better believe, we very quickly become aware of a special form of diversity in this place: varying comfort levels with Christianity. Some people are fine with God-talk and fine with the traditional songs and imagery. “In Jesus name we pray,” is not offensive but comforting. And then there are those who are like vegetarians being offered a juicy steak. Traditional songs and imagery that smack of Christianity are jarring and unwelcome—real turn-offs.

Unitarian Universalism is part of the problem here—and it is ALL of the solution.

I say “part of the problem” because Unitarian Universalism is just a little over 50 years old. (Yes, Unitarianism as a separate tradition is positively ancient, and so is Universalism as a separate tradition—but they married in 1961 and the marriage created something completely new. That’s why I’m saying we’re just a little over 50 years old.) And, from the perspective of other world religions, 50 years old is miles away from maturity. Miles away from adulthood. We’re more like a teenager whose very real dependence upon his elders can at times feel utterly humiliating. “Mom!!” whines Unitarian Universalism at its Christian roots. “Mom, stop embarrassing me!” The reason is developmentally appropriate and understandable: we are trying to stand on our own two feet, as the independent post-Christian, more-than-Christian religion we are becoming. We are busy establishing our own traditions and rituals and stories and symbols and on and on. But we can go overboard in our quest for independence. We can think everyone else has wisdom for us, but not Mom. Not Dad. No way!

That’s the problem I’m talking about, and it’s a good problem, it’s the problem of growing up and figuring out who we are.

As for Unitarian Universalism being ALL of the solution, what I mean is how our faith calls us to bring compassion to our self-understanding and to the understanding of others. Each of us has a past. Each of us has a story. Our spiritual preferences reflect this. For a long time I could not say the word Jesus without choking, because I was in recovery from being a part of an abusive fundamentalist church growing up. I was allergic to Christianity. Highly. Some of you are right there. Now, when I start to talk about Jesus, pretty soon I’m brought to tears because I love him so. He is beautiful and noble. The allergies have all been worked out. Some of you are right there. And others of you grew up with good experiences, so you’ve never had to heal any allergies. Still others of you are in a different place, and Jesus and God and the Bible are just interesting and you want to know more and all the talk about allergies is actually off-putting for you….

If we can’t bring compassion to this Beloved Community and our shared religious venture, then we are not really Unitarian Universalist at all. Or we’re just bad UUs. As a people of covenant, our diversity works because we make a basic promise to each other: to give up a sense of entitlement, that everything that happens in worship or anywhere else has to satisfy me all the time in all ways. We make a promise to give that up. We also promise to be generous. When we are our best UU selves, and something happens and it’s like we’re vegetarian and someone offers us a steak, of course we don’t eat it, but we also don’t grumble grumble grumble, because we know that someone else in our Beloved Community needs that steak and delights in it. Knowing that is what makes it all OK. That’s what feels good. That’s what Beloved Unitarian Universalist Community is all about.

And so we bother with Easter. We brave Easter even though it brings up mutually exclusive desires. Covenant helps bring us through and take us to something that’s beautiful.

We also bother with Easter even though it puts us at odds with millions of others who read the Bible literally and not figuratively, not as a poetry of the spirit. For them, resurrection is about Jesus literally coming back to life after he was definitively destroyed; resurrection is about this specific miracle. Understandably so, since it was Paul in the Christian scriptures who declared that if this kind of resurrection did not happen, then all of the Christian faith is folly.

But we part ways with Paul. Christianity is not folly, even though Jesus died and stayed dead. That’s what my Unitarian Universalism leads me to, and in fact it tells me that the literalistic conception just confines the resurrection, makes it too small, makes it actually irrelevant to regular human beings here on planet earth who are constantly experiencing tragedy and pain and constantly feeling burned up like the phoenix and we can taste those ashes in our mouth and we cry out to God to be born again and we don’t know how to manufacture that miracle for ourselves, it just has to happen in its own good time…

We need to get the resurrection right. You do know what the symbol of our congregation is? The phoenix. Resurrection is who we are.

Go back to the old story. Jesus enters Jerusalem for the last week of his life. His disciples actually thought that he was finally going to take possession of his rightful power as the Messiah. They actually thought he was going to go in like Rambo and crush the Romans and take over. Did you know that? But he didn’t. The most vigorous thing he did was argue with the moneylenders in the Temple and turn a table over. Mostly, what he did was preach love to God and love to man. He sat around praying. That’s pretty much it.

When he was arrested by the Romans (because they too thought he was going to go all Rambo on them), that was the last straw for the disciples. It shattered all their illusions about who he was. In disgust. they started to drift away, one by one. Peter, his closest follower, denied him three times. We all know what the infamous Judas did—but now stay with me. This is Judas ISCARIOT we are talking about, and “Iscariot” comes from he word “sicaroi” which refers to a group of Jewish terrorists who violently resisted Roman rule. In other words, it’s likely that Judas was so frustrated at Jesus’ nonviolence that he turned on him. Love became rage, in the blink of an eye.

Now we’re getting into the heart of the real Easter story, the real story of resurrection. It’s not about what happened to Jesus’ body. It’s about what happened to Peter and the disciples who survived those turbulent days of death, and beyond. It’s about what happened to the women who went to the tomb, discovered it empty, were “seized with trembling and bewilderment” and then ran away from the scene, talking to no one, because “they were afraid.”

That’s what I call the phoenix all burned up, all ashes. The underdog who seems like he’s always going to stay under and it’s NEVER going to get better. The ugly duckling that seems he’s always going to be ugly. The little train that seems like he can’t.

But we know what happened. Death did not defeat Love. Death did not conquer it. Death only changed it. That’s the miracle. Jesus’ words and Jesus’ spirit came alive in his followers and they realized that the whole Rambo-obsession was completely misguided, that what this world needs is less Rambo and more Beloved Community. Gandhi realized that too. So did Dr. King. What this world needs is less obsession with impossible miracles and more focus on the sort of miracles that really can happen.

We bother with Easter because we get to say that. Unitarian Universalism gets to say, “The resurrection and the life is not at all supernatural. It’s not about a dead body coming to life. It’s about broken hearts made whole, love transformed into beauty and strength and community. Against all odds, the underdog does triumph. It happened to the followers of Jesus, after everything they endured. And it can happen to us today. Humans are that resilient. Have hope. Keep hope alive.”

We get to say that.

That’s why we bother with Easter.

Good music liberates.
You feel small, but the music makes you feel big.
You feel all crumpled up, but the music un-crushes you,
it smoothes out all the wrinkles,
it makes you feel fresh and presentable again….

In this reflection I offer a brief personal story
about how music does this for me.
Originally I toyed with the idea of just playing you a song on the guitar,
since the guitar is something I go to
when my heart is tired of being cooped up
and wants to get out there, wants sunlight…

But while playing guitar and the music is doing its liberation thing
and my heart is happy and smiling
and I’m really getting into it
sometimes my fingers forget what they are supposed to be doing.
As in, “Huh, that’s not the right chord…”
I just get carried away….
Which is ok in a much smaller venue than this one….

So rather than play you a song, I’m going to show you
another one of my favorite ways in which music liberates me.
How it takes this body
(which can spend so much time
sitting behind a steering wheel,
sitting at various desks and tables,
standing and doing basically nothing while my mouth gabs away,
walking but it is pure vanilla walking)
and move it towards something completely different….

That was me back in 2012, at the Adult National Figure Skating Championships in Chicago.
It was an interpretive program
to Rufus Wainwright’s version of the Leonard Cohen classic, “Hallelujah,”
which refers to King David in the Bible,
who would dance before God,
he would dance and rejoice,
and there is one story told where someone sees him
and despises him
because the music moved him so…

But David would dance and keep on dancing—
the music moved him to express the hallelujah feeling in his heart
which is a feeling of praise to that which is larger than oneself.
That’s what the word “hallelujah” means….
It’s why we can see music as a First Source of spirituality,
among all the Six we talk about as Unitarian Universalists.
It’s a way in which we can directly encounter God.

And I know in the video I might be looking a bit fatigued
and maybe a tad scared—
you would be too,
skating in front of judges
and it’s just you out there
and you’re in your later 40s
and falling really hurts
and you know
that there’s no box of Wheaties featuring your smiling face
at the end of all this,
you are not Olympics bound,
you are just an adult skater
and the best you can ever do
is just keep on showing up to skating
and keep on doing the best you can do in your fast-aging body….
So yes, I’m tired and it’s scary,
but despite that,
in my heart of hearts is the hallelujah feeling
and it is huge,
it is a positively spiritual feeling that’s flowing,
and the music—the MUSIC—is moving me
beyond merely sitting behind a steering wheel
and beyond sitting at various desks and tables
and beyond standing and doing basically nothing while my mouth gabs away
to something completely different…
It carries me into jumps,
it sends me spinning,
it puts fire in my feet as I do the footwork sequences
and I love it totally,
I feel like I’m truly myself,
I feel free.

50 years ago yesterday, a march on behalf of voting rights made national news. ABC interrupted its Sunday night movie, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” to air 15 minutes of uninterrupted footage of a sort of brutality truly worthy of Nazi Germany. But happening on American soil.

Selma, Alabama.

Nonviolent protestors were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery, to protest all the ways in which Alabama law and practice prevented blacks from voting. They were assaulted with tear gas, billy club beatings, vicious dogs, and attacks from police on horseback.

History knows it as Bloody Sunday.

The namesake of the bridge is entirely appropriate. Edmund Pettus had been a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Naming the bridge after him was Alabama’s way of affirming their dogged commitment to white supremacy.

How dare the marchers attempt to cross!

But they dared. They dared a second time, and then, with a third march, and surrounded by national guardsmen, military police, and army troops, 8000 people left from Brown Chapel, crossed that bridge, and kept on, and the marchers would eventually swell to 30,000 strong. When finally they reached the state capitol in Montgomery, here’s what those marchers heard Dr. King say:

“The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.”

We need to hear these words today, too. On our side of history—from the side of 50 years later, and beyond—we need encouragement to keep going, because he was right, the battle has been in our hands, there has been a call to higher ground, but there were no broad highways leading us easily and inevitably to quick solutions.

From Selma to now, we haven’t seen them…

New York Times writer Charles Blow reminds us that a majority in this country believe that race relations are getting worse and that more than a third think police-minority relations are getting worse. “Obviously,” he says, “in the long sweep of history, no one could make such a claim. Race relations are certainly not worse than they were 50 or 100 or 400 years ago, but there is a nagging frustration that things haven’t progressed as fast as many had hoped.”

Charles Blow adds that, “for young people in their late teens or early 20s … whose first real memory of presidential politics was the election of the first African-American president, any seeming racial retrenchment is jarring, and for them, over the course of their lifetimes, things can feel like they are getting worse. This is their experiential moment,” he says, “that moment when the weight becomes too much, when the abstract becomes real, when expectations of continual, inexorable progress slam into the back of a slow-moving reality, plagued by fits and starts and sometimes prone to occasional regressions.”

That’s Charles Blow. When the abstract becomes real. Slow-moving reality, fits and starts, occasional regressions…

One of these regressions is how access to the vote is currently under the most sustained attack since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was the direct win of the Selma campaign. In 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the 1965 Act, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. States are now requiring stricter voter IDs, cutting early voting, ending same-day registration, and curtailing virtually every reform that made it easier to vote. Minorities are the ones disproportionately impacted.

On the other hand, to what degree are people taking advantage of the vote that Selma won for them? “There was nothing magic about Selma,” says Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest aides. “Selma just gave us the right to vote. But if you don’t vote, and don’t take advantage of that right, you’re still living in a pre-Selma age.”

The road ahead is not altogether smooth.

It’s also a road that takes us from Governor of Alabama George C. Wallace, on Face the Nation,

pulling out one rhetorical trick after another and talking faster than an auctioneer trying to shore up the image of Alabama to a nation and a world that has seen the horror of Bloody Sunday—a road that takes us from this straight to Ferguson and the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, Robert McCulloch, who, when it was his turn to be on TV, did everything but jumping jacks and jitterbugging to undermine his own side in the trial. “I’m not going to be stampeded and blackjacked in making any accusations against police!” said George C. Wallace, and it was essentially the same thing we got from the establishment in Ferguson, 50 years later.

And then the Federal Government stepped in. Have you read the report?

Here’s a summary from the New York Times:

“The Justice Department on Wednesday called on Ferguson, Mo., to overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in so many constitutional violations that they could be corrected only by abandoning its entire approach to policing, retraining its employees and establishing new oversight.”

“In one example after another, the report described a city that used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics.”

The report gave credence to many of the grievances aired last year by African-Americans in angry, sometimes violent protests after the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. Though the Justice Department separately concluded that the officer, Darren Wilson, who is white, violated no federal laws in that shooting, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said investigations revealed the root of the rage that brought people into the streets.”

“‘Seen in this context — amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices — it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,’ Mr. Holder said.”

Now, you might have heard President Obama speaking yesterday from Selma, and he directly addressed this report and what it implies about the state of things today.

“Just this week,” he said, “I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country. I understand the question, for the report’s narrative was woefully familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was. We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America.”

That’s President Obama. And of course, we don’t want to do a disservice to the cause of justice. To say that bias and discrimination are immutable is to be tone deaf to the music of Selma and all the accomplishments of the past 50 years. But this doesn’t stop how the feeling of being black in America is still a feeling of being unsafe, unprotected, and vulnerable to random violence and hate. Cornel West says it’s equivalent to what Sept. 11th felt like to all of us. That’s Cornel West, not white me. Who knows how many individual criminal justice systems there are in America that are as compromised as Ferguson’s, but they’ve not been exposed yet. Exposed, the Feds would swoop down on them like they did Ferguson, but until that time, what’s going to protect the American citizen?

You never know when the other shoe’s going to drop.

Back on February 16, UUCA and the Georgia Psychological Association co-sponsored a panel discussion on the issue of police-minority relations in this space, and one of the questions was about “what citizens can do to decrease the chances of escalating situations that involve interactions with law enforcement.” As a member of the panel, I got impatient really fast with all the pussyfooting around. Blacks and whites on the panel—police officers, psychologists, civil rights lawyers—but I was just not hearing anyone addressing the reality of being black in our times. So I asked the white folks in the audience of about 100 people if they ever had to coach their kids—especially their white sons—to prepare to be humiliated if police stop them. To lie down, if police tell them to sit down. To walk in the street with only one other boy at a time because, if it’s three or more, police will think you’re a gang. None of the whites in the crowd raised their hands. But most of the blacks did. They bear the burden of decreasing the chances of escalation. They are the ones, always bearing the burden!

The road ahead: not altogether smooth.

Dr. King knew this above all. Days before his assassination, he said to Harry Belafonte, “Are we integrating into a burning house?” Now this is a remarkable question. This is an arresting question. It is but another way of saying that, as central as racism was to Dr. King’s concern, he concern was larger than that. What bothered him was larger than that. You can talk about racism all day but that doesn’t mean you’ve covered all there is to talk about. You can completely solve racism but it doesn’t mean complete success. The house can still be burning—burning in flames of poverty and militarism and materialism.

Who wants to integrate into that?

People got Dr. King’s focus on racial justice, but they didn’t like it when he strayed from that single issue. 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of his opposition to Vietnam and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. People just didn’t get it. Wanted him to stay single-issue. Didn’t understand his holism, how he saw systems of oppression intersecting and reinforcing each other.

This is exactly why he says, in his eulogy for the martyred Unitarian Universalist minister the Rev. James Reeb, “So in his death, James Reeb says something to each of us, black and white alike—says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murder.”

That’s it: the system, the way of life, the philosophy.

Oppressions working together, in concert.

Call the focus on this “intersectionality.”

Dr. King’s intersectionality is something that most people never really got.

The road from Selma to now has not been altogether smooth….

Which is why we do not dare forget what else was said in the shadow of the Montgomery state capitol, 50 years ago: We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.” “They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.”

Don’t get turned around. Keep fighting for voting rights. Keep reforming the criminal justice system. Eradicate racism in all its new 21st century obnoxious forms. March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and march on!

But in all of it, keep the provocative question from Dr. King in mind: “Are we integrating into a burning house?”

We need to stand before the forces of power, with intersectional focus. We need to expand our imagination about what the Edmund Pettus Bridge truly symbolizes—how it represents not just racism but poverty and militarism and materialism and other oppressions as well. UUCA’s Amelia Shenstone, in a recent blog, quotes writer Naomi Klein where she says, “…if wealthy white Americans had been the ones left without food and water for days in a giant sports stadium after Hurricane Katrina, even George W. Bush would have gotten serious about climate change.” Do you see that? Race intersecting with class intersecting with the environment?

We have to cross that bridge. The road from Selma takes us right there.

Here’s yet another instance of oppressions intersecting. I’m going to read a series of true quotes from various American court cases, laws, and politicians. Some of them are referring to marriage between races, and others are referring to same-sex marriage. See if you can tell which is which. (This, by the way, comes from writer Andrew Kirell):

“They cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies” not allowing their marriage.

OR

This relationship “is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results … [Their children turn out] generally effeminate … [their relationship is] productive of evil.”

OR

State legislators spoke out against such an “abominable” type of relationship, warning that it will eventually “pollute” America.

OR

“It not only is a complete undermining of … the hope of future generations, but it completely begins to see our society break down … It literally is a threat to the nation’s survival in the long run.”

OR

This type of marriage is “regarded as unnatural and immoral.”

Can you tell which is which? The only one that is actually referring to same-sex marriage is the second from the last. The rest are anti-interracial. But all of them sound alike. All of them come from the same spoiled well of hatred.

How can you fight racism and not fight homophobia?

Even as the country marches towards nationwide marriage equality and polls show record levels of support for same-sex marriage, it’s just like 50 years ago, and George C. Wallace and his thugs want to stop that march. Refuse to let them cross the bridge. Just this past Thursday, the Georgia Senate overwhelmingly passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is legislation that seeks to secure the right of “persons” (a term not defined and so could therefore be interpreted to include businesses, individuals, and even state employees) to refuse service to LGBT Georgians, or anyone else who supposedly offends someone’s “religious beliefs.” Marriage equality comes to Georgia, in other words, but clerks can refuse marriage licenses on the basis of their “religious convictions.”

Don’t let them cross the bridge.

What drives me to despair is the whole appeal to “religious convictions” which, for the conservative politicians involved, is supposed to somehow relate to Jesus of Nazareth. I just say, read your Bible. Jesus was someone who regularly shared a table with exactly the sort of people that the religious leaders of his day thought were inappropriate and out of bounds and evil—but Jesus thought they were not evil but children of God like everybody else. I want to tell those conservative politicians that they are no followers of Jesus at all. At least not the real Jesus.

But “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around,” right?

The so-called Religious Freedom Act heads to the Georgia House, so what can we do? I spoke with Georgia Equality Executive Director Jeff Graham, and here’s what he said. “First: no one should consider this inevitable. The political dynamics of the house are very different than those of the Senate, so people should continue to voice their opposition.” More concretely, he said, “Folks can contact business interests such as AT&T, or the Metro Atlanta and Georgia Chambers of Commerce, and ask them why they are not vocally opposing this bill like they did last year.” You can participate in Georgia Equality’s phone bank and call people to to educate and mobilize people against the proposed legislation. You can stay informed by following Georgia Unites Against Discrimination via twitter, Facebook or email. Finally, Jeff Graham said that if the bill is passed by the House and it goes to the Governor’s desk, that’s when the protests will start. So stay tuned.

The road from Selma to now. There is a sense, 50 years later, that we are still trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. So much has been accomplished, but there is more yet to do. And our imagination about what is ours to do needs to be intersectional like Dr. King’s. No one wants to integrate into a burning house.

I’ll close with a story from just this past Wednesday and our amazing “Remembering Selma” event. It’s the benediction part of the service, and I’m saying those immortal words from Dr. King: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Standing beside me is the Rev. Dr. C. T. Vivian, who I’ve asked to stand with me, together with others, because he was there in Selma 50 years ago, he saw it all, experienced it all, was beaten bloody but refused to stay down, was faithful to the cause of justice. He was there with Dr. King, was instrumental with Dr. King in leading the cause. This great man is standing right beside me, and as I am saying the immortal words, he is whispering them too, but he’s not reading them, his eyes are closed, he’s remembering them and the man who originally said them, perhaps he’s remembering the exact moment when Dr. King first said them, and the words are seared upon his heart, the words are sealed upon his very soul. In that moment I felt as though the love message came straight to me from Dr. King himself, and Dr. Vivian was the link.

From Selma to now, the challenge is, and will always be, bridges of darkness and hate to cross.

From Selma to now, the message is, and will always be, the power of love to overcome.

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered….

It’s February 15, 1965, and the Rev. Dr. C. T. Vivian and 40 marchers arrive at the Selma courthouse. Sheriff Jim Clark is there, a bulldog, wearing his George Patton-inspired World War II helmet, and he’s not happy. Dr. Vivian walks up the steps, says they’ve come to register to vote, but Clark refuses to let them pass, says the courthouse is closed, forces them to stand in the rain.

Then Dr. Vivian sings a song, a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. He says, “Whenever anyone does not have the right to vote, then every man is hurt.” Clark doesn’t want to listen. He turns his back. Dr. Vivian can only sing more of his song full of faith, says, “You can turn your back on me, but you cannot turn your back on the idea of justice. You can turn your back now and you can keep the club in your hand, but you cannot beat down justice.”

That’s when a crowd of whites start to heckle Vivian and his song. They call him a screwball. That’s what they call this great man.

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.

It’s March 7, 1965, and it’s the first march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. 600 people are met with beatings and tear gas. Bloody Sunday. It’s captured on film and national networks and now the nation has seen with its own eyes how America is just as bad as a place like Nazi Germany. One of the leaders of the march, John Lewis, says, ‘‘I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam—I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo—I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma.’’

Dr. King puts out his call. He wants troops of a different sort to stand up for justice. Clergy of all faiths. Among them, the Unitarian Universalists, who come streaming in by the hundreds. Among them, the Rev. James Reeb.

“Since my days as a Hospital Chaplain” he says, “some of my deepest concerns have related to the problems of Negro people in our society. I would like to have a further opportunity to contribute to the changes that will bring them full equality in American society. But I believe that dream of justice is one of man’s noblest aspiration and one which continues to grow in importance to me.”

But he never made it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Yet his sacrifice would be enough, and more than enough. “History,” says Dr. King at the memorial service a few days later, “has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of this fine servant of God may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark state.”

And it absolutely did.

But how much consolation is there in this, for Mrs. Reeb and her children?

So many people hurt in all this. All the martyrs. All the violence.

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Stony the road we trod

We know that here, too, in Atlanta. For this story, go back even farther in time, to 1948. A black Unitarian from Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Thomas Baker Jones, comes to Atlanta University to become chairman of the Department of Social Work, and he applies for membership in the United Liberal Church, which was the ancestor congregation to UUCA and all our metro Atlanta UU congregations. Dr. Jones applies for membership and is refused. The Board of Trustees turns its back on justice, like Sheriff Jim Clark does to Dr. Vivian in 1965. That Board heckles the idea of integration. Or maybe they are just anxious. They don’t want to rock the boat. Nice people, for reasons of niceness, or simple insecurity, can do awful things…

What follows is a death that is nothing at all like the noble death of the Rev. James Reeb. The sequence of events is like dominoes falling. When the minister at the time hears the news, he resigns. The national bodies with which the church is affiliated—the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America—blacklist the congregation and urge that no minister step in to serve while it is segregationist. Then, in 1951, the American Unitarian Association, which owns the building and practically everything else because the congregation is a cheap bunch, sells the building out from under them—to the Bible Research Foundation, headed by Finis J. Dake, a fundamentalist preacher. Add insult to injury.

The United Liberal Church is dead. And it had to happen, because the church turned its back on justice.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
Out from the gloomy past
’Til now we stand at last…
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

“Every crisis,” says Dr. King, “has both its dangers and its opportunities, its valleys of salvation or doom in a dark, confused world. The kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.”

He says, “When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way…”

We feel that power stirring in the story of Dr. Vivian and the Rev. Reeb and Lula Joe Williams and so many others. Power to make a way out of no way. The Kingdom of God may yet reign….

So, one year later, in 1952, the American Unitarian Association commissions the Rev. Glenn Canfield to create a Phoenix miracle and resurrect the United Liberal Church. The commitment, unequivocal and right from the start, is to human and civil rights. “Our fellowship includes all people, regardless of race, color, nationality, or station of life. We believe in the essential unity of humanity and that only together can we work out successful ways of living in happiness and peace.” That is what you read in the congregation’s order of service.

And this makes history. The United Liberal Church, reborn, is Atlanta’s very first integrated congregation. Says Jesus, “No one can see the Kingdom of God, unless they are born again.” We know the truth of that directly.

Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies

All of a sudden, a congregation that never goes above 50 in membership shoots up to more than 100, and beyond. Whitney Young, then Dean of the Atlanta School of Social Work (and later national head of the Urban League), is a member of the Board of Trustees. Dr. King, at this time assistant to his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, is a pulpit guest, as well as the Rev. Sam Williams. All these amazing things are happening because now the congregation is turning towards justice.

Nothing screwball in that at all…

So it’s the early 1960s, and Coretta Scott King is the leader of the youth group at Ebenezer. Our congregation and theirs have a joint Sunday evening program, alternating back and forth between them, so young people, black and white, can get to know one another and learn with each other. But one day the Klan calls. It threatens violence at the next Sunday evening meeting. Congregation officials consult with Mrs. King regarding the options and she says to go ahead with the meeting. All the parents are called to give them the option of keeping their children home. Not one parent holds back. And then, that evening, while inside the church the youth are building up the Kingdom of God, outside are the fathers, who ring the building, they are forming a visible wall of protection, they are part of the power to make a way out of no way, they are a part of that.

There is nothing screwball about turning towards justice.

There is nothing screwball about facing down all the Sheriff Jim Clarks who, across the years, reappear with grim regularity, most recently in the guise of the Staten Island police who had Eric Garner in a choke hold and Eric Garner croaked out “I can’t breathe” eleven times but no one was listening and then he died, another martyr in a long line of martyrs, another family bereft, another sign of the stony road we tread, another sign of the bitter chastening rod.

We are not done yet. And yet,

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty.

Our weary feet have come to the place for which our fathers and mothers sighed, and struggled, and died. Our feet have come to this place. Because of people like Dr. C. T. Vivian and the Rev. James Reeb and Lula Joe Williams and the people of the reborn United Liberal Church who made history here in Atlanta, whose fathers put their bodies on the line to protect the miracle that was happening inside the church—the Kingdom of God being being built through the delight of young people coming to know each other and crossing boundaries of race.

We must keep crossing boundaries.
We must keep on building the Kingdom.
We must ring it with our lives, to protect what’s being built.

Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever on the path, we pray.

Never stop turning towards justice.
Don’t let the hecklers stop you.
Don’t let the sheriffs stop you.
Don’t let niceness stop you.
Don’t let the fact that sometimes, like James Reeb, we won’t ourselves cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We have to leave that to others.
We must never prejudge what our influence can be.
How dare we stop ourselves before we even begin?
How dare we give up because we can’t jump immediately to full victory?
Bring your gift to the altar anyhow, whatever it is.
Don’t stop.
There is a power to make a way out of no way.
That power is real.
That power stirs in this place right now.
Be a part of it.
Turn towards justice.
Don’t stop.
Never stop.

In her poem “homage to my hips,” Lucille Clifton says:

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,   
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

That’s the poem. No apologies. No shame. No sense that her hips (or any other body part for that matter) are making her unworthy.

The message rises to theological height. These hips are big hips, these hips need space to move around in, these hips don’t like to be held back: the suggestion is that it does not matter so much what bodies look like or whether they conform to some externally or internally imposed standard but, rather, where does your body take you, what is it showing you in your life, what is it enabling you to put a spell on and spin like a top?

The body is not an end-in-itself but a way to live out a larger purpose.

In this sense, everybody’s hips are big and want to be proudly claimed as big.

I call this “body electric theology” after the famous Walt Whitman line, “I sing the body electric.” Lucille Clifton sings and sings, and maybe we sing too.

Or maybe we don’t.

Listen to Alexandra Marshall, writing for W Magazine in 2012: “When injectables took over the world in the early aughts, having facial wrinkles became more of a choice than an inevitability. But at the same time, armies of women of a certain age started to look like the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and I began to believe that there was something honest and rock ’n’ roll about being able to move my face. I actually like my crow’s-feet, and I can live with the lines between my eyebrows.”

“But—and there is always a but—no one warned me about my neck. As noble as a few frown lines may look in post-Botox America, there is no air of refusenik coolness to a wattle. Every woman I know who has reached her early 40s and woken up with a falling chin or a wavering jawline agrees. (No wonder the late Nora Ephron’s 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck was a best-seller.) ‘This neck thing just makes me feel old,’ my friend Gillian, a 43-year-old interior designer in Los Angeles, told me while wrapping her ever present cotton scarf tightly around her throat. I know exactly what she means. I’m 42 and have become conscious of an area that I’ve named ‘the drop zone’: the increasingly declining curve between my neck and jaw, which used to be a taut right angle.”

That’s Alexandra Marshall, and from here the article goes on to consider “what can be done about it,” and of course it does.

Lucille Clifton might be singing the body electric but how do you do that with wattles or turkey neck or whatever the heck it’s called?

Really? A turkey neck is going to enable you to put a spell on someone and spin them like a top? Really?

From here it’s open season on our bodies. Those of you with actual big hips might never have bought into what Lucille Clifton said to begin with. And don’t get me started on what it’s like to be a short guy, or have a big nose. If I get started and if you get started about all the things that bug us about our bodies, well, this is going to be one LONG LOUD communal sermon and everyone’s talking nonstop and it’s just miserable.

Body electric theology can simply fall apart in the fingers of our body anxieties and body shame….

That’s what I want to talk about today—the shame and what anchors it, and then the things we can think and the things we can do to help us rise to Lucille Clifton’s theological delight in her big hips. We want to rise to that height, too.

Because “Your body is a flower that life let bloom.” (Ilchi Lee)

Because “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” (Anthony Bourdain)

Care for the flower life has let bloom. Enjoy the ride.

But easier said than done, because shame poisons the flower and poisons the fun.

Says writer Toni Morrison, “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!”

But there’s always the THEY that works against this love—that’s the poignancy of this passage from Toni Morrison. Always the THEY.

Today it’s no longer slaveowners and a society that affirms the brutal institution of slavery, but what about the idea within communities of color (especially among Black women) that the closer one’s hair is to European texture (straight and smooth) the “better” it is? THEY is racism, internalized and externalized.

THEY do not love your flesh.

THEY is also sexism. The way women’s bodies in particular are monitored and policed for propriety. Two examples come to mind: One is professional model Tess Munster who is 5 feet 5 inches and a size 22. Now the average model is 5 feet 10 inches and a size 4—which is why Tess Munster holds the distinction of being the very first “model of her size” to be signed to an agency. She’s got big hips and she wants everyone to know it and the camera loves her—and for this, she gets hate mail like you can’t believe. Death threats. As body advocate Gabi Gregg says, ”If there is a fat person on television trying super hard to lose weight, crying about how hard life is, and talking about how they eat to cope etc, then everyone is at home crying and cheering them on. Put that same person in a crop top while they smile, and the pitchforks come out.”

An equally fascinating portrait of sexism comes from Aidan McCormack, a transgender man who has always been very hairy. Mustache hairs sprouting out of his face when he was a 10-year-old girl. Talk about enduring a barrage of constant public comment and ridicule. “Why people find hairy women to be threatening,” he says, “continues to bewilder me, and why people believe they have some ownership or right to comment on the state of a female body bewilders and infuriates me even more.” But all of this became crystal clear for Aidan McCormack when he transitioned from female to male. “Suddenly,” he says, “my body and facial hair was a prized possession. […] I also began noticing that people didn’t comment on my body anymore. I mean, every so often somebody on the street will point out how short I am, but by and large the constant companion of unwanted attention and commentary ceased to exist.”

Aiden McCormack goes on to say something that is just as much body electric theology as Lucille Clifton’s poem. He says, “The thing that I’ve come to is that all bodies are strange bodies, all bodies are queer. To be embodied is to be queerly embodied because there’s all sorts of hairs growing, and teeth showing up in brains, and trick knees, and runny noses. There’s asthma and allergies, dwarfism and diabetes. We are all kinds of shapes and sizes and we have all kinds of desires and worries. No one’s bodies fit our expectations. There is something ‘wrong’ with all of our bodies. In fact there’s so much wrong with human bodies that you could say that abnormality is what’s normal, what’s human and, ultimately, what’s powerful and beautiful.”

Yes! All bodies are queer. Your minister is saying that today. We are all queer and we all have big hips,

they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.

That sounds like Unitarian Universalism to me, people!

But. THEY won’t have any of that. THEY do not love your flesh.

THEY is business. As Jennifer Weiner, New York Times writer, says in a recent article about a particular body part that is the “new” focus of anxiety but which I cannot, in all good taste, describe to you in church, “Show me a body part, I’ll show you someone who’s making money by telling women that theirs looks wrong and they need to fix it. Tone it, work it out, tan it, bleach it, tattoo it, lipo it, remove all the hair, lose every bit of jiggle.”

But business is also becoming wise to the increasing awareness in men that women like to look just as much as men. Women ogle too—at Ryan Gosling’s abs, for example—and men, well, we’re getting the message that we’re not measuring up. Liposuction is one the fastest-growing plastic surgery procedures being performed on men; eating disorders and body dysmorphia are on the rise in guys. So business comes swooping right in…

THEY is racism, THEY is sexism, THEY is business, so many forces of THEY beyond these three. We feel shamed by them, we internalize that shame, and we ourselves become agents of that shame. THEY don’t even have to lift a finger. We can’t help but find something wrong with ourselves. We criticize another’s appearance in front of them. We criticize them behind their backs.

A special case of this is fat shaming, which, really, is one of the few forms of discrimination that people still think is ok. Says my colleague the Rev. Cyndi Landrum, “People shame fat people all the time, and they seem to feel good and virtuous about it. The argument is that ‘Fat is unhealthy. My shaming them will help them to stop this unhealthy behavior.’” And then she says, “Without even addressing the ‘fat is unhealthy’ statement, this is wrong on two other levels: shaming does not help people. And even if shaming someone did change that person’s behavior, that does not justify the shaming. The shaming is still wrong. Your fat jokes are not justified by your ‘concern’ for my health. Period.”

Can I hear an amen?

Literally, shaming does not help. A recent long-term study out of UCLA found that young girls who were called fat by someone close to them were more likely to be obese in later life.

I don’t have time now to address the ‘“fat is unhealthy” issue in any depth, so all I will say is this. If you see a fat person and you think any of the following: “Huh, he must eat fast food all day and never exercise,” OR, “Huh, she must be so unhealthy,” OR, “Huh, that’s a person with absolutely no willpower,” OR, “Huh, no one must bug them about being fat so I need to be the one to fill that void,” OR, “Huh, they must feel bad about themselves and want to be skinny”—if you catch yourself thinking any of these things, stop the thought, don’t indulge it, don’t allow yourself to go down that little rabbit hole. Question it. Challenge it. Go online and google “fat stereotypes” and see how fat is actually a complex issue, there’s way more here than meets the eye.…

And already we are on the path towards liberation from body shame. Just breaking the silence is big. Silence solidifies shame, but opening up heals…

I asked a member of this Beloved Community, Melissa Mack, to share her personal thoughts about liberation from body shame, and here is what she said: “Here’s what I most want people to know. For me, liberation from body shame hinges on 2 key points: the airplane metaphor and the idea that it’s a journey, not a destination.”

“So when you get onto an airplane and they’re doing the safety demonstration, they mention the bit about if the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, you have to put yours on first and then assist others. You can’t assist others if you can’t breathe, obviously. I have found that learning to love my body and myself have tremendously increased my capability to love others and to love this world. For me, it’s a way to live our UU principles. Believing in the inherent worth and dignity of every person includes myself! And if we’re all part of an interconnected web, knowing that I’m a fabulous piece of that web makes the whole web a little bit better and a little bit stronger.”

“That said, it ain’t easy. I still have days where I feel like my body is betraying me. Everyone does, even folks who are 100% liberated from body shame. And when that happens, when we have bad days, that doesn’t mean that we’re slipping or that we have succumbed to the shame. It means we’re human. It happens to everyone, and it’s okay. But it means that loving our bodies is a process that we have to keep working at constantly. And it is work! It is hard, intense, tedious work. But I have found that putting in the work is totally worth the effort. So I keep plugging on, even on days when I wish I didn’t have such a big belly or that my thighs were smaller. Because loving my body makes me a hell of a lot happier than hating my body. I choose to be happy.”

My body—short as it is, with the big nose that comes from my father—is, all things considered, the only true home on this earth I will know. It’s the only place I have to live. Same thing is true about your body, for you.

Whatever it is that might be causing you shame—your queerness, and you feel the constant disapproval of the THEY—it’s your truly big hips, or your too-small hips, or your saggy neck wattles, or you don’t have abs like Ryan Gosling—well, love your home anyway. Love it despite what THEY say. Love it hard. Sing the body electric!

Because our amusement park bodies are just waiting to be enjoyed.

Because life has let the flower of our body bloom.

Choose to be happy.

One day the great Mulla Nasruddin was invited to deliver a sermon. First thing out of his mouth was, “Do you know what I’m going to say?” The response was NO and at that, he announced, “I have no desire to speak to people who don’t even know what I will be talking about!” and with that he left. It confused and embarrassed everybody. But maybe they had misunderstood…. So they called him back for the next Sunday, and again, he asked if they knew what he was going to say. This time they replied YES. “Well,” said Nasruddin, “since you already know what I’m going to say, I won’t waste any more of your time!” and left. The people were completely flummoxed. They decided to try one more time and invited the Mulla to speak the following week. He asked the same question as before—“Do you know what I am going to say?”—but it is said, “forewarned is forearmed,” and so half of them answered YES while the other half replied NO. Unfazed, Nasruddin said, “Let the half who know what I am going to say, tell it to the half who don’t,” and he left.

Now I can’t say I wasn’t tempted by this story to ask the same question of you, and let the chips fall where they may. That would be playful, right? In a sermon about the wisdom of playfulness?

But it would perhaps be a very short sermon. Frankly, I’m not sure myself what Islam’s holy fool was trying to get at.

Except for this: whatever it is, he’s playing by a different set of rules than his hearers. Everyone else sees a duck, but he sees a rabbit. Everyone else sees the goblet, but he sees the two faces. He’s coming at things from very different angle.

And that IS part of what makes up the wisdom of play.

Listen to this wonderful story that comes from Boston College psychology researcher Dr. Peter Gray. It puts a smile on my face every time. A few years ago I had an experience that helped me see the difference between play and PLAY. I was invited by two ten-year-old girls, whom I knew well, to play a game of Scrabble.  I’ve played a fair amount of Scrabble in my life and am not bad at it. […] The two girls, in contrast, were complete novices. So, I saw this as an opportunity to teach; I would teach them the rules and some of the strategy of Scrabble. I would be their Scrabble mentor!

But, as it turned out, they taught me something way more important than Scrabble.
They loved the basic situation—taking turns at putting down letters in an organized way on the board, with sets of letters interlocking with other sets in crossword fashion, making interesting designs. But they had no interest at all in keeping score, and the idea of limiting themselves to real, actual words—words that can be found in the dictionary—bored them. They very quickly and effortlessly, with no overt discussion at all, and despite my initial protests, developed their own rules and strategy.

Their unstated but obvious goal, on each turn, was to put down the longest, funniest nonsense word that they could, using as many letters as possible from their rack combined with at least one letter on the board. It had to follow the rules of English phonology (or, as they would have put it, it had to sound like it could be a word), but it could not be an actual word. The object was not to score points but to make each other laugh, and laugh they did! They laughed like only two high-spirited ten-year-old girls who have long been best friends can laugh. Sometimes one would “challenge” the other’s “word,” asking for a definition, and the other would offer an hysterical definition that somehow seemed to fit with the way the “word” sounded; and then they would laugh even harder.  I realized, as I pulled back and watched them and began to laugh along with them, that my way of playing was something like what we usually call work. Their way of playing was play. I realized, too, that I used to play like that, as a child. What had happened to me in the interim?

That’s the story from Dr. Peter Gray. And note how he thinks he’s going to teach the girls a thing or two, but ultimately they pull a Nasruddin on him, and in the end he’s left wondering what the heck’s happened in his life, why he can’t play like THAT, because play like THAT is what aliveness looks like….

Play like THAT is full of all good things…

Says the immortal Greek philosopher Plato, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

And already we are deep into our subject. Part of it has to do with what makes play PLAY—five factors—each of which the story illustrates. One is that the activity is freely entered into. For the two girls playing Scrabble, there’s absolutely no feeling of being pushed into something against their will, and no sense that it’s impossible to quit. If a person feels coerced or forced, it’s not freedom and therefore, it’s not playful.

As for the second factor, think for a moment about how the girls are self-determining. They are free agents and determine their own rules and strategy—-even in the face of Dr. Gray’s protests. Dr. Gray thinks he knows best (just like all the people in our lives who think they know what’s best for us) but it can’t be playful for those girls if they are feeling micromanaged down to the details, and it’s the same for us.

Which takes us immediately to the third factor in all playfulness: imagination. Scrabble, in conventional reality, aims at real, actual words; but the girls aim for nonsense words which have to at least sound real and which are as long and silly as possible. They even invent definitions to fit the way the fake words sound. In the hands of imagination, everything can be different than what it is, or more than what it is. Imagination can even go so far as to find windows where there seemed to be only walls. It’s writer Jules Verne in 1870, in his book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, fantasizing about electric submarines—and eventually science was able to make that fantasy come true. Maybe this is why Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Now what I have just done with this Einstein quote is to suggest the practical usefulness of play. And the usefulness is tremendous. But the irony here is that the emphasis on usefulness actually violates the fourth factor in genuine play: that’s it’s done primarily for the sake of fun and not for any other further purpose. Our Scrabble-playing girls are not endeavoring to create new words and thereby improve the English language. They just want to make each other giggle. They just want to make each other guffaw. They just want to make each other laugh so hard that whatever it is they’re drinking spurts out of their nostrils. That’s the principal thing in anything qualifying as genuine play. Yes, there can be practical positive side-effects. But that’s not principally why you do it.

And finally, the fifth factor in all genuine playfulness: you are completely absorbed. Intensely and utterly: you are focused on what’s happening. You are in the flow. You are in the sweet spot. Above all you are not distressed, you are not afraid of failure, you are not distracted by anything else. The path to learning how might take you through the valley of the shadow of awkwardness, or appearing foolish, but you are not afraid. You give yourself to the process, no matter how messy.

All this is what makes play PLAY. Activity that is freely-entered, it’s self-determining, it’s full of imagination, it’s valuable in itself, and it’s characterized by a mindset of utter absorption.

Play sounds pretty sweet, right?

What’s amazing is how evolution—which is as practical and even ruthless as you can get—seems to love playfulness. There is a reason why a puzzle game like Candy Crush Saga [who are my Candy Crush Saga addicts in the room? you know who you are] has inspired players to spend $1.3 billion dollars in 2014 alone, with the dollars used towards game purchases like extra lives, extra moves, color bombs, lollipop hammers, and gold bars. There’s a reason, and it’s not moral terpitude.

It’s because play develops your mind and keeps it sharp.

It’s because play can provide safe outlets for releasing aggressive impulses—who hasn’t witnessed a generous, sweet friend at the game board turn into Donald Trump?

It’s because play of the specifically risky sort (like climbing heights, going fast, chasing and being chased, wrestling, wandering and getting lost) teach kids how to regulate fear and anger—and when risky play declines, emotional disorders in children increase.

There’s a reason why we play….

It’s because play teaches people how to take turns, which is nothing less than the basis of civilization.

It’s because play gives people the opportunity to connect and socialize—this is why video games never killed off the more traditional board games which, when you think about it, have the quality of a campfire about them, around which people gather and become friends.

It’s because play energizes the imagination and can open doors to new insights and connections.

The reasons for why evolution selects for playfulness go on and on because, very simply, there are so many things that human beings must learn to claim their full humanity. “An amazing fact of human nature,” says Dr. Gray, “is that even 2-year-olds know the difference between real and pretend. A 2-year-old who turns a cup filled with imaginary water over a doll and says, ‘Oh oh, dolly all wet,’ knows that the doll isn’t really wet. It would be impossible,” Dr. Gray says, “ to teach such young children such a subtle concept as pretense, yet they understand it. Apparently, the fictional mode of thinking, and the ability to keep that mode distinct from the literal mode, are innate to the human mind.”

There is nothing of moral turpitude in this.

There is only nature.

Nevertheless, just like Dr. Gray in the Scrabble story, we might find ourselves remembering how we used to play like the two girls played—how we used to be able to get into a Nasruddin space—but no longer. Our lives have gone contrary to nature. What has happened?

Well, think about the sound of fun. The sound of fun is LOUD. And when you are holding pain, you don’t want to hear anything LOUD. “Children,” I was constantly told growing up, “should be seen but not heard.” But it’s not really about kids. It’s about adults with trauma hangovers and they can’t bear fun happening around them and so they kill it wherever they find it.

It’s not hard, after all, to explain how our lives have gone contrary to nature. Adult pain, adult fear. Evolution has designed children to know innately the difference between real and pretend, and so one day you catch your son playing cops and robbers with a toy gun and he is shooting that gun for all it’s worth and it scares you to death because you KNOW all about gun violence and (as a parent) you KNOW that your kid’s behaviors right now might be an indication of an enduring trait (as opposed to just a phase). Which one it is—well, that you DON’T know. So you worry. You are a parent. That’s what parents do.

Our lives go contrary to nature. But it’s not just about parents and children.

If playfulness involves freedom to enter into and to leave, think of all the ways in which you might be tied to a position you can’t afford to leave, or to a marriage, or to something else. Recently someone told me about a job they were tied to with “golden shackles.” Good money but it’s soul killing. Ugh.

If playfulness involves the ability of choosing exactly how you will play, think of all the ways in which people of all ages are micromanaged—at school, at work, at home. For example, in some schools, children come home every day with a color that indicates what their behavior has been like that day. No slack at all. Every day you are judged. Parents, every day, have to deal with it. Ugh.

If playfulness involves doing something just for fun, think of all the messages we receive about getting on track, growing up, getting a life. Don’t get that degree in philosophy! Don’t get that degree in studio art! What are you thinking? How are you going to make any money with degree like that? Ugh.

If playfulness involve full absorption in what you are doing without any distress or pressure, just watch the evening news and allow the pain of the world to pour in and that will make you feel plenty distracted and plenty distressed. Ugh.

If playfulness involves imagination, just think of all the ways in which the world wants us to be serious and literalistic. All the literalism and conservatism out there that makes religion, for example, shallow and uncreative and violent. Ugh.

If we could just flip the joylessness script for a moment….

If we could just channel Nasruddin even a little bit.

Muslims say, “Take one step towards God and God takes seven steps towards you.” “Walk to God and God comes running.” If playfulness is anything, it is God energy stirring in us!

We want to take that one step, we want to start walking….

There’s a fascinating finding in developmental psychology that I just can’t resist sharing even though we are near the end and all the preaching professors say, “Don’t introduce something new near the end!” But rules schmools. You gotta hear this.

According to classic developmental theory, children under 10 or 11 years old simply do not have the conceptual ability to solve arguments like the following:

All cats bark
Muffins is a cat
Does Muffins bark?

“When British researchers,” says Dr. Gray, “put syllogisms like this to young children in a serious tone of voice, the children answered as [classic theory would predict.] They said things like, ‘No, cats go meow, they don’t bark.’ They acted as if they were unable to think about a premise that did not fit with their real-world experiences. But, when the researchers presented the same problems in a playful tone of voice, using words that made it clear that they were talking about a pretend world, children as young as 4 years old solved the problems easily, and even many 2-year-olds solved them! They said, ‘Yes, Muffins barks.’” “Now think of it,” says Dr. Gray: “Four-year-olds in play easily solved logic problems that they were not supposed to be able to solve until they were about 10 or 11 years old!”

Now isn’t that amazing? How everything changes when we shift from a serious tone of voice to a playful tone of voice?

Yes, BUT, we say…

The joylessness script runs so deep….

Just taking that one step, just starting to walk, can feel so hard…

The other day I was in Marshall’s looking for even more silly socks to wear on a Sunday morning, because I want to be playful with you, and there were kids playing chase, and they were laughing and carrying on and it was the sound of fun (LOUD!) and I just wanted them to SHUT UP, it had been a long day, I was upset about things, and there I was—being contrary to the nature that surges within me and within you and wants playfulness, wants us to be alive and vital, wants us to feel charged up with the electrical charge of the soul.

Did I think I could solve things by being a grinch? I think I did.

But again and again, the playful approach is the powerful one. It releases 4-year-olds to solve problems supposedly impossible for them to solve. And maybe the playful approach can release us to solve whatever is hard for us.

A little bit of Nasruddin can go a long way.

**

The video before this sermon:

On January 7 of this year, the French satirical weekly magazine called Charlie Hebdo was the target of a terrorist attack. Twelve people died. Witnesses said they had heard the gunmen shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “God is Great” in Arabic while calling out the names of the journalists who dared portray the founder of Islam in irreverent ways.

This came to mind as I was coming to know the figure of the Mulla Nasruddin, Islam’s great comic foil who is village simpleton and sage all rolled into one. The earliest written accounts of him go as far back as the 13th century. He is shown as wearing a turban, which is the traditional sign of a person of learning, but in fact he has no formal education. He is seated on a donkey, but backwards. In one story, he is rushing through the marketplace. When the townsfolk greet him, he replies to them hastily, “Sorry—can’t stop to talk. I’m looking for my donkey!”

He is a holy fool. Everywhere there is Islam, there is Nasruddin. In the Albanian language, in Arabic, Armenian, Berber, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Daghestani, Greek, Judeo-Arabic, Kurdish, Maltese, Mandaic, Macedonian, Persian, Serbian, Sicilian, Syrian, Tajik, Turkish, Uighur and Uzbek—in all these languages—we find tales of his outrageous silliness. We laugh and laugh, but this laughter opens up a space in our hearts, and into that space the Nasruddin story slips a piece of wisdom, and that piece of wisdom helps us wake up.

“What is this precious love and laughter budding in our hearts?” says the Sufi poet Hafiz. “Listen … it is the glorious sound of a soul waking up!”

So it comes as no surprise that Nasruddin was the main character in a magazine called, simply, Mulla Nasruddin, published in Azerbaijan from 1906 to 1931. Wikipedia reports that it addressed corruption and inequality and “ridiculed the backward lifestyles and values of clergy and religious fanatics, implicitly calling upon the readers to modernize…. The magazine was frequently banned but has a lasting influence on Azerbaijani and Iranian literature.”

It’s Charlie Hebdo before Charlie Hebdo. From out of the very heart of Islamic culture comes a wisdom that wants to heal that culture of its excesses and evils, and it wants to heal every culture. Wisdom that takes the form of a turbaned man riding a donkey backward.

No punches are pulled with this guy.

Listen:

The Mulla lay gravely ill, surrounded by family, friends, and his wailing wife. The doctor arrived and a hush came over the room as he examined the Mulla. After quite some time the doctor turned to the Mulla’s wife and declared, “O honorable wife of the Mulla, only Allah is immortal. It is with deep sorrow that I have to inform you that your husband has passed away. He is dead. His soul has flown to the bosom of God.” As the doctor continued his eloquent remarks, the Mulla feebly protested. “No! Wait! I’m alive! I’m alive!” “Quiet!” retorted his wife. “The doctor is speaking! Don’t argue with the doctor!”

Listen again:

Nasruddin was walking in the bazaar with a large group of followers. Whatever Nasruddin did, his followers immediately copied. Every few steps Nasreddin would stop and shake his hands in the air, touch his feet and jump up yelling “Hu Hu Hu!” So his followers would also stop and do exactly the same thing. One of the merchants, who knew Nasruddin, quietly asked him: “What are you doing my old friend? Why are these people imitating you?” “I have become a Sufi Sheikh,” replied Nasruddin. “These are my students. I am helping them reach enlightenment!” “How do you know when they reach enlightenment?” “That’s the easy part! Every morning I count them. The ones who have left – have reached enlightenment!”

No punches are pulled in a Nasruddin tale. In both stories, blind faith is lampooned, whether in doctors or spiritual leaders. Whatever else enlightenment may be, it’s freedom from slavish dependence on the “experts.” It’s coming to realize that a fake teacher is indeed a fake and a fraud.

All this suggests an even larger truth. That the enormous power religious communities wield can be co-opted to serve unworthy ends. Thieves can break in and steal. And so, another story has Nasruddin noticing the Devil sitting down, looking confident and relaxed. “Why are you just sitting there, making no mischief?” the Mulla asks. The Devil replies, “Since the clerics, theoreticians, and would-be teachers of the religious paths have appeared in such numbers, there is nothing left for me to do.”

This is blasphemy equal to what the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists committed. But thankfully you can’t kill stories.

In every Muslim nation, and around the world, the Mulla Nasruddin is unstoppable. A force for spiritual freedom. He represents the “loyal opposition” to religious institutions everywhere. For as important as institutions are in transmitting wisdom from age to age and in shaping people’s character in the image of such wisdom, still, institutions are imperfect. They can lose track. The pristine message of founders like Muhammad or Jesus or Buddha or Ralph Waldo Emerson can be degraded. Constant reform is needed.

One day a student came to the Mulla and said, “I have heard that there are secret words that, when repeated, open the gates of enlightenment, accelerate our ability to find contentment in life, and connect us to divine mysteries.” “Absolutely true!” said the Mulla. “You may start your special secret lessons tomorrow and will be joined by a student who is at a similar level of attainment.” The next day the student arrived with eager anticipation and found the Mulla teaching the mystical words to a parrot!

We all want a silver bullet solution. A silver bullet theology that gives a person a spiritual identity that is always clear and never changes and defends against every anxiety. A silver bullet spiritual technique that protects a person from making mistakes and racking up regrets. Silver bullet church strategies guaranteed to result in governance without tears, leadership development without bumps, and numerical growth in the pews without a doubt.

That’s when the Mulla says to us, “Absolutely true! You may start your special secret lessons tomorrow and will be joined by a student who is at a similar level of attainment.”

When an institution promises to deliver a silver bullet strategy, you can bet that its focus is to create parrots, not people. I call that a degraded spiritual mission.

You just can’t be both parrot and spiritually free.

**

Now, besides “loyal opposition” to religions and religious institutions, Nasruddin stories address other aspects of spiritual freedom. Islamic teacher Imam Jamal Rahman, in his book Sacred Laughter of the Sufis, helps us understand what these are. He identifies them as “a common thread of Sufi teachings:”

1. Every human has a divine spark veiled by the layers of personality. Whether we call it Allah, Jesus, Elohim, Krishna, or any other name, that spark is the same, and we are foolish not to realize our astounding potential.

2. An essential spiritual practice is to observe and witness oneself continuously and compassionately, acknowledging and laughing at foibles and weakness while working relentlessly to evolve into higher consciousness.

3. The light of persistent awareness is bound, little by little, to dissolve our false self and bring us closer to our authentic self.

As Unitarian Universalists, we speak of the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and we can bring a distinctly Sufi understanding to this. We call it a SEARCH and not an automatic accomplishment because it takes time and trial-and-error and lots of help from others and lots of compassion to dissolve the ego patterns that keep us bogged down. Our authentic selves are inside us, but it can feel as if they are a million miles away. Thus the SEARCH. Thus the need for the PERSISTENT LIGHT OF AWARENESS, which dissolves the false self.

Enter Nasruddin, the holy fool. Lots of his stories shine a light on the false self….

In one, we meet the Mulla as a court advisor. One day, he encountered the royal falcon for the first time. He thought to himself, “What an odd looking pigeon!” Wanting to be of service, he trimmed the claws, wings, and beak of the falcon until, crowing with satisfaction, he declared, “Finally, you look like a decent pigeon. Obviously, your keeper was neglecting you!”

In another story, the Mulla went with a friend on his pilgrimage to Mecca. People from every corner of the world go on pilgrimage each year, all of them clothed in plain white robes, so the Mulla tied a conspicuous eggplant around his waist so that his friend would recognize him if they got separated. One evening after the Mulla fell asleep, a trickster untied the eggplant and fastened it around his own waist. When the Mulla awoke in the morning, he was confused. He saw the man with the eggplant and said, “I know who you are, but then, who am I?”

In yet a third story, the Mulla happens to be working in a factory. The president of this factory called a meeting and told all the employees that, starting next month, the factory would be completely automated. There were gasps of disbelief and people shouted, “But how will we feel our families?” “Please don’t be alarmed,” the president said. “All of you have been loyal employees. You will no longer work here, but I’ve got some fantastic news. Because of the increased profits, you will be paid as usual with annual increments! You will continue to enjoy the subsidized cafeteria and sports facilities! All you have to do is come in on Friday to collect your pay.” There were sighs of relief, tears of joy, and much laughter. After a while, the Mulla raised his hand and asked, “That’s great, but not every Friday, I hope!”

The stories help us wake up to the silliness of our egos. They always want more—that’s the lesson of the last story. A sense of entitlement is always around the corner if not center stage, and that sense kills an ability to inhabit the spaciousness of the present moment and appreciate our lives as they are….

Then there’s the second story, the one in which the Mulla establishes his identity through something external to him: an eggplant. But he could equally have done that by crowing over his expertise with social media (as we saw in the video from today), or by pointing to the kind of car he drives, or the career he has, or how his body looks, or the size of his paycheck. We do that all the time—base our sense of self on externals and not on the divine spark within which is what truly gives the peace that passes all understanding…

This is all false self stuff. This is what makes the free and responsible search such a long and winding road…

Same thing with the story about the falcon. Like the Mulla, all we know is pigeons, and so every bird we meet we treat like a pigeon even though it might be something vastly different. Situations and people come to us like falcons, but we don’t know how to appreciate them in all their fullness….

Just yesterday a friend confessed that, like me, she is terrible at remembering song lyrics. That old Bangles’ classic, “Walk Like an Egyptian,” has a line that goes, “All the SCHOOL kids sooo sick of books they like THE PUNK AND THE METAL BAND.” But in her mind that had become “All the cool kids sooooo sick of books they like the funk in the Indian.” It had become that, and it had stayed that for years and years like a broken record until she checked the actual song and realized there is no funk in the Indian involved in walking like an Egyptian…

It’s just like the false self. The false self is an old record, a tired groove, the words are all wrong, repetition ad infinitum. But laughter is the glorious sound of a soul waking up. Sunlight exists underneath this skin. “This little light of mind, I’m gonna let it shine…” But only as the false self patterns are dissolved….

It is said that the Mulla complained every day at lunch that he was sick and tired of cheese sandwiches. Every day, his coworkers had to listen to this. Finally, one of them offered some advice. “Mulla, tell your wife to make you something different. Be persuasive with her.” “But I’m not married!” “Well then, who makes your lunch?” Replied the Mulla, “I do!”

What are your cheese sandwich patterns? What are the cheese sandwich patterns of our families, our nation? What about this community right here?

Shine the light of persistent awareness. Dissolve the false self systems.

Mulla Nasruddin comes on his donkey, sitting backwards. He wears a turban that indicates he is learned but he has no formal education at all. Mulla Nasruddin the holy fool comes into our midst, and he makes us laugh, and we need that laughter, the world is so serious, there are so many circular firing squads we find ourselves in, we need something to dispel all that deadly serious energy that only binds us even further to the deadliness…

Do you know that Sufis are regularly accused by conservative Muslims of being overly flexible (much as Unitarian Universalists might be regularly accused by conservative Christians)? But the Sufis smilingly reply, “Blessed are the flexible for they will never be bent out of shape!”

It is said that laughter is the best medicine.

It is said that the person and the community that laughs, lasts.

Mulla Nasruddin, come give us a blessing today!

“Turn your wounds into wisdom,” says Oprah Winfrey. She’s on the same page as countless others. “Do you not see,” said the poet John Keats, writing hundreds of years earlier,” how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

Norse mythology underscores this exact point. The God Odin wants to be wise and so what does he do? He plucks out an eye and offers it to Mimir, the god of the well of wisdom, in return for a drink. Or he hangs himself from the world tree Yggdrasil for nine nights and wounds himself in the side with a spear so as to win the wisdom of the Runes.

Wounds become wisdom.

Our fourth Unitarian Universalist principle that affirms a free and responsible search for truth and meaning—it’s often a wounding way.

The wound is where the light comes in.

That’s what I want to talk about today, as refracted through the fascinating thought of Thomas Moore and his book, Care of the Soul, originally published in 1992 and still going strong.

Here’s how he echoes the ancient “wounds into wisdom” idea. “A person doesn’t wake up until he or she is forced to deal with something—a major problem, issue, trauma, or life change that causes them to reflect. If everything’s going well the tendency is to just go along unconsciously. But once something happens that is disturbing, then you have to take a look.”

Here are some disturbances:

You’ve been planning to escape your job for years, you are depressed and completely dissatisfied, but you’re still in it.

OR

You feel like your relationships aren’t working because you’re just too dependent. This is how you see it.

OR

You’re in your fifties and you’ve fallen madly in love, like a teenager—and it’s the full stereotype, you know it completely, and you are deeply embarrassed.

OR

You have all this energy to change the world—when someone says PROTEST you jump up and you’re right there!—but your home life is in constant crisis and you just can’t relax and enjoy.

OR

You feel empty, disillusioned, spiritually unfulfilled. You’re dry.

Compulsions and symptoms of all kinds.

Something disturbing is happening—so we have to take a look.

Did you know that the success of Care of the Soul shocked pretty much everyone, most of all its author? Millions and millions of copies have been sold; it’s been translated into more than 30 languages. Clearly, a nerve has been struck.

The reason is: because it’s fascinating, what Thomas Moore sees when he takes a look at our wounds. What he sees is something he calls “soul.”

Now we all know that “soul” is a word charged with theological static electricity. Plenty of meanings already stick to it, like lint. We want to try and pick off all that lint so we can engage it as if for the first time…

We are reclaiming the word, and let’s begin with the following quotes that all revolve around a central theme:

“The soul finds its fertility in its irrationalities. Maybe this is a hint as to why great artists appear mad, or at least eccentric.”

“The soul generally does not conform to the familiar patterns of life. Whenever the soul appears strongly—in love, passions, symptoms—its moods and behaviors seem odd and are difficult to fit into life.”

“When soulfulness appears in any human institution, its asks of us unusual tolerance and broad imagination.”

From these quotes we can infer that whatever else the soul is, it is a force that disrupts the status quo. The little town of your life has been peaceful for years but suddenly it’s overwhelmed by an earthquake. Feelings and behaviors come upon you threatening the status quo, and you try to reason them away but they can’t be reasoned away. They are impervious to all your pep talks and all the pep talks of others. Because the earthquake is you, too—an expression of you that may, in fact, be far more authentically you than the current status quo ever was….

That’s why Thomas Moore uses the word “soul” and not something else. “Soul” connotes something that is fundamentally who we are, larger than ego consciousness, and we can feel like marionettes in its hands. “Soul,” he says, “is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and control it.”

An old saying comes to mind: “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” Our egos are busy making others plans—our egos imagine themselves completely in control—but then they learn the hard way that they are not in control.

Soul is the “font”—the abundant source, the living stream, the wild nature of our being….

But it is understandable how, when our status quo lives are disrupted, the go-to strategy is to want to surgically remove whatever the disrupting thing is instantly. Find what is to blame, cut it out, bludgeon it, remove it immediately.

And so:

You’ve been planning to escape your job for years, you’re depressed and completely dissatisfied, but you’re still in it. Stop complaining and just get out of there! (This is from the shouting school of psychotherapy.)

You feel like your relationships aren’t working because you’re just too dependent. Get a grip and stand up on your own two feet!

You’re in your fifties and you’ve fallen madly in love, like a teenager. Snap out of it already, for God’s sake!

You have all this energy to change the world—when someone says protest you jump up and you are there!—but your home life is in constant crisis and you just can’t relax and enjoy. But the world’s going to hell in a handbasket! Some sacrifices you just have to make….

You feel empty, disillusioned, spiritually unfulfilled. Wow, talk about a first-world problem. You should feel ashamed!

They say that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is choosing to keep it out of a fruit salad. When we bludgeon ourselves or others, it’s like piling tomatoes on the fruit salad. We are not wise where the human heart is concerned.

Wounds can be turned to wisdom.

But the way there is through caring. Care for the Soul.

One aspect of this is a sheer capacity to bring compassionate and nonjudgmental attention to what is happening. We receive this message from so many sources. Speaking from a Buddhist perspective, Pema Chodron says “The peace that we’re looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth; it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.”

Similarly, and perhaps more picturesquely, Thomas Moore says, “Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can’t care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observance is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for, but also to honor and keep, as in the observance of a holiday. The serv in observance originally referred to tending sheep. Observing the soul, we keep an eye on its sheep, on whatever is wandering and grazing—the latest addiction, a striking dream, or a troubling mood.”

So we keep an eye on the soul’s sheep. The latest addiction, a striking dream, or a troubling mood—we pay attention to them as they roam through our lives. And then we do something else: we trust that there is more than meets the eye. We shake the habit of literalism. As Unitarian Universalists, we say that we ought to read the Bible seriously and not literally. So why should we not extend this principle to the kind of scripture that is even more sacred: the Bible of our hearts?

So we don’t automatically interpret the discomfort we’re feeling as something that is fundamentally bad. We don’t react, cut away what’s offensive. We take a deep breath—we have to, because the whole thing is deeply unsettling!—and we try looking beneath the surface of the disturbance for the healing message that’s there.

And so:

You’ve been planning to escape your job for years, you’re depressed and completely dissatisfied, but you’re still in it. But have you truly given yourself to that job? What would it be like to stop trying to escape it and, by extension, the life you’ve been given? What would happen if you chose to enter into your job even more fully—to give yourself to it? The only way out is through…

You feel like your relationships aren’t working because you’re just too dependent. Maybe your sense of dependency is asserting itself because it needs more attention from you. You think you need more independence but, in fact, you’ve been avoiding deep involvement with other people and the world all your life…

You’re in your fifties and you’ve fallen madly in love, like a teenager. The Romantic Youth that has suddenly appeared in your life—has it not returned a world of energy and beauty to you, which is a good thing? So: can you find enough space for both the Old Man and the Romantic Youth inside yourself, to give each a proper place?

You have all this energy to change the world—when someone says protest you jump up and you are there!—but your home life is in constant crisis and you just can’t relax and enjoy. Can you give proper place to your needs to savor the world, as opposed to just saving it? Can you trust that, were you to relax and enjoy more, that your passion for justice would not evaporate but, in fact, be more focused?

You feel empty, disillusioned, spiritually unfulfilled. Your tears will bring you healing. Your tears will open the door. (This was what my therapist once told me, when my soul was disturbing my life by bringing me symptoms of disillusionment and dryness and I was simply flummoxed. In the end, she was exactly right.)

Ultimately, looking underneath our symptoms and disturbances for some kind of message with helpful intent means trusting what’s going on, trusting our process, even if in the moment things feel confusing and chaotic. “In care of the soul,” Thomas Moore says, “there is trust that nature heals, that much can be accomplished by not-doing.”

Don’t do. Just look. Just see.

We are so surrounded by the artificial, and we are so studied in the artificial, that we treat ourselves as if we were artificial too. We don’t know who we are! We must reacquaint ourselves with the nature that is within us, nature that is as wild and strange and surprising as stars and sky and trees and animals.

This nature within us, which is the soul: pay attention to it long enough—love its sheep long enough—and what you will realize is that it is always uniquely itself and never about adjustment to accepted norms. Imagine Henry David Thoreau, a man who always had mud on his shoes. That is the soul.

The wild nature within us: it seems to delight in paradox and complexity. It just does. So why are we always surprised when life takes us into paradox and complexity? Ego consciousness wants the world to be flat and black and white. But the soul is multidimensional and shades of grey….

Nature within us: its preferred process is slow and not fast. It tends to go over the same territory of memory again and again, like a cow chewing its cud. The soulful path through life is a spiral path. We are always going back to old things but with minds and hearts that are new.

The wild within: when we lose touch with it, when our status quo lives become soulless, earthquakes come—the soul sends them our way, as the gods in Greek tragedy might—so as to bring us back to sanity.

Nature within: it is the font of our deepest life, it is the absolute richness of our being, and when we are in sync with it, we are filled with purpose and meaning. Not necessarily happiness, though….

“I spent three weeks with a man,” Thomas Moore says, “a psychiatrist, who had just turned 90 years old. His family was killed in the Holocaust in Lithuania. And he is still in grief over this, from when he was 17. He is still deep in it and wanted talk it through. He is still dreaming, still having nightmares. From 17 to 90—and he hasn’t worked through his grief. Does this mean that he’s missed the boat? That he’s not done something he should have done? Not at all. He’s lived an absolutely beautiful creative life, more so than most people. But the grief is there with him and you might even say that his capacity for that grief has allowed him to be a psychiatrist and help many people.”

It’s like that ancient story of Odin. An eye is the cost of being wise. The soul wants us to be wise, but ego consciousness doesn’t want to give up an eye, but there is no stopping the soul.

Or at least, we may try. We may bitterly protest our fate. We refuse to let go of the ego-oriented hopes we have for our lives. And so we are dragged.

As I say that, imagine a waterskier who’s fallen down. Don’t be the fallen waterskier who refuses to let go.

Joseph Campbell once said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

That is the essence of Thomas Moore’s care for the soul.

The spirit of Dr. King gathers us here today, as congregations around the nation remember this great man and his message of social justice. Early on in the recently-released movie, Selma, he asks his friend, confidant and fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy what is the use of integrating lunch counters if black people still could not afford the items on the menu.

That is exactly what a prophet of social justice asks. A prophet who sees completely the tragedy and complexity of our situation. It’s not racism over here and economic exploitation over there. They travel together. They go together. With all the other terrible –isms.

But did you know that it was not until the late 19th century that the very phrase “social justice” came to exist? It was coined during that time, as a way of articulating the main insight of a progressive movement called the Social Gospel. Social Gospel leaders like Walter Rauschenbusch said that the church needs to stop emphasizing individual salvation in some afterlife as the full story. We have to start talking about how the church can help save society in THIS life—how churches can inspire and support initiatives that will impact public policies and institutions and take them in the direction of Beloved Community. How churches can bring salvation to the broken-down human community, and not just to private souls.

From this turning point of consciousness, the phrase “social justice” comes, and Dr. King took up the baton and he ran the next leg of the race and he was faithful. He was faithful. May we pick up the baton and be faithful in our turn.

So I ask the question today: Can we afford the items on the menu? Can we do that, whatever our skin color happens to be? The Unitarian Universalist Association, at its 2014 General Assembly, selected “Escalating Inequality” to be the question that Unitarian Universalist congregations across the land are asked to wrestle with in the next several years. Back in 1964 LBJ declared a War on Poverty, and Dr. King’s voice was lightning and thunder on that, but here we are in 2015, and … just exactly how is that war going? Now people are talking about another kind of war: to preserve the middle class!

It’s a sad story. America’s “shining city on a hill” has become, among all the advanced countries of the world, the one with the greatest level of inequality. Of all the cities of our nation, income inequality is greatest right here, in the Big Peach, the City of Trees, the Empire City of the South.

Who by now has not heard the statistics? The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 percent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 percent took 59 percent. CEOs enjoy salaries that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity. Dr. King said “It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages”—and the crime still goes on. Bankers, among the strongest advocates of the government keeping their hands off economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from that very same government in bailouts during the Great Recession. Big Money triumphs, and Big Money takes care of its own. We say democracy, but really, how can democracy withstand the enormous political influence of the Koch brothers and others like them? Don’t say democracy—say OLIGARCHY. Rule by the wealthy….

In all of this, perhaps the saddest part is the internalized hatred of the poor. One of our Unitarian Universalist writers, Kurt Vonnegut, talks about this in his book Slaughterhouse Five. “Americans, like human beings everywhere,” he says, “believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.” He goes on to say, “Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.” That’s what Kurt Vonnegut says, and let me emphasize how increasing inequality only intensifies this assault against people’s inherent worth and dignity. As the worlds of the oligarchy and the insecure widen, it only becomes easier for one to misunderstand the other and to blame it. The oligarchy imagines itself as truly human and projects onto the other animalism and unworthiness. Which of course translates into oligarchy-made social policies that are merciless and only make things worse. Downward spiral.

Warren Buffett has said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It is a sad, terrible story…

But must we keep telling it? Over and over and over?

Go back to the Social Gospel and progressives like Walter Rauschenbusch. He had a vision. He once said that what we need to do is create structures in society which incline people doing bad things to reverse course and do what’s good. This is soft power, not hard. Structures in which cooperation is rewarded, not selfishness, not greed. Set up reward systems that make a better society. Just as the architecture of cities can incline people to go in some directions and not others, so can an architecture of choice do the same…

The Social Gospelers got all excited about this vision, but then what happened next was World War I. The war knocked the air out this positivity, as just as Vietnam did to the War on Poverty. The Social Gospelers ultimately found themselves passed over, and then: silence.

But you can’t keep a good idea down forever. Listen to the insights that come from some contemporary holders of the vision of choice architecture: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the one from the University of Chicago, the other from Harvard—both drawing on research in psychology and behavioral economics in their enormously interesting book entitled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Here, I’m highlighting chapter 3 of that book which focuses on creating collective change by drawing on the very human tendency to be influenced by others. As in, if you see a movie scene in which people are smiling, you are more likely to smile yourself (whether or not the movie is funny). As in, peer pressure, as the following case study illustrates: “People were asked, ‘Which one of the following do you feel is the most important problem facing our country today?’ Five alternatives were offered: economic recession, educational facilities, subversive activities, mental health, and crime and corruption. Asked privately, a mere 12 percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to an apparent group consensus unanimously selecting that option, 48 percent of people made the same choice!” That’s power! Power of peer pressure…

But how to leverage that power for the common good?

We already know that people tap into it for other kinds of purposes.

“Advertisers,” say Thaler and Sunstein, “frequently emphasize that ‘most people prefer’ their own product, or that ‘growing numbers of people’ are switching from another brand, which was yesterday’s news, to their own, which represents the future. They try to nudge you by telling you what most people are now doing.” “Candidates for public office, or political parties,” they continue, “do the same thing; they emphasize that ‘most people are turning to’ their preferred candidates, hoping that the very statement can make itself true. Nothing is worse than a perception that voters are leaving a candidate in droves. Indeed, a perception of that kind helped to account for the Democratic nomination of John Kerry in 2004. When Democrats shifted from Howard Dean to John Kerry, it was not because each Democratic voter made an independent judgment on Kerry’s behalf. It was in large part because of a widespread perception that other people were flocking to Kerry.”

It’s the power of “most people prefer,” the power of “growing numbers of people.” The power is simply there to be used. So make it smart, say the choice architects. Make it responsible, say these inheritors of the Social Gospel vision. Turn it to the common good.

That’s what I want to do, right now. Nudge you by simply informing you of what one of the elite 1 percenters—one of the members of the American oligarchy—is doing, and it’s quite surprising.

I encountered the story in the Huffington Post:

Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini announced on Monday that the health-insurance company will be raising wages for its lowest-paid employees. Starting in April, the minimum hourly base pay for Aetna’s American workers will be $16 an hour, according to a company press release.

The 5,700 workers affected by the change will see an average pay raise of about 11 percent. The lowest-paid workers, who currently make $12 an hour, will get a 33-percent raise.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bertolini recently requested that Aetna executives read Capital In The Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Piketty. The book, which has been hailed as the “most important book of the twenty-first century,” warns that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is heading toward Gilded Age levels of inequality and calls on the world’s largest economies to fix the problem.

The U.S. government, which last raised the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour in 2009, has not exactly scrambled to respond. Aetna’s move is one way companies could help close the gap. “It’s not just about paying people, it’s about the whole social compact,” Bertolini told the Journal.

That’s what one of our American oligarchs is doing. “He’s doing it,” we can say to the other American oligarchs, “so what about you?” We already know that nothing’s worse than a perception that voters are leaving a candidate in droves; so why not create the perception that economic elites are leaving a fundamentally foul arrangement of excessive inequality and moving towards something far more sane?

I’d rather help create this perception (which IS based in reality but we want to make it more and more real) than revert to a standard strategy of the 99 percent which is to tell folks all about how wealth infects people and makes them evil. I mean, there is article after article floating out there that essentially wants to demonize the financial elites.

But I will not do that. Yes I’m frustrated and angry. Yes I am! Yes I am! But I will not go there. Because it is not helpful to freeze people in time. It is not helpful to decide in advance what is and is not possible for the human heart. It is not. Cornel West (whose vision we explored a couple weeks back) says something of key importance to progress around economic equality: “Our elites are not to be demonized. Elites can make choices. They’re not locked into a category. Choices that are connected to truth and justice. But it takes courage.”

At first I thought he meant courage in the 1 percent—the kind of courage that Aetna CEO Mark Bertolino shows. But maybe it also takes courage in the 99 percent. For the people who are not elite to believe that as a nation we just don’t have to keep on telling the same sad small story. Psychologist Jean Houston once said, “If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.”

Don’t demonize, says Cornel West. Do this instead. Make elites see. Believe that they can see. “Democracy,” he says, “is always a movement of an energized public to make elites responsible; at its core and its most basic foundation is the taking back of one’s powers in the face of the misuse of elite power.”

Don’t demonize but democratize.

Make the American oligarchs responsible and responsive to what’s happening, using the power we have: of giving them examples of how other oligarchs have shaken off the stupor of greed and have done the right thing. Tell these stories. Shout these stories from the mountaintop.

An American oligarch has really said, “It’s not just about paying people, it’s about the whole social compact.” He had other American oligarchs read Capital In The Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Piketty, so they could see, like he does, the disaster that awaits for all of us unless, as a nation, we are born again.

That is a conversation among peers we want to encourage.

We should buy a thousand volumes of that book by Piketty and distribute them like Gideon Bibles. That’s what we should do.

Don’t freeze the elites but free them. Defy the tragedy that we see again and again all throughout history, as suggested by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who says: “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”

Let’s not allow it to be too late in America.

Let it be not sunset, but sunrise, in America!

This sermon is a democratic message to America….

Writer Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”

We are most definitely not ready for the harvest. Right now where economic inequality is concerned we are in a terrible place. As a nation. Here in Atlanta. But there is still hope. We need to be smart. We need to know what our power actually is, and use that power.

I still want to believe my vote has power. I still want to believe that the politician I vote for will legislate in ways that heal the poor and defend the middle class. I am most certainly not going to stop voting and stop hoping. But rock beats scissors, just like money beats the ordinary citizen’s vote….

But I also know this: money is not unbeatable. Thank God. Paper beats rock, and human connection beats money. The Bible tells me so, and so does science.

So use it. Use the power of human connection to nudge people to walk in the ways of social justice. To walk the ways of righteousness, not greed.

Fulfill that old Social Gospel vision. Fulfill the dream of God.

Bring salvation to our nation. Turn sadness to gladness.

Dr. King hands the baton to us, and now it is our turn. It is our time.

So I want to tell you a little about my Mother.

The quickest way I can invite you into her life is by sharing a dream she had repeatedly over the course of many years. When she shared it with me, it helped me to appreciate the journey and challenge of her life in a new way. She certainly knew it was one of those big dreams people have which come like nothing else, with the force of undeniable urgency, to tell the truth the way only big dreams can.

In the dream she would find herself kneeling on the ground and wanting to rise up, stand up on her feet, but she couldn’t, she wasn’t able to, because an invisible and unknown pressure from above was holding her down. And that’s the dream. It was always the same sequence of events. Always ending with her trying to get up, but not being able to. The last time she told me about this dream, she looked at me with her big beautiful eyes, and I felt so helpless.

Hers was not an easy life. People would call her up on the phone, invite her to lunch, to chat, but she would say NO. So many friendships could have been possible, but Mom was self-isolating. She just wanted to be alone, and was stubborn in this. “It’s hard being around people,” she’d say. She would open up to her sons, but to few others.

The pain she carried was immense. Being with her was like a desert experience, wind whipping up the sand of her emotions, and the sand would get everywhere: in your eyes, in your mouth. Mom was the kind of person who nursed resentments. She would remember a slight from decades ago, and she couldn’t let it alone, would talk herself into the memory until the old emotions flared and took on explosive life. She could get enraged. Screaming angry. Her beautiful face all red, bulging veins in her elegant neck. One moment I am her “precious darling angel” (her words) and then the next, in a completely unpredictable way, she is telling me she hates me, how she wished I had never been born. She was unstable in her relationships with others and especially with herself. She looked to drugs to help her cope. There was depression, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, suicidal ideation. It was so very hard growing up. Mother’s Day is a difficult day for me.

Only much later did I put all the pieces together to see that she was a person with a mental illness: borderline personality disorder. She had seen doctor after doctor, but there was misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis. And then there was the terrible stigma of mental illness, which wounded her proud spirit and caused her to avoid treatment as far as possible. Dad enabled this because he was equally proud and equally stung by the stigma.

This was the pressure from above holding her down. Why she could never really stand up.

My mother graduated from the Edmonton General Hospital School of Nursing in 1962 and was inspired by its vision statement which said, “Together, we are summoned to be vibrant and compassionate signs of hope in our broken world.” That was her ministry, preceding mine. One day on the job, Mom happened to see a young boy being prepped for surgery. He looked so frightened and alone. Mom went over to him and took him in her arms, and loved him, asked him what his name was. The boy said, “Anthony.” She said to herself, “If I ever have another son, that’s the name I’ll call him.”

This is her story, and it is equally my story.

So many of us share similar stories of love and pain.

One UUCA congregant tells me about her son, who was diagnosed just recently with bi-polar with a dominant manic component, after years of living with a misdiagnosis and all the trouble that has caused. The misdiagnosis was adult attention deficit disorder (AADD), which resulted in mis-medication with drugs that only made the mania worse. She says that this particular misdiagnosis may be fairly common, since AADD has become a “popular” diagnosis, one that does not carry the stigma that bi-polar does, and therefore is aggressively promoted by the pharmaceutical industry. She says, “We lived through (as did has wife of less than a year) a major behavioral and psychological crisis as he self-medicated with too large doses of his AADD meds as well as alcohol—all this to handle his run-away anxiety, work crises due to his mania, rising debt due to spending during mania episodes, and fear of losing his job.” Just listen to all the issues here, the ones explicit and the ones implied!

We have, in this beloved community, so many stories of love and pain. They are more common than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. One in four adults (approximately 61.5 million Americans) will experience a mental disorder in any given year. In any given year: approximately 20 percent of youth ages 13 to 18 will have this experience, and of children ages 8 to 15: approximately 13 percent.

Just look around you. Just think about what I’m saying.

There is no one kind of mental illness, I hasten to add, although if there is anything the various kinds of mental illness hold in common, it’s this: (1) they manifest as alterations in thinking, mood, and behavior which are not signs of moral weakness or irresponsibility but are like asthma, or a broken arm—they rooted in brain chemistry imbalances, or something physiological; (2) the result is distress and or/impaired functioning; and (3) the people who have them (and the families who love them) face overwhelming prejudice every day, on both personal and social levels. That’s what the various kinds have in common.

And what are these various kinds? There are mood disorders, like depression and bipolar. There are anxiety disorders, like panic attack, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia. There are psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia. There are eating disorders, like anorexia and bulimia. There are personality disorders, like narcissism or borderline personality. Many of these co-occur with some form of substance abuse or other.

One kind of disorder that doesn’t comfortably fall under the category “metal illness” but also results in significant impaired functioning are the degenerative brain diseases—one of which is known as Alzheimers. It impacts millions of families, including families right here. One of these families includes longtime member Ortrude White, whose story was featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution back in 2012. So grateful to her and to her husband Myles for their willingness to share their story publicly. “Ortrude White, a Harvard-educated architect,” says the article, “wears a silver bracelet on her left wrist engraved with her husband’s telephone number. White won’t leave her home in Inman Park without it. At night, she leaves it by her bedside table. For months earlier this year, a recurring nightmare filled White with terror. The jumbled scenes repeated themselves: She stood alone, surrounded by walls, trees, buildings she didn’t recognize. The bracelet ended the nightmares. On mornings she feels foggy, she grabs hold of it. Two and a half years ago, White’s brilliant mind started unraveling. The woman who depended on figures for her livelihood could no longer add or subtract. […] White struggled. She had trouble connecting the dots on a sheet of paper. Counting backward by sixes in timed sessions was difficult. She puzzled over drawing the hands of a clock, a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer’s…” The story goes on from there.

It’s our story. Ortrude and Myles are us.

But now, recall the mission words from the hospital my mom got her nursing degree from, way back in 1962: “Together, we are summoned to be vibrant and compassionate signs of hope in our broken world.” Besides simply breaking the silence around mental illness—besides just saying that it’s real and it impacts all of us in one way or another everyday—this is what I want to talk about: doing justice to it. How to be signs of hope. How to be bringers of hope.

Back when I was a teenager, a bringer of hope in my life was my pastor. Pastor Dan Manual of Crocket Road Church of Christ. We didn’t talk about mental illness as a church community, but my pastor, he cared. He knew my family and felt a special connection with my Dad. On two or three occasions when things got really bad (as in Mom had locked us out of the house, or she was particularly vicious and violent), he had me and my two brothers spend the night. Safety in a warm bed. In the morning we awoke to the revelation of a family at peace, sitting together around the kitchen table. Toast and jam. Eggs. Orange juice. Prayer to begin the day. Today I am light years away from my pastor’s theology, but the theology of a warm bed, the theology of a family at peace sitting around the kitchen table, the theology of toast and jam and eggs and orange juice: this is theology I can get behind and proclaim again and again and again.

Thank you Pastor Dan. You helped me keep walking. You were like the Jesus you always preached about. Thank you.

But as sweet as this was, I need to say that I cannot in all good conscience recommend it as how to do true justice to the challenges of mental illness. I simply cannot.

I will always be grateful. But it’s not the way to go.

Because sustainable justice in a congregational setting can’t rest on any single person’s shoulders. For the pastor to do it all is overfunctioning. Sustainable justice in a congregational setting, which works to create sustainable justice in the larger world, is about all of us. Collective commitment. Communal engagement. The challenges are simply too big and multifaceted.

Says Dr. Thandeka, “… if someone tells you that she or he knows pain, loneliness, loss, fear, and dismay, but does not know the feeling of being sustained by a love that is wider, deeper and infinitely vaster than the sorrows, hear those words as a commission. Hear your commission to love, to create community, and to heal.”

Do you hear this?

If you come here to UUCA, you are not being ushered into some sit-and soak-it-all-up sort of passivity. You are not being invited into lethargy. You are not being invited to be a Wal Mart-Target-Amazon-like consumer. You are being charged to serve. You are being charged with the electrical charge of the Soul. You are being charged to get on up and not to sit down.

Be charged today! Find a purpose and a mission! Hear the commission!

Listen to this study from Baylor University. It indicates that while help from the church with depression and mental illness was the second priority of families with mental illness, it ranked 42nd on the list of requests from families that did not have a family member with mental illness. See this side-by-side with the statistical realities I mentioned earlier (that, for example, one out of every four adults is going to struggle with mental disability this year) and I hope you see that ranking the needs of people and families coping with mental illness 42nd is a recipe for congregational irrelevance. A recipe for doom. People are hungry for bread and we give them stones. Not going to cut it.

There are at least four things we can do.

One is education. So much to do around this. A recent survey found that 57% of adults WITHOUT mental illness symptoms believed that people are caring and sympathetic to persons with mental illness; but as for adults who DO have mental illness symptoms, only 25% of them agreed. The gap between the two is galling. Stigma, says the Surgeon General, is the “most formidable obstacle to future progress in the area of mental illness and health” because “stigma is an excuse for inaction and discrimination that is inexcusably outmoded” in our day and time. Nearly two-thirds of all people with mental disorders do not seek treatment or resist treatment—just like my mother. People aren’t afraid of putting a cast on a broken bone, but there’s something shameful about taking medication to stabilize a chemical imbalance in the brain. When the government at any level has to cut the budget, guess which programs get the axe first?

But education is the antidote. Hit the source of the prejudice hard. Call it what it is: “Sanism.” It’s a word I had never heard before, but I had asked Joetta Prost, past Board President who happens to be a psychologist, to send me some stuff to read, and you better believe she did. “Sanism,” says Michael L. Perlin, “is an irrational prejudice against people with mental illness [and] is of the same quality and character as other irrational prejudices such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes.” Attitudes such as: “people with mental illness are erratic, deviant, sexually uncontrollable, emotionally unstable, superstitious, lazy, and ignorant; that they demonstrate a primitive morality; they are invariably more dangerous than persons without mental illness.”

More dangerous? Compared to Dick Cheney? I don’t think so.

And then Michael Perlin makes a fascinating claim. That one explanation for the stubborn quality of the prejudice lies in history. He says, “Thousands of years ago, it was commonly believed that sickness was ‘a punishment sent by God.’ Historian Judith Neaman has concluded that ‘demonic possession remains the simplest, the most dramatic, and secretly, the most attractive of all explanations of insanity in the Middle Ages.’ Society saw madness as a condition ‘in which a person was possessed, controlled, or affected by some supernatural power or being, and this connection has remained extremely resilient in western culture.” So is that it? The stigma is ultimately rooted in an irrational feeling that people who are mentally ill echo all the creepiness of a movie like The Exorcist? With heads that rotate 360 degrees?

All I know is that my Mom died alone. At some level she probably thought she was a demon and unworthy of care. So she died alone.

We must hit “sanism” hard. Name it so we can claim it. Brain disorders have nothing to do with demons and devils. We are at a place where the vast majority of mental disorders can be managed, but stigma is the main obstacle to progress. So hit it hard.

That’s one thing to do, and here’s a second: Be more welcoming. An important way to do this is being more careful about language. Don’t say “the mentally ill.” Say, “people with mental illness.” Don’t say, “She’s a depressive.” Say, “She is a person with depression.” Can you see the difference? On the one hand, we have a form of speech that reduces a person with all their inherent worth and dignity to a narrow diagnosis; and then on the other hand, we have a form of expression that puts the person first—affirms that FIRST—and then acknowledges that one of their many characteristics has to do with mental illness.

Let’s cultivate a habit of using “people first” language. It reverses the tendency to stigmatize. It works to include people coping with mental illness in the larger circle of humanity, which is where we want them.

There’s this great story from the Talmud: A rabbi asks his students, “How do you know the first moment of dawn has arrived?” After a great silence, one pipes up, “When you can tell the difference between a sheep and a dog.” The rabbi shakes his head no. Another offers, “When you can tell the difference between a fig tree and an olive tree.” Again the rabbi shakes his head no. There are no other answers. The rabbi quietly walks in a circle around them, then says, ”You can know the first moment of dawn has arrived, when you look into the eyes of another human being and see yourself.”

Fight the stigma through education, be more welcoming through a more thoughtful use of language, and then, third of all, be supportive. Individually, for sure, but even more so as a congregation. Myles and Ortrude are a part of a covenant group here at UUCA called Journeying Friends, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Same goes for the Caregivers Support Group that meets later on today. On January 20th, your staff, at its January retreat, will have a two hour workshop that focuses on mental illness in the church and how to be more informed and more effective around this issue. Rev. Thickstun and I are planning on a similar training for our Lay Ministers, so that they can feel confident in being compassionate and helpful presences to people in need.

Let me add to all of this my excitement about the Lifelong Learning and Growth Minister we are currently in search of. As a congregation we cannot flourish unless the way we configure staff positions is in sync with the reality of our needs. Our reality is one in four adults coping with mental illness in any given year. Our reality is approximately 20 percent of youth ages 13 to 18 coping with mental illness in any given year, and of children ages 8 to 15: approximately 13 percent. To face this reality, and all the other realities of people in their journey from cradle to grave, we must have visionary leadership that makes a focus on this a priority and then knows how to implement. Unfortunately, in my experience, Unitarian Universalist congregations have historically fallen short in doing this—as opposed to conservative religionists whose theology may be painfully regressive (my opinion) but they do an absolutely outstanding job taking care of their people. We need to do that too.

We will do that here at UUCA.

Finally, there is the social justice dimension. As a congregation we come together to be Beloved Community, and then we work for the larger good. One aspect of this is brought up by the UUCA member we heard from earlier. She says, “For any patient in crisis who needs in-patient care, particularly a dual-diagnosis mental illness/addiction patient like our son, a minimum of 4 weeks in residential program is recommended. Just try to get a health insurer to say ‘yes’ to more than a couple of weeks of inpatient therapy.” Yeah. What she said. From health insurance, to job support, to ensuring that law enforcement can deal fairly and effectively with people who are mentally ill, and on and on—the justice issues are plentiful. Advocacy means improving the situation in the public sphere so that access to care is easier, there’s truly sufficient funding and support for mental health treatment, and mental health concerns are voiced loud and clear.

Four things we can do. At least four. Do them because you love these people in the pews that surround you. Do them because you love your family. Do them because you love yourself.

I do it because I love my mother, who, until recently, I had always thought I hated. But it’s not true. I love her. Pressure from above held her down on her knees. She could never stand up. But that doesn’t mean you can’t stand up, or someone you love.

We need to get up off of our knees. We need to make it possible.

We need to stand up.

http://bigthink.com/videos/why-cornel-west-beat-up-his-third-grade-teacher

Here’s what his father would tell him, as a child: “You can’t fight other people’s battles.” His mother clarifies: “He would take things from somebody who he thought had too much and give it to somebody who didn’t have as much. Such as their lunch money or their whatever. He shouldn’t have been involved in that kind of situation, and that’s the kind of calls we’d get from school. Where he was trying to help one kid by taking from another kid…”

We are speaking of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s 2015 Ware Lecturer. The prestigious Ware Lecture is given every June at General Assembly, and you are not invited to present unless you are one of today’s most visionary people, willing to fight other people’s battles. Visionaries like Eboo Patel, Karen Armstrong, Mary Oliver, Kurt Vonnegut, Martin Luther King Jr., and now: Cornel West.

Bill Moyers calls him “one of the most prominent public provocateurs in America.” The man is simply brilliant. Gary Dorrien, his colleague at Union Theological Seminary, talks about how, in conversation, he can glide effortlessly “from Matthew Arnold to C. L. R. James to Socrates to John Coltrane to Kierkegaard to Michel Foucault to Toni Morrison to Dostoyevsky to Alain Badiou to Jay-Z and Outkast.” A student of his at Princeton says, “Once we were talking about jazz, and he extemporaneously wanted to talk about the similarities between bebop and a particular moment in the Italian renaissance. I wondered,” he says, “What kind of mind is this?”

A mind on fire.

We want to know who Cornel West is. We want to know what Cornel West says.

There are two reasons for this, essentially. One is, he reminds us of who we are as Unitarian Universalists. And two, he can scare the pants off of us.

He brings us into the peace of our religious identity, and he disturbs that peace too.

Begin with the insight that to understand Cornel West, you must understand Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, time and again you will hear Cornel West described as the Emerson of today. There are many reasons why this is true, and certainly one of them is RAGE. How how he channels Emerson’s outrage at an America that is failing to live up to its promise.

First, Emerson: who said, “my quarrel with America … was that the geography is sublime, but the [people] are not.” America is full of “selfishness, fraud and conspiracy.” “[People] such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money …. And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest.” “We are,” Emerson said, “a puny and feeble folk.”

Now listen to Cornel West, from his book Race Matters, “We have created rootless, dangling people with little link to the supportive networks—family, friends, school—that sustain some sense of purpose in life…Post-modern culture is more and more a market culture dominated by gangster mentalities and self-destructive wantonness.” “Most of our children—neglected by overburdened parents and bombarded by the market values of profit-hungry corporations—are ill-equipped to live lives of spiritual and cultural quality.” This, says Cornel West, applies to all Americans but especially and above all to black America. A nihilism of “horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness” descends…

Cornel West is positively Emersonian in his outrage, with that special emphasis on the false dream of financial success as the highest a person can aspire to. So naturally, like Emerson, Cornel West urges folks to wake up. “We have to draw a distinction,” he says, “between success and greatness. And you tell people, look, you can be successful in terms of financial prosperity, but greatness has to do with moral integrity. You can be successful in terms of your personal security, but greatness has to do with your magnanimity, your willingness to do something for others, to take a risk, and so on. I say to young people, always aspire to greatness. Have a habitual vision of greatness, that greatness has to do with a love for all translated into a justice for all.”

That’s what Cornel West says. But tell us more!

And he does in another one of his books, Democracy Matters. The answer he gives there is: be like Emerson, whom he describes as “The indisputable godfather of the deep democratic tradition in America.” “He reveled in the burning social issues of his day (the annihilation of Native Americans, slavery), highlighting the need for democratic individuals to be nonconformist, courageous, and true to themselves. He believed that within the limited framework of freedom in our lives, individuals can and must create their own democratic individuality. He understood that democracy is not only about the workings of the political system but more profoundly about individuals being empowered and enlightened (and suspicious of authorities) in order to help create and sustain a genuine democratic community, a type of society that was unprecedented in human history.” Greatness is in being like this. Democratic individualism.

Again and again, he quotes passages from our spiritual ancestor—the very same passages I read in seminary and formed me in my Unitarian Universalist ministry:

Whoso would be a person] must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

or

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,-cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint [people] at first hand with Deity …. Look to it first and only… [make sure] that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,–are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,–but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.

or

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

or

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.

People, this is the root of our spiritual way which is at one and the same time a justice way. “The privilege of the immeasurable mind.”

Today we might summarize it all more simply—say “All people have inherent worth and dignity” or “We affirm a free and responsible search for truth and meaning” or “Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” But we say all this because of people like Emerson. Emerson gives us ourselves, and Cornel West, as he channels Emerson, does too.

(Now as a side note, I will say Cornel West explicitly identifies as Christian. And then he immediately follows up with: “But it’s self-styled; it goes through Chekov, it goes through Samuel Beckett, who are two of the great lapsed Christians, two of the great agnostics, probably two of the greatest writers of the 20th century, actually, Chekov and Beckett. Can’t live without them. Kafka would be the other for me. Another agnostic in that sense. Full of love, though.” So: his Christianity is self-styled; it’s being fed by agnosticism and atheism; and what ultimately matters is that it’s full of love. That sounds VERY Unitarian Universalist to me…)

But now let’s take a sharp turn, go a different direction. Remember from the video, how, as a third grader, Cornel West hit his teacher with “a Joe Frazier counterpunch”?

Here’s one example of the counterpunch for us.

It starts out innocently enough, with an insight from Emerson (naturally) about the character of a truly democratic rhetoric that can speak to all, not just to the elite. Emerson says “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. […] I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.”

So that’s what Cornel West has done. Besides his scholarly work, he’s appeared on numerous TV sitcoms like 30 Rock, he’s recorded with a hip hop band called The Cornel West Theory, he’s released several hip-hop/soul/spoken word albums of his own, and he’s also featured in the movies The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as “Councilor West.”

But his critics could care less about the underlying democratic impulse. One of them says, “West has sadly exchanged the unsexy tedium of sustained scholarship to the siren call of public gestures.” When Cornel West was still at Harvard, its President, Larry Summers, blasted him for his rap CDs and other forays into popular culture and said he was embarrassing Harvard.

Now, there is an issue for us in all of this: what is required for UUCA to be a truly democratic free faith….

If we should feature hip hop or soul on a Sunday morning—or do other things that smack too much of popular culture—how many of you would feel, like Larry Summers did, that we were embarrassing Harvard?

For how many of you is serious church equivalent to “the unsexy tedium of sustained scholarship”?

Cornel West likes to ask, “How funky is your faith?”

Counterpunch!

Here’s yet another. Has to do with what I’ll call his “prophetic stubbornness.” How he says what he feels he needs to say—and lets the chips fall where they may. Why this is so is suggested by the signature on emails coming from his office: “There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.”

Cornel West just doesn’t want to pay the bigger price.

So, right before the 2012 presidential election, this is what he’s saying about President Obama: that he’s “the black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” How he wants to “slap him on the side of the head.”

New York Magazine writer Lisa Miller met with him in his office and “offered the argument [she’d] heard: that his assault on the president hurts poor and working people more than it helps them. By seeding the left with dissatisfaction, West risks suppressing that vote and jeopardizing the outcome of November’s election. Whatever his failings, this reasoning goes, Obama is bound to represent poor people better than Mitt Romney would.” What happened next is this: “West considered the objection for the smallest fraction of a second before casting it, witheringly, aside. What, he asked [her], leaning across his desk and jabbing his long fingers downward, if the Jews had asked Amos to tone it down a notch? ‘Well, Amos,’ West imagines the residents of the Kingdom of Judah, circa 750 B.C., saying in a sort of whiny white-person voice, ‘Don’t talk about justice within the Jewish context, because that’s going to make Jewish people look bad.’ Amos [would] say, ‘What?’ ‘Kiss my Jewish behind.’” And then West said, “My calling is to say, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”

What do you think about that? Do you think he was right about speaking out against Obama so strongly, at risk of inflicting even greater harm to poor people?

As democratically-empowered individuals, nonconformers, true-to-selfers, do we take a hard line, insist on all-or-nothing; or do we compromise for now in order to secure future victory?

What do you think about the idea that liberals prevent themselves from succeeding because they keep on shooting eachother in the foot?

This leads to the third counterpunch coming our way from Cornel West.

Fast-forward from 2011 when he’s slamming Obama to October 2014, when he’s addressing the travesty of the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. A huge crowd has gathered—mass protest. It’s rainy, cold. The event begins with one speaker after another saying that the best way to confront police racism and use of excessive force is through peaceful and orderly protest. Eventually, the speakers are shouted down by those pressing for more confrontational tactics. Someone says, “The people who want to break down racism from a philosophical level, y’all didn’t show up,” and this is greeted with loud cheers.

Finally, it’s Cornel West’s time to speak: “The older generation has been too well adjusted to injustice to listen to the younger generation. The older generation has been too obsessed with being successful rather than being faithful to a cause that was zeroing in on the plight of the poor and working people. Thank God the awakening is setting in. And any time the awakening sets in it gets a little messy.”

That’s the scene from back in October 2014, and the ultimate question raised here is: what does effective reform really look like?

Here in Atlanta, folks protesting police brutality marched on to the Downtown connector and blocked traffic. That’s what “confrontational” looked like to them. Is this how we’re going to make society better? And if you don’t participate in all such confrontational tactics, does that mean you are not sufficiently maladjusted to evil?

Furthermore, as we struggle to define effective protest, does it really boil down to a clash of generations? Younger vs. older folk? (I can’t resist adding that Cornel West is not at all young; and also that I have known people grow more radical as they’ve grown older. Just sayin’.)

And what do you think about him saying “any time the awakening sets in it gets a little messy”?

Fact is, Cornel West is just not afraid of revolution—he believes you don’t have to have all things figured out ahead of time before you pull the trigger. “We need,” he once said in a burst of democratic frustration, “a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to ordinary people, ordinary citizens. I don’t know how it happens. The central political system right now is decrepit, it’s broken. Congress legalized bribery and normalized corruption. Presidential candidates are basically bought off by big money. Both of them. In both parties, oligarchs rule. Mean-spirited Republicans, oligarchs rule. And milquetoast, spineless Democrats—oligarchs rule. Democrats [are] much better than Republicans but still caught within the oligarchy.” We need a revolution. And it’s “going to be fought less in the political system and in the courts than in the streets.”

But note one line here in particular: “I don’t know how it happens.”

Is it ok to plunge on ahead if you have no idea what steps to take?

In fact, how much messiness is ok? Can we possibly succeed without some kind of reasonable strategy?

If you are a white person, does your answer change when you consider Cornel West’s conviction that the feeling of being a black person in America—“feeling unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence and hate”—is equivalent to the feeling all of us had as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks? With this in mind, can white folks see how anxiety over perfecting strategy plans can appear as just another form of privilege to the people who are suffering?

I’m throwing a lot of questions at you. I know it. And it’s not like I have answers—the questions are open, truly. But January is our Justice month, so we’re going to reflect on these questions. Take them seriously. Take them into your small groups, your classes, your conversations over coffee. I have phrased them in intentionally provocative ways because I am very much aware of our history as a people who in general (despite the few radicals among us) prefer peaceful protest and gradualistic change.

What above all in us feels the smack of Cornel West’s counterpunches is our Unitarian Universalist Superego…

That’s why thinking is the hardest task in the world…

But all this is far better than being oblivious to the needs of our day. We want the counterpunches to wake us up, stir things up, call us not to success, but GREATNESS.

How funky is your faith?

How deep is your love?

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.

That’s what Cornel West says.