A sermon for Foothills Unitarian Church, on our second Sunday in the sanctuary after being only online for 18 months.

Reading: The Tensions of I and We by Fred Muir

Near the end of my junior year in college, on the afternoon of the first Earth Day, I was in a class on American Transcen­dentalism. We sat in the grass and listened as the teacher read aloud Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” It was as though he was channeling the Sage of Concord, who was speaking to me.

After class, I asked what religion Emerson was. “Unitarian,” he said. I asked if it still existed. “Exist?” he replied. “Yes it exists! There’s a congregation on the west side. Do you want to go Sunday?” And that was that! 

Prior to my Earth Day epiphany, I was religious—I had felt the pull toward ministry as a boy in my liberal Protestant church—but did not think of myself as “spiritual” because I never had the words to put to the spirituality I had known since childhood. 

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature,” Emerson proclaimed. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Emersonian individualism has become part of the American story, of course. 

Think of the “i” that’s placed in front of the names of Apple products. Some say the “i” means “Internet.” Others explain that the “i” stands for “individual”: This is your personal piece of technology, to be used for whatever purpose you want. Fifteen years ago, Apple appealingly exploited the theme of individualism in a commercial that sounds like Emerson channeled through Jack Kerouac: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. They push the human race forward.”

Many of us were drawn to Unitarian Universalism because it seemed to be the church of Emersonian individualism. We are the iChurch. 

I’m not sure Emerson’s goal was for us to be “the crazy ones,” but my thirty-seven years in the UU ministry have convinced me that historian Conrad Wright is correct: “[O]ne cannot build a church on Emerson’s dicta: ‘men are less together than alone,’ or ‘men descend to meet.’”

For all its appeal and its influence in American culture, individualism is not sustaining: Individual­ism will not serve the greater good, a principle to which we Unitarian Universalists have also committed ourselves. There is little-to-nothing about the ideology and theology of individualism that encourages people to work and live together, to create and support institutions that serve common aspirations and beloved principles.

The inherent worth and dignity of the individual is not just our First Principle as UUs: often it is our defining principle. But we frequently overlook another strand of our tradition in our Association’s Principles and Purposes, another story about ourselves that can deepen and grow our future. It is not the language of individualism, not of the iChurch, but of covenant: “As free congregations we prom­is[e] to one another our mutual trust and support.”

We cannot do both covenant and individualism; individuality, yes, but not individualism. Articulating and living our Principles as a commitment to covenant—creating and sustaining a community by “promising to one another our mutual trust and support”—this takes extra effort.

Sermon

In the middle of July, as wild fires raged across the west, with drought and heat threatening major cities, and as the Delta variant created the groundhog’s day of weighing risks and precautions – right then, two different US billionaires launched themselves into space.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, whose net worth is over 177 Billion, took what CNN called a supersonic joyride on July 20^th – he and three others onboard were weightless for three whole minutes.  The 11 minute ride cost Bezos 2.5 million dollars per minute – so quick math – that’s a 27.5 million dollar joyride.

Just over a week earlier, Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, also launched himself into space, on his latest test flight for what will become a space tourism company – Branson says he wants to make space accessible to everyone – it’ll only cost you $250,000 a ticket.  With a net worth of over 4.4 billion, Branson was quick to point out to reporters after his flight that he doesn’t want to be known as a “billionaire,” since as he says, he started off with 200 quid (that’s about 270 bucks), implying, I guess, that his money changes nothing. 

A third billionaire, Elon Musk, is also working on a space tourism effort – SpaceX – but has yet to actually launch himself into space.  I’d say maybe he’s saving up, except his net worth is just over 150 billion.  So.  I don’t know.

Regardless of their intentions – and at least Bezos seemed pretty insistent that his were humanitarian – the spectacle of billionaires escaping the planet while the planet is burning and COVID was raging – was to many of us disgusting, and also just one more absurd reality we’ve been forced to witness over recent years. 

One of my favorite cynical tweet went: “Jeff Bezos, you have the ability to end world hunger. You also have the ability to take a teen to space. Which do you – oh that was fast.” 

Watching the whole thing play out, I kept wondering if these billionaires and their efforts to go to space – especially right now – represented the least UU thing ever, or the most. 

I mean, most Unitarian Universalists I talked to or saw posting about it treated it like it was the antithesis of our religion – focusing on how irresponsible it was, how selfish, and wasteful, especially in light of things like world hunger, or COVID, or climate change – and how much good their resources could do to address these major global problems.

And I agree, these are not Unitarian Universalists values. 

And, I also felt like, in their choices, you could see some of the roots of our faith. We too have had times where we have made scientific discovery the most important value – leading to a shameful history in eugenics. We too have been a part of colonization – leading to our equally shameful founding of boarding schools for Native Americans.And we too have prized the sort of rugged / Emersonian individualism Branson, Bezos and Musks’ stories epitomize. 

We too appreciate calling most sacred the law of our own nature, and trusting in our individual selves most of all.  “We are the iChurch.”

For a lot of us, discovering a religious community that encouraged individualism felt like freedom. It was for many of us, the thing that brought us here.  We love Emerson!

As UU Minister Cheryl Walker has said, “Individualism is so attractive in the beginning. For many people who felt the heavy yoke of being in communities of faith where they could not fully be who they were, individualism tastes like the food they have been hungering for. But it is good only when we are starving. When we have had our fill, we look for food to sustain us for the long journey of life. That life-sustaining food can be found only in true communities of shared purpose and values, where the individual is affirmed but is not worshipped.” 

Fred Muir first described Unitarian Universalism as the iChurch in 2012 in a Lecture to his fellow Unitarian Universalist ministers, entitled “From iChurch to Beloved Community.” Muir’s critique of the iChurch focused on what he called our “Trinity of Errors”(it’s funny because we’re Unitarians!). These three historic errors, in his estimations, prevent us from living into our potential impact and relevance, and will ultimately lead to our decline. 

The Trinity of Errors start with our individualism; then, this individualism leads us to the second error, exceptionalism.  As he says, “We must stay conscious of how we explain, defend, and share our perspective, lest we come across as elitist, insulting, degrading, and even humiliating of others.”

These two errors of the iChurch are co-equal with the third error: our allergy to power and authority, which he says, ironically has led to their abuse and misuse.  He writes:

“Unitarian Universalist anxiety about power and authority makes it hard for us to welcome and listen to a diversity of interests and passions without being distracted and immobilized.”

Instead, as Rebecca Parker notes, “Most liberals, consciously or not, seem to prefer that their religious institutions remain weak, underfunded, or distracted by endless attention to ‘process’ and checks on the exercise of power. One friend of mine, quips that liberal religion teaches you can do anything you feel called to do as long as you do it alone.”

In place of these errors, Muir advocates a return and reclaiming of our practices of covenant, as we heard in the reading, he invites us to “articulate and live our Principles” not as individual statements of belief – the inherent worth of any individual, but as promises to one another, a commitment to create and sustain a community, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.”

Instead of the iChurch, we need a church focused on we.      

2012 was the year I arrived at Foothills. So if this all feels familiar to many of you, I’m glad. Over the past 9 years, many of us have been trying to look intentionally at the ways Muir’s Trinity lives in our individual hearts, and in our collective practices. 

Of course, while Muir’s critique focused on Unitarian Universalism, we can also apply it to American culture, which has also been heavily influenced by Emersonian individualism. The story of the American Dream, or what UU minister Lisa Bovee-Kemper calls the “Fallacy of the American Dream,” which, “tells us that not only are we expected to succeed alone, but also that every person has the innate ability to do so.

[This lie, as Bovee Kemper says,] is the single largest contributor to the [fractured and declining] state of our nation (and many of our churches) today.”

That the state of our nation has been such a persistent pain point for many of us over the last five-ish years has likely been motivating to many of us: we can see the impact of extreme individualism play out with each new absurdity we have had to witness, including with the elevation and election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, who seems to me, the supreme example of a proud individualist. 

In turn, as a congregation, Foothills has met each selfish, ego-driven, divisive headline over these years with an increasing care for the whole.  We became a sanctuary congregation, we started our twice-a-month food bank, we moved to three services, we accepted different sorts of music, and different styles of ministers, and different words. We addressed unhealthy uses of authority, and got more explicit about how we intend power and accountability to work.  We grew up all sorts of small groups, and spiritual practices, and we have been shockingly generous with our giving – including to fund the building we’ve needed for at least 15 years. (By the way, we break ground early next year.) We practiced partnering and following the lead of other organizations, and we regularly give away $50,000 a year to other community partners.

To be clear, we did all of this not because it was good for any particular one of us – any “I”, we did it because it was good for we.

Actually, if you talk to any one of us, you will likely hear disagreement, discomfort, and even distaste for some or all of the shifts we have made.  And, if you keep talking past that, you will also tap in to a clear abiding yes, an understanding that we do this not for me, but for we. 

Something over these years clicked.  We got done with that lonely outdated story of liberal religion as a place where you can do anything you want, as long as you do it alone. We didn’t get rid of individualism – it is the water we swim in, and we still love Emerson, and we can still get seduced by the idea of being non-conformists who just always go our own way. But along side this, we also began to discover what it could mean to prize not individualism, but the Beloved Community.  

And then came Friday March 13, 2020. Will we ever forget that day?

On that day, everything, everything changed, and for a time, we – far beyond the church – I mean, much of the world, we were all in it together. We were flattening the curve, We were cheering for health care and other essential workers, and we were learning new terms like social distancing, unprecedented times, and the promise and perils of muting yourself.    

Our congregation’s collective orientation drew an easy yes to sheltering families experiencing homelessness in our otherwise empty building, and through much of 2020 kept us committed to remaining connected in totally unfamiliar ways.   We learned zoom and circles; we spread kindness and sang silent night; we gave to the discretionary fund and the immigrant relief fund.

In our personal lives, we set aside travel plans, learned tech we had no interest in learning, and we tried to listen to well-meaning adult children who told us to stay home. 

2020 was a time of sacrifice, and we accepted the sacrifice because it was meaningful. Even as politics and capitalism troubled the idea being all in it together, we made these choices because we were living our values. Through our collective commitment, we could imagine our collective salvation.

But then, things shifted again.  The vaccine arrived.  To be clear, the vaccines are a miracle, a miracle of science. They came way sooner than any of us had any right to expect – I think of my dear queer siblings who just kept dying through all those years of AIDS – Vaccines are a miracle.

And, vaccines do not work in the iAnything.  Vaccines require we.

Many of us got our vaccine knowing this, and it made our resolve even stronger – it was our individual and collective path to liberation. It’s what led us into the work of vaccine equity earlier this year. 

But then, to our shock, and our heartbreak, it turns out, others had the opposite reaction to the vaccine. For many people, the vaccine represented not collective salvation, but the need to assert individual liberty, and individual choice. And so, here we are, nine months into the availability of an extremely effective vaccine, but instead of dwindling virus numbers – we are crossing 700,000 lives lost. Nurses and doctors and other medical staff are burning out and dealing with trauma in ways not unlike veterans of war. And all this must be set in the context of the climate crisis, where the supremacy of individual success – the fallacy of the American Dream – is corralling us all to an uninhabitable planet.

But, at least the billionaires will make it out ok, right?

Friends, I’m tired.  Are you tired? I’m tired, and I’m angry, and I’m sad. Like the series we’ve been offering online, I am filled with rage, and grief – .  I am tired of accommodating selfishness, and being the one to make all the sacrifices. I’m tired of marching for women’s right to basic health care – as I’m guessing many of you did yesterday in response to the restrictions on abortion.

I’m tired of being the ones to go high.

I’m so tired I start to think, maybe it’s time we meet today’s individualism with some of our own – we were the OG non-conformists afterall. Maybe everyone should just go their own way.  Focus on their individual lives, families, health, individual goals – If you don’t get the vaccine, and end up sick, or worse, you made your choice.

In our exhaustion, and our grief, it’s understandable that we have lost some of our resolve for the common good.   It is understandable that individualism would feel alluring, safer, familiar – both in how we interact in the world, and how we want to show up in our church. It makes sense that we’d show up here, in our church, with a strong tilt towards individualism. 

We have made so many sacrifices. “Individualism, as Cheryl Walker says, “tastes like food we’ve been hungering for.” 

And still after some time – we will also remember that if ever there was a moment to lean into the power of true community, it’s now. 

For as much as we know that initial spark of being celebrated as an individual, we also know, we remember, the deeper power of being for others. We know and we remember the power of being for the greater good, and for the future.  

We know the power of living knowing that we Inter-are.  I am of you, and you are of me.  As Thich Nhat Hahn says it.

Here we know, and we remember: we do this so that we all may live. 

So let us affirm even now, especially now: the end of the iChurch. As Fred Muir said nearly a decade ago: “That story is over; it won’t take us where we must go.  What we need for a healthy future is the Beloved Community…”

And the good news I have for you friends, is that we’re already doing it.

Right now. Look, we are wearing these masks, and we are not singing, and we are pre-registering – who would’ve ever thought Unitarians would pre-register for church?

And if you ask any one of us, do we like it, is it our preference? We’d say no way.  We hate it.  But we do it because it’s not about me, it’s about we.

The aching earth and its hurting people need us to keep declaring the end of the iChurch, and needs us to keep offering a community grounded not in individualism, but in covenant, a community grounded in the the promise of mutual trust, and support – where– no matter what comes at us next – we remain committed to life abundant, for all.

A message for the 10:00 Foothills community, preached in the park on September 26th and October 3rd, 2021, the first and second Sundays in person after 18 months all online

Reading: Bluebird by Charles Bukowski

Sermon 

We were two days back after winter break when my family had our best day of pandemic school. 
 
My son was actually all online, and my daughter was technically half in person; but both of these things translated to them being at home that day. 
 
This is the funny thing about saying kids had school online for the last year – because from the perspective of our kids –their teachers were online, their classmates were online, but they were just home. 
 
My partner and I were home too, each in our own by-then well established offices and rhythms.  So that when someone texted me to turn on the real live news, on the TV, and I did, it caught the whole family’s attention.
 
Online school lessons stopped, and we all gathered round to watch history unfold in front of us. 
 
An angry mob of pro-Trump protestors had broken into the US capitol, and we were watching it all happen on live TV. Josef kept asking the question we were all asking, mom, is this really happening right now? This is real?
 
For a lot of that day, I chose my words carefully:
Yes, it’s real. They believe they’ve been lied to, that Trump was actually re-elected. 
I don’t know why the police aren’t stopping them. 
You’re right, if they weren’t mostly white, it wouldn’t be like this.
I don’t know how it will stop, I don’t understand either. 
I don’t know what will happen next.
 
To be honest, some of the time, I spoke less carefully. 
 
Still, like I said, it was the best day of pandemic school. Because watching it all, we were all learning so much – about history, and about now; about our nation, and about ourselves. 
 
Learning is actually terrible, and awful. It’s one of the earliest realizations I had in the pandemic – learning is terrible. I mean, having learned is amazing – when you’re on the other side of it all – you feel fabulous.  But when you are really learning, not just in your head - but in your whole self where you are totally discombobulated and everything about how you do anything must be re-constituted from scratch – it is so painful! 
Especially when the learning must be done quickly, because the new world is already here demanding our adaptation. 
 
Do you remember the movie Alien – and that scene where the one guy is at one minute just enjoying regular conversation and the next he’s convulsing and struggling until finally an alien comes out of his chest? 

Yeah, that’s about what I’ve realized deep learning feels like. 
 
A little bit like birthing an alien out of your chest.  
Like – who is this person I am becoming? 
What is this world I’m now in? 
And what’s all this goo I’m covered in?
 
When we think of it this way, it helps us remember that we have all been thrown into a world we don’t understand in the last 18 months, 
and we are all learning, and learning is terrible – 

Remembering this helps us stay in the place of compassion – for ourselves, and for the people around us, including the people who attacked the capitol that day in January, or for those who are having a very different understanding of the pandemic, or the vaccine, or other COVID precautions. 
 
It helps to remember that we’re all going through something big. And we all have our own story within this bigger story.  We’ve all been forced to birth an alien.  I mean, we’ve all forced to learn, and it’s been often really hard. It’s important to practice remembering, because too often instead, we’ve practiced forgetting.  
 
Too often we perform a careful amnesia that Unitarian Universalist minister Nancy McDonald Ladd describes it as performing - for ourselves, and for each other, our well-being.  
 
I mean look at us: we have all have faced multiple moments in the last 18 months where everything we knew to be true was upended, and so many of the things we turned to for comfort and courage - like working out in a gym, or dancing in a crowd, or losing yourself in live theatre, or hanging out with your grandchildren, or gathering on a Sunday in a church - all these things became non options because they were themselves the danger.  
 
But through it all, if someone asks, we’re most likely to say - I'm fine. Although my favorite answer that started last year is when someone would say I’m fine and then pause and say, I mean, pandemic fine. There’s a glimpse of the real there.  
 
But as we’ve moved into this stage of the pandemic, this stage that is still just as confusing, where we have to learn, and adapt every single day - but now I’ve stopped hearing that phrase- the performance has returned. Like, the poem: I don’t weep, do you? 
 
I read this article recently about how there’s this huge uptick in health crises from extreme dieting in the last few months – 
because we are all so desperate to ensure that it doesn’t appear the pandemic has affected us at all. The threat of climate change, the presence of wildfires, and flooding, shrug. Nah, we haven’t aged, we haven’t lost anyone, or anything, Our kids - maybe they’ve fallen behind a little but they will catch up. 
There’s no alien to see, no bluebirds.   
We’re good.  All good.    
 
I’m not judging. I do it too. 
It’s a coping technique we’ve all learned. Like somatic teacher Resmaa Menakem talks about, it’s not that we are defective by practicing this performance, we’re protective. We’re not defective, we’re protective. We’ve learned to protect ourselves by acting ok so that we could keep going.
 
I picked the poem from Charles Bukowski for today because I know that during this pandemic we’ve all had to do this. We’ve had to find ways to survive.  And some of those ways have required us to push aside what was really happening - because we just had to keep going.
 
Like the song that came out last October, from The Bengsons, the Keep Going On Song - if you haven’t listened yet and don’t know it, maybe turn it on on your way home, or when you get home.  The refrain of the song is simple - it just goes: Keep going keep going keep going on song. Keep going keep going keep going on.
 
We have all found our ways to keep going. It’s how you are all here, now.  We have found ways to protect ourselves enough so that we could keep going.  Especially in the isolation of the pandemic, the isolation we experienced, and that we watched our kids, and our youth experience. 
 
We’ve had to compartmentalize some or a lot of what is true in order to keep going. Like in the poem, he says to the bluebird: “Stay down, do you want to mess me up? Do you want to screw up my work?” 
 
We should be proud of our survival, and give thanks to our bodies and our minds for bringing us through. 

And, we also know that this perpetual performance we’ve practiced has a cost. Over time, when keep cutting ourselves off - we lose the language and the skills and the strength to deal with what’s really real - we forget how to be honest with ourselves, let alone with others. We cut connection off with the reality in ourselves, and we cut connection off with others.  

We numb pain, as Brene Brown reminds us - which means we are also numbing joy.  

And all this practice does not mean that the things we aren’t dealing with go away - more like, they go underground, become sub-conscious. 
 
More likely than not, these things end up guiding our lives and our actions in ways that we don’t even realize.  As Richard Rohr says, “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” When we don’t heal pain, we pass it on to others. And you can’t heal pain you practice not seeing, you can’t heal pain you’re avoiding or numbing yourself from. You can’t learn the lessons, you can’t metabolize the experience - birth the alien, or set the bird free - because all your energy is going into that protection, that performance.  
 
Post pandemic, where we understand the idea of “transmission” at a whole new level - the idea that pain that is not transformed is transmitted - takes on a whole new power. 
Doesn’t it seem really clear that we are living world shaped by untransformed pain? That pain is the real superspreader? 
 
Which means that for as much as the vaccine is the way to heal the virus, the only way we’re really going to heal what’s going on in our world today - all the forces that led to those events at the capitol - and so many other things we’ve gotten through in our time - is birth the alien - learn the lessons, I mean tend to the pain.  
 
The pain in ourselves, in others. The pain from the last 18 months, the pain in our country, and the pain that has been passed on generationally – and bring it in as a regular part of our story about what it means to be human, what it means to live a human life – here in Fort Collins Colorado, in the 18th month of a global pandemic.  We need to practice remembering rather than forgetting.  We need to stop the keeping going on, the pushing through. We need to practice staying put with life as it really is - and holding, and metabolizing it.  And we need to do this together.  We can only do this together. 
 
It’s one of the main reasons we are so excited about this pod experiment, and our return to in person church.  Because it’s one of the main things we can and will do together. It’s what church is really about.  Here we help each other birth the alien.  And set the bluebird free. 
 
The bluebird is probably a better image than the alien, right? A better way to talk about what we’re doing when we are learning.  This work of deep change where we are adapting to a profoundly changing world.   
 
Because this work is so disruptive, and scary, and painful - just like a bird that comes close in always is! - but it is also beautiful. 
 
Learning like this offers us something so entirely new that it threatens our whole existence, but it is also a life unto itself.  
 
And these things are true about this world, this reality.  
All that we are holding at bay, all we have practiced holding at bay, it is so disruptive, and scary, so overwhelming - but it also contains the seeds of a new life that calls to us to pay attention, and to listen.  It calls us to release the protective performance and the forgetting, and instead remember ourselves, remember each other, stop transmitting all this untransformed pain.  

Set the bird free, and let’s heal.  

Part 1 – From Trembling to Telling

Despite the bright pastels of the season, the story of Easter begins in the dark.  

In the earliest morning hours when night has not yet given up the fight, Easter is born in confusion and uncertainty and bewilderment. For the friends and followers of Jesus, the story they thought was steady and indestructible had instead been shattered, and was lying all around them in a thousand pieces.

Jesus had been for each of them, life-changing. He was, we could say, a story breaker too. Meeting him, people would leave their jobs, their families – and follow him. He taught his students and friends to be keepers of a wild imagination, a bold and beautiful vision for a transformed world – a new “kingdom,” a Kingdom of God to use the language of his time. 

When I try to imagine what Jesus was like, I think of those people in my life who have inspired me to make a big change – maybe you have a few in your life like this – people who, in encountering them – your life sets off in a whole new track.

These are people with so much charisma – but not in a superficial sense. That wouldn’t be enough. It’s more this deep, authentic integrity that exudes from them, an authentic warmth.  There’s also something there that invites you into compassion, a depth of meaning.  They are often incredible listeners – making you feel seen, and understood, and loved.

I think, Jesus must have been all of this, and so much more.

But then, suddenly, this amazing, life-changing person was just – gone. 

Over a few days, Jesus had been tortured and killed by the oppressive state that many had hoped he’d come to end. He’d been treated not just without the dignity appropriate for who he was, but executed as if his life did not matter at all.  

And so there, in the dark that was not yet day, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome came to see their way through. These women who loved him – bravely, cautiously, tenderly – collected the pieces of their shattered story, and went to his tomb.

They brought spices and oils to anoint his breathless body. They came as soon as the sabbath broke, worrying the whole way how they would move the heavy stone that would block their way in. But when they got there, the stone was already rolled back. And there was a young man sitting there – still in the dark, with the light just beginning to grow they could barely see – who was he?

Had he moved the stone? Why?

They were scared, and confused – what was happening?

But the man told them, “Don’t be afraid. You came looking for Jesus, but he is not here” – and then he showed them the empty tomb.

Their spices heavy in their hands, none of this made sense.  “He has been raised,” the man told them. 

“Go and tell his other friends, his followers – tell everyone this story.” The women were shocked, confused, and afraid. The text says they were “trembling.”

And so they told no one.  And they said nothing. 

And that is the end of the Easter story in the Gospel of Mark.

We have three other versions of Jesus’ life, and death – three other gospels.  But only Mark ends in silence and trembling. Mark was the first gospel to be written – and even that, 70 years after Jesus died. I imagine in those early days of fear and darkness, the words were slow to form, and the desire to just move on must have been strong.

It was all so confusing – his life, his death, the empty tomb- and even if they could make it make sense, who would believe them. 

It was an impossible story, and as the days went on, even they started to wonder at the truth. Maybe best to try to forget it all, get back to regular life. Swallow all the sorrow, explain away every mystery. 

As we’ve inched closer to the end of COVID’s grip, we find ourselves at a similar threshold. Still in the shadowy disorienting dark, not yet in the light, trying to make sense of death. Death from the virus, death on trial in Minneapolis, death in supermarkets and spas. Senseless, bewildering deaths.  

Still, in the not too far off distance we can see something else beginning to rise. A new beginning, an opening to imagination – as Elaine urged last week.  

I’ve heard some happy comparisons with the end of the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918.  Because on the other side of that illness were the roaring 20s! I am definitely for a future that includes more flapper dresses and jazz clubs.

And, what I also know about the days following the Spanish Flu, is that for a long time it was known as “the Forgotten Pandemic.”  Even though it killed over 50 million people worldwide.  Even though it struck young people so swiftly, you could be healthy at breakfast, and dead by the end of the day.

It was forgotten because world leaders were afraid that if we spoke too much about its impact, or counted the cases too intently, it might bring down morale for the war effort, or cause a panic that reduced partnership for a lasting peace. 

And so in that threshold time, no stories of the illness were compiled, and no stories were told.  People just – moved on.  Think of how many knew grief, and loss – and yet without any collective telling, they didn’t have the strength, the space, they could only – go forward. Try to forget. Bring on the roaring 20s. 

Two thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, today. Humans are masterful amnesiacs, especially after trauma, and harm. We hide from the truth and all the too-much that comes with it.  Too much pain, or shame, or uncertainty.  The stone is too heavy to roll back and set it free – and so we push it all down, push through, move on – as if silence could ever bring salvation.

When really, the mysterious young man at the tomb was right. We need to tell the story.  

As theologian Serene Jones says: “With individual and collective trauma, the harm haunts you — haunts your dreams as an individual, haunts your collective unconscious as a society — until you tell the story; till you face the truth [of what has] happened.”

Humans need our stories in ways not too different than the ways we need food, or water, or love. Telling, and hearing each other in our stories does not induce fear or division, or cause more pain.  Failing to hear and tell our stories does that.

And so before we push on to the light of day, we need to pause here. Pause to listen, and tell, and hear – slowly sorting out together  the fullness, and the brokenness of our true stories. 

We need to tell our lessons learned through loss, and we need to hear how it felt to carry fear so close, for so long.

We need to tell the shifts we saw in our priorities, and purpose, and we need to hear from teachers, ER nurses, bartenders, and grocery workers about being so-called “essential.”  

We need to hear the trauma of white supremacy, which is not new – though some of our understanding is – and we need to hear our will to change.

We need to tell about zoom birthdays, and ICU Facetime calls, lapses in recovery and the apocalyptic ash that fell from the sky – and we need to hear our longing for touch, how deeply we miss the sounds of shared laughter, and the vibration of shared song. 

Resurrection requires remembering.  Resurrection requires telling.  

Let us tell, and hear; heal, and rise.  

Part 2 – From Grief to Morning

Instead of saying that Mary Magdalene, Mary, and Salome returned from the tomb and told no one, I might’ve instead said, they told no one else. Afterall, they had each other, and they had their own hearts.  In those early days, in those private rooms and inner contemplation, they told, and re-told.

All of the texts describe Mary Magdalene in tears– often with reprimand by a (male) stranger “Why are you crying?”

My colleague Robin Bartlett imagines they must’ve left out the part of the story where she responds, “Why aren’t you?”

Clearly Mary Magdalene was not prone to emotional repression.

So, she and the other women surely turned the story around in their minds, and told it to each other – again and again, all the while beginning to understand more fully what they had experienced – in a phenomenon known as the “Self-Explanation effect,” as we tell stories to ourselves and to each other – even when we aren’t gaining any new actual knowledge, we learn. 

In trying to explain the sequence of first this, then this, and now…we start to see the gaps in our story, the pieces that pain or trauma keep us from knowing, the parts we’ve held at bay because we just aren’t ready, and the ways pain often distorts our understanding, and causes us to create a more cohesive narrative than actually exists. 

It’s one of the dangers in the human desire for story – the more uncertainty and disorientation we experience, the more likely we are to find patterns where there are none.

It helps explain the attraction of QAnon and other popular conspiracies today – in this time of incredible uncertainty and disorientation, we long for a story that pulls everything together. Even if that story isn’t actually real.

This danger is why we always need to seek out other ways of seeing – there are always so many different ways to tell a story. As with all of our stories this morning – and still so many stories are under-represented here, stories of immigrants, stories of those in prison, stories of those without homes, stories that are contradictory and complicated, stories of messy human realities not at all easily told in three sentences on Sunday morning. 

We need to move from our individual stories into the collective story, asking what story has been suppressed, what others have been amplified, and refusing to flatten any of the diverse experiences in the ways of mono-culturalism or white supremacy.

One of my favorite things about Christian scripture is the way it refuses to resolve its own contradictions, and instead allows for the different versions to sit alongside each other. 

As the story was told, and re-told across individuals and held in community – we find ourselves now with four gospels, plus the accounts from Paul – even Mark was given an update after some time, adding in lines to explain how the story traveled over time. 

Serene Jones describes the move from individual storytelling into collective practice as the process of moving from a place of individually experiencing grief and loss, to a communal expression of mourning, where we can acknowledge the loss together. 

Jones says that it is in the collective experience of mourning where we can “make sacred the pain, so that the rest of [our lives can be] transformed by it. [Individual and internalized] grief locks you in an eternal present, but mourning [in the context of community] allows the possibility of a future.” 

In the 70 years between Jesus’ death and the first attempt to write the story down, something happened.  

As Peter Stenfels writes, somehow “after Jesus was executed, his followers were galvanized from a baffled and cowering group, into people whose message about a living Jesus and a coming kingdom, preached at the risk of their lives, eventually changed an empire.” 

No one knows exactly how this happened. But we can imagine that it has something to do with the way they kept telling the story. Turning it around, and around, turning grief into mourning – they came to understand that the most important truth was that Jesus was not gone – he was still with them. His compelling, transforming love still had a grip on them, and on their lives; he was still shaking loose their fragile stories and setting their lives on a new track –and what they came to understand was that this was the story they needed to live from, the story they needed to bring back to the very world that had tried to defeat Jesus. 

A story of his endurance, a story of love having the final word, a story of healing, and hope, and repentance. 

I’m guessing that wasn’t the word you thought I’d end with. Repentence! At its root, repentance – something Jesus calls for often in scripture – simply means – stopping in your tracks and turning in a different direction. It’s the shattered story that is rebuilt in surprising ways, held in community and in courageous love.

At this threshold moment, in the still unresolved dark – we too must tell the story – not just one time, but over, and over again – the story of our year, our country, our lives – stories of upheaval and harm and loss; stories of resilience and repair and rebirth -reckoning with truth in the greatest possible sense-  the pain we’ve experienced, and the pain we’ve caused, the culture of death we’ve learned to survive, and the vision of life that still compels us to stop in our tracks and turn in a whole new direction.  Turning grief to mourning, and turning us all towards the tough love that brings us into the light of the dawning day.

Reading: “There Is No Easier Way” by Elizabeth Nguyen

Sermon: Tough Love Saves Us All

When my partner and I were first together, our parents used to talk about us with their straight friends and co-workers by making sure they knew that we were “just like everyone else.”

“You know,” they’d say, “they pay their taxes.” 

This desire to point to our sameness, how we were just like them, was motivated by love, and it was an attempt to activate love. They were trying to overcome what they imagined or knew for sure their friends were thinking, trying to address whatever fears they might have, or image that came to mind when they thought about LESBIANS. If we were more the same than we were different, then we would be less scary, less “other,” more human. 

The Unitarian Universalist minister and historian Mark Morrison Reed talks about the central task of the religious community as revealing the bonds that bind each to all – the connectedness and the relationship across everyone everywhere that compels us to act on one another’s behalf.  This is the impulse behind this claim that we are basically the same. It is a way to invoke relatedness, and the duty to care, or at least the duty not to cause harm. 

Twenty years later, our parents don’t do this too much anymore. They and a bunch of others making the same argument seem to have convinced sufficient numbers of straight people that the “gay agenda” was often as boring as the straight one…I mean…we do pay our taxes.

And this works relatively fine for those of us who successfully pass or code switch our way in the straight community, those of us whose gender expression perfectly lines up with the societal expectations for the gender we were assigned at birth, those of us who are monogamous, aiming for marriage, and/or parenthood, those of us who are white, and who are citizens…you probably get my point.

When the bonds that bind each to all are grounded only in the ways that we are alike, or the idea that we must “like” each other –someone’s always going to remain outside the circle; someone is always going to be the definition of “regular human,”and someone else is always going to be…irregular.  Maybe even, sub-human, or “undermensch” as the so-called “scientific” field eugenics called it, or undermenschen as the Nazis came to apply it in their philosophy, picking up directly from the Jim Crow laws of the US. 

In her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson delves deeply into this history – if you haven’t yet found your place in our Common Conversation, check out foothillsuu.org/caste. In an accessible, compelling narrative, Wilkerson offers a framework to understand how we have found ourselves caught in a culture that ranks one another’s humanness based upon a certain sameness, a culture where some are perpetually assessed to be insufficiently human, and so therefore outside the circle of care, or love. 

Relying on sameness to determine a duty to care or the presence of love is not unusual, of course. It’s actually the norm.  Despite political or religious slogans affirming justice for all, as non-violence expert and activist Kazu Haga writes, “when we say ‘all,’ do we really mean all? Usually what we mean to say is that we are fighting for justice for all of our people, the people we like, the people on our side.  And too often, justice for our people comes at the expense of those people. When we are able to defeat those people, then our people will have justice.”

I think we all do this.  Intentionally, unintentionally, consciously or subconsciously. We’re trained through our culture, and rewarded in our politics – maybe now more than ever before – to set these limits around who we actually mean when we say “all.”  

I caught myself in this mindset earlier this week when I was working on vaccine equity. I felt that one of the groups was working against the goals that I felt were critical, and so, I wanted to shut them out. If they could be defeated, then our OUR people would win. I felt pretty righteous about my outrage for a while, and my strategy for success. Until I heard myself talking to a friend about it on the phone, and suddenly, I was like….hmm. maybe there’s another way…   

I feel some shame admitting this, especially assuming that any of those partners might be hearing or reading this, and wondering if I mean them. I want to just say – I’m being vague on purpose. Because the point is – my impulse was sincerely wrong. And it goes against a core commitment of our Universalist faith –that when we say all, we actually mean all. 

Universalism, as a religious tradition, started off as a theological claim about life after death. Our religious forebears asserted that there was no way that an all-loving God would damn any of God’s own people to eternal punishment and torment.

The idea was inconsistent with love in an ultimate sense. Universalism was a claim that whatever destiny any of us is meant for, all of us are meant for.

In the 20^th century, this after-life affirmation became instead a claim, and a commitment we make about this life.  An affirmation that as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Whatever lines we may consciously or subconsciously seek to draw between us and them, enemy and friend, good or bad, worthy or unworthy –there is no escaping or undoing how interconnected we are, how interdependent.

No matter how different or disagreeable, no one is less or more human than any other of us. 

No one.

The outcome of this theological claim is what King described as the Beloved Community.  BeLOVEd as in fueled by and held together by the promises of love. Not just any love, but agape love. Whereas other types of love are directed at particular individuals –romantic love, or the love of friends, King described agape as the sort of love that “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy …it is an overflowing love that is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative…the love of God operating in the human heart….” 

King went so far to call it “disinterested love” because it is the sort of love that doesn’t care whether it is loved back.   It is the love that will “go to any lengths to restore community.”

It’s helpful to remember that we are not always responsible for generating this love. Instead, our work is just to show up on its behalf, and further its reach.  It’s helpful to remember this when we encounter people who are distinctly difficult to love, that while we need not generate love that is unconditional and universal, it is there nonetheless.

Including for us. 

Maybe the fact that this is way harder than it sounds explains why – while we can glimpse pieces of Beloved Community, and these glimpses in their beauty compels us to keep moving forward – it is resoundingly a vision for the future. 

King was doing the life-saving work of moral imagination, the sort of work that moves us out of the limitations of what is into the infinite beauty of the possible. 

Imagine: In the Beloved Community, all people share in the wealth of the earth, and all people care for the earth. There is no hunger, or poverty, or homelessness. There’s no racism or other prejudice, and there is no war.  

Which is not the same as saying there is no conflict; King understood that conflicts are inevitable in human communities that embrace rather than shun differences.  It’s just that these conflicts are resolved through a commitment to non-violence, and grounded in a mutual respect for one another’s dignity. 

Which again, is not the same as mutual agreement, or liking each other, or even spending time together.  As Kazu Haga reminds us “… the Beloved Community is a big place, so we have can have love for people, and they can live all the way over there in Beloved Community.”

I appreciate this reminder for many reasons –first, it affirms the role of boundaries in Beloved Community (that Sean and Elaine talked about last Sunday),and, in affirming Beloved Community’s bigness, it reminds us that in the Beloved Community, there’s enough of everything for everyone. 

It’s a big tent with big resources with big love.

In the Beloved Community, no one hoards resources, and power is shared – we practice power with rather than power over; and there is no need to compete for some small slice of pie that is already stingy and insufficient – we can lift each other up, ensuring that each person, and each community has what they need. 

This is one of the most radical ideas embedded in the vision of Beloved Community, because it stands in direct contrast to 21^st century capitalism where we are taught there’s never enough, that you need to hustle to get what you need, and if you don’t have what you need, that’s on you.    

I’ve seen this too in the work for vaccine equity. 

Each organization is so accustomed to needing to compete for funding to meet the needs of their community, the idea that we could work together for a common good requires trusting that there will be enough for everyone – enough vaccines, enough funding support, enough acknowledgment of the labor and expertise and care to go around. 

Given the realities of funding, the bureaucracy of government, and the overwhelming number and loud presence of white people in Northern Colorado, I get why these communities who serve people of color and immigrants would be doubtful and suspicious, and always wondering if they should instead pull out of collaboration and instead look out for themselves. They haven’t done this, but I get why they would.

The system we have created rewards competition and isolation, and the loudest and fastest movers get the attention from those who hold power-over and without any idea or model for power-with….It’s not really any one person’s fault, I want to be clear – it is the system that we have all inherited, the system we are caught in. In this system – this slow, messy, non-hierarchical emergent collaboration seeking to creatively meet our shared needs means it’s really unclear, for example, who will sign a Memo of Understanding, or receive funds with the appropriate 501c3. And to be clear – we want that memo of understanding, and the funds to the c3s – because that is the only way to move through the system as it currently exists!

It’s just that – in the end, however, this slow, messy and hard to document type of collaboration for the common good across deep differences and divides, the work of inviting folks out to tea and dinner and beers – the work of building the relationship that endures – this is the work that it actually takes to build the Beloved Community.

It is agape love not in the generic idealistic sense, but agape love in the particular. Where you have to find ways to overcome your instinct to defeat the person who annoys you or who seems like they are actively working against you or who you just don’t get – and instead find an authentic way to widen the circle so it includes them too. 

And by you, I obviously mean, me.

The term Beloved Community was actually coined by philosopher Josiah Royce in the early twentieth century. He spoke of Beloved Community as that community worthy of our ultimate loyalty – what he called, the loyalty of loyalties. Unlike partial communities that seek to put limits around love or duty, the Beloved Community is that community that keeps drawing the circle wider and wider still. 

It is a loyalty that is based not in our sameness, but to the Love that holds us across our differences. To call this Love holy, to pledge our allegiance to it. 

Which in turn requires critical awareness of our own tribe, and our own trauma. 

Our own tribe so that we can be aware of our implicit bias, that is, the hierarchy we hold deep in our brains and our bones for who is more, or less, our people; and in turn, perhaps, more or less human. 

And then, our own trauma. We need to be aware of the struggles we carry from our own lifetimes, and those we inherit from past generations.  We need to know when we are acting out of our wounds, rather than our hope; we need to know, so that we can heal – backwards, and forwards -and together. 

Grounding our understanding of Beloved Community in Royce’s original ideas of loyalty reminds us that the heart of Beloved Community is not a belief in an idea, but a steadfast, unshakable commitment –  a tough love.

Martin Luther King Jr was very clear that Beloved Community is possible in this life, but it is only possible when a critical mass of people make this commitment, based on an understanding of what it means to be loyal to this love.    

This commitment is what drives the proposal for an 8th principle – because our principles are the covenant we make as Unitarian Universalists – our promises to ourselves, to one another, and to life itself.   The 8th principle says: we commit our loyalty to the building of the Beloved Community, and our loyalty to the love that binds us each to all, the love that meets us across all of our beautiful diversity. 

I wish I could say that making the commitment to the tough love of Beloved Community is is the hard part.  Like the vote we’ll have in May is the end, when really it’s just the beginning. 

Because the hardest part is what comes next.  When we live as if all actually means all, “there is no easier way.”  “…the work of justice often asks us to do impossible, hard, terrifying things.” 

It asks us to risk things that actually matter, especially our own comfort, our sense of order, or control. It asks us to risk our own safety, our privilege, our hearts.

But the good news is that along with the hardest part also comes the sweetest part – because in following the hardest part we also more often get to to see, and we get to know the beauty. The goodness. We get to glimpse the promise of true Beloved Community, and the freedom that is based in a love that is unconditional, transformational, and universal. 

The tough love that saves us all. 

May it be so, and amen.

I know, I usually post poems and sermons and other churchy things. But sometimes it’s fun to take a break and share about my other obsession: shows. This post was inspired by a question by a church member, who asked for suggestions of 30 minute shows on Hulu or Netflix. I’ve been meaning to do a shows suggestion post for a while…so….why not now?!

Thirty minute shows can really hit the spot. Low commitment. Fast pace. With comediies, you get a quick fix of joy and laughter. And the rare 30 minute drama often means a quick fix of brilliant editing and focus. There are tons of great 30 minute shows to watch right now, but here are 15 that I really love, all currently streaming on Netflix or Hulu.

1. Atypical (3 Seasons Netflix) Even though technically the main character is neuro-atypical young adult Sam, I love every character on this show. It’s a beautiful, funny, heart-wrenching story of familly, marriage, and growing up.

2. Atlanta (2 Seasons, FX on Hulu) Everything about this show is brilliant! The story centers on Earn, who is a little lost, but is trying to make a go as a manager for his cousin Paper Boi after he has a sudden big hit. But really, it’s a story of race and America, of what it means to be a man in America, a Black man. It’s subtle, and innovative and brilliantly funny. Seriously, watch it.

3. The Good Place (4 Seasons, Netflix) An extremely Unitarian Universalist take on the after life. The truth of this won’t become clear until a few seasons in, so you’ll have to trust me. It’s funny, smart, and surprisingly wholesome. First best season finale in my memory.

4. Schitt’s Creek (5 Seasons, Netflix) A bratty, superficial rich family loses all their money and ends up in a dead-end town living in a motel. Yes, it starts with some old tropes and some extremely unlikable characters, but this is a redemption story wrapped in a love story held together by dry humor and bananas costume design. Second best series finale I can remember.

5. Dear White People (3 Seasons, Netflix) I’ve written about this show before (in one of my post-sabbatical reflections). It’s a sharp, fun, easy to watch story of Sam, a biracial college student who hosts a radio show called, “Dear White People.” Sam’s story is at the center, but along the way it offers a compelling look into identity and race on college campuses (and across America) today.

6. Russian Doll (1 Season, Netflix) Natasha Lyonne is back! TBH I’d watch her in anything. But this just happens to be an awesome, trippy, smart show, that is also a little groundhog’s day throwback. I’m not sure I totally buy the ending, but the way there is totally worth it, I promise.

7. Pen15 (2 Seasons, Hulu) Speaking of weird shows. This Hulu gem is non stop cringe, but in the best way! Mostly because the (adult) actors – Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle – are all in for a real and hard telling of middle school life in the late 90s/early 2000s. Erskine is so fearless in her acting, I can’t look away. One of the best stories of tween/teen best friends and how so much can be survived if you just have a best friend to turn to.

8. GLOW (3 Seasons, Netflix) Did you watch women’s wrestling in the 1980s? No?? Don’t worry it’s not a requirement to enjoy this funny, smart re-telling of the strange and amazing world of women’s wrestling (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling to be exact). I have read so many reviews about how people love Betty Gilpin, but I’m here for Alison Brie who plays the determined main character Ruth. I’m only bummed that we won’t get to see where she and the ladies all end up because GLOW won’t get the last season it had planned. Stupid COVID!

9. Grace & Frankie (6 Seasons, Netflix) I was a little skeptical of this show when it first started because I so don’t buy the connection between Sol and Robert, but by the end of the second season I was hooked. I’m so glad I stuck with hit because it ended up being a singular portrayal of female friendship, older adult sexuality, and older adulthood period. Not to mention Jane Fonda is stunning and vulnerable and I Grace more than maybe any other character ever. It almost makes me forget how unbelievable I still find the chemistry between Sol and Robert….almost…

10. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (4 Seasons, Netflix) Funny and smart with also a twinge of tragic – if you like Tina Fey’s sense of humor you’ll probably love this show about a 29 year old who was rescued from a kidnapper/cult leader after 15 years believing the world had ended. Supposedly it’s a story of Kimmy’s growth and self-discovery, but ultimately it’s a story of how it’s never late for any of us to find and claim our own path of joy and meaning. All that sounds pretty serious – really it’s mostly justa fun, silly enjoyable show.

11. Gentefied (1 Season – so far – Netflix) I gobbled up this funny, real show about Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in east LA becoming gentrified, and the Mexican American residents who are trying to figure out whether and how to embrace the changes to their community. I found the whole complex portrayal of gentrification really honest, and so appreciated the representation of the Latinx community.

12. Shrill (2 Seasons – so far – Hulu) I debated about whether to leave this show on the list or not because there are some things about it that leave me a little mixed. But ultimately, Aidy Bryant’s performance as Annie Easton, as she tries to gain the confidence and self-understanding to see herself as worthy of love and respect keeps me coming back. It’s why the second season wasn’t quite as compelling for me – because it was that early journey that really hooked me. But still, I kept with it because it remained fun and Bryant is fun….we’ll see about a third season.

13. Younger (6 Seasons, 1 to go – Hulu) Don’t judge me for loving this show until you try it! The premise is unbelievable – a 40something (Liza) who can’t get a job passes herself off as 20something. And also it’s genuinely annoying how clueless they make Liza about social media, while on the other hand saying can drink with the 20somethings without gaining weight…..but other than that – this is a really fun show with charismatic acting all around. It’s a show that feels like the actors really love working together, and love making the show.

14. Better Things (4 Seasons, 1 to go – Hulu) – Sidenote, this is the third show on my list with a main character Sam! Weird. Anyway, this Sam is totally different than the others, and different than a lot of the characters on TV. She’s a single mom to three girls, and she struggles in normal, honest, complex ways. But also she’s a lifelong actress in her fifties who is insecure, headstrong, anxious, and clear. This show started off as a collaboration between the lead acress – Pamela Adlon – and her good friend Louis CK. But then CK had the awful #MeToo moment, and Adlon took the whole thing over on her own. Which feels really fitting for this feminist, determined, headstrong show that tells about women’s lives.

15. Fresh Off the Boat (6 Seasons, Hulu) – If you didn’t catch this show when it was running on ABC, you can catch up now on Hulu. Our family watched it together – making it the rare show that held all of our attention! It’s the story of the Huang family who are all clueless and dorky in ways we could relate to, and also who had the particular challenges of moving from Chinatown to Orlando and suddenly being the only Taiwanese American family around. Like all middle aged white queer women I know, I am 100% in love with Constance Wu (who plays mom Jessica) and Louis (Randall Park) is so endearing in his love for his BBQ steakhouse. We also all loved Eddie (oldest child, played by Hudson Yang) who loves hip hop and struggles the most to comply with his mother’s traditional Taiwanese expectations. The whole series is charming, smart, and entertaining. Not to mention a rare telling of Asian American immigrants on mainstream TV.

Reading: Rebecca Elson’s Antidotes to Fear of Death

There’s a lot about the Bible that perplexes me. But maybe the most perplexing story in the bible is the story of Moses.

I don’t mean the stories he’s most known for – like “let my people go,” or the burning bush, or even when he gets clear instructions written on stone tablets by the hand of God.  (wouldn’t that be nice?)

These stories are strange, of course, but they also make sense. Not to say anything about whether or not they are factual, just that they are the sort of stories that a people – the Hebrew people in this case – would want told about their most heroic leader across all of time. 

They are powerful stories, inspiring, and they underscore Moses’ righteousness. As they would want to.

This is one way to think about the bible – as a record of the way the Hebrew people came to make sense of and want told about how they lived, and how they tried to make sense of it all. 

Which is why it is so perplexing that after all Moses does to lead the people from slavery, after wandering with them in the desert for 40 years – the whole time with them swearing slavery was better, griping about how he was infringing on their rights…finally, the Hebrew people find themselves on the border of the promised land and Moses isn’t there.  Because just before that, Moses dies.   

Right, this he gave his whole life to, and he doesn’t get to go – and not only that but he doesn’t really ever know for sure if his people go either.  He dies not just before he gets there, he dies before anyone gets there. It’s unfair, and absurd –

Some people say he is being punished because he gave his whining people more water when God said not to.  But come on. If giving in to a whiny ask for water is grounds for undoing every good thing you’ve ever done, every parent everywhere would be doomed….. That can’t be it.

This sort of outrage both entertained and challenged my Bible professor in seminary, who one day made the obvious observation:

Gretchen it seems like you have a problem with this God. 

I was like….what makes you think that? 

It wasn’t actually God I had a problem with – it was more, the way the stories always made it seem like God had all the power, and humans had none….and ok, yes, God was sometimes kind of a jerk. Jerk is an understatement.

One day, after we’d re-read the early part of Exodus where it tells how the Hebrew people had been enslaved for 400 years then God saved them, and it was clear everyone thought this was good news…

I was appalled.

I burst out to one of my classmates:  First of all, where was God for 400 years? Vacation?

And second of all, why should we be waiting for God to save us?

Don’t we need stories that remind us of our agency, how we can and we must work together to save each other? 

My classmate, who by the way was an African American man getting his PhD focused on the Black Church looked at me, and paused, and took a deep breath before gently – more gently than I deserved – he offered: 

Well, when you can’t imagine anything in this world that’s gonna make things better, you better start hoping that there’s something out of this world that could. 

It was one of those moments. 

You know those moments when you want to crawl into a hole, but also you don’t because everything in you starts to crack open….In that moment, the bible and the way I’d been reading it cracked open for me, and also my privilege broke open, and also my bias….like, maybe God was not the only jerk in the room.

This story I had about human agency – that we all have it, and equally, is a story that those of us who are white, formally educated, Americans are carefully, subtly, and systematically taught. 

And in many ways, this story about human agency, has also been an implicit story of Unitarian Universalism, even if in our version we focus less on individual success than collective progress….We can and must save each other! And if we work hard enough, do the right things, si se puede! Yes we can.

I’ve thought about my classmate’s words so often since then, each time feeling like I grasp what he was saying a little more, feel it more close in.  Some of that, of course, has to do with working on race, racism, whiteness….but also it’s about getting older. Confronting changes in my body, not to mention parenting teenagers, which is a daily lesson in how little control we have.

And also, it’s the last few years.  All of it. The new levels of helplessness that I know many of us have confronted, especially when we’ve, as our last series invited, gotten and stayed honest and clear about the reality that is here, now.    

And especially for those who – like Florence Field talked about a couple Sundays ago – marched for Civil Rights and thought a new world was just around the corner…and here we are, and what changed? Like the Israelites, here we are, decades later, still wandering the desert. 

All these things and so much more have taught me the real reason Moses doesn’t live to see the outcome of his life’s work: the reason is that there is no reason. 

There’s no reason because it’s just how life is. We come to the end of our story in the middle of a larger story, a movement that was at work before we were born, and that will continue long after we are gone. 

We do what we can, in the time we have.  And then we let go. 

(Breath)

On the day last week when the sky turned dark orange, and the fires were headed for places many of us consider ground no less holy than what Moses found on that mountain top –

which was the same day I sent my kids off into the falling ash for their first day of in-person school since March – even though the infection rates in Larimer County are now are the worst they’ve ever been –

which was the same day the Senate Judiciary committee voted to confirm a conservative extremist as Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s replacement, despite most voters believing they should wait until after the election  –

that day, with all these moments circling around me –

I heard my friends words in my ears, like he was talking to me right now:

when you can’t imagine anything in this world that’s gonna make things better, you better start hoping that there’s something out of this world that could. 

….I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?

The psalmist’s question is an especially vexing one if you – like me – have a problem with God, at least in the traditional sense. 

In my rational self, my higher, I might say “the arc of history, which is long but bends towards justice.” That’ll be help.  Or, I might listen again to Scott’s beautiful opus describing the great story of the universe, and remember how fleeting this moment is, how insignificant any of this is.

But, in the end, the poet Stephen Dunn writes, “You can’t say to your child ‘Evolution loves you.” In other words: it’s a beautiful story that is factually true, but it can feel so far away, it might as well be make-believe.  It’s help that doesn’t feel like help.

It’s only when I find ways to thread together my original human-focused impulse towards agency and collective liberation, which need not be totally thrown out – with the beyond-human story of life in a greater sense;

When I look at the ash falling from the sky and remember that it is not disconnected from the dark spooky kind-of gross smoke that Scott says is between the stars, which is not disconnected from the blood pulsing through the firefighters doing the impossible right now, holding the line on all that holiness;  

When I refuse to separate myself from the universe in any way, and yet know how much more the not-me of the universe there is than there is me –

when I find ways to “eat the stars” – even on nights when the smoke is so thick they seem like they are all gone – only then do I start to sense that thing people talk about – a higher power that I can hold on to, and turn to, help that is both personal, and transcendent.

How we eat the stars by the way – to answer the question this service poses…. There are a hundred ways to try.  Look up at the night sky. Lie down like Rebecca Elson describes.  Visualize. Imagine.

Or when the stars are hidden in smoke or sun, try centering prayer, or creative writing, or dancing. 

Like all things worth doing, it takes practice, commitment, intention – and maybe different than in other practices, it also takes a sense of wonder, so that you invite in that ancient life of primordial power and possibility, that movement of love and justice that, like the stars, even when we cannot see it, pulses on…and on…..and on…like the beating of your heart.

 (Breath)

One last story.  In 1966, young activist Jim Forest was at the point of despair about the state of the Vietnam War when he reached out to the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton for advice.

Merton responded, but maybe not in exactly the way Forest expected.  He said, “Jim, do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless, and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

In these last few months of 2020 (Amen!), and these last few days of the election cycle (AMEN), and with winter coming, I know that many of us are like the activist who wrote to Thomas Merton, in our own life, or about life itself – on the verge of despair.

And so in the spirit of Merton’s response, I invite us to remember that when we commit ourselves to a movement that is worthy of our whole lives, then like Moses, we’re not going to live to see how it all turns out.  It’s not punishment, it’s just the power of the movement of life, going on. 

Whatever results come, let’s remember, they are always provisional, always about the moment. The other thing the last few years have taught us is that things that seem like victories at one point, later look like we are going backward. We must not depend on the hope of results.

All this might sound sort of futilist, but I mean exactly the opposite.  We hold within us the power of the stars, and so we must keep offering our life, momentary as it is, infinitesimal, a speck of dust….star dust – to whatever good we can find. Find the movement in this moment.   

And then trust, and let go.

I set up a new home office this week, setting up a more permanent space for this new time.  

In my re-arranging, I came across an old journal, and some old photos – all marking my life more than twenty years ago. I was never a very good journal-keeper, so the entries were sparse, but even still, there was enough there to make me take some deep breaths. 

Twenty years ago I was coming out. I was distant from my family. I was poor. I was grieving deaths, and relationships, and I was also falling in love. 

Remembering all I survived from that time, I feel proud, and strong, and also I feel sad, and tired, and angry, and brave.  Remembering survival often brings up all the feelings.  Because survival is a different thing than “overcoming” or “thriving.”  

Survival is about getting by – first, in your body; then, hopefully, in spirit.  Survival is basic, primal – we are wired for it. When we’re at the point of trying to survive, it helps to keep in our center, the mantra that we’re all doing the best we can. 

Remembering how we survive requires a generous compassion – for ourselves, for each other.  Because how we survive sometimes doesn’t look pretty.  Sometimes it looks like “the least bad choice.”  Sometimes we survive, but with a cost. A personal cost. A collective cost.  

And, sometimes our survival requires looking the other way when others aren’t as lucky.  

And sometimes that’s just what it is – luck. And sometimes it’s privilege. Sometimes it’s injustice.  

Most of the time, we don’t know how to think about it, what it is.  Can’t know, until later – when we’re doing the remembering. Because until then, survival means hunkering down, trying to get by. And this is important – for the moment we’re in right now.  

To explain I want to turn to words from Heather Cox Richardson, an historian who has been offering a nightly recap of the day’s news put in historical context – this is from her Friday night recap, she writes. 

“The news is overwhelming. It is designed to be overwhelming. This sort of chaos and confusion destabilizes society. In that confusion, as tempers run hot, people are desperate for certainty and return to old patterns…Many are willing to accept a strong leader who promises to restore order, or simply are so distracted and discouraged they stop caring what their leaders do. They simply hunker down and try to survive.”

It’s so important that we draw a line from the personal stories we’ve heard today to the protests happening across the country. These protests that are a march for literal survival, a march that’s been going on now for African Americans for generations – marching, remembering survival of all those who came before, feeling all the feelings that come with remembering.  

Feeling weary, and brave, and angry, and grief stricken – all the feelings because it’s not just remembering, it’s happening now. The struggle to survive is right now.  

And the risk in this moment is that any of us – especially those of us who are white – become so focused on our own individual survival, or the survival of our most immediate circle, (Which is understandable and probably biological in the middle of a pandemic!) 

But the risk is that we forget some of the most important lessons of resilience we’ve been exploring over these weeks, lessons that were so present through all of the stories we heard today.  

The risk is that we forget that we survive through community.  Or that we survive when we all survive.  Or that we forget that collective resilience comes – to paraphrase Sean’s message from 2 weeks ago – through collective healing for our collective body.  

The chaos and confusion of this moment, the profound uncertainty – it can lead us to hunkering down even more, focusing in on our own survival. It can lead to judgment about tactics or accepting any internet meme that simplifies the situation as truth.

But it doesn’t have to.  We can remember that the roots of our resilience live in our reaching out, connecting, asking for and receiving help from each other, learning each other’s stories, that are anything but simple – working together – (Even when we don’t feel like it, or it seems like we don’t “need help” or when it’s awkward). Because community is awkward, and survival isn’t always pretty.

And we can remember the roots of resilience that live in our willingness to open to even greater waves of compassion, seeing our survival as fundamentally linked to OUR survival.  

From this foundation, we can engage this moment of great uncertainty not (only) with trepidation, but also with creativity and faith – a sense that with courageous love, this time of uncertainty and upheaval can also be a time where together we imagine and create a world where we all can survive – and thrive. 

There’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot in the past few months: we are living in an unprecedented time.  

And in a lot ways – it’s true.  No one in our congregation was alive in 1918 for the Spanish Flu…so none of us have experienced a pandemic like this. Something requiring massive and prolonged isolation. Let alone a pandemic in a time where truth is so hard to pin down, and there isn’t a sense of trust in public leaders, or in each other…and yet with this equally unprecedented capacity to remain connected through technology – all across the globe – so we can really see just how unprecedented this is – for all of us. 

And, at the same time, over the past few weeks, I have started to remember a history that is not the story of my own life, but of our collective lives. And it is a remembering. In my bones, and in my breath, I’ve started to remember that this is not all entirely new. We have been here before. 

We have lived and struggled through what Margaret Wheatley has described as “enormous upheaval, dislocation, famines, and fears. We’ve had to counteract aggression, protect our loved ones, and face the end of life as we’ve known it.”  We have lived and survived so many times where life itself felt at risk. 

Which means that in our collective memory there resides – maybe not that tangible clarity so many of us crave – but still the wisdom and the strength, that is the resilience we need to meet this moment, to survive and to thrive. 

Like many of you, I grew up Catholic. So the idea of connecting with spiritual ancestors and their help is not new. Growing up we called them “saints.”  

But still, as an adult – while the lives and lessons of the women and queer folx, and the courageous actions of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors – while all of these have been inspiring, and bolstering – for a long time, these stories have felt distinctly past tense.  Disconnected in any real way from me and us, in the present, here and now.

But then the last few years…well, you know the past few years. So much change, and grief – nationally, globally, and, for many of us, personally. 

Pema Chodron talks about the Tibetan word “ye tang che.”  Ye, as in: “totally, completely.” And the rest: “Exhausted.”  She says:  “Ye tang che describes an experience of hopelessness. And this is important – as it’s the beginning of the beginning.  Without giving up hope, we never relax enough with where we are or who we are…” in order to make the space to become something else. 

 In the past few years I’ve become pretty familiar with ye tang che. In the past few weeks, I’ve been there – a lot.  And what I’ve learned about this place, is how freeing it can be, how things that previously were blocked by my rational, skeptical brain, arrive as gifts.

And one of those gifts is a new relationship with our ancestors. In the past few years I’ve discovered that the people of the past need not remain past tense, but can be present here – connected in the now.  It’s like – when all that is tangible and seen fails to make sense, then you start to turn to what is unseen.  When things fall apart, we can more readily lean in to mystery, its power and its possibility.

So I was fully in a place of ye tang che the fall of 2018 when I went on retreat to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.  (Some of you have heard me tell this story, but let’s hear it again – it’s so good for right now.)

I had brought with me my grandmother’s rosary and the golden cross that had sat on her bedside before she died, and when the time came, I placed them on our shared altar. As we settled into a meditation meant for connecting with our ancestors, I imagined meeting her there.

She’d been a nurse for returning soldiers from World War 2, which is where she met my grandfather. She gave birth to seven children, was the mother to seven children – and her husband struggled with mental illness. And still she was a powerful leader in her church and her community – she started her town’s food bank. 

I figured she knew some things about survival, perseverance and resilience.  So as I settled in for the meditation, I listened for her response: Grandma, how do I keep going?

But then as I settled into the silence, instead of my grandma, another voice and presence came to me – the Rev. Anna Jane Norris – circuit-riding minister of the 1880s who preached up and down the wilderness of northern Colorado trying to start a liberal church.

It hit me as her name came to me, how much resistance she must have faced, how much derision, how familiar she must’ve been with ye tang che – and yet somehow she kept going until a church took hold in 1898, what became Unity Church – Unitarian of Fort Collins, which changed its name to the Foothills Unitarian Church in 1968.

And so instead of asking my grandma, I asked Anna Jane: How do I keep going?  

And here’s what she said to me – I wrote it down right after so I wouldn’t forget – she said:

 Everything you are thinking about,

All the things you’re stuck on –  all these questions that are swirling –

none of this is God.

God is bigger than you know. Bigger than what you can dream, or imagine.

I could’ve never imagined you – she said.

I could’ve never imagined this church that you serve today.

It was impossible. And still, somehow I was sure of it,

even when there was nothing.

There are dreams at work beyond your own.

So, keep going. Just keep going.

You don’t have to do everything.

Someone will come next.

What you leave unfinished will be their calling.

Just keep going.

I’ve returned to this encouragement, and her words, and the felt sense of her presence – so many times since then – I’ve felt her resilience like it’s my own. 

Over the coming weeks, as we continue to make our way through this unprecedented time my invitation is for us to all lean in to the precedence that we hold within us, as we allow these histories to come alive in us.  Because together we can remember a resilience rooted not in our individual lives but in our collective life, in life itself. We can remember we are not alone in this moment – we are a part of a powerful history unseen by our eyes, but still available in our bones and our blood.  In our DNA. 

In these days, we can allow every weary moment, every moment where we feel totally exhausted to be a place where we can open ourselves even more to the power of this mystery – God that is so much bigger than our worries, or even our dreams.  The life that is far beyond what we can see. 

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

Sermon: Hush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, you might find numbness.  Floppiness. Weariness. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DANGER, DANGER!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re not defective, just protective.  

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

Not defective.  Protective. 

Remembering this opens up compassion, starting with ourselves. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, it’s just the opposite. 

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

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

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

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

This is important, let me say it again.  

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

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

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

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

One more story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon: Inefficiently Yours 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, why doesn’t Amazon just use machines?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check, check, check, check, check.  

~~~~~

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

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

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

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

Without much effort – just click!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which makes acquiring those basics a colossal feat. 

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

~~~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice resurrection.

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

Reading: The House Called Tomorrow by Alberto Rios 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford says it this way, 

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

This is different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a noble, courageous commitment.  

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

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

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

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

How would it shift your pace? 

The resources you’d need? 

The spiritual practices? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The bad do not win—not finally….”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the story of Hanukkah. 

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

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

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

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

Just this.  And it is enough. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The choice that made the 8 nights of light possible. 

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

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

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

Something beyond their own effort, their own vision.

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

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

Because by their expectations, they made the miracle possible. 

This is the power of expectations.

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

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

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

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

Not just their grades.  Their IQ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me offer an example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He kept walking. Water hit his waist.

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

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

His expectation of the miracle made the miracle possible. 

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

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

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

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

They expected a miracle – and made the miracle possible. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the only ways they could be, is 

if we act as if they are

If we take the step forward to light that first candle 

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

Reading: Ross Gay’s Loitering

Sermon: Lose Your To-Do List

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

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

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

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

And also, of course, a treat. 

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

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

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

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

Every year, these same questions.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I’d bet she’s not alone.  

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t panic. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start here, and then return here.  

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

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

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

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

Start with the thirst
the deep well you have been forgetting,
ancient and ready to be soaked
without shame
the well your grandmothers dug for you
the reservoir carved and cared for
by the people your ancestors
betrayed
your thirst is their faithfulness
undeterred from believing
there are no strangers here
in the same thirst
we are made and unmade
born and born again

Thirst is the thing
that remembers
who you are
before the land, the hard rock, your
body stiff and unyielding –
hungry for canyons, mountains,
oxbow lakes, whole oceans of whales
and sea lions, and even
the bitter stories of slave ships and refugees
refused at the shore –

The thirst can hold it all,
untellable tales of
water coming before the ground is ready
water rising without recourse
stories also of creation and construction
the pot boiling for tea, and dinner,
warm washcloths, and
the first starts of a seedling in the spring
the thirst tastes the air,
knows the sky, and the
rain before it comes, and
sets in motion
the leap off the ledge
of the dock
freedom bound
into the startling cold, and the way the
breath leaves, and returns
like the sense that you are small
and also not unlike
late summer monsoons
always on the verge of
danger, and undoing it all

The thirst says
we are soft in these bodies
part river, flowing with the browns, the cuttbows, the
immigrant geese, sometimes too much, and
risk ready, part creek trickling
for miles underground,
the thirst knows there is a way
to turn every breaking thing
into beauty, to flush the wound clean
and begin the healing
again, thirst is what is possible
when we tend to the wanting
of all the world, the generations, the stars
starting with
your one, dry mouth
and the reaching for the glass,
the pouring, and the filling
the lifting to your tongue, and the
drinking in until you are
drenched in
life

I know it sounds naive, but I swear at the start, I thought it was a one-time thing.

Granted, they were everywhere, so I knew it wasn’t going to be simple, or short term.

But, still, I thought if I was thorough, attentive.  If I got to the roots.  If I spent enough time – in what I came to think of as both my penance, and pleasure – sweating in the often blistering sun – if I was sufficiently dutiful – I would eventually be able to move forward. All the weeds would be eradicated, and my garden would become safe, and regulated – without having to return again, and again, and again.

Before I knew to call it “bindweed,” I saw its ropes wrapped around every little thing in my garden just trying to break free, and survive.  There were others, too – what I later learned to call crabgrass, goatsbeard, thistle (mostly Canadian variety), spotted surge, and the wayward starts born of nearby trees, confused about worthy ground.

All of them, a flourishing, interdependent ecosystem of garden colonizers – and we know, no colonizer gives up their territory too easily.

Still, it was beautiful.  All of this unruly growth, when you stood back – my garden was robust, alive, with the weeds indistinguishable from intentional plants.   Wild, unruly, beautiful.

It had been like that for such a long time, I confess it had started to feel like destiny. Like that was the plan all along. Two full seasons since we moved in, probably many before that. And for each of these seasons, the wild beauty was enough. 

I’d even say that sometimes, when I looked out at the great green wall of everything mixed up and running free – it was exquisite.

Wild, exquisite, free.  And perfectly low-effort – exactly aligned with what I had time to wish for.

As sabbatical began, I decided I should take a good walk through the garden. Get a closer-up sense of what was actually going on, start to imagine something else, a bigger wish.

It was the first week of May, before anything was in bloom, but already swelling with spring rain, and newly bright sun – the garden was already loud, or really, mostly, the weeds were loud, and pronounced.  And the trees, too, pronounced with huge bundles of dead branches weighing down new growth.  And in every corner, fallen leaves and peach pits decomposing, and weeds on top of leaves, and rocks in all the wrong places.

So I set out, on a mission.  To bring order, clarity, new life.  Beginning with understanding what that life would even mean – to learn about each plant on its own terms, with its own impulse towards life, and to see – what is this intending to be, to do? which parts here are plant that we want to save, and which is the invader?

I took many walks through local gardens with handy labels – CSU, Spring Creek – and I googled often.

Once I had a sense, I moved on to the work of liberation – unwind the bindweed, extract the thistles, remove the leaves, move in new rocks, settle everything in, bless it with water, and then, step away to see what would happen.

Although it’s true, there’s a lot of labor at a number of points along the way, equally, gardening is an act of just paying attention – with occasional pep talks, laments, and praise.  This is how I ended up with poems like the one that begins, “I found myself apologizing to the peaches again today….” 

I bought two pairs of sturdy gloves early in the summer and I used them regularly, and there’s even a couple of well-earned holes in the fingers), but still I mostly preferred to meet the weeds with my bare hands.  (Except the thistles.  I mean, ouch.)

Which means, I am returning from sabbatical with calloused hands. Calloused, and still dirty-looking, despite many regular and thorough washings.

Sometimes, at the end of the day I would look at my hands and imagine my paternal grandfather, Gus – the smell of his tomato plants, the rhubarb he’d complain was out of control, and the way he pulled the carrots out of the ground and I thought it was a miracle.

Or, my father’s hands after a day in the raspberry bush, or the potatoes, or the annual planters on our deck.  The way I learned, not with words exactly, just in the living – how the garden can turn a bad day, or bad week, or bad year of work, or a fight at home, or a checkbook that won’t balance or reveal the money for all the bills that need to be paid – all of these, after a few hours of watering, weeding, re-arranging, witnesssing – can be transformed into joy, and release, and even, purpose.

I know it’s probably too obvious, but it’s still true to say that weeds are a lesson in power.  The power to choose what has the right to keep on, to flourish, the power to understand what was worth saving.  Or, the power to remain careless and haphazard, to pull up something someone had sometime earlier planted with some great intention.

Even just today I pulled on a particularly interesting weed only to realize from the black well-balanced dirt that came bursting out – it was something I’d planted early in the summer, and had forgotten.

We are always all making this choice – what is worth saving, what matters, what belongs, what we want to feed, what we will leave behind.  Some of us have a greater chance to decide, a wider span of control, autonomy, privilege.  And still, all of our lives are attempts at this power – in the garden, our homes, our cities, our lives.

For example, for a long time, in the early summer, I decided to let the goatsbeard thrive as part of the garden.  The yellow flowers were so tall, proud – it gave some height to an otherwise ground-cover-heavy yard.  They asserted their place so particularly, not appearing at all like invaders.  And still, when I looked at them, I knew, their time would come – and little by little, they came to look more and more like dandelions, and so I reached down at their base, and dug my fingers into the dirt around them, and pulled them each up, one after another.  Like a massacre, or a liberation.

I’m sure not everyone experiences their garden as if a battle – but I could not help, over the season, to begin to know myself as the defender of the plants that were intended to flourish – battling all those that were constantly attempting to squelch this flourishing.

Not just weeds, but hail – late, and devastating.

And squirrels, especially in the late season as the peaches swelled.

Bugs came earlier – i.e. the hungry caterpillars trying to turn into the butterflies who will later pollinate flowers in all the right ways are first a threat to the leaves of those same flowers.

My well-intentioned but still careless dog is both a danger and defender, though probably, in balance, an extremely-well-disguised enemy.  And still, his company makes it worth his betrayals: the ways he displaces the rocks on top of the fragile new plant while chasing down a squirrel, or decides the just-cleared out area with a new tall-reaching flower is just the place for an afternoon nap.  Mostly, his company, especially attentive when I’m digging, or sitting and staring at it all at the end of the day overrides all of this.  Net positive, I swear.

More questionable are my thoughtless and only-occasionally-well-intentioned children -who travel up and down and around my garden without thinking twice. They forgot to notice there’s been a change since the weeds covered it all, forgot to adapt their behavior to find the newly installed steps around either side.  I shout at them, plead to be careful of the flowers and they look down and shout out, sheepishly, sorry mom, and then by the next day, forget again.

All this – not to mention the news coming from the border, the President, and the dual massacres in Ohio and El Paso – all had me thinking all summer about danger, and what we do to protect the things we love.  This is what happens with such a huge expanse of time, and the chance to listen to all the news, and the brain space to worry about your children and all they may be getting themselves into, and to think back on all that life has brought, and all that has been lost along the way.  You can’t help but contend with the fact that danger is everywhere, and grief.  No matter how dutiful we may be, how thorough, hard-working well-intentioned, how diligent – there is so much at risk, all the time, everywhere.  Not everything can be saved, and barely anything – especially people – can be protected from danger.

To decide to care about something means to decide you’re going to have your heart broken, sooner or later.

I kept thinking – it would be so much easier if I just let the weeds keep on with their takeover. If I cared less, paid less attention.

But then, I would look over at the trees, freed from all their dead branches that had been for so long holding them back, now flourishing – and the path I’d made after all the weeds were cleared that we could walk up to survey it all, and sit under the shade, while the neighbors’ chickens make their daily plea for food or attention –  and the phlox offers itself in bright pink, and purple, and white – I didn’t even know those flowers existed before all this began, and yet their potential was there the whole time. The whole time, there was always so much here than I even knew to hope for.

Only this that can keep us from letting the danger take hold – this seeing something beyond what we thought was possible, this stunning surprise of life, this faith in what remains not yet.  Only the clearing everything out, the caring for something before you even know what it is, that risk to care, to tend, to feel a part – only this decision to love keeps us going.

I kept on with my plan for much of the first few weeks.  Working slowly, dilligently, whole days would pass and I’d hardly made it through a small plot of land.  And with each hour, the filling of buckets and buckets of weeds, alternated with re-distributed rocks.  And then, throughout the day, I would empty the weeds into the yard waste bins, that over the week would fill, until each Wednesday they would again be full, or over-full, to place on the street – and another week would begin, with hope, and intention.

Weeds, and rocks – these were the truest story of my sabbatical.

It continued like this until early June when I took a trip with my family to the northwest, which meant I left it all behind for nearly three weeks.  There was water on it, that wasn’t a worry, I decided it could survive a couple of weeks in early summer, and then I would get back on mission.

The good news was that, it all survived – water does make sure of that.  The bad news, or really, just the lesson, was that the water also fed the weeds, and even more so.  In fact, the weeds, while I was away, decided it was their time to party / take over.  A full resurgence, over every little area that I had considered conquered.

I had no right to believe that one pass would tame all that had been running free for years – but I did believe it, and seeing everything I had so carefully cleared all grown over again, I was devastated.  I wondered if I had been wasting my time, or if I would ever move beyond this 20 square foot plot into the rest of the yard- or if I would keep at this one section over, and over, and over.

Every thought I had about danger being everywhere intensified – and instead of just thinking about danger, I started to wonder about nihilism.  But then, there was still about 8 weeks left in sabbatical – I had all this time to just, go back, try again.  So I did.

Pulling, and moving, and assessing, and blessing.  This time it all went much faster, as I realized I knew some things about how the plants should fall, and because I’d been there recently, the soil was quicker to give way when I came for the weeds.  Before long, I was moving along to the next section, and the next, and the next.

Along the way, I kept circling back to the prior places, watering the new plants I’d added, reshuffling displaced rocks, finding the bindweed that was so insidious, persistent – sometimes even having the nerve to flower – conceding the impossibility of really ever getting it all.

One particularly problematic section I’d done over three or four times, I finally decided to clear out all the rocks and dig it all up, spread out weed-preventer, and then put down a weed barrer, and then the rocks again, along with a few new plants.  We have to vary our strategies, I reminded myself. Keep trying new ways to tend to all this life and these dreams for more.

It’s a set up, you know that, right?

This was the response the minister who led my life review retreat in July asked me when I told her about my work in the garden, and my hope to get it stable – finished – before I would feel ready to go back to work.

It’s a set up, what you’re doing to yourself. 

And then we took a walk to the garden right below the window we had been sitting beside.

She and her husband had been gone from home for the first 6 weeks of summer.  They returned to find their garden looking like this on all sides.  Wildflowers aka weeds had fully interspersed with every flower they’d previously intentionally planted.

Sometimes life looks like this, she said.  And sometimes it looks like something more orderly.  The work is not to make it all look orderly, and it’s not to give it all up either.  The work is to discover in all of it, where the beauty is at any given moment, the joy, and what will be, good enough.

Good enough is not a concept I’ve let myself entertain much – like ever – and even though I wrote it down when she said it,  and even agreed to give such an idea a try – I’ve had to turn it around and around since then to begin to understand what she was getting at.

Which is – I think – about coming to terms with our place in life, which is not nothing, and also, not everything. To accept that there are seasons in life, as in the garden, and rhythms.  I think good enough means coming to make friends with time – rather than, as I have always done – thinking of time as a problem to be solved.

Good enough means coming to terms with what we can do in day, an hour – or a lifetime.  Calling that offering a blessing – whether it turns out to be a garden abundant with weeds and wildflowers (as mine was as well – and it was, in its own way exquisite), or one governed with intention that yields peaches, phlox, hydrangeas, wisteria, sage, daisies, columbines, lilacs and so many others – and fends off any creeping invaders with diligence and fidelity.

Good enough is not to surrender to the danger that threatens all that we love, or pretending it does not exist, but only to know that our best defense must include knowing our own limits, and even our helplessness in a bigger sense – to continue to do our part, regardless, and to give the rest to those who will come next, to the earth, to God.

Good enough feels like a discipline to me, a scary one, sometimes, and a liberating gift most of the time. And, it is a practice I am trying out each day far beyond my garden, far past sabbatical – as my attempt to feel less compelled to hold it all, to refuse to concede to the danger, or to stop noticing them – or the grief – but to stay connected to the beauty, and all that keeps growing, and thriving in my garden – and in this life – far beyond what I ever could have imagined.

What does it mean to meet again?

After months, or years, or decades, to encounter another that we have not seen, or kept fully in touch with, especially one we once knew well, one we were close to, who knew us, who still carry in them, our secrets and our stories, our once-articulated dreams – memory offers us an almost-automatic familiarity, a nostalgic trust.  We feel at once close, and connected, like time travelers sent back, as if nothing could overcome the strength of love (or whatever it was) caught in history.

But then, time descends, stubborn, we notice changed skin, hair, the crack in the voice that was not there before, a new love hovering nearby, a certain bitterness or grief glimpsed in otherwise casual conversation – and suddenly we realize that we do not really know each other any more, that we are strangers, that we need to start at the beginning, learning each other’s names, dreams, preferred beverage, the ways we spend our days, the questions we wake wondering, the fears that we push away.

Or at least we do, if we want the reunion to be real, for the connection to be real, to be alive.

I am just past mid-way through my 44th year – which, if I’m lucky, could be something approximating the midpoint of my life.  I have lived long enough to have accumulated many stories – losses, and disappointments, betryals and terrors, and also joys, and breathtaking beauty, and even things I would call miracles.  I have left behind so many things I once loved, or struggled with, and people – some I have left, some have left me –  sometimes with relief, sometimes with regret, most often both of these, indistinguishable.  And also, places I have moved from, homes and communities and whole worlds I no longer inhabit – and within myself – whole worlds I have forgotten to remember in the process of building a life.  Picking up, settting down, sorting out, begining again, marching on.

It started in the garden, in early May, moving from tree to tree, tracing the branches that needed to fall, discovering buried perennials I never knew were there, finding order and light. There, I remembered myself before seminary, before children, in our little house on Santa Fe, where the neighbors blasted polka every Saturday, finding long-neglected and grown over-irises that would end up making big shows a few months later – and planting Pye-weed that I thought I’d killed before it turned up a few feet away strong as ever, and writing about it all in what would become a reflection I’d read in church one Sunday. The Sunday where the nice church ladies asked me after how far along I was in seminary – even though seminary wasn’t even in my view of the possible, but then, I started to wonder, and dream.

I met this part of myself again – in the sun, and the dirt, before the kids were even yet out done with school – with curiosity and an abundance of time, and a capacity to keep showing up each day to learn what this person I am today knows still about the one I was then, how or if we connect, what wisdom we each have to offer the other.  Reunions are never just a matter of meeting another again, but always include an encounter with ourselves from another time, to see ourselves then as whole, without giving in to the temptation of regret, or sentimentality.

To make it past giddy nostalgia, to the real meeting again, reunions must release all assumptions of what growth should look like, or what life should mean, could mean, and withhold all judgments of how time has served, or failed us.  We must open ourselves only to the real stories of who we have become, how we have changed, what we have lost, and gained, the choices we have made, and why.  It takes work to make this much space for the familiar to become also, at once, entirely new.

I remembered myself without children, without sermons to write, without theology. I remembered what it felt like to have dreams disconnected from community, and whole days, and weeks, and months that would pass without ever once finding my voice.  I remembered time, and choice, and solitude that is only sometimes loneliness.

about 1/3rd of my rock-wall garden in mid-may, after 5 full days of moving rocks and pulling weeds

This early experience in my sabbatical gave me some good groundwork for a trip in early June, when my family and I drove all the way west, stopping for a few days with my sister in Portland, and then eventually heading north to Olympia, Washington, where my sisters, neices, and parents live, and for what would become home base for an actual reunion at my undergraduate university in Tacoma.

Officially, it was for Reunion Weekend at the University of Puget Sound.  But what drew theatre majors to the campus that weekend in June was not actually some generic idea of reunion.  It was instead, the retirement of a beloved teacher and mentor, a teacher who started my sophomore year.  Which meant that we didn’t just have a students who graduated from a single year, but classmates spanning from the mid-nineties to current students – which makes more sense I think for how we should always do class reunions, because you never really just make relationships with the students graduating in the same year.

I haven’t ever been to a class reunion – college, or high school – and I was anxious/skeptical/dreading headed into the first night.  But….it didn’t take long for all of that to drop away.  Walking in, I saw the faces of so many beloveds – some of them looking as if no time had gone by at all – and felt immediately, wholly, at home.

It helped that we were in our theatre, the space where we fell in love – or tried not to, built sets, quick-changed, found and lost and found props, learned to focus lights, watched each other grow up – or tried not to.  Meeting a beloved place again is less complicated than meeting a person, though barely.  Sometimes in church we say that the walls hold the stories of all those who have ever come in to this community, and that immediately, when you enter, the stories begin to find their way to you.  Walking into the theatre, I thought the same thing – all the stories held in these walls, all the late night tech runs and the Sunday matinee duds, all the anxious auditions, and the mystery of when everything, suddenly works, and comes alive.

On the way in, my dear friend and I stopped in at the green room, and I flashed on a thousand formative moments that happened right there, and really, a few in particular.  Love notes passed.  Questions – big and life-changing, or petty and coy – all shared between two, or ten, or twenty joined in intimacy and the deadline of a show going up, at least until strike comes 8 weeks later.

We didn’t have cell phones, or social media, everything happened in the time it took to trek across campus to retrieve a note someone left for you. Which could mean hours, or even days, before you knew that your whole life had shifted. Life that could’ve gone one way, but instead went another.

When he looked at me from inside the green room, I flashed his face 22 years ago, scared and strident and sad and filled with so much longing.

Some moments in life feel like they are so big, there’s no way that anything after could live up to them – that was what a lot of our time in the theatre department felt like.  To return, to see us all at mid-life with children, and wrinkles and gray hair, and regular-life jobs with regular hours – some part of me had an instinct to call it a let down.  But instead, I leaned into the sense of this huge relief, and amazement.  To see that we went on, and survived. That we had the audacity to believe we deserved life’s most regular, and daily joy.  It turns out, the stories we thought we were in when we were 19, and 20, and 21 were not, for the most part, the stories we were meant for.  Which does not undo the righteousness of our dreams, the glory of who we were, then.  It was – and we were – glorious together.  And also, there is such a sweetness to knowing how wrong we were, and what other thing was brewing that was the life we would come to call our own.

After UPS, things got even more reuniony, as I traveled with my daughter and my mother to my hometown – Port Angeles, Washington, on the way to a few days in Victoria, British Columbia.  Because my parents moved from my hometown my freshman year in college, I haven’t been back too often as a grown up, especially with my mom, and maybe never with my daughter, who is now old enough to understand what it means to go see her mom’s hometown.

Having Gracie with me allowed me to return to my hometown with a little more strangeness, and generosity- a little more openness to its beauty, which is, I realized, incredible.  I showed her the house I grew up in, a house my dad designed, as well as the field my sisters and I played in, and the route we took from our school to our grandparents’ house.   Here is the place where I tried to teach my sister to ride a bike.  Here’s where we rented our very first video.  Here are the county fair grounds where we learned about roller coasters and rodeos. Here is the swimming pool I swam in morning and night for most of my life, and here is the cemetery where my grandparents are buried.  

We also had the chance to spend some time with my uncle and aunt, whose house I spent many hours in growing up as their daughter was my same age, and a good friend.  My uncle showed Gracie Victoria and the ferry through his telescope, and I sat in his living room remembering the hours of dos-based games I’d played there.

Before our trip I had downplayed our visit to BC, where I had grown up going often given its proximity just 17 miles across the water.  But then, going there with Gracie, with the new passport requirement, and the sometimes-strange vocabulary and the gorgeous harbor with the houseboats and water taxis – I was amazed again, and grateful in new ways.  To know this place so well, and also to realize how much I did not know it, to learn it all over again as the person I am now, and to see how we had each changed, and also how we had not, to make space for meeting again, to be fully in this time, here, now.

Most of all, it left me feeling really grateful.

I carried all of these memories from my trip home with me as I traveled to the north shore of Lake Superior in mid-July for a life review retreat with the Rev. Karen Gustafson.  Another reunion – this time by way of telling the story of my life, and to be heard telling it.  To see what is familiar there, and then to encounter it anew.  To find ways to tell the story differently, to notice patterns, to imagine what is differently possible from this encounter-  both in how we understand what has been, and how we can build our lives into the future.

In telling the story of my life, I met again the major (and some minor) characters and tried to see them not only from the perspective of the person I was when I knew them – which was, sometimes a child, or a young adult – but as the person I am now.  Sometimes this meant that I forgave them more fully, sometimes I saw that they needed to be held more accountable, sometimes I came to see that I still could not save them – and that had to be, and was, ok.

Real reunion allows for this sort of shifting to take place, this re-telling of the story, this unlodging of too-long-stuck feelings, this freedom into creation rather than destruction, an opening into possibility.  As Karen reminded me, life is not arrival, it is constant becoming.  And I would add – it’s not just becoming, it’s also constant ending, and also the constant attempts at reconciling these, making sense and pulling the pieces together – which is really still, becoming, and ending –  and then reconciling.

We always talk about reunion as a matter of meeting those we knew a long, long time ago.  But in this way, reunions are not just encounters after long spans of time apart, but are also the chance we are given each day, to meet ourselves again, to meet each other, to meet this life again – and to hold in these encounters both the trust we grant the familiar, as well as the space to discover the entirely new.

Imagining life as reunion has helped me to imagine the ways that my life is both ancient, and newborn.  That I carry with me a deep well of history – choices that I have made, people I have loved, places that have formed me – and all of these connected with other histories, other choices, beloveds, places.  This history is steady, and strong, and trust-building.  Which means it is good, and fine, and possible to believe that I know some things now, that I have traveled to this place with some intention.

And equally, that these companions of history, people, geography – all of these are living companions that can and will keep changing in the daily meeting again.  Just like the stories we thought we were in as undergraduates – everything we know now may turn out to be wrong, and something else entirely may be at work.  That there is an alternative world just waiting for us to discover it, to create it, to become it – together.

In so many ways, reunion has been the story of my sabbatical.  And, as sabbatical ends, the theme continues as I prepare for the reunion with the church, with the people of the church, with my colleagues, and with ministry.  It is a gift to remember that in this meeting again, we can both lean into the easy trust of familiarity and history, as well as make space for what has shifted – for growth, and change, and new life.  Not just in these first few weeks, but as a daily practice, and a gift we can give to ourselves, and to each other, and to the worlds that are just waiting for our willingness to become.

I trace my love affair with TV to Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.

Moonlighting ran from when I was 10 to 14, a time when I had a super small TV in my room.  Before I even knew it was a thing, Moonlighting taught me to go all in on the will-they-or-won’t-they.  I can still remember – without any googling….

You can see how this might get lodged in a 13 year old’s brain.

I also remember the nights I’d decide to watch it – no DVR or catching-up-when-it-hits-netflix back then – without having finished my homework.  And the staying up way too late afterwards to slog through Grapes of Wrath or Spanish III vocab.

It’s a pattern I really never unlearned, despite today’s on-demand-culture. I’m still willing to sacrifice sleep and good sense for a good ‘shipping.  (I mean, I can basically attribute my whole marriage to another will-they-or-won’t-they story…but I suppose that’s another post entirely…..)

Which is to say, even when I’m not on sabbatical, I love shows.* But it’s only on sabbatical that I get to follow that love without guilt, and without (too much) lost sleep. 

My best guess is I watched about 22 shows in the last 14 weeks, some of them spanning multiple seasons.  I have a pretty-close cataloguing at the end of this post, but before that I want to highlight just 5 (ok, 6)- which I picked not only because they are shows I’d recommend to most anyone, but also because I think they do a good job of telling the story of my sabbatical.

1. Better Call Saul – Carri was late to the Breaking Bad party – despite my urging, she kept getting stuck on how dark it all is, and how Walter is just such a selfish whiner. And, I mean, she’s not wrong.  But this last year she went all-in, and immediately dove into this pre-quel spinoff.  On the other hand, I’d resisted going any further into the dark world, and we role-reversed, and she was the one now constantly confused as to why I wouldn’t just give in and enjoy all this brilliance.  Sabbatical gave me the head space to finally imagine doing that, and I quickly realized what she’d been telling me: Saul is even better than Breaking Bad.  Dark in more tolerable ways, but still with characters just as problematic, yet even more lovable – making choices that have you cringing in advance for what will inevitably – maybe 3 or 5 episodes or even whole seasons later – lead to their ruin.  And still the acting, writing, and filming is just stunning.  Also, if you are like Carri and just cannot with Breaking Bad, I don’t think it matters.  I think it works on its own, and it’s just a bonus if you happen to already know the later-tragedies of these characters.

2. Pose – The whole of the first Season I was pinching myself that this show – about trans and gay folx of color in NYC in the late 80s and early 90s – exists on TV.  I loved (and cried through) every single episode – it even made me love Ryan Murphy again.  Which is why I was both obsessing over / dreading Season 2 – I figured there was no way to keep up all that brilliance.  But then, at least as far as I’ve watched, I was happily, fully, proven wrong.  The characters and stories remain fierce, and queer, and complicated, and beautiful.  The actors blow my mind.  Billy Porter.  MJ Rodriguez.  Indya Moore.  I thought a lot during sabbatical about queer identity, and how queerness is (or is not) compatible with church life, and ministry.  I wrote some on queer relationships, and queer love (which hasn’t yet been ready for sharing), and what especially gets me about this show is how well it manages to get at the fragility and the fidelity of the queer community.  The family that is created by choice by those who know everyday of their lives – as Audre Lorde said – we were never meant to survive.  

3. Fleabag – About half-way through my sabbatical I got to spend some time with my friend Kelly Dignan, who was just a few weeks from concluding her ministry at the UU Church of Boulder.  Kelly and I get along for so many reasons, but one of those is our mutual drive and ambition, and our relentless work ethic.  Which is why it was especially fun to spend some time with her in the middle of my time-away, and a couple weeks from her quitting her job to leap into a great unknown.  We took a hike in the foothills of Boulder, marveled at the wildflowers, and each expressed a lot of gratitude for where we have been, and for the chance to re-group, and to make choices for our lives that are more fully aligned with our call – rather than a need to prove ourselves and our worth through our to-do lists.  While I was there, Kelly told me that of all the shows I could watch on sabbatical, I had to be sure to watch Fleabag.  I hadn’t heard of it, but came home and started immediately – and loved it. It’s a show about grief, and friendship, and family, and regret.  It’s witty, tragic (though, like the main character, it hides it well), funny, and smart.  And it’s a great length for such a powerful show.   The second season is a world unto itself, probably even better than the first, but totally different.  Especially fun (and again, tragic) to watch as a clergy person who has spent a lot of time thinking about boundaries, intimacy, and power in the church.

4. Marcella / Broadchurch – I’m cheating a bit by putting these as one – but I watched them quickly and sequentially so I experienced them as all one.  I’m including them here because they represent my “British TV” phase of sabbatical.  They are – fair warning – extremely dark.  Especially season 2 of Marcella and pretty much all seasons of Broadchurch.  Still, the characters are so compelling – and it was so mesmerizing to live in the British police world for a while – how few guns they all have! How little worry there seems to be about their makeup, or love interests, or especially perfect looks by any of them, or tying up all the leads they threw our way.  I thought a lot about betrayal, and how we decide to believe what people tell us – even ourselves – during sabbatical – and these were themes played out in both of these shows.

5. Dear White People – Through my sabbatical I had the chance to participate in a series of conversations with community leaders and activisits from across Fort Collins (facilitaed by the Colorado Trust) – many of whom are people of color.  And in these conversations we talked a lot about who feels at home in our city, and why – and whose story is told when we talk about Fort Collins.  I’ve been wrestling with the questions of how change happens for our city, and if it’s even possible – and how to listen more, and support the leadership of those whose stories have not been told, or told as centrally.  I thought about all of this watching Dear White People – both seasons 2 & 3 – as the main character, Sam, moves out of sheer idealistic and righteous activism, into a more active heartbreak and disillusionment.  Especially in today’s polarized and white-supremacy-normalizing world – do we counter racism in ourselves, and in the world?  Bonus: one of my conversations this summer introduced me to the term “hotep,” and despite a shallow googling, I wasn’t quite getting it.  Until one of the episodes of Dear White People featured a dude getting called out as hotep, and it all became clear.

I toyed a lot over sabbatical with starting up a whole new blog just dedicated to reviews and reccomendations of shows (with a splash of podcasts and music for variety). Afterall, Carri often tells me she can’t keep up with / remember every show I tell her she should watch – and also that recommending shows to watch is one of my love languages.  Which made me like: she sees me….

But I decided that one of my favorite things about shows is that they are almost always an experience entirely related to my own pleasure.  Without justification, explanation, or work product.  Hardly ever do shows translate well into sermons in any setting – but especially in a UU setting, there’s a longstanding too-good-for-TV orientation so it’s rare to find congregants – or even colleagues – who can speak this language with me.  If I was an avid book reader, I could more easily bring up the books I’d read (even fluffy novels find an easier conversation in after-church coffee time than the latest netflix binge).

Instead, shows are like my little mini-rebellion in the middle of life always oriented towards producing, and efficiency, outcomes, and utility.

We all need these things in our lives, these things we choose for no other purpose than joy, and relief, and the remembering of entirely other worlds, other stories than our own, and the ones we carry.

And it was this personal, private joy that was the story of my sabbatical.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Below you’ll find my full list of shows I watched (I think) from May through August  – feel free to ask me about any of them if you’re curious. Or tell me what you thought about something – though I don’t want to write (more than the occasional) blog posts about shows, I do love talking about them.

1. Jessica Jones – Season 3
2. Catastrophe – all Seasons
3. Big Little Lies – Season 1 and half of Season 2
4.  Workin’ Moms – Season 2
5. Handmaid’s Tale – current Season
6. Pose – current Season
7. Dear White People – Seasons 2 and 3
8.  Shrill – Season 1
9. Better Caul Saul – all Seasons
10. Younger – current Season
11. Queer Eye – current Season
12. Cooked – all episodes
13. Marcella – all Seasons
14. Broadchurch – all Seasons
15. Bodyguard – Season 1
16. Dead to Me – Season 1
17. Bonding – Season 1
18. Insatiable – Season 1
19. Fleabag – all Seasons
20. The Defenders – all episodes
21. The OA – Season 2
22. Pen15 – Season 1

*Since today, a lot of watching TV shows doesn’t happen on an actual TV, I’ve taken to just calling them simply “shows.”

I’ve always loved writing – especially poetry – which I started experimenting with in middle school when all things feel like they should go in a poem.  By the time I was in high school,  my journal was filled with lots of poetry (and math proofs), with a somewhat hilarious and hubristic variety of subjects, most of which I had no right to have an opinion about.  Bullying and domestic violence, racism, love, loneliness, and trying to grow up.  Some of these I knew some things about.

Regardless of all this writing, I never really thought of myself as a writer, let alone a poet, which seemed a term reserved for people like Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, or my 10th grade favorite, Sylvia Plath.

Around the same the time I read The Bell Jar, I overheard a friend of mine talking about a poem she wrote with one of her friends.  I had showed her a little of my writing, after she’d shown me hers, but we hadn’t really talked about it.  I just figured, she too was shy about sharing.

Which was why I was especially surprised when I heard her say my name, and that I wrote poems too.  Yeah, Gretchen also writes poems.  Really cheesy ones.  You should read them – they are all so sweet. 

I basically died.  It was literally the worst thing I’d ever want said about something I’d written, let alone a global characterization of my writing to a random guy.  It hit me so hard.

While I didn’t decide to stop writing, I did start thinking that whatever I wrote would have to be like Emily Dickinson.  As in, discovered after I die, for the world to evaluate long after I wouldn’t have to hear anything about it.

Obviously, given the fact that a major part of my job involves writing, and then sharing what I’ve written, I mostly got over it.  But still I’ve remained hesistant to take my writing, in and of itself, as something serious, or worthy.  Something to share as writing.  What I write for Sunday is spoken into the context of community, and relationship, and then by Monday, set aside for the next Sunday.  I write calls to worship, and prayers, and sermons – but I am not a writer, per se.  Especially not of poetry.

Which is one big reason that I came into sabbatical with an intention to write everyday, as a discipline.  To free myself of some of these old stories, and to remember the joy of writing just for writing.  To experiment and learn about different practices of writing, to remember different forms – and to relish in the freedom of being unrestrained by the practical needs of an upcoming theme and persistent deadlines, or the expectations of what is appropriate for church, or the worry of how my words would be taken, if they would matter, and in what way.

And then, sabbatical actually began.  And it turned out, I wanted nothing do with writing.  I found myself exhausted of introspection, and of meaning-making entirely. 

I wanted only to be quiet, work in my garden and in my home, to watch netflix, to go on walks and to have nothing to say about most anything.  And as the days and weeks passed, I could feel the weight of Sundays lifting, the push to produce a certain number of words (not too few, or too many), with a well-crafted bottom line, and a tidy message of hope and meaning – all fall further and further away.

I loved the relief of it all so much that not quite half-way through sabbatical, I confessed to my spiritual director I was worried that I had nothing to say about anything anymore, except maybe about moving rocks from one part of the garden to another, or the mystery of still having Uggs boots in our shoe bin two months into summer.

She said, isn’t it interesting how reality doesn’t come with meaning attached to it? Reality isn’t a story.  Reality is just – what is.  You’re experiencing reality.

We’d talked about this, she reminded me – that this would happen.

This is life, she said.  How does it feel?

We are asked and ask ourselves to process our lives so quickly today, to move from experience, to story, to meaning, (and often to reporting it out on social media) – so fast – we start to take the story-making, and the meaning, as the reality itself.  Especially when a main part of your job is getting up in front of people and trying to weave meaning out of the preceding days, or weeks, or years – all in the span of 20 minutes for a crowd whose attention is already veering towards the grocery list, or the text they just got, or the week ahead.

So that to step away from the cycle feels – terrifying, disorienting, groundless.  And also, if you let it, glorious.

In place of story-weaving and meaning making of my own, I found a hunger to listen to new words, and new ideas.  Another story of sabbatical I’ll tell soon will be about “my summer of infinite podcasts,” as podcasts were how I began to feed that hunger.

On my own for most hours of the day, in the hot summer sun, I’d alternate between listening to the trees, and the next-door neighbor’s chickens, and the windchimes sounding from every direction- and then hitting play on another random podcast while kneeling in the dirt, amending the soil, noticing all the small changes of summer.

Along the way, I kept my my journal near, and would write small and unfinished notes to myself that when I look back at them now appear like little pep talks I was giving myself….or maybe, I see now, like aphorisms, or psalms….here are a few of the more intelligible ones….

• It takes a long time to dig up such a small amount of ground. Often, whole days.
• Time is not a problem to be solved. But I keep trying anyway.
• There is nothing extraordinary about betrayal, or grief. It’s regular.
• There are right and wrong ways to love.  Love is not actually always love.
• Weeds are a way to remember we have the power to choose.
• To pick up is to begin setting down.

I’d get a line like this written, and then – nothing else would be there.  I’d want to go back to moving rocks, pulling weeds, listening to podcasts, or the wind, making dinner, watching netflix.  It was sometimes terrifying, annoying – sometimes just – perfect.  Who needs meaning anyway?

Along the way, I discovered two podcasts that began to shift things in me.

One was an interview with the poet Maggie Smith, who wrote what became a “viral poem” in 2016…..

The conversation with Maggie Smith had her talking about coming to believe that her life, in the every day, would be a worthy topic for poetry.  Motherhood, and meal making, laundry and car pools.   She talked about a moment in her life when she realized she didn’t have to write about things that “poets write about,” she just had to write about life as she saw it, and that still she was just as much a poet.

Second, I discovered a podcast from poet Tracy K. Smith, called The Slowdown.  It’s a poem-a-day type thing, except with curation and most-often commentary from Smith.  Most episodes are five minutes or less.  For a while, I just let the back episodes play one-after-another, with only a short breath between – like I was gulping it all down.

But eventually, I fell into a rhythm of each day waking to hear the new episode, to let that be my poem of the day – without any real need to make my own meaning or application.  Just to take the time to really hear the words, the ideas, and the sound of Tracy Smith’s voice which basically feels like a lullaby to me.

These two podcasts opened up even more curiosity, so that I went looking for more books of poetry – I got Maggie Smith’s book, and a few books from the library – Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton and Christian Wiman.

And then more poetry podcasts, including an interview with Camille Dungy where she talked about form in poetry, and about the need to study and practice different forms.  Which led me to Mary Oliver’s two books on poetry – A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance – where she talks about why it’s good to emulate other writers, that it’s a critical way to gain skill and eventually, to develop your own voice.

In mid-July, about 10 weeks into sabbatical, I flew to the north shore of Lake Superior – an area of the country I have never been, but that immediately felt familiar. (I learned later that my great grandparents had settled there for a time, with the other Scandanavians.)

I was there for a retreat with a senior colleague, an individualized retreat meant for looking back on the story (stories) of your life, and considering the story ahead.  In my room there were shelves of even more poetry, that I sat for hours late into the night reading – Wendell Berry, May Sarton, Audre Lorde, Marge Percy…

And another book, a guide of contemplation and prayer grounded in poetry. It invited a three part practice – a question to contemplate, and then write about, a verbal prayer of poetry or scripture, and then centering prayer for increasing amounts of time – eventually 40 minutes a day.  I began right away, and have been continuing every day, ever since. I have found an especially beautiful collection of poems that I highly recommend – called Poetry of Presence – that, in addition to Tracy K. Smith’s daily poem, have been part of my daily scripture.

And somewhere – through all of this – everything changed. Slowly, and also suddenly.  Like going to the gym for weeks and weeks – and just at the moment when you feel like maybe you just aren’t the sort of body that makes muscles – you look in the mirror and it’s happened.  That it was happening the whole time.

Since then I have written every day, including four completed poems and three sabbatical reflections – with another three poems and ten or so reflections in the works.  You can find all the poems posted here.

I don’t know that I have yet come to peace about calling myself a writer, but I do have clarity that I want and need to keep writing, and to take writing – including poetry – in and of itself as a serious and worthy part of my life, and what I am called to do.  Which also means that I have to continue to find ways, even as I return to church – and meetings, and email, and the march of Sundays coming again, and again – to make space for the experience of Reality.  Unstoried, unfiltered, without any meaning around it, at all.

Which is maybe what scares me most about returning to work.

Because what I have learned during sabbatical about Reality, is that it takes a really long, long, long time.  It cannot be forced to comply with our deadlines, not if we really mean to contend with it rather than our ideas and stories of it.

That is, it takes a long, long time – until one day, it feels sudden and simple.  Relentlessly available, and abundant.  That there is no way to make it feel available and abundant by rushing it, but only by giving over to its slow and invisible and mysterious workings.  That it is random, and unpredictable, and that somehow, this makes it all the more beautiful, and trustworthy.  Because we cannot make sense of it, not really, cannot contain it, certainly, cannot force good news to come on our terms – we can only pay attention and let the world and life work on us, and then – maybe, something will come through.  Something some call spirit, or grace, or maybe just Life, for real.

This is what it means to be a grown up, my spiritual director tells me, when I express my fear that I will not be able to continue to pay attention like this, with the emails and the meetings and the march of time.  She says the challenge becomes not whether or not you will continue your spiritual practices, or lose these new insights and connections – the challenge is only how many emails or meetings will you be able to add in to your life, while maintaining these things.  Growing up means being able to choose to keep going, to not lose yourself, or Reality, along the way.

This is the story, and the prayer of my sabbatical.  To keep choosing to pay attention to Life – and to trust that the meaning, and the story – and even, the emails – will find a way to come through.

Stop changing
I tell the peaches,
pluots, and
plums, as I pull them
from the sack
and line them up straight
Stay as you
are, sufficiently
fragile and
alive for ripening
to remain
ready, with sweetness
to drip when
my teeth break the skin
and the juice
finds my lips, hungry

Last night I
watched my daughter sleep
with her hands
raised over her head
she filled the
bed with her body,
teenaged, and
fearlessly unfurled
I saw her
infant arms, surrendered
and the prayers
in my mouth,
habits equally
impossible –

We can’t save
anyone, life goes
too far, too
much beyond what can
be held in
our hands, stayed by our
plans – life is
ruthless, and rarely
ripe at the
right amount given
the mess, and
the need to spill not
despair but

light

Despite memory
and betrayal
and my daughter’s arms,
teenaged, and
brown, up above her
head, also
I fear sudden shifts
from life, to
death, and the wish not
to stop, but
hurry, and to keep
living – the
summer is filled with
stories of
juice bursting from flesh
perfectly
sweet, and my children
looking at
me, too late to catch
the swell of
stickiness, we laugh
at the rush
of everything on
their mouths, and
mine, and careless joy,
dangerous and true
believing
if only long enough
to taste life,
uncontained,
radical, and free

At a certain point in the summer, I figured that I’d peeled, and sliced, and cooked up more shallots in the past few months than I’d probably cooked in my whole life.  Shallots are, I realized, one funny but true way to tell the story of my sabbatical.  

It’s not like I hadn’t ever made anything with shallots before. But I confess that a lot of the time when I’ve seen “shallot” in a recipe I just substitute whatever onion I have on hand. 

But sabbatical means: time to shop, and cook, and consider our meals carefully.  And it means: the meals can include peeling, and chopping, and food processing, special dressings and marinades that must be remembered and executed well-in-advance. 

Which means, during sabbatical, shallots can become regular.  

So much so, I start to wonder about shallots – why does a recipe want a shallot instead of a red, or white, or yellow onion? What’s special about shallots?

And because sabbatical means I can follow such random curiosities into actual knowledge, I learned that shallots are more subtle than those other onions, and are more akin to garlic, so add a little extra and different, but subtle flavor.  Many of the recipes I’ve tried this summer have some sort of complex dressing, many served without cooking – for which shallots are the perfect, interesting flavor.

And because sabbatical also means indulging even beyond the intial site of inquiry, I reveled in the fun facts about all the onions offered on one of my new favorite podcasts, The Splendid Table, in their interview with onion-expert Kate Winslow.  

I have tried so many new recipes in the past 14 weeks – some that took hours and then were pretty so-so…some that were fast and then turned out to be so delicious and satisfying.  What my kids call – keepers.  As in, this ones a keeper, mom.  My kids are adventurous, and discerning when it comes to food – so it’s not a shallow compliment. Some of the keepers included portabella tacos, beef fried rice, broccoli chicken tikka masala, and just this week, a leek and sausage gnocchi and a killer greek salad.

I’ve learned that effort and time does not always correlate to a good product.  Instead, a good read of the full recipe, and the flavors, and the care to get all the elements fresh or fully defrosted – this goes a long ways.  I’ve learned what a difference it makes to not multi-task while cooking. As in, not read emails, or catch up on facebook, or talk on the phone, or even think about an upcoming sermon – while cooking.   It is a gift to be able to focus on one thing, and to give ourselves to it, to just pay attention and to learn what is there.

My spiritual director told me, before sabbatical – this is your chance to learn more fully about the reality of your life.  Without the chance for distractions – like, send an email, call a meeting, write an email.  This is your life – is it funny, irritating, boring, sweet, scary, fascinating, confusing, endearing, joyful….maybe all of these, and more? Sabbatical, she said, is your chance to find out.  And as with most things my spiritual director says to me, she was horribly, wonderfully, right.

When we learned to cook, we became fully human – Michael Pollan says in his netflix documentary, Cooked. (Based on his book, I’d imagine, though I haven’t read his book.)

It’s a big statement that a lot of the times I’ll admit was hard to keep in mind when the kids would look at me after hours of chopping and sweating and mixing – and say, this one is not a keeper, mom.  Or, when the garden was calling, and my mom was calling, and laundry was still not done (the laundry became not even a tiny bit easier to conquer during sabbatical, why is that?!?), and I was drudging through one of my well-researched, well-considered “interesting” recipes, likely with shallots.

Pollan’s big push is for us all to cook more – to resist the rush of corporatized food, the outsourcing of food, the glamorizing of covenience – to slow down, and to sit down – to cook, and to eat, together.  He says it doesn’t really matter what we cook, but only that we really take and pay attention to the experience of cooking, and eating, and being.  Especially in these times, in these days.  His is a cooking as resistance, as counter-cultural.  Cooking as community, and care.  He says that preparing something delicious and nourishing for the people you love – despite what our culture wants to teach us – there is no time less wasted than when we do this.

This is the story of my sabbatical.  These hours of each day spent learning, and mixing, and hoping the timing works out.  This begging my children to get their drinks so that we could sit down together.  This remembering to pull the meat out of the freezer, or this carefully placing the summer fruit in a row so to slow down the spoiling.  This race to get all that has been bought each week, to be eaten, before it goes bad.

Every minute of it a love note.  Felt then, and if not, maybe later.  Years, or decades even.  So that when the day comes when I cannot always be there to chop shallots, or peppers, or mushrooms, or thyme – when that first Board meeting – which is already scheduled – runs fully through the dinner hour – that they will, and I will, remember the smell of garlic, and ginger, and the sprinkled sesame seeds or parmesan cheese, and feel still connected, and together, and loved.

By the time we sat in the room
where life turned

from what was, to what would be
I had barely begun to believe

there was a game, and
we were players

there was a strategy, and
you intended to win

you’d been making already so many moves
it was all I could do, to decide the sorrow

I could swallow, and survive
the waves I could take

without staying under
too long – we like to believe

there is perpetually some perfect
calculus, a thing called right, and wrong

we will know when the time comes
but the right choice does not always arrive without regret

even Moses marched
toward the Red Sea, in liberation

even he could not stop wanting the land he had known
or the quiet of the past

not long after his freedom was declared
he grew weary of justice

loud, and plague-filled, whiny, and the sea
refused to release its threats of drownings, or hypothermia

and the walls of water, majestic, still failed to disclose
the way of dreams, or comfort

after we have walked so long and left behind
so many, carrying with us the voices of the unbelievers

sometimes wrathful, just as often wanting
I still have an idea of the promised land

and an aim past this impossible choosing
where there is no pass, only play

a willingness to have been the one to respond, to see
past the lighthouse, and the whales, and the oceans

rising, our daughters becoming mothers
uncoerced, ready to clear the board, and begin again

I found myself apologizing to the peaches again today,
the green ones I found on the ground,
near the coneflower that could never make it to bud
After the hail, and the late snow, and my
intermittent neglect, somehow they had found their way to
midsummer, and hope –
but the neighbor’s
baby would not stop crying,
and Charlie, clumsy and filled with slobbering love
was rightfully concerned,
bolted and shook the branch
with his worry –
you tried so hard, I told them,
holding their soft skin for a moment,
like a blessing –
before tossing them into the bin of weeds, and grass, and rocks –
You have to be tough to make it here, and stubborn
to know how to be stepped on by children, choked by
weeds, to absorb the falling stones shot loose when it’s not just
babies crying, but the infuriating squirrel, or bunny –
and not forget who you are, or
lose sight of the life you have come to make –
or, when my son, overcome by hormones and
well-earned resentment,
slices clean off all the parts
you had hoped to offer
to butterflies, and hummingbirds, and the sky
the orange parts, the yellow, the red,
when there is nothing impressive left,
you have to be ready to take that heartbreak
and keep going, patient and undeterred
There can be no pride here, no attachment,
only survival, which is to give everything away,
except your roots, and the earth
which holds you, and everything else,
in what cannot be seen, or undone
the promise to persist,
forgetting even grief, though earned,
to be determined to go on
inhaling, and exhaling
equal, and enough.

markers with lids half-on, coloring books

set out with pages like butterflies, half-beautiful;

my hands covered in raw meat, dripping and

dangerous – or dirt, with the torch lilly barely out of

the pot, ready to be surrounded and

held by something familiar, to take root;

my hand caught on their other

mother’s hip, before the crash of the

front screen door, and the request

for referee, score-keeper, coach;

their adolescent bodies, nearly my

size, and the words that come

out of their lazy lips

unpurposefully, except the

sting, and the way they will bring me

from my world into theirs with a bang and a

burst, interrupting whatever unimportant

tale I’d been running, with the sort of

ferocious love they know

how to bump up against,

to feel a part of something already

in motion. They tell me to pray here, to place

my knees at the altar of

dandelions, and mud, and nerf bullets leftover

from my son’s last birthday party, not

as an act of giving up

on beauty, or to stop seeing all that is possible,

but because the holy is also here, the

wholeness of something wild, and unbalanced,

something not easily told, or shared, or explained

when my mother comes to visit –

but to believe that this is

enough, this incomplete world, in the middle

of the day, the summer, my life,

the story of the earth, this planet, life itself;

they come offering only themselves,

like the poem I’ve been writing, waiting still for

the beginning, the ending, and edits,

wanting to be made sense of,

to feel resolved, at least for a

breath, before the next movement; to be loved

not for what will be but

for every unfinished part, now.

I want to tell them, of course,

to gobble them up in my arms

like when they were infants,

to agree with ease, life is not

arrival, but becoming –

I want to turn the prayers into hymns,

to say amen and to ready it all

for Sunday, but they tell me this one’s not

for sale, and besides,

no one’s buying I’ve been well-

taught. They send me back for tutoring, and

summer school, loads of laundry, and the kitchen

sink filled again, and their urgent need

for a clean spoon,

remedial lessons for a stubborn

student, still secretly drafting

a happy ending.

while i was away the weeds decided to stage a coup

across the rocks   and plants   and trees

where i’d spent whole days meticulously     

digging out the thistle    unwinding the bindweed

  moving the rocks aside    to get at each piece

        of cheatgrass    conspiring with

the rain the sun and my apparent negligence

they made an unruly revolution

like you   they have never been good   

at boundaries    an abundance of green brazenly

draped itself over gray and white stones meant

to mark space   for breath and   steps   

tiny tendrils stroked the sedum and

whole stalks of goatsbeard turned up

between the columbines    danger

can be so beautiful

as i knelt in the wet grass and cut my fingernails

into the dirt pulling on every last one  

less meticulous this time  more furious  as if

it was not their nature   to go into forbidden places

while the rain returned and the

mosquitos swarmed   i remembered your face

when you saw   i wasn’t going to save you  

this time   as if i was the one   who had betrayed    you

my hands grew raw and numb as night took hold  

i worked to unbury the secrets   the roots   the radically selfish intentions  

the memory of what it felt like   to be for a time   wild and   uncaught  

the hope i know they still harbor   to try again  i tried

to kill every last seed so i could return safely  

to only the good of my garden  

to see unblemished the new blooms of deep blue on the salvia  

the baby peaches  swaying in the gray sky  untouched

by the ground assault   my son’s fledgling oak tree  promising

a far-out future  by the eighth bucket filled   i had emptied every corner

of the invaders   my fingers ached i surveyed the carnage

and cried   it all looked so battered  and bare  just three hours

after you confessed what you had done    i led the memorial

where   the daughter     moaned perfectly   from the front   row 

the whole service   from her gut   

wailing  her grief    while i kept    my tears     in check    and whispered

under my breath              amen.  

All we can do

is walk into Jerusalem,

with the Hosannas ringing

in your ears, and the palms

coming at you in every direction,

and you’re wondering what’s real here, and

if there’s any love that won’t swallow you up, and

you’re already starting to remember the bitter

of all that will come next –

even then, all we have

is the next

step into the city,

and the listening

for the call

that reminds you –

you’ve been preparing for this

your whole life.

That every good thing will come

undone does not make it all

make believe,

and when the world turns

upside down, and lovers become

strangers, and thieves

and betrayers

turn out to be the beloved

beside us in the dark,

because secrets are loyal company,

even when the palms turn to

passion,

even then

we can throw our arms open wide

and turn forgiveness

over and over

on our tongues

until it just falls

out

and we find ourselves empty of everything

for a moment.

Until the breath begins

and the next morning comes,

steady

with

life.

All I could think, as I headed into my second day of the machine of Rethink Leadership and the Orange Conference (a mostly-evangelical Christian leaders gathering) was:

Progressive Christians have ruined me. 

Before seminary and my classmates – those brave and bold friends who taught me over and over again the meaning of that song that I sang growing up: They will know we are Christians by our love.  And before witnessing the compassion and innovation of colleagues who lead Christian churches all across the country.  And definitely before Anne Lamott and Glennon Doyle, and Jim Wallis, and Barbara Brown Taylor, and before Rachel Held Evans – whose sudden tragic death the day after the conference ended only underscored the grief that was weighing on me in that gathering of about 8,000 people younger and more-racially-diverse than most UU gatherings.

Before any of these voices and relationships that have over the last 12 years, drawn me in and sent me out, loved me, and known me. Before, as the conference theme said it – progressive Christians made Christianity feel personal for me, I could’ve dismissed all of the discomfort I was experiencing (and sometimes nausea) as inevitable. I could’ve rolled my eyes, shrugged it off.  I could’ve dismissed it all as confirming my shallow, stereotype of what Christians are like.

And how not-Christian I am.  How unwelcome I am.

Before it got personal, I would’ve thought it was just further proof that to Christians, I am the enemy.  My people are the enemy.  The ones to pray for and to look down on, and to convert. And most of all, before progressive Christians ruined me, I would’ve remembered to keep my guard up.  Because they are my enemy, too.

But instead, I was caught off guard.  I was caught off guard by my grief, and even more, I was caught off guard by my rage.

Which is not to say that I didn’t love a lot of what I experienced at Orange.

Actually, the opposite.  I think what they are doing is brilliant, and mostly spot-on – which is what makes the whole thing so especially infuriating, and terribly sad.

This combination of brilliant/infuriating can be summed up in one question.  The question that the conference put at the center of this year’s conference:

What’s your name?

I was standing in line for my free/Jesus-approved coffee, when one of the volunteers looked right at me with this question.  (One piece of their brilliance is that they are not shy about immediately putting their tactics into practice.)

Before I could respond, the guy wearing the perfectly-designed Christian t-shirt read my name back to me off my badge. And then, he had more questions.

Do you know what it means? Do you remember? What’s the story behind your name? Why did your parents call you that, do you know?

Do you know my name? is actually just the first in a series of five questions the conference kept coming back to.  Because these are the questions that they say lead to real belonging, hope, and transformation.

The others:

Do you know what matters to me?

Do you know where I live?

Do you know what I’ve done?

And Do you know what I can do?

All of these questions go to support this year’s theme: Everything changes when things get personal.  Everything changes when you know someone’s name.  And everything changes when that knowing leads to another layer of knowing.  When you see someone not just at the surface, but for the story behind their name.  When you know what they care about, where they are from, what they struggle with, and what they long for.

Everything changes when you see someone.  And, everything changes when you let yourself be seen.

Which basically feels like the core of what I’ve been preaching for the past few years in my Unitarian Univeraslist church – vulnerability, connection, belonging.  I kept thinking about my 13-year-old daughter and her friends, a peer group that has seen three attempted suicides and regular psychiatric care for more than that in just this school year.  They need exactly this sort of ministry.  Personal.  Committed. Deep. Ministry that says – you matter.  It would be literally life-saving for them.

That’s the brilliance.

As for the infuriating…note I said I was in line for coffee when the guy hit me with this approved-line of questioning.  Which means I hadn’t had any yet. But my under-caffeinated state was not the only reason – despite being totally sold on the whole idea –  I shrugged and half-smiled, and thanked him for the coffee, unwilling to play along.

Because, see, each time they asked the question flashed on the big screen – do you know my name? I couldn’t help thinking about one of my friends whose parents’ evangelical faith was the primary reason they have never even tried using his name, or his pronouns.  It’s been decades. Even though studies show that using a trans person’s name automatically decreases their risk of suicide and depression, this question of “do you know my name” does not lead the evangelicals to a campaign for all adults to use all kids’ names and pronouns.

Instead, we get bathroom bills and righteous wedding cake-cases, and chick-fil-A.

When the question about names wasn’t making me think about trans and queer folx, I’d instead remember the chanting of protesters and lamenters: Say Her Name.  It was a call that began after the death of African American woman Sandra Bland while in police custody, and that has become the cry of a movement seeking justice for Black women and African Americans everywhere who have been profiled, targeted and brutalized at the hands of police officers.

It wasn’t that there was no racial lens at Orange. A few of the speakers, especially those digging into the “do you know where I live” question linked their faith directly to their cultural and ethnic context.  And Dr. Bernice King – that’s MLK’s daughter – held the floor with bad ass bravery with a straight-up Micah-centered call for social justice as the heart of Christianity.

It was a moment where I wondered – if white evangelicals might manage to grow in their understanding and vocabulary around race, even a little – there is such a potential for organizing with Black Christians.  They wouldn’t need to move any or at all on women, or on GLBT inclusion.

Another reason I’m so grateful for Black Lives Matter’s insistence on intersectionality, and why I don’t see Orange connecting their “Do you know my name” campaign with the “Say Her Name” campaign anytime soon.

After all they presented all sorts of stories and ideas related to the “Do you know my name” question (and the other 4), the speakers’ lines took a small but important turn: We make it personal, because God made it personal.  In Jesus. 

For the most part, Orange is remarkably low on specifically-Christian content.  It’s how they can have a crowd of 8,000 with beliefs ranging from Presbyterian to Pentecostal to Unitarians (hey, we were took up at least a row of 8 at one point!).

For example, they chose one bible story – the story of Zacchaeus – and came back to it repeatedly – but even that, only about every third talk.  The way they told the story, it was accessible regardless of what you believe about who Jesus was, or what his life, or death or resurrection meant.  Instead, their message focuses mostly on how to improve life for everyone, at every age, now.  How to love the outcast, and how much that matters when the outcast is you.

The smaller-than-you-might-expect-Jesus-content makes this turn to Jesus, and how everything changes when you know Jesus’ name – feel both sneaky, and again, brilliant!

And it was in this sneaky brilliance that the rage hit.

And the grief.

Because before that I was starting to give in, as I remembered the women in the prison where I served as a chaplain my first year of seminary, how they taught me about swaying and raising your arms – in vulnerability, and solidarity.  I was giving in to being present, without defense. Yes, we’re all in this together.  Seen people see people.

I was even thinking – I was wrong to have not let myself be seen by that friendly coffee guy.  How could I see them if I wasn’t willing to be seen, I was thinking?

And even more, I was wrong to have not let myself be seen by the senior pastor who I’d sat next to the day before.  After two days of conversation about church life, and leadership, he asked me what the name of my church was, and I said simply: Foothills.

Are you a part of a denomination, he asked? I said, no.  I mean, it wasn’t exactly a lie.

But then the name of JESUS flashed across the stage.

And the people around me were deep in the swaying and the singing What a Beautiful Name

and instead of vulnerability and solidarity and telling them my name, I wanted to say all the swear words.

But not because I don’t think that it matters that we know who Jesus was – and where he lived, and what he cared about, what he did, and what he was capable of.

But because I have seen what it looks like when Christians think it matters too.  I’ve felt what it feels like when Christians put Jesus at the center of their worship lives, their communities.

When Christians center Jesus (and not just Paul), they throw baby showers for two women who have a new baby – as my classmates did for me and my family my first year in seminary.

When Christians center Jesus (and not the Republican party line), they show up at the border and feed and clothe the migrants seeking refuge – just as I witnessed so many doing when I was in San Diego in December.

When Christians center Jesus (and not patriarchy), they tell a young (heretical, queer) potential church leader: the church needs you as you – as one of my mentors did for me.

But what Christians who care most of all about who Jesus was, would not do – is (on the same day they flash JESUS from the mainstage) celebrate the latest expansion of “religious exemptions.” Exemptions lobbied for by Christians just like those in that stadium, that make it legal for anyone in the medical field to refuse to care for someone because of their religious beliefs.  Which is another way of getting personal, I guess.

“Religious exemption” is of course code.  Code for refusing to care for women needing reproductive health care.  Code for refusing to learn where women really live, and what matters to them.  (An afternoon session at the senior leaders portion basically tried to persuade the room that women are people.  Thank Beyoncé they didn’t ask us to talk at our tables after that one.)  And…code for refusing to treat trans people for all sorts of reasons.  Code for refusing to learn – in a very literal way – their names.

Before progressive Christians reminded me, in a really personal way, of what centering your life on Jesus for real looks like – I would’ve let all this slide.

I would’ve accepted that Christianity is inextricably connected to bigotry, and even death.

But because Methodists and Lutherans and Baptists have given me a taste of what it means when Christians follow Christ – I found myself so angry at this disconnect, this hypocrisy.

Especially when it is packaged up in this much brilliance.

Because I have a sense, a lived-in personal sense of Jesus – far beyond his name.  Because I know what it looks like when someone cares about what he cared about, when whole communities work to understand his context and applies it to our own, and when leaders wrestle with complexity as Jesus wrestled – I really want to stand up like Emma Gonzalez and call BS.

Because I really don’t think it matters if you can say the name of Jesus, if you don’t know the name of Amber Nicole, a trans woman who was recently beaten in Denver.

And I don’t think his name is all that wonderful if it doesn’t compel you to say the name of Stephon Clark, who was shot by the police while in his grandmother’s back yard in Sacramento just over a year ago?

And while millions of Christians are singing about what a sweet name Jesus is, how many are working to find out the name of the 16-year-old boy who died recently in ICE Custody?

Dear Orange.  Dear Evangelicals.  Dear Christians.  Dear friends who I know in my heart are not my enemies, but my kin – You are so right.  Everything changes when you know my name.  And when you know their name.  And my prayer, my lament, my rage, and my grief, which I pray with my hands raised and my heart open – is that you’ll keep growing whose names you mean, and whose name you’re willing to call beautiful.  

They came in the very early morning hours.

In the stillness of the deep dawn, when light and dark were equally everywhere.

Mary, Mary Magdalene, Salome, maybe other women – came to anoint their friend, their teacher with all the rituals of death.

Just a few days ago, they had watched him die, and terribly. Why? They still weren’t sure why.  

Another of their friends, someone close to Jesus, had betrayed him, and somehow it quickly ended here. In the not-quite-light, at his grave.

It made no sense.

All they knew is that he’d taught them that they mattered.  Everything about him taught him this, again and again. Until they believed him.  

They’d never be the same.   

But somehow, he was suddenly just – gone.

And so they came with their spices and their oils, their grief, their sense of duty.  They came to help, in the only way they could.  

Over the last few weeks we have been exploring this idea of help – mostly in terms of our common neediness – our limits and our vulnerability.  We’ve talked about asking for help, receiving help. We’ve even dealt with our helplessness.

Which is why I’d imagine you might be breathing a sigh of relief today, because today we are finally talking about helping, as in offering help – rather than (shudder) receiving it.  Right?

Let’s be honest, we Unitarian Universalists often want to be the shepherd – not so much the sheep.

It’s one of the reasons that our tradition hasn’t taken so well to the idea of using pastor as a title for its ministers – even though I think it’s a lot easier to say in regular speech than minister, or reverend.  But Pastor is Latin for shepherd so historically UUs have been….hesitant – because if we’re shepherds, then who are the sheep?

This has been made worse by the rumor that sheep are dumb, or that they thoughtlessly follow the crowd.

It turns out however, that sheep are actually quite intelligent, social, and complex.  

But I’m guessing this doesn’t convince you – it’s hardwired.  We want to be the helpers – the ones who step up, and show up, the ones who make things a little, if not a lot better.

Helping feels good.  It reminds us of our power, our agency, which is not wrong. Especially when things feel chaotic, painful, or confusing – helping can be a way of regaining some sense of control.  This is what the women were doing in the early morning hours.

These strong, courageous, prophetic women – tending to the body of their friend.  

As the story is told, they were the first to meet, in fear and amazement, the resurrected Jesus, the first charged with telling the world that he had risen, the first to be disbelieved by the male disciples because who would believe a woman’s story afterall.

These strong, courageous prophetic women went to Jesus’s grave as many of us go in these moments. Hoping to do what they could for him, and for his body, to honor and remember his life.  

They went as helpers.

And yet we know, and they likely knew too,  that even more they went because they needed help, and comfort.  They needed reassurance that everything would be ok. They were feeling – lost, helpless, painfully aware of their own limits.

Even when we try to assert some degree of agency – it’s always true – that we run into our limits.  Even when we’re offering help, we still need help.  It turns out there’s no firm line possible between us, and them.  

Help that is helpful gets this – accepts it – surrenders to it as part of the deal. 

Even more, help that is helpful knows that this limitedness is fine.  Even good, and a gift, a relief – to be able to trust that you could show up filled only with this sense of love, of inherent worth, to believe this offering is enough.  Trusting that not being able to fix everything doesn’t mean we can’t fix anything.  And that our worth is not dependent on fixing or helping or saving anything at all.  

This is a gift.  

A couple weeks ago I finally got to watch the Mr. Rogers documentary.  

In case you’re not someone who grew up or raised kids in the US in the 70s, 80s, or 90s – Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was a show on PBS that basically broke every rule for good TV and yet somehow totally worked.  

Watching the documentary from today’s context, I was shocked at how radical Mr. Rogers really was – and still is.  

Because at the core of his message – and he says this in a clip at the end of the film – is the idea that you don’t have to do anything sensational to be loved.

Help that is helpful gets this still-radical idea  – and just tries to pass it on.  

Help that is not helpful, however, doesn’t get any of this.  Thinks that this whole idea – that you don’t need to do anything sensational – or fix everything, or save everyone – that that idea is stupid, foolish, insufficient, and/or irresponsible.  Help that is unhelpful is afterall – often driven by our egos – it’s why helping can feel so good! Unhelpful helping wants everyone, including ourselves, to know how strong and capable and in control and not vulnerable we are.

Help that is not helpful wants to keep that idea of a clear line between those of us who are helpers, and those who receive help; Those who are needy, and those who are not; help that is not helpful denies our inter-relatedness and instead tries to hold us all as entirely separate, disconnected. 

A lot of the time, this sort of unhelpful help believes that unless we can make it all better we shouldn’t even try.  Or, that we aren’t good enough anyway, to help. That we don’t have the right words, or the right education…We are too quick to fill up the silence, or change the subject.  We don’t show up at all.   Or, we show up too much, and get confused about whose pain is whose.  Finding ourselves so caught up in the struggle it starts to pull us under.

A few years ago, psychologist Susan Silk started to notice this sort of unhelpful helping when she had breast cancer, and people would say things that she would find – unbelievable.

One favorite she says, came from one of her colleagues, who wanted to visit her after her surgery.  

“Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so.  Her colleague’s response? ‘This isn’t just about you.’  

‘It’s not?’ Susan wondered. ‘My breast cancer is not about me?’”

From these experiences, Silk developed a model for helpful help. She calls it the “Ring Theory.”

It can apply to all sorts of crises – medical, financial, emotional, existential.

The idea is, you draw a circle.  This is the center ring. In it, you put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma.  For Silk’s breast cancer – that would’ve been her.  

Next, draw a larger circle around the first one.  In that ring, put the person next closest to the trauma.  Maybe the spouse, or other immediate family. 

Repeat the process as many times as you need. In each larger ring, put the next closest person.  

When you are done, you have, as Silk says, the “Kvetching Order.”

She goes on: “Here are the rules.   The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, ‘Life is unfair’ and ‘Why me?’ That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.

“Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings. When you are talking to a person in a smaller ring – the goal is to help, which means listening more than talking, and avoiding giving advice.  

“People who are suffering don’t need advice, they need comfort, and support.  

So, say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Or, ‘This must really be hard for you.’

Or, ‘Can I bring you a pot roast?’ 

Listen for their experience that is just theirs.  

Don’t say: ‘You should hear what happened to me.’

Don’t try to argue them out of their pain, or tell them how hard it is for YOU.

When you need support – and you will – just look for it from someone in a bigger ring.”

Silk’s mantra is: Comfort IN, Dump OUT.

It’s a great way to think about how to create entire communities that offer help that his helpful.  Communities of help.

Help that is helpful realizes we’ll all get our turn in the center ring.  And in all the other rings too.  We’ll all get a chance to be the helpers, and the help-receivers – it’s all part of the single fabric of destiny that Martin Luther King spoke of – this inescapable network of mutuality.

As I’ve been thinking about the Easter story this year, I’ve been especially thinking about how help that is helpful comes from an awareness that we too need help.   Because I’ve been thinking especially about Jesus as a helper – and what his life, and his death have to teach us about help that is truly helpful.

*Image by Amy Petrie Shaw

Afterall, it’s one of the promises that Christianity makes –

that Jesus saves.  Which is like helping, but super-sized.  

Help that fixes and heals – everything.

In those days, and months, and years after Jesus died, his followers and friends tried to make sense of the senselessness the women were just beginning to acknowledge in the stillness of the morning.  

Why he died.  Why he lived.

The way his life had changed them.

How or if this change would last, or matter – even beyond their own lives.  

There is no way to say for sure what happened to Jesus after his death, if he was actually there to greet the women, calling Mary by name; no way to know if later he asked his followers to touch him, to feed him – to prove he was alive.  There’s no way to say for sure – any more than any of us can say what happens to us after death.

We can only say that the people of his time experienced – or at least universally said that they experienced – Jesus as alive. As scholar Marcus Borg says – it was the unanimous testimony of all the early Christians.

Still, it’s important to note that only much later did this testimony become the sole focus of how people made sense of all that senselessness – what help his life actually provided, and what it meant for him to be a savior.

As scholars Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock remind us in their work, Saving Paradise, it took about 1,000 years of Christianity, before all of Jesus’ help got narrowed down to his crucifixion, and what came to be understood as his atoning sacrifice – a turn that connected love to suffering, even death.  

It took about 1,000 years for this turn to happen.  

Before that, the good news of Jesus’ life, the way we understood the help he offered, was focused more on his – and our – lives here on earth.  The experience of his humanity in human community.  Humans with bodies, and feelings, and needs; humans who help and heal and save one another in small and big ways, every day.  

I thought about this last Thursday night, at our vespers service. As I felt the water hit my bare feet – all of us awkwardly carrying around our socks in our hands, so human together. I tried to imagine this great teacher kneeling before his followers and washing their dusty, dirty, weary feet. And I thought – this is what Jesus meant when he said love one another.  

This kneeling, this letting go, this helper that is also helpless.

This savior who also needs saving.   

This healer who needs the touch of his friends’ hands, the food of the Passover meal, the company and witness when the fear becomes too much, the surrender when even the supreme helper knows he cannot stop the end from coming…

Love one another.  He told them – that night, as he passed them the bread and the wine. 

In the same way that I have loved you, love one another. It’s all that really matters.

If they loved one another like this, even if he wasn’t literally with them it will feel like he is.  

If they can stay connected to this love that is inherent, perpetual – if they can be its partner. If they can help and heal in a way that is connected to their own helplessness, their own need for healing.  Then it will feel as if he never died.  

These many years later – it’s still true – when we wake in the early hours of dawn to find news of the world’s and our own brokenness then it feels as if we are too small, too limited – we are still called to offer what we can, to do what we can, and then to trust that a love is holding us through it all.

We are the shepherds, and the sheep.

We are the helpers, and the helpless.

We are the name at the center of the ring; and we are sitting at the outer-most-edge holding our arms out wide.

And the good news of Easter is that when we stay connected through it all to the love that says – You Matter.  You Belong. No matter what. If we live our lives in a way that keeps coming back to this truth.  Then we can trust that this Life, and this Love, will never die.

Amen, and alleluia.

The Story of this Sermon

About 18 months ago, one of our church members, Mary Hill, “bought” the right to select the topic of a sermon from me at the church Auction. Usually when someone does this, they have a topic in mind – but Mary didn’t. 

But a couple months later, over dinner in downtown Denver, it came to her.  We were there because we were lucky enough to see the musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton.  We were talking about the show, and our favorite parts – the inspiring ambition Hamilton had, his determination – all represented in his theme song that declares – I’m not going to throw away my shot.

That’s what I want my sermon to be about, Mary said, not throwing away your shot.

I nodded, and immediately tried to figure out who in the congregation could pull off that song’s rap.  

But then.  A few months later, life – happened. 

Mary got a crappy cancer diagnosis. Before long, her life was all about treatments and pain management. Which is when I started to think about her request a little differently.

I started to think about the double meaning of Hamilton’s song about his shot – as you might know from the musical or from high school history class, two literal shots -gunshots shift the whole course of Hamilton’s life.  First, a shot that killed his son Phillip. And then the shot that killed him, too early. 

What happens to our ambition, our will – when life doesn’t go the way we thought? It’s not that we threw away our shot.  It’s that the shot wasn’t what we thought it would be….life happens.  And we’re helpless to fix it.  

These questions – and also a little bit that I don’t think we have someone who can pull off that rap – are why I decided, instead of anchoring this service with the song about Hamilton not throwing away his shot, we should begin with another song, It’s Quiet Uptown.  

It’s in the middle of Act 2 when Alexander Hamilton’s son, Phillip, accepts the invitation to a duel.  Hamilton and his wife, Eliza, have been somewhat estranged – because Hamilton was obsessed with his work, and also he cheated on her, an affair she found out about when he publicly confessed. 

Hamilton had advised his son that no one really shoots in a dual, that he’d be fine.  

But it wasn’t true.  Phillip is shot, and dies with his father by him, helpless.  

This song, It’s Quiet Uptown, comes right after his death.  As Hamilton tries to make sense of this senselessness – and as the song says, learn to live with the unimaginable.    

Helpless

A few years ago, my mom decided to reclaim her attic, which resulted in a 3 box fedex delivery filled with remnants of my childhood.  

One of my favorite finds was small purple Hello Kitty diary which represented my 3rd and 4th grade years.  

Every entry is equally embarrassing and fascinating. 

One stand-out was an angry and frustrated tale of trying to teach my sister, who was two and a half years younger than me, how to ride a bike.

I was 8 at the time, so she was not quite 6.

Dear Diary,

My sister is so ungrateful!

I was trying to teach her how to a ride a bike today,

And she won’t listen.  

She was soooo cranky and stubborn.  

I was just trying to help!

I decided she was destined to never ride a bike. She was a bad listener, and she was mean.  And stupid.

This is how we all react, in the face of helplessness.

We get angry, or frustrated.  We blame.

Maybe we lecture, explain or criticize.

Help is about connection.  Helplessness cuts that connection off. 

We take helplessness personally. In my mind, my sister hated me.  Rejected me. Her inability to take my help was about me. 

Or, she was particularly stubborn, and mean.  I was helpless because of her.

Helplessness feels personal. Even though it almost always indicates that there’s stuff going on that has nothing to do with us.  

Like, a developmental stage that wasn’t yet ready to bike ride.

I start here because helplessness isn’t just a matter of life’s most extreme situations – losing a child, a cancer diagnosis…let alone a duel.  Helplessness is regular. Daily.  Familial.  

It’s our good advice our friends won’t take. It’s our aging parents.  It’s our own aging. It’s depression, and overwhelm, and stress. Helplessness is addiction. Illness. And debt. It’s job our partner can’t find. And it’s the scrolling through news on auto-pilot, seeing in an instant, one unimaginable thing after another. So much helplessness..

And helplessness is when the news gets personal – like with our compa, the woman some of our members are companioning while she awaits a decision on her asylum application. So many experiences of helplessness.  

Helplessness is born in compassion – it starts in the hope to fix, to heal, to pick up all the broken pieces, find the glue, and get to work.  It’s why helplessness can be so painful, such a shock – because we come with all our good intentions, our blessing to offer – and we meet instead – rejection. We find the limits of what we can, and cannot control.  

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, I’m guessing many of us know this prayer written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1940s. 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It became connected to the work of Alcohol Anonymous – as they embraced the critical step of sorting out of what is within and  beyond our control. The discerning work to not over, or under -estimate our personal power. 

Which it turns out, we aren’t always great at. Our brains trick us to believing we can fix something we actually can’t; and just as much, we can believe we have no agency or power when actually there’s a lot we could do to help.   

“Learned helplessness” is a psychological term for those times or situations where we feel helpless, but we actually aren’t. Learned helplessness can be the result of trauma – where we experience something extremely painful that we didn’t have control over, and then we apply this feeling of powerlessness broadly.

It doesn’t have to be from trauma though – one study I read talked about how students who don’t do well on math tests, as an example, come to experience a feeling of helplessness with any math-related task. Learned helplessness is an overgeneralization of our our sometimes-real-helplessness – it’s a flawed reading of reality, and even more, it’s a breakdown in our imagination.

We can’t imagine all that is possible, all the ways we might act, all the ways that life remains available to us, that life is still becoming.  Life constricts, we constrict. Pessimism has a strong correlation to feelings of helplessness.

Writer Parker Palmer talks about being caught in this sort of helplessness as a major component of his depression.  No matter what he did, or what help others tried to offer, he could not pull himself out of this dark place. He says people would come to him and say “why are you sitting here, being depressed? It’s beautiful outside.  Go feel the sunshine.  Smell the flowers.” Or, “You’re so successful, you’ve written so well. Why are you depressed?”

Next week, for our Easter service, we’re going to explore more about offering help that is actually helpful. But spoiler alert –it’s not usually helpful to try to argue someone out of their pain. This kind of admonishment often only makes us feel worse.

As Palmer says, of course, he knew “intellectually, that it’s sunny out and the flowers are lovely and fragrant, but [he couldn’t] really feel it in [his] body.” He started to feel like a fraud. Which of course made him feel even more helpless. I imagine his friends and family were also feeling pretty helpless during this time. This incredible person, who they loved, with so many gifts to offer the world, was caught and disconnected – they wanted to do something to make it, make him better. They needed him.  The world needed him. They had to be able to fix it.  Or convince him to fix it. 

It isn’t really a thing as far as I can tell, but it seems like we should call this learned over-helpfulness.  Because we are taught these things too.  We are conditioned to save, to fix, or at least to keep trying to fix – far beyond what it is actually ours, to fix, or control.

Hardly any of us are taught to give up – taught to accept things as they are – to let go of the struggle.

We aren’t taught to pause, to wait in the midst of the struggle. To be patient.  To see what happens that is not through our own doing or our own fixing.

The experience of helplessness is often a practice of patience. Realizing that help doesn’t always come on our private timetable.  Or in the way we’d like it to come.

Helplessness invites us to be present and open to all we do not know. Open and present to the other, to their suffering – to grow in empathy. And helplessness invites us to be open and present to ourselves, to our own suffering, and struggles. 

Often when we are trying to help someone else, especially over-help someone else our own pain is at play.  Some feeling is at risk that we don’t want to feel, some experience we don’t want to experience. A deep need that is just ours.  A need to be needed. To do. Whatever it is that we’ve unconsciously connected to our own worth.

Only when we pause, and get in touch with these feelings, can we breathe into the letting go. Breathe into the love that holds us, regardless of our doing, our fixing, our saving regardless of how helpful, or helpless we are.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Palmer did eventually receive help that was helpful during this time – from a friend who didn’t offer him anything that most folks would call “helpful.” Every afternoon, his friend would sit with him, and with his permission, take off his socks and shoes, and massage his feet. He hardly ever said anything. He offered no advice.  No encouragement.  Only occasionally he would say something like, “I can feel your struggle today.” He would simply report, from time to time, what he was intuiting about how Palmer was doing.  

We cannot be argued out of our helplessness. But we can be seen in our struggle, in our suffering.  And in being seen – fully we can begin to see more fully. Being accepted in our helplessness helps us to see more fully the help that is available, both within, and beyond ourselves.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

Actually, it’s not actually about knowing the difference. In my experience. Sorting out of what things we can change, and what we cannot –it’s not really about knowing.

Not in the usual way we mean knowledge, at least. It’s not facts, information, reason.

Because sometimes we can know exactly what we cannot change, and yet refuse to know.  Sometimes the knowing is too much, we close off, we shut down. And sometimes the too much overtakes us and we go the other way.

Helplessness leads to surrender, and we fall into the arms of whatever might be there.   

And we pray.

Like Alexander Hamilton, and his wife, in those days following their son’s death, we surrender to the quiet where we try to learn to live with the unimaginable. In these moments, I have come to think of the task of helplessness as less a matter of knowing, and more as a matter of forgiving.

As in: can we forgive life for not going completely according to plan?  Can we forgive ourselves for not being able to stop it, or fix it, or save it – whatever it is? Can we forgive our own limitations? Our own humanness? Can we forgive everyone, everywhere for their being human too? 

This sort of forgiveness is a practice psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach describes as the beginning of a radical acceptance. 

Which is not the same as saying everything is ok, that we’re good with it. This is important because we can get stuck here – thinking if we accept the unimaginable – then we are condoning it.  But acceptance is not the same as agreement.

Acceptance is a practice that invites us to release ourselves from judgment, release ourselves from disconnection, from the hardening and shutting down to life. Acceptance frees us into compassion, radical compassion. Acceptance, and the forgiveness that brings us to it is a practice of softening, rather than hardening our hearts, so that we can free ourselves into life’s blessing that is still available – still there.

And so we can be fully present to the gift of life that is arising even…now.

Just over 13 years ago, my partner and I brought home a 2-day old baby girl from the hospital. It was what they call, a high risk placement.

Her birth mom still had parental rights. Which meant, we were extremely aware of our own helplessness. Every call that came, we thought was the call saying she couldn’t stay.

The way we dealt with this helplessness was by taking up the very important and serious task of – worrying.

Sometimes worry works like this – like a proxy for being able to do something when we know we can’t do anything. Like a task that signals to ourselves and the world – we may not be able to stop the bad thing from happening, but we can worry about it.  

We lived a little on edge – all the time.  We wouldn’t let our friends buy us anything. And we didn’t want to name her, or act as if she was going to stay.  Imagine the heartbreak, we thought, if she has to leave, and we are left with all her stuff.  We couldn’t.

A couple weeks after we picked her up, I was talking to my sister – the same one who refused to take my help to learn to ride a bike – I was telling her how we knew that she might not get to stay, we were being careful not to love her too much. 

She responded with a real sisterly love, “That is so stupid.” 

“To her, you’re already her moms.  You can try to be all distant, but you’ll miss out on what’s happening right now, and if she doesn’t stay – your hearts will still be broken.”

And then she made me deal. “How about if I take your worry for you? I’ll worry for you, every day.  So you know it’s taken care of. But then you don’t have to do it.  And instead, you can just love her, and name her, and be her moms – now.”

Some call this invitation my sister made me, a “worry fast.”  When we actively choose to not worry – for some period of time, we just choose not to.  Worrying keeps us locked in the future that may or may not arrive – and it keeps us disconnected from what’s happening right now.

Letting go of worry, we accept what is – regardless of whether we can control it, or change, it or fix it. We accept this moment just as it is, we forgive and accept ourselves just as we are, and open ourselves to the beauty and the grace that has been there all along.

Even without someone else willing to take on your worries – anyone can go on a worry fast – for an hour a day, or more, or less. Whatever break you’ll let yourself take – so that you can be fully present to all of this.  A couple days after that call with my sister, we held our little baby at the kitchen table, and lit a candle, and named her.  

Gracie Ella. It means, she who is a gift.  

Everyday, in ways sometimes catastrophic, but more often, casual, life offers us these moments where we get to experience our helplessness. These chances to practice giving up. Giving up, and letting go, and forgiving – everything.

This chance to stop worrying and to radically accept life – as it is right now.  Even when we find ourselves face to face with the unimaginable.  

And, in the giving up, we have the chance to receive the gift, the grace – the help that holds us always, and connects us. The help that as Anne Lamott says – is always on the way.

I was in my second year of seminary when I learned how to pray. It wasn’t in a class, or a field placement – technically I learned prayer in those official places. But the real lesson happened at home.  One night. 

My children were about 3 and 10 months. 

My partner was away for work, and entirely inaccessible even for a consult. Which meant: I was on my own, with my kids, and with a sermon that needed to be done by Sunday.  

But I had a plan – the kids would go to sleep at their usual early bedtime, and I would write and everything would be fine. 

The evening started out promising.  I put Josef to bed first, no problem. Then Gracie, also smooth.

She was almost asleep when she called out – mama, I sick.  

I ran in, and saw that she’d thrown up, everywhere.  

Before I could even figure out how to respond – Josef was crying, loud and insistent, from the other room. 

I ran to him, he hadn’t thrown up – thank God – but he was crying hard.  

I went back to Grace and started cleaning up. She was crying then too.  

I got her cleaned up, they were both wailing.  

I grabbed each of them under an arm, and brought them upstairs, where I sat down, and felt – nauseous.  

And completely overwhelmed. Scared.  I started crying too.

And right then I heard myself say, “Help.”

It was quiet at first…. “help.”  

The second time it got a little louder “Help!” and the third time, it was louder but also more polite – “Please, HELP. I need HELP.”

We’d been talking about prayer in my spiritual direction. I’d confessed I still didn’t really get it.  I always got stuck on the address part.  Like, to whom it may concern? 

But in that moment I couldn’t care less about the who. All that mattered was the need I had for real help.  All that mattered was the word coming out of my mouth. Letting myself know: it was true. I couldn’t do this on my own.

I cried for a while.  Finally I called a friend, a mom with slightly older kids, she talked me through it.  Eventually, the kids passed out, and the sermon got done.  And Sunday came as, I’ve learned, it always does.  

Like a majority of folks in the US, asking for help makes me – uncomfortable. And that’s even assuming I know I need help.  Which a lot of times, I don’t. At least, not until it’s way late in the game – like, two little kids sick and crying and a sermon to write kind of late in the game.  

It’s hilarious really.  That this thing that we all need, this thing we are hard wired for – as stewardship consultant Mark Ewert says “we are all joined in a common neediness” –even still, we are so bad at it – so often.

We end up in these totally absurd situations, trying to prove to ourselves that we can do it on our own. While being helpful – as in, giving someone else help – is a source of pride, or honor – receiving help often comes with feelings of embarrassment, even shame.

These feelings often go back to deep messages we hold, especially from our childhood. Think about the messages your family gave you about asking for help. Not just verbal, but in the way you lived.

Were you the sort of family that prized “doing things yourself? Or, letting others in?” (See this article for more info)

In my family, for example, we volunteered at a second hand store, folding and sorting – but we didn’t shop there.  

Even though we probably should have.  We could have. But we didn’t.  That’s a message.

We learned we might have needs, but others were needier.  Our problems, our needs – weren’t that big of a deal, not compared to others’.  And our small needs, they’d somehow, just take care of themselves….we’d take care of ourselves.

We were help-givers, not help-receivers.   

A lot of us got messages like this growing up – messages that prize self-reliance, and independence.  Messages reinforced across our whole lives. It’s the water we swim in, in the US – this deep story where independence and self-sufficiency are the ideals.

So that even if we do need help, we don’t want help. Help means feeling feelings we don’t want to feel, after all.  Needing things and people in ways we don’t want to need.  Even when it seems obvious we should seek help…Or maybe, even more, asking for help means we’d have to know what we need – what would be “helpful.” 

But so often in our neediest moments, we don’t know.  We’re flooded instead by the struggle, the emotions. Even help that might be helpful later just feels overwhelming, imposing.   

Help means acknowledging all the places we don’t have it together.  Our weaknesses, our inadequacies, even our incompetence.  Mostly, it means acknowledging our limits.  

Help is vulnerable. Which for women is plenty difficult.  But it’s usually even more difficult for men. Vulnerability challenges some of the fundamental things our culture teaches us about masculinity.  What it means to be a man.

As Brene Brown talks about this tightrope that men walk.  “Where any sign of weakness elicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.”

Even though, as Brene Brown’s research has shown, vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, of belonging – there’s no pathway to courage without it.  Musician Amanda Palmer gets to the heart of these complications in vulnerability in her 2014 TED Talk, the art of asking. Before she was able to make a living playing music, Palmer was a street performer. “The 8-foot bride.”

She’d put out a can and then freeze in place until a random stranger would come by and help her out.

This is a really important moment, in our core messages about help.  

The moment after we’ve asked for help.  As in, did help come? In your growing up stories, does help come? From where, and how? And what were you taught about how to respond? 

In this sort of moment, we learn early, and then over and again, how reliable people are, or aren’t, in meeting our needs. We learn to believe that help is available, or that it is not.  We learn to trust, or to fear; to hope and heal, or to hide, and protect.

We are often taught to say thank you, no matter what is being offered our way, even if it is not all that helpful, or needed.  Less often we’re taught how to be open enough so that people know the actual needs we have.  What helpful would even mean.

We learn rarely how to open ourselves to the opportunity that receiving gives us for connection we rarely learn how to be close to another, which is the main opportunity that receiving help gives us.  

It was this opportunity that Palmer learned to embrace as a street performer.  When those random strangers would give her money, she would respond by offering them a flower, and then, she’d hold eye contact.

And she says, “we would sort of fall in love a little bit…” She saw them.  And in their return gaze, they would tell her, thank you.  Nobody ever sees me.

It became really unclear then, who was the giver, who was the receiver – who was helping whom. 

Eventually, Palmer’s music took off enough that she stopped being the 8-foot bride.

But she realized she missed the direct connection she’d had with people.  So, after all her shows, she’d meet with her fans, and make that same connection.  There, she “made an art out of asking people to help” her.  Eventually this after-show connection transferred to twitter, where she regularly asked for help, and they’d respond…

She needed a piano to practice on. Done.

Home cooked food. All the time. Done.    

Most of all, places to stay while touring.  Done.

One time, she and her crew showed up to a Miami home where their host was an 18-year-old girl, and her family – all undocumented immigrants.  

That night, her whole family took the couches, while Palmer and her crew were in beds.

As Palmer says, “I lay there thinking, these people have so little. Is this fair? 

“In the morning, her mom took [Palmer} aside and she said to [her] in broken English, ‘Your music has helped my daughter so much. Thank you for staying here. We’re all so grateful.”

And I thought, this is fair. This is this.’ (Flower, eye contact)

Eventually, her band signed with a label and their album sold 25,000 copies – and the label considered it a failure.

At that same time, a guy came up to Palmer after a show and handed her $10 because he’d burned one of her CDs off his friend.  

In this moment, everything came together for her.  She decided to give away her music for free from then on. And…she decided to ask for help from her community to make that possible.  Help so she could keep making music.

She set a goal of $100,000. She ended up with $1.2 million. All from about 25,000 people.

It was an incredibly vulnerable thing to do – risky.  But that’s not how she thought about it.  

“I don’t see [it] as risk.” She says, “I see [it] as trust.  

Through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. When you connect with them, people want to help you. When we really see each other, we want to help each other.”

As with a lot of things in the US today, it’s fair to blame the Puritans for our struggles around help.  

Their messages about hard work, sacrifice, and even suffering being indicators of worth have infiltrated the foundations of our country, and shaped the foundations of Unitarian Universalism.  

So much that if there isn’t struggle, or even pain involved, maybe we don’t deserve whatever it is we’re hoping for.

Despite a sense among us that – maybe this is not the whole story, this ideal is still perpetuated in so many ways in our culture today.

For example…

This is just one of the thousands of images that were posted on Instagram with #blessed just this past Friday.

Vast googling reveals that #blessed was first used in about 2011 as a way for posters to acknowledge blessings they felt in their life.  Blessings, particularly from God.

It quickly became one of the most popular hashtags, so that now you can even find it printed on clothing.  

Not only is your photo evidence of your #blessed, but just look at your whole life.  #blessed.

Anyone ever posted something using the #Blessed? Or maybe you thought about it, but didn’t?

Maybe because you knew that over the past few years, this hashtag has become, as one writer put it, “one of the most annoying hashtags on the internet.”

“Calling something ‘blessed’ (this is a quote from the New York Times) has become the go-to term for those who want to boast about an accomplishment while pretending to be humble, fish for a compliment, acknowledge a success (without sounding too conceited), or purposely elicit envy.”

Instead of acknowledging the gifts you’ve received – that is the help we’ve received – #blessed has become a way to say – look at how amazing I am, how successful.   

How good I have it.

How much you wish you were me.

How great our lives are, and so how little help we actually need.

OK, I didn’t use the hashtag, but in some ways, it doesn’t matter.  

A lot of social media works in the same way.

Look at my amazing life. How cute my family is.  How we have it all together.

This photo was taken last July.

We were in Glenwood Springs, at the adventure park at the top of the mountain – which is amazing, no doubt.

We had just arrived at the park, after a long, hot drive from the town where we were staying.  It should’ve been a two-hour drive, but it was more like five, because construction. 

We were not our best selves on that drive – my family.  

We had to play the quiet game at least twice.  

But you don’t see that in the photo.

You don’t see our frustration, or the anxiety that grew as we realized it was possible we wouldn’t make it.

And you don’t see the café we stopped at along the way where the owners had just baked fresh bread, and how the smell and its warmth was just the comfort the kids needed to trust that maybe this was enough.

A few months before this photo, our dog had to have really expensive surgery.  The photo also does not show the vet bills, or the credit card interest rates, and the stress Carri and I felt trying to figure out how we would manage it all. Up until a few weeks before this, we were pretty sure we couldn’t afford this trip at all. Until one of my friends offered that we could stay with her, the whole week.  

The photo doesn’t show her either.  Or the reality that we would’ve never been able to go on vacation without her help.

Actually our dog had surgery twice.  He didn’t heal right; they did it over.  

And the vet took responsibility – absorbed the second surgery cost – even though maybe we just didn’t do a great job with the post-recovery instructions. The photo doesn’t show it, but definitely, if not for our vet’s help, we’d never have been there either.

There’s a whole web of people this photo doesn’t show.  A whole web of help that made this moment possible – by which I mean – a whole web of need. Behind this “blessed,” there’s actually a mess.  Our mess. Our need. 

And that’s how it always is.  

The picture at the end, the life that looks “amazing,” that’s not actually not the blessing.  

The blessing is the path that came before, the help that came, in response to that mess, and the courage to receive.  Every #Blessed life is born first in our common neediness – and then the help that rose to meet that need.

Mark Nepo says, “on the surface, giving and receiving are about exchanges.  I need. You give.  I feel grateful. You feel good about yourself. I feel indebted.  I give back. We take turns. But below the surface of things, giving and receiving become indistinguishable – [Just like in Amanda Palmer’s street performance] The aim is not to simply move things from one person to another, but to keep the gift of life flowing. The pulse of being alive moves like blood circulating in the body, and giving and receiving like arteries and veins, are both necessary.”

Amanda Palmer didn’t just go to her fans for places to stay.  She also went to them for a literal place to land. Couch surfing, and crowd surfing, are basically the same thing, she says.  You fall into the hands of others, and you trust them.  

Which is what all help is, really.  Help is about trust.  And connection. It’s about belonging.  In the asking, and receiving, and in the offering. In the place where all of these meet, help is the falling into each other, and letting the gift of life freely flowing.  

“We need to face each other.” Palmer says. “We need to give and receive fearlessly…to ask for help, without shame.”

We must come to see, and to say – whether clumsily and awkwardly, or boldly and courageously – Help.  Please, Help.

And then we need to stay put, and receive, generously. Knowing, that in our common neediness, in the mess of it all, we are for real #blessed.

I kept imagining how it might have gone.

I keep thinking of it like my Universalist Dream Ballet version of the horrifying/captivating Senate hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. That is, a version of events fueled by my most idealistic notions of redemption and reconciliation. A version that would obviously include spectacle, ornate costumes and over-the-top musical flourishes, and/or non-linear plot devices—because it’s that disconnected from reality.

Which did not stop me from thinking about it.

Like most everyone I know, I listened to almost all of Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony. I listened reflexively, out of loyalty more than curiosity. After all, I’ve been off-book on this script for most of my life. All the words, the players, how it turns out. I’ve had it all down at least as far back as that same life stage they were working so hard to recall in the course of the hearings.

There are plenty of things I don’t remember about being a teenager. Still, there will always be those things I will never forget, even if I try…. My first long, slow, increasingly desperate survey of the school cafeteria wondering who to sit with.

Staring down the swimming lane at state finals. Beating all the boys at the math competition. Getting the love note from the boy everyone said liked me. Saying goodbye to my sisters and my parents once they dropped me and all my stuff at the dorms. And a month or so later, that night in the frat house.

The therapist who greeted me the day I realized the memory was not going away agreed with me, it wasn’t rape. But it was questionable— in the consent arena. Fuzzy lines made fuzzier by alcohol and the dark rooms of Greek row. I was 17 when I went to college, still very much a teenager. A couple years older than Dr. Blasey-Ford, the same age as Judge Kavanaugh when he held her down, and covered her mouth, and she wondered if she would survive.

I don’t remember everything about it. Definitely not enough to withstand Lindsey Graham and his temper tantrums. But enough to still know his name. His face. His smell.

In my Dream Ballet version of the hearing Brett Kavanaugh still doesn’t remember doing it, still isn’t sure. It isn’t required for reconciliation to begin, I’ve realized. Because I’ve seen it enough now, the power of denial. The stories we tell about ourselves, stories that if you topple them, would mean toppling over entirely. Facts are no match for these stories. And at 53, he’s been telling himself these stories for decades. “I went to an all-boys Catholic high school where I was focused on academics and athletics and going to church every Sunday and working on my service projects and friendships.”

These sorts of moments challenge Universalists (and others oriented towards a commitment to compassion and our common humanity). Because we don’t believe in writing anyone off. Because we often don’t have a fully formed theology of evil. Because we do have an over-functioning theology of human goodness. Not to mention a totally unscientific faith in human reasoning. Because we too often confuse today’s US court system with anything resembling real restoration.

So, in a different world, in the world of my Dream Ballet, how does restoration happen?

It is a process that requires multiple steps, what I call the Five Rs:

1. Recognize yourself in ways you have not been willing to know yourself before. Recognize the injury. Study it. Not just from your own life perspective, but also from an empathetic view that imagines how someone else might have seen it. Recognize your role, without excuses or explanations. Accept responsibility.
2. Remorse comes naturally after a full recognition. Remorse is more than regret. Remorse means we know ourselves as the one who has caused another pain.
3. It’s this real remorse that inspires our Refusal to ever repeat the same mistake again. Without this commitment, all the other steps are meaningless.
4. It’s not always possible to Repair the damage that was done, but trying matters too. Do whatever you can to put the pieces back together. Repay the money. Restore the reputation.
5. And finally, it requires Revelation. As in, your own out-loud utterance of every other R—out loud to the person you injured, out loud to the surrounding community. Out loud to God, the universe. Bring what has been previously hidden and secret into the open so that it can be accountable.

Despite what any of us might wish, time does not automatically do the work of the Five Rs. Even the time that passes from age 17 to 53. A law degree does not do it either. Nor does a successful career as a judge, or a nice house with a beautiful family. The work requires actual effort. Intention. Starting with that first move towards recognition.

In my fantasy version of the hearing, Brett Kavanaugh does not have to topple over. (Even in a Dream Ballet, we can’t imagine that denial can be undone in one moment.) But even an opening towards the pain Dr. Blasey-Ford was expressing would be a start, a move towards restoration. Rather than amplifying his own sense of pain and entitlement, channeling anger for what was being done to him, in my Dream Ballet Kavanaugh would look toward repairing what was broken.

He would show a willingness to acknowledge that it is possible that he did not have all the information. It is possible that his memory is imperfect. (Dr. Blasey-Ford could teach him a little about the scientific reasons why memory can be deceptive and self-protective.) Any move towards wholeness would have to begin here. With an acknowledgment that there are always things out of our view, a humility, and a willingness to see anew.

Imagine how differently things might have gone if he’d made even the slightest move towards this recognition. In the courtroom or, even better, in the first hour he learned of her coming forward. Or even more incredibly, in any of the days between that night at the party and the day his name was put forward for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the US (so-called) justice system.

Imagine. Instead of trying to accept that we are appointing a self-righteous sexual predator to the Supreme Court, we could even be giving thanks that we’d be appointing someone who knows what real justice looks like. This is the power of this path of real turning, real redemption and restoration.

I know. It’s a wild fantasy, but it’s a fantasy we need not abandon. We can hold this fantasy at the forefront when we are talking to our kids about the lessons of this hearing. About the lessons of the #MeToo movement. About the sorts of humans that we can and must be for each other. About consent. And respect. And love.

We can and must also speak about failure, and regret, and repair. Because we are not perfect creatures. None of us. Science actually shows that we are mostly profoundly irrational, illogical, inconsistent. But I want my kids to know not only that if they have something terrible happen to them, they can and should expect this degree of accountability, and repair—but also that if they do something terrible, there is a path to restoration. Because it remains true that no one is ever outside the possibility of redemption. And because even when all seems lost, truth continues to be revealed. Even for Judge Kavanaugh.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211109232955/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_04/01.mp3

Sermon: Knowing Unknown 

When I was seven, I became obsessed with a series of wooden sculptures that hung on each side of the walls of the sanctuary, in my little Catholic church where I grew up.  They were spaced out equally, so that they one after another, they told the story of Jesus in his final hours.

queen of angels catholic church, port angeles, WA, courtesy of google. see the wooden statues? still there.

Each year – about this time (we’re in the first week of Lent) a group of women would gather every day to move from one figure to the next.  One suffering scene to the next. There must have been men who came and prayed the stations. But only the women came as a group.

They exuded an incredible combination of both utter boredom and total commitment.  Commitment to this muttering of words that they had long ago disconnected from, commitment to this kneeling, sitting, standing, moving – and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Yet somehow, at seven, all the mysteries of life felt to me contained in this routine, this rhythm.

I was in second grade at the attached Catholic school, and I had been watching them.

One day I asked my teacher if maybe during recess, I could go over and join them.

I wish I could remember my teacher’s face, to get such a question.

But all I remember is that she said yes.

I don’t remember the women being especially warm when I showed up, or willing to look after me.  Which was fine. I didn’t feel I needed looking after.  I came for the sculptures, the story. I came because I too knew the words by heart, and wanted to recite them with the same regularity, the same duty.  I came to move from one station to another, with others who had moved in the same way for years, all within this story of suffering and salvation.    

I came most of all, because I needed to be a part of this knowing, a part of the mystery – the knowing, and the mystery.   

That same year I went to my priest and asked him what I should to do to become a saint. His face, too, I’m guessing would’ve been a sight.

I had other questions: about God, and Jesus, and what it meant to live a good life. But this question – about how to be a saint – was the real reason I asked to meet with him.  How I could become like the saints in my book, that I had read over, and over. 

Theresa of Avila.  Catherine of Sienna. Joan of Arc. Theresa the Little Flower.

Just like those who gathered to pray the stations of the cross – and in contrast to the priests, or the kids who got to be altar BOYS, or the bishops, the saints were often women.  Sometimes really young women – teenagers.  Even though their middle-ages, plague and crusades-filled stories – were ridiculously far from my own cozy 1980s childhood in the pacific northwest…. somehow their ways of knowing felt accessible to me. Like a path I could travel, if I could just learn how.  

The saints seemed to know – everything.  Not just a piece of truth, but the most important truth.

Just as importantly, they were recognized for this knowing – in their times, and now. Their voices mattered, their lives were lifted up as examples.  

They were powerful.

Their example was what drove me to spend my recess time studying sacrifice, and stillness, around a series of wooden sculptures, with women mostly my grandmother’s age.  (I know it seems unbelievable, but I swear it’s true!) 

It is a different sort of knowledge that comes in these sorts of rituals, and these spaces. Here we learn the wisdom of our bodies, of community, the wisdom held, and released through the breath, and in breathing together.  It is the sort of Truth that comes through direct experience, without observation, or interpretation.  

Truth in the now, in our Being.  Truth before words, before story, before meaning. When we’re children, we accept this sort of knowing intuitively, readily, automatically.  Our ignorance is a gift that allows us just to dive in, and receive.  It’s only later, when we try to “make sense” of things, when we try to attach language, and meaning, and logic – then, the spell breaks, and this once-intuitive-wisdom becomes harder and harder to access.  

It can be a kind of grief, this breaking of the spell; even when there is also liberation and release – the grief can linger.  So much, we wish we could go back to unknowing, so that we could know in this way, again.

The mystical tradition – and many of the saints were mystics – is what happens when the unknowing stays, and the spell remains unbroken.   Mysticism is Truth disconnected from language – and any attempt to connect words or concepts to mysticism degrades it, by definition.

Which makes a sermon on mysticism basically ridiculous.  

It reminds me of the first time I heard the Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka speak.  She started by reminding us that “God” is a word to describe an experience, and a reality.  But before the word was the experience.  The experience is first order spirituality. The language we put around it, the meaning we try to make, this is second order.

All theology, and most of what we do together, it’s second order.

It’s why my theology professor used to say – remember, all theology is a lie. But unfortunately, as I said last week, even when we are wrong, we often start to believe we are right.   

Julian of Norwich – a powerful Christian Mystic once proclaimed: “I am made of God.” 

In his recent podcast on mysticism, Mike McHargue shares her words – and then he adds: “Whatever that means.”

It’s the perfect phrase as we attempt to talk about mysticism.  An open acknowledgment of an open hand, as with our meditation, knowing that these utterances are an inadequate, and yet all we have.  

Philosophers Walter Terence State, and Douglas W. Shrader are two of the more well-known scholars who’ve also made this attempt to put into words that which is beyond words.  And so I’m going to thread their work together, and offer what the 10 things that mystical experiences have in common. 

The first one is what we’ve already named.  Their ineffability. They are beyond words.

Second, mystical experiences are transient– they don’t last.

Third, there is a sense that this experience happened to you – you didn’t make it happen.

Fourth, mystical experiences put you in touch with a unity of opposites.  There is no separation between you, and not-you. You realize “You are God – in Drag.”  Everything is everything, and you are a part of everything. But also, you are nothing, as everything is nothing. 

Fifth – there is a timelessness about the experience – it transcends time, and space.

Sixth – there’s a sense that you have encountered your true self.  Or Truth itself. Truth that was there all along, but just hidden. You have been a “divine elephant with amnesia, trying to live in an ant hole.”

Seventh, there’s a sacred quality about the whole experience.  It’s why people often end up using religious words – even though still those words are inadequate.

Eighth – these experiences leave you with a deeply felt positive mood.  They are good for you.

Especially for those who have experienced trauma or who struggle with mental health conditions.

Nine.  The experience feels real.  It doesn’t feel like a dream or like you imagined it.  It feels real.  Which is actually complicated – and made more so by those same brain studies.  Researchers can now track mystical experiences in the brain, which means, we can prove, there’s a there there.

But also they’ve found that people with damage to the frontal or temporal lobes are much more likely to report mystical experiences.  Which makes some say that maybe mystical experiences are “simply” the workings of a damaged brain.  This is basically impossible to settle – all we can say for sure is that just because something shows up in the brain does not mean it is ONLY in the brain.  And as with most things, realness is mostly a matter of what happens next.

Which is number ten – what comes next.  After a mystical experience – there is a positive change in the self.  A lasting change.  So the positive mood and health effects don’t just happen in the short term – they stay.

If we use these criteria to describe mystical experiences – researchers estimate that 30 – 40% of people in North America have had a mystical experience.

Which does not mean that 30-40% of people are mystics…..because mystical experiences are not the same as mystical practices.

You can have a lifelong mystical practice – and yet never have a mystical experience (this is called: frustration); and you can have no practice at all yet still have an experience that we would call “mystical.”

What’s more, while all of the world’s religious traditions contain and some even center mysticism, traditional religiosity is not a pre-requisite for mysticism.  There’s an entire field of philosophy called phenomenology –  which basically means, the experience of things, rather than the meaning.  It’s like, the heat of the flame, the smell of the alcohol burning – rather than the meaning of the chalice, these phenomenon are the thing you experience.  We can experience and notice, without meaning-making,  and allow ourselves to be filled with wonder.  

When this wonder transform into an expansive wonder about everything – all in a deeply mysterious way that overtakes you – this too is mysticism.  No religious language or theism required. 

I don’t know if this happens so often with the heat of the flame, but maybe – with the wind on your arm, the aspens singing, the light vast across and through the clouds, maybe there, a kind of transcendent beauty has overtaken you – everything coming into clear focus, while also dropping away – 

Maybe there you have felt – both how small, and how great you are.

This too is mysticism.

It is what Ralph Waldo Emerson was trying to describe when he wrote of about being a “transparent eyeball.”

I put the full quote on the cover of the order of service – it’s from his 1836 essay Nature.

“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.”

This too is mysticism.

Emerson was a Unitarian minister – or at least he was until about four years before he wrote that essay, when he decided to resign.  

He was a part of a growing reform movement in and around Unitarianism at the time – what became known as Transcendentalism.  This group of reformers were responding to Unitarianism’s focus on rationalism, and tradition as sources of truth and authority. They didn’t believe that truth should come in in second-hand, or through anything other than a person’s direct experience.   Emerson especially thought the  preachers of his day were fake, inauthentic – and he wanted none of it.

When you learned about Transcendentalism, you probably heard it in relation to Emerson, or maybe Henry David Thoreau.  It’s less likely you heard about the women – Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody – for example incredible leaders, feminists, social reformers, and intellectuals. 

Women were drawn to Transcendentalism for the same reason women were drawn to early mysticism – the same reasons women gathered for the stations of the cross – the same reason I wanted to gather, too – it was a rare place where women were affirmed in our capacity to directly understand, and to know the Truth. 

This is the radical assertion of mysticism – that any and all of us have access to this knowing.

Despite my early start, I have spent much of my life entirely disconnected from this sort of knowing – caught instead in the broken spell. Like most of us, I got filled up with so many words, and ideas, and mental models – a different sort of knowledge that has been consistently rewarded, and rewarding. I have felt less a transparent eyeball, let alone God in drag – and more like a big brain, with an incidental body, and a bunch of terribly-inconvenient feelings.  

For much of my life I have studied mystical experiences, but I don’t have them.

But then, over these last few years, things shifted. Life shifted.  The world shifted. 

Just in the last year, I could point to at least 3 moments I’ve had that fit most if not all the 10 I listed. Life has shifted, the world has shifted, and I have shifted, as I have come to know a degree of pain, and grief, and lack of control – I just didn’t know before. 

I don’t believe I am alone.

I see it all across our progressive communities – in this community, in us.  As we have come to understand that answering the call of courageous love is inherently risky –  it’s why it’s called courageous after all.  Answering the call of courageous love often asks us to turn towards rather than away from suffering, and sacrifice – our own, and others.  Suffering that we cannot fix, maybe not ever.  We find ourselves feeling lost, ill equipped, ill prepared.  

Our big brains are not enough.

As one of my colleagues has said, the sort of problems we face today, we can’t simply “think” our way out of them.

The past few years have taught me – mysticism is not what happens when the spell never breaks. That’s maybe a childhood version of mysticism. Mysticism is actually what’s possible when the spell breaks, but then the breaking breaks, and then all knowing comes apart.  Mysticism is the surrender to unknowing after the knowing. It is the surrender that allows us to know everything.

“At the end of all my ideas, I glance freedom.”  Mike McHargue says.  “When I surrender to my limits, I glimpse the infinite.” 

As I lean in to the suffering that is everywhere, including, in me – I see also the beauty that is everywhere, and in everyone because as Julian says – they are made of God, too.

“Whatever that means.”

Sermon: You Make No Sense – Gretchen

This past week, the State of Oregon heard public comments for a Bill they were considering that would stop non-medical exemptions for vaccinations.

See, just across the Columbia river, officials in Clark County, Washington have just confirmed three new cases of measles, bringing the total to 68.  

I think we can officially un-declare the elimination of measles, a declaration we made almost two decades ago.  

My sister Kristina, a pediatric oncologist in Portland, provided comment for the hearing, and then later she was on the local news.

Kristina treats kids who are immune compromised, as in, they medically cannot get a vaccine, and they’d be in serious danger if they got measles.

In her interview she talks about how when she treats her patients, she is always balancing risk and reward, and in this case, if you aren’t immune compromised, getting vaccinated is extremely low risk and high reward – for everyone.

I told my sister that her interview was a little like having to go on the news to make the assertion that the earth revolves around the sun.  

Which, as Sean reminded us last week, was BIG NEWS in the 16th century.  But it should not be a surprise to anyone now – it should be SETTLED as fact. 

And yet.

Before my sister, they interviewed a mom who was against the bill.  She spoke on behalf of people who have settled instead around alternative facts, understandings that lead them to believe that my sister is wrong – the risks of vaccination are too high, for any child, especially their own.

The anti-vax movement started in 1990 when Andrew Wakefield published research asserting a link between vaccines and autism.  This research has been repeatedly discredited as bogus.  Repeatedly.  

And research showing what my sister said – that the risks are low and the benefits high – has been equally ubiquitous. And yet over this same period of time, parental worry and ambivalence towards vaccinations has continued to grow, so that it’s estimated that up to 25% of all parents in the US fall into a category researchers call “vaccine hesitant,” choosing to develop their own vaccination schedule rather than follow the recommended protocol. A small yet vocal sub-group of these are anti-vaccination entirely.

What’s even more fascinating, is that largely these same folks tend to be highly educated, with financial means.  As in, it’s not that they don’t get science, or that they can’t pay for health care.  And it’s not that they don’t care about their children – often the opposite, many care intensely – one researcher called them “uber-moms” – who also watch carefully their children’s diets and their environment to make sure their kids are safe, and healthy.  

They read articles and listen to interviews, obsessively in many cases, they share across parental forums, and with their friends…and they are bolstered by a number of well-known voices speaking about the dangers of vaccinations and the potential links to autism.  Including the voice of our current President.

This whole thing basically infuriates my sister – and others who are scientifically-oriented.  No matter how many times they point out the research, the reasoning, the rationale – the trend is going the other direction.

It’s a common phenomenon today, that some of us feel exasperated at others of us, for refusing to accept what feels to us like settled fact. It’s part of a cycle of outrage that can be so exhausting, a cycle that plays out not just with random strangers and high school classmates on the internet, but even in our workplace, within our families and friendship circles, in our schools, and in our neighborhoods, even our churches.

 Humans we have come to realize, make no sense.  And by humans, I don’t mean just mean other humans.

I mean you.  

All of you engineers out there, you STEM types, you Unitarians.  

Seriously, this is like Unitarian heresy, we’ve prized human reason for so long. Centered human rationality.  Prized – the “guidance of reason and science.” (that’s our 5th source) But seriously.  You make nosense. Just ask your kids.  Or your spouse. 

Don’t worry, I don’t either.   

None of us do.

I mean, did you know that Steve Jobs – the genius Steve Jobs – when he first received his cancer diagnosis, refused the earliest treatment because he wanted to try natural remedies? Only after 9 months did he go back for the traditional treatment, by which time it had already spread in ways that made it basically untreatable – if he would’ve done that first one, the success rates at that stage are really high. 

I mean, if Steve Jobs can be so terribly wrong, what chance do any of us have? 

Most of the time, all of us make no sense.  Our decision-making is often flawed, and our brains are terribly untrustworthy.  And worse, we’re clueless about this. Instead, we are pretty sure, most of the time, that we have carefully, rationally come to the logical, obvious, correct conclusion.

In her 2011 TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz asks a really great question.  She asks, what does it feel like to be wrong?

Think about it.  What does it feel like when you’re wrong?

Embarrassing? Uncomfortable? Irritating? Not good, right?

But Schulz reminds us – actually, that’s just what it feels like to realize you’re wrong.  Because when you’re wrong, but don’t realize it, it feels exactly the same as it feels to be right.

I thought about this a lot this week as I watched the news come in from the United Methodist General Conference.  They were deciding in a pretty finalized way if they would welcome gay lesbian bisexual trans and queer folks. Ultimately, they decided, they would not.  

Along the way there were many moments where people demonstrated just how it often we can feel exactly right, even when we are totally wrong.  It’s why psychologist Daniel Kahneman says that of all things in human behavior, he wishes he could rid us of over-confidence.  

“We have too much confidence in our beliefs. Overconfidence really is associated with a failure of imagination.  When you cannot imagine an alternative to your belief, you are convinced that your belief is true.  That’s overconfidence.  You look at failures, and overconfidence [always has] something to do with them.” (That’s from his interview with Krista Tippett)

Daniel Kahneman is best known for his work on behavioral economics, which blasted through the foundational principle of western economic theory – that humans are rational decision makers.  

Because, as Kahneman has said, rationality, for the finite human mind, is an impossibility.  Instead, we are filled with contradictions, and our decision-making processes are often illogical and faulty, based on shortcuts and assumptions instead of actual, intentional thinking.   

If I asked you why you believe what you believe about, say, “climate change, or whether you believe in some political position or other.”

Kahneman says, “Reasons come to your mind. But the reasons may have very little to do with the real causes of your beliefs.”  

Even yours.

Let me try to explain.  With this picture 

As you look, notice your thoughts.

What story have you started to create?

What do you imagine she’s about to do?

This thinking you’re doing, it just happens. It’s a kind of thinking that Kahneman calls our fast thinking.  “Automatic, quick, no sense of voluntary control.”

I’ve also heard this processing mode called ancient thinking, or even, the lizard brain – because it’s the way of thinking that developed as a means of survival.  

It uses patterns, mental models, heuristics to make quick automatic assessments. These mental models are useful, and efficient, especially if you are being chased by a wild beast in prehistoric times. They give us a quick way to make decisions – this angry woman is about to start yelling at me and I need to run the other way.  

They are useful, efficient…..and sometimes completely wrong.  

When 19th century minister and one of the founders of Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, declared his faith in human rationality, or when Unitarian Universalist minister Kendyl Gibbons recently said that “what we are willing to say about the universe…..is based exclusively on human reason,” I’m guessing that in either case, they were not talking about fast thinking. 

Instead, they were probably pointing to what Kahneman calls instead, slow thinking, or what I’ve also heard called “modern thinking.” 

Let’s look at one other thing…..

17 x 24 = ?

Go ahead, begin to try to answer it.  And again, notice your thoughts.  As you do, this process you’re in, this is slow thinking.  “Deliberate, effortful, orderly.” 

Slow thinking includes everything from this math problem to parking in a narrow space (unless you do it all the time for your job, in which case it may be able to be done by fast thinking).  Slow thinking definitely includes doing your taxes, as well as monitoring the appropriateness of your behavior in a social setting.   

Slow thinking is what makes friends, and nurtures connections.  And it’s what offers compassion and contemplates life’s big questions, including whether humans make sense. 

Anything that doesn’t come “naturally” requires slow thinking.  We think of ourselves as our slow thinking selves. Because slow thinking isn’t automatic.  It’s conscious, intentional, and careful.  Slow thinking inhibits us from acting on all those automatic thoughts of the fast thinking system. Instead, slow thinking carefully considers complexity, nuance, statistics, probability, risk. We think of ourselves as our slow thinking selves, but actually, the large majority of the time, fast thinking runs the show.

Because whereas fast thinking will jump into action, slow thinking has to decide if a given situation is really worth the effort, and in a lot of cases, decides it’s not.  Slow thinking is lazy, slow to engage (like it’s name implies), work-avoidant. 

But because we don’t think of ourselves as in terms of fast thinking, we “remember” our processing as slow. We believe we make decisions, not based on shortcuts – our feelings, our likes or dislikes, or on our cultural assumptions, or our upbringing….We believe that we engaged a complex analysis of logic and reasoning.

We have chosen to not vaccinate our child not because of the marketing strategy of the “natural” food movement, or because we have a mental model that distrusts authority, or because we have a desire to belong with a certain group, or because as a kid we really wanted to be and/or date Jenny McCarthy.

No.  We have done our research.  We are being cautious, independent, responsible, rational. 

It is always a risk, that what we believe is our slow thinking’s careful deliberative corrective to the automatic fast thinking system, is instead an apologist for it.

Take for example, the great and radical 19th century Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker. He was an abolitionist, who took in fugitive slaves – his fellow Unitarians turned their back on him, even as his congregation grew to be the largest in Boston. He believed that all people, of all races, had human dignity.  This was his religious faith as a Unitarian and Transcendentalist.

Yet, he was also committed to reason, and science as sources of truth.  And in his day, science and “reason” taught that there was a “hierarchy of racial superiority, and that race was the driving force behind human achievements…. science and his own observations convinced him that his own anglo-saxon tribe was the most advanced, and was at the forefront of human progress.”

It’s what we know now as one version of “Confirmation bias.” The tendency to see things that confirm our pre-existing mental models. It’s basically a conspiracy between the lazy slow thinking system, and the error-prone shortcuts of our fast thinking, all in a way that tricks us to believe – we were super thoughtful about this.

Throughout her recent interview with Kahneman, you can hear Krista Tippett trying to get him to give her some better news.  Some hope for our times.  

There must be a way we can get humans to be more reasonable, she says.  

And mostly, he says no.

But eventually, as she keeps trying, he concedes.  

There is, he says, one thing that could help: other people.

A group of us from Foothills went to go see the social psychologist Steve Robbins speak this past week, he was speaking on diversity and inclusion.  One of the first things he said was that human brains work best when they are surrounded by other people, and even more importantly, people who care about them, and who believe they matter.

Because while we are not good at recognizing the flaws in our own thinking, we are sometimes good at seeing the flaws in others.

 I know, you’re all thinking – I would be good at helping other people see the flaws in their thinking! 

No.  This is not the point.

I told my mom, after I saw one of her recent posts wondering why people wouldn’t just listen to facts to listen to the sermon today.  But not because I have the secret for how to get people to listen, but because in the end, I think it’s so important to remember we are only responsible for our own thinking.

Sorry, mom.  

But on that note, who among us likes it when someone tells us we’re wrong? It’s one reason why Steve Robbins says we don’t need random other people around us, we need people who care about us.  People who are invested in us, and in our growth. People who love us.  People who will mentor us – over the long haul.  Even if it turns out, we are not as rational, logical, and smart as we try to portray.

People who won’t run screaming when they see our flaws, but who will actually just lean in more, and love us more.  Even better than this, if some of these folks come from a different culture or background than we do….

Because while their mental models will still have flaws, they’ll at least be different flaws than our own. 

On the other hand…I know my partner is all of those things.  She loves me, respects me, won’t leave me if she sees how wrong I am. She’s invested in me, and in my growth. And still! I strongly dislike it and basically stop listening whenever she tries to point out my wrong-headedness.  

Which is why my answer to Krista Tippet’s question would add in one more thing.  Which is the need to pause.  And to practice pausing. 

So much of our world encourages, even requires fast thinking. Scrolling through my social media, I see in just seconds stories of friends’ major health scares, job loss, school plays, babies reaching milestones.  Between those, the latest complex international crisis boiled down to a one sentence headline, all interspersed with puppies.

It’s all so fast, and so much.

We don’t have time for curiosity, or nuance, for slow thinking. We need the efficiency of fast thinking just to keep up with all that comes our way. We’ve come to believe confusion is a luxury we cannot afford, forgetting that our confidence is actually our fast thinking brain caught up in half-truths.  

As Wendell Berry says, “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.” 

Which is why we need to practice the pause. Like a training for our brains.  A training to learn/re-learn how to focus, how not to be interrupted, how to get our lazy slow thinking systems to wake up, to show up, to engage. The best way to do this training is….whatever way will mean you keep doing it.  

Come to our meditation group on Mondays. Download a mindfulness app.  

Or, just spend 5 minutes, every morning, sitting and singing like we did in the story of Old Turtle. Singing has been shown to have very similar effects to silent meditation. 

Or, just sit, and breathe for those same 5 minutes.

Your brain will wander, and when it does, just bring yourself back.

This practice might be excruciating for a while, and maybe always.  That’s ok. Not everything is going to be fabulous.  Mostly your task is to try not to think there’s a right way to practice pausing, or a wrong way.  

And instead, just to keep practicing.  Paying attention, and as Mary Oliver would say, being astonished. The more we train our brains to pause, the more space we make to doubt ourselves, afterall, and our own thinking, that we can thinking again, and better.

In our history as a movement, we have talked a lot about cherishing our doubts, but less so have we cherished doubting ourselves.  Don’t worry, next week I’m going to come back around to how we should trust ourselves – and our capacity to know truth.  It’s a service on mysticism. 

But for today, let’s stay with the pause, and the doubt.  Cherish your doubts.  And try to remember, you, and we, make no sense. And in the remembering, maybe, we can make a little more.  

Reading – from Alain de Botton’s 2016 essay, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”  

It’s one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others.  We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well.

In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities.  Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day.  As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us.  One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t.

Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we marry the wrong person. We mustn’t abandon him or her, but only the idea…that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning. We need to swap this view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.  But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce.

Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.  The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste, but the person who can negotiate differences intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement.

It is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person.  Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Sermon – What Comes Next

There was a moment last Sunday, when Sean came out for the announcement of the results of the vote, this vote that represents the unique right of congregations in our tradition to call their own ministers – the congregation rose to cheer, the whole place was filled with joy, elation, and also relief.  Relief for many reasons, but especially because it indicated something important.  Something represented by a word we use to talk about ministers once we are called – we say we are settled ministers.

As in, we aren’t going anywhere.  

Now, in my rational mind I haven’t been worried at all – about Sean going anywhere, but the less rational parts in that moment felt the relief too. The relief that we could be – set.  For a time.  Settled. We can breathe a little, maybe rest, go on sabbatical…

It took so long to get here, we had weathered so much over the last five years to feel this stability.  But then – in that same moment,

I felt this visceral memory of my own call.

I’ve actually had two moments like we had last Sunday, two votes, and two calls. First, my call as associate, five years ago almost exactly.  Marc Salkin would be retiring a few months later, after more than two decades as the settled senior minister. After the vote people told me with a similar joy and relief, how much they appreciated that I’d keep things stable, and settled at least to a degree through Marc’s retirement.  Some of you know, however, that the interim period that came next was many things, but stable or settled? Not so much.  

Which is why, in the fall of 2015 when the congregation voted for my senior ministry call, the relief and the joy was even more profound.  I had people tell me that they were so glad I would be here to do their memorial. Which isn’t that unusual for someone to say when they feel a connection to a minister, but, I mean….people in their early 50s.  

We had worked so hard to get to that point, it was a relief.  To be able to count on a little predictability, to say that we’d made it, that we could breathe…. Little did we know what 2016 would bring, and 2017, and 2018…in our country and our culture, and in our congregation…We have not yet experienced a time that I would call – settled.  

In his book, The Course of Love, Alain de Botton reflects on the moments in relationships where we officially decide we’re in, that we’re committed – moments like a vote to call a minister.  

He’s talking about romantic relationships, but I think it applies in relationships of all sorts, and the way that we think about love in our culture.  Which is that we confuse these early moments, these starts – as the high point of love itself.

The stories we tell, and internalize – are all about the work it takes to get to these moments – this yes –  so that once there is commitment, everything else is well….happily ever after.  

As he says, “in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined future – or kill them off…..we seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”

The real work of love, after all, is not in the falling, but in the continuing – the real work of love is in what comes next.   

It was late 2014, when I got an email from church members. 

Late 2014 means about 8 months after that first glorious moment of relief and settling of my first call.  And 6 months after Marc’s retirement aka his unsettling.  Pretty much everything in this community, this network of relationships, in that moment, felt hard, and at risk.  

Those of us in leadership had not too long before received this other email from one of our members, the subject line said literally: “the church used to be such a joyful place.”  

When this email came to me, I knew I had to go see them, as soon as possible.  They were ready to leave, they felt alienated, and angry – for some specific reasons and also from a really generic sense of disorientation.  

I called and asked if I could come over. 

They said yes and before long we were at their kitchen table talking about our church.

Where we had been, what they were feeling now, what would come next.  They wondered if they should just take a break for a while, at least during the interim time. Before the next new settled minister. 

I looked at them, as they said this.  They were people who I knew had made this church, this community – all of this human goodness possible – for years.  

My heart was filled with gratitude, and anticipatory grief at the idea of their leaving.  

I said, you can do that.  If you must. There is no coercion in covenant, so it is always a choice that you have. But what I hope you’ll do instead, what we need you to do instead, is not to leave, but to lean in closer.  

Come more often, not less.  Show up even more – with your commitment, your care, your passion, and your pain.  This community needs you now more than ever.

And you know what is amazing? They said ok.  

Every Sunday from then on – pretty much the whole of the interim time, they came.  And with their help, and the help of many others, including many of you, we worked out a way forward through that time of transition, and change – which is to say, a time of grief,

And also re-birth.  Think of all we have become in these past few years….The vibrant community gathered here. The care we have sustained sisterhood groups. Food bank and one village one family and sanctuary and new emerging immigration work  

The real work of love is not actually in the settling, but in the what comes next.  

Two Sundays ago, Kristen shared a quote from writer Glennon Doyle:

“when you look closely at people, you end up loving them.” I appreciate this quote so much because what I think what she’s saying is that there’s always a story behind any given behavior.  There’s always a need, a value, an upbringing, an injury, a hope.

It’s nearly impossible to disregard someone, or to imagine they are unworthy of love once you know their story.  So that it is in the leaning in closer – often right as we most want to flee – that allows us to learn – as Glennon Doyle also says – it’s in these moments that we realize there’s another option than fight or flight.  

A third option, which is to heal.    

Any of us who have been in close relationships of any sort for a sustained amount of time, know there are endless opportunities to consider – all three options.

Because while it is true that as you look at people closely, you love them, it is also true that as de Botton says, in this closeness “we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge.”  In any given relationship, there are thousands of ways to misunderstand each other, disappoint each other, break our promises…New and regular opportunities for us to know betrayal, or loss, to find our beloved annoying, or simply boring, and sometimes, downright mean – and to wonder if it is perhaps no longer true, that the gift is in the staying, and leaning in, but instead, that the gift would be in the leaving, and the letting go.  

Another thing about writer Glennon Doyle – she of the “when you look closely at people you end up loving them” she wrote a book called Love Warrior.   It was about a major what-comes-next moment.  

Her husband had confessed to her, after many years of marriage, that he had been serially unfaithful since their wedding.  The book is about what comes after his confession. And ultimately, the book is about the way they repaired their relationship, and committed themselves to each other and to loving for the long-haul.

Which is why it was especially surprising when – right as the book was released to the public – exactly one month before it dropped – Doyle announced that she and her husband were separating.  

Her publishers were– let’s say – not thrilled….announcing your divorce while trying to sell a book about the power of marriage? Not exactly a recipe for success. In her announcement, she describes how she learned with her husband, after all they’d been through – that you can be shattered, and still put yourself back together, piece by piece.  

She discovered that third way – instead of fight or flight – what it means to stay, and heal.

But she also discovered that sometimes, in the healing, and the putting your pieces back together, you realize you have become a whole new person.  A person that no longer fits in the relationship as it was.  She decided that she was not called to be successful, only faithful.  And in this case, she decided that leaving was faithful.

One of the realities of long term community life is that there will be transitions.  People will leave, for all sorts of reasons, and often for reasons we can’t totally name or understand.  While these are often tinged with grief, it matters most of all, how we we tend to these transitions-  both as the ones who are leaving, and the ones who stay – how we acknowledge, how we refuse to blame, or coerce, how we stay open even in the parting to this call of healing that is still available –  to keep leaning in to the ongoing work of love.  

It is never easy to know in those moments when the impulse arises – whether leaving or staying is the faithful choice.  The choice that represents the work of love. There are, however, often clues that can help us discern. We can listen for what is behind our impulse to stay put, or to leave.  Whether we are seeking to control, or to surrender. If we are seeing more clearly, or less. If we are driven by fear, or by hope. We can listen for where healing needs to happen –  where growth is possible. That is, in the relationship, or out of it; knowing that the only thing that really grows us is love, and pain. Often all mixed up together.

It is an intensely spiritual choice, to learn how lean in like this. To turn towards rather than run away from what feels like our limits.  To learn to endure in the presence of the real – the real of the other, the real of ourselves. To let ourselves feel this much, to feel this much in the company of others. To let our lives matter this much.  It is an intensely spiritual choice.

“Reaching our limit,” Pema Chodron says, despite what we have been taught, can be “like finding a doorway to the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle, or a punishment.”

What happened last Sunday, in Sean’s call – is just like what happens each time someone joins this congregation – and like what happens in marriage ceremonies, and in the arrival of new children…..all of these are not insignificant milestones. They often represent a culmination of so much work and care. But also, even as they are completion of one thing, they are also just the start.

They are the promise of love, but the real work of love is in what comes next.

Which brings me to the envelopes you received on your way in. I hope you’ll read through all the materials, slowly. Some of the print is small so if you need a large print version, just stop by the office on your way out.  Most of all, I want to draw your attention to the orange sheet where you will find our new vision. This vision is the path we set for ourselves last fall.

It is the promise of love that we intend to make real over the next five or more years. The path that we will make real through our willingness to show up fully in this next moment – with our open hearts, our curious minds, and with our resources.

We ask everyone to get on a path to 5% giving – and get us all on a path to our future. And we invite everyone who participates at Foothills to participate – to find your place on this path.

120 years after our founders first imagined it, we are still called to be the church of humanity.  To do the work of love long past the first promising – to meet every bewildering and beguiling moment with resilience, and a constant faith, discerning together the path of healing, of hope – of justice, and of joy.

The power of this community, as with all relationships, has always been in this decision that we make to offer ourselves, as we are – to keep showing up even in struggle, and in our doubt – in service of this bold vision, that is ours, that we might keep growing together, held and called by a courageous, steadfast love.

Reading: Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye 

Sermon: Loving People Anyway 

Sermon Audio Available Here

Almost exactly one year ago, 17-year-old Zachary Cruz was having a regular afternoon at the skate park when his mom’s friend showed up running towards him, in a clear panic….“Do you know what happened? Do you know what happened?”

It was in that moment that 17 year old Zach learned his older brother Nik had just opened fire on Parkland High School.

In that moment, he learned that his brother had killed fourteen students and three staff members.  

And it was in that moment that he learned that his brother had survived, and was in police custody.

Zach and Nik’s life had not been easy or simple up until that point. Even beyond their father’s death when they were little, or their mother’s death in 2017, Nik struggled – with anger and violence, bullying, isolation and loneliness.  

But still, he was Zach’s brother – and after their parents died – he was all Zach had. 

“I’m stuck between loving him and hating him,” he told the Washington Post.

After he had a chance to meet with the detective charged with making sense of the senseless, Zach asked if he could see his brother.  The video of their meeting is – gut-wrenching.

“You probably felt like you had nobody,” Zach tells his brother. “But, I care about you.  I know I made it seem like I hated you, but…I love you with all my heart.  I know what you did today – other people [will] look at me like I’m crazy even – and I don’t care what people think.  You’re my brother. I love you.”

After hearing all this, Nik starts shaking and crying, and Zach wraps his arms around him. “…stuck between loving, and hating him.”   

I know, most of us will not have to figure out how or if to keep loving someone who has committed such a horrendous act.  

But still, we all know a version of what Zach is wrestling with in that room.  If we have loved anyone at all, we know what it means to have to come to terms with their accidental or on-purpose failing.

To face their betrayal, negligence, cowardice, or lies. To try to understand why they did what they did, what part we might’ve played in it all.  (In the interview with the detective, Zach wondered if he could’ve been a better brother, if it might’ve made a difference….) We all know what it means to have to decide whether or not this thing they have done makes them once and for all un-lovable, or if there is a path to healing or restoration, to loving them anyway – and if so, what this would look like.

It is a complicated question, especially for those of us who claim a Universalist faith. After all, one of our core historical commitments says there’s nothing that you can do that would ever place you outside the reach of healing or redemption.

It’s the reason for our first principle – our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It’s the principle that most people remember – not just because it’s the first – but also because it is often the reason that people come to our congregations, and why people decide to call themselves Unitarian Universalists. 

Especially when held in contrast to religious traditions that start with an affirmation of human sinfulness and failure, or communities that make someone’s worth conditional – on right behavior, or right belief.  And even more when offered as an antidote to much of the world’s tendency to link someone’s ultimate worth to their financial worth, or their race, their gender, their looks, or physical abilities. 

The first principle denies all of this, and for this reason, it feels so good. 

But also, for these same reasons, the first principle can also feel so wrong. 

While we are drawn to this radically equalizing notion of humanity – eventually we do all find ourselves in that room figuratively or literally with someone we love who has broken our hearts.  And in that moment, the first principle feels not just wrong, but also ridiculous, maybe even stupid.  We think about moments like the one Naomi Shihab Nye describes at the airport – and we decide, these are just fantasies – exceptions, not the rule of human nature.