Last year my therapist started asking me at every visit, “You having any fun?”

I’d laugh, and say, “Nope.”

Eventually, I realized that I just wasn’t any good at fun. Either I’d never learned, or I’d forgotten how to let loose, kick back, and have a blast doing something.

So I did what we do these days: I asked Facebook. My friends gave me all kinds of suggestions, and some of them actually sounded like things I might enjoy. In the time since then, I have had more fun. But lately, I’ve been thinking that question is a hard one for parents of young children.

Do you remember that Nyquil ad? The one that said, “Moms don’t take sick days”? (And yes, there was a dads version of that commercial. No non-binary parent commercial though.)

For the default parent, there are no sick days. There is no end to the work of child-tending, and every precious hour of respite care, should we be lucky enough to have that, is measured out carefully. We always ask ourselves, “Is this a good use of babysitter time?” There are always dishes and laundry, deadlines and past-due projects—so many things that seem more urgent than self-care of any kind, let alone play.

After five-plus years in the trenches, I’ve decided that there are only two ways that parents get to have fun.

Option one: convince yourself that fun belongs on your to-do list. That it’s not optional. That the well-being of your children depends on your ability to have fun. The oxygen-mask metaphor is so old that we roll our eyes at it, but it’s true. Play is as important as air and water and food and shelter. Without it, parts of us die.

Which leads us to option two: play with your children. I’m not just talking about getting down on the floor with them and making elaborate racetracks. I’m not just talking about doing whatever the things are that your kids think are fun. Find the places where your joy and their joy overlap. For my partner Liesl, that’s the racetracks. For me, it’s art. It’s liberating to do kid art. The kids and I will sit at a table with a big piece of paper, a bin of crayons, and a timer. Every time the timer rings, we switch chairs, and color there. It’s so much fun—free of the constraints of needing to make “real art.”

Last weekend the kids and I went to something billed as a “Clay Extravaganza.” My daughter and I both tried our hands at a pottery wheel—and loved it. Then we watched skilled potters compete—competitions that were silly and serious at the same time. In the first one, a team of three potters worked together—one operating the pedal controlling the speed, and the other two each using one hand only, working cooperatively to draw the clay evenly upward. In the second one, seven potters sat at wheels—with paper bags over their heads, a silly face drawn on each bag. The timer started, and all but one created beautiful pieces. One potter, when she removed the paper bag, said, “That’s not at all what I was imagining!” The crowd’s favorite was the potter whose piece collapsed. I think he actually won.

Had I been alone, I would have loved to stay and watch more of the competitions. I would have taken longer to explore the exquisite works of art for sale.

But it was time for my son’s nap, so we packed up and went home. He had a snack, then went down easily for a long nap.

Did I want more? Maybe. But if I’d been alone, I would have missed seeing my daughter’s delight and mastery. If I’d been alone, I would have missed a lesson in saying, “It is enough. My heart is full.” And if I’d been alone I might have been drawn into judgements of good art and bad, or comparisons between my creations and those of the talented artists I was watching. But my children and I were able to stay with the spirit of art as play, and each of us and our relationships   together came out stronger for it.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110044111/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_09/05.mp3

Psychologist David Elkind, in his book The Power of Play, identifies several characteristics of play, including:

1. No worry of failure—whether you win or lose doesn’t matter.
2. Balance between challenge and skill—some risk heightens the experience, but not so much that known talents can’t be relied upon.
3. Action and awareness merge—you’re so involved you’re on autopilot.
4. Self-consciousness disappears—you don’t worry about how you look, if you’re good enough, etc.
5. The activity is an end in and of itself—the doing is what matters, not any reward you get for it.

This experience of delight in the task itself is not just a luxury, it is a need.

We need the lightness of being that play creates to better face the fact that our lives will end in death—and what could be more absurd?

We need the lightness of being that play affords when we do the serious work of relieving, in whatever way we can, the hundreds of thousands around the world who are dying from disease, malnutrition, abuse, neglect, and war.

We need the lightness of being that play offers when bringing groups in conflict together so that bonds can be forged and new hope for peace and healing encouraged.

We need the lightness of being that play brings to young Black men feeling hopeless, police officers feeling under attack and undocumented immigrants fearfully hiding.

We need play to face the work of the world.

We need play to maintain our emotional, spiritual, and physical balance so that we can do the work that desperately needs doing.

Come, let us play, even as we work.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110044133/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_09/04.mp3

Brian La Doone is a musher—a sled dog racer—in far northern Canada, which is polar bear country. He says he keeps a working distance of about 70 feet from the bears. His Canadian Eskimo sled dogs don’t always do likewise. On one occasion La Doone warily witnessed a polar bear loping toward one of his sled dogs. The dog wagged his tail and bowed. This happened during a time when the polar bears were particularly hungry. The sea hadn’t yet frozen and the bears couldn’t reach the seals they typically hunted on the ice.

To La Doone’s surprise, the two began to play, to frolic. They rolled around and wrestled in the snow. They embraced and nipped at each other. The dog knew something La Doone didn’t know. The bear had signaled its playful intent while it approached. The dog in turn had signaled its playful intent. The bear actually returned every day for the next week to romp with the dog. And then, when the ice finally thickened enough, the bear headed off for its hunting ground.

What possessed the polar bear to want to play with the dog rather than making a meal of him? Why did the dog take the risk? Why did these two unlikely creatures become playmates? Why?

Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughn relate this story in their book Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul. The title of the book pretty much tells the story on play, which is as vital to true aliveness as breath is to being alive. Children and animals know this. They engage in play naturally. If left to their own devices, they play. That’s what they do. They intuitively and instinctively play. For adults, play too often comes to be seen as a waste of time, goofing off, or something to do in our spare time. At best, we set aside time for play—times of the day or week or year. The Protestant work ethic, our culture of busyness and drive for achievement, keep a tight grip on us. Many of us are frantically trying to keep up with the day-to-day demands of work, family and household. There is a constant urge and encouragement to demonstrate our worthiness and productivity. We need to get things done. And church can sometimes feel that way too. “Go for a walk” or “take a vacation” get added to the bottom of a to-do list.

The lack of play is no longer just an adult concern. There’s increasing evidence that children are becoming play deprived. Parents are often the ones most aware of this. Ironically, research suggests that the adults most worried about their children’s lack of play are also the ones most likely to lack play in their own lives. Parents, take note. The solution is obvious. Start playing more yourself.

The greatest danger in play deprivation may not be obvious at first. It may just seem like life is a little less fun and a little more serious. But observing those who have stopped playing makes it clear that there are more troublesome repercussions. A person or animal that stops playing becomes disinterested in new activities. When play stops, it becomes hard to find pleasure in the world. When play stops, our creativity, adaptability and intelligence get thwarted.

The opposite also occurs. When animals and people stop finding pleasure in the world, they stop playing. Anyone who has a pet has witnessed this behavior. One of my cats was recently unwell. He was having what looked like seizures and overall lacked his usual pep. A vet visit and blood work revealed a urinary tract infection. He got an antibiotic shot. After only one day, he was bouncing around like he had springs in his feet, livelier than ever at age 14. Play puts an added bounce into our step. Brown and Vaughn point out that play also animates the mind and has physical, social, intellectual, and psychological benefits. Play aids in survival. It makes us smarter and more adaptable. It makes us more creative and innovative. It fosters empathy and enables us to form complex social relationships and groups.

So it might be a good time to take a personal inventory of how exactly your play life is going. How much are you playing? Are you bringing a playful spirit to your work life, to your relationships, to worship? Is there a particular form of play you might engage in more often?

I’ve been reading a lot about play, and trying to practice it more. There are many benefits and attributes. I want to highlight just three that aren’t immediately obvious.

For one thing, the point of play is that it doesn’t have a point. People who study play consistently name purposelessness as a central quality of play. In other words, play isn’t goal-driven. You do it for the sake of the activity itself. Margaret Guenther, an Episcopal priest and spiritual director, says, “Play exists for its own sake. Play is for the moment; it is not hurried.”  During play, there’s a sense of timelessness.

As a child I loved anything artsy-craftsy—coloring, drawing, making things. At Sunday School and in regular school I got so absorbed in my projects that I lost track of time. I struggled with the time limits on arts and crafts projects. I wanted to keep on practicing “holy uselessness.” That’s a phrase Guenther uses to describe this sense of purposelessness. She says in her book Toward Holy Ground:

When we play, we also celebrate holy uselessness. Like the calf frolicking in the meadow, we need no pretense or excuses. Work is productive; play, in its disinterestedness and self-forgetting, can be fruitful.

Similarly, Stuart Brown says, “[Play] doesn’t have a particular purpose, and that’s what’s great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it’s probably not play.” That’s a great distinction. I can’t tell you how often I have tried to multitask my play time. If I go running to lose weight or be healthy, that’s great. But it’s probably not play. It’s possible it will become play while I’m running, but maybe not. On the other hand, if I run just for the sheer sake of running, for its own sake, for the pleasure of it, that’s play.

A second, striking, aspect of play is that it is deep. Soul level deep. It has its own reality. It runs counter to cultural norms, rules, and expectations. Maybe that’s part of what scares and thrills us about it. In her book Deep Play, author and poet Diane Ackerman says:

One sheds much of one’s culture, with its countless technical and moral demands, as one draws on a wholly new and sense-ravishing way of life…. We can lay aside our sense of self, shed time’s continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world’s ordinary miracles…. When it happens we experience a sense of revelation and gratitude.

Deep play invites us to give up control, give up certainty, and give up our preconceived ideas and rules. That’s because play arises from deep within us, not from the world’s standards for us. It is an authentic expression of self. Play taps into our own creativity and innovation. Special equipment and fancy toys can actually get in the way. They can suppress the inner expression of self, rather than cultivating it.

Religion is the third quality of play I want to talk about. Diane Ackerman writes that: “Deep play … reveals our need to seek a special brand of transcendence, with a passion that makes thrill-seeking [understandable], creativity possible, and religion inevitable.” Religion may seem an unlikely playground. So often we think of religion as being stiff, boring, structured, dogmatic, and serious. That has a lot to do with the kind of religious upbringing and experiences we’ve had. I don’t think of our Unitarian Universalist religion as stiff or boring. And we certainly aren’t dogmatic. But too much focus sometimes gets placed on church “work” rather than church “play.”

UUs can be a driven group of people who want to save the world. That’s part of the reason for religion. But we do well to remember that play helps us do that even better. Play helps build the beloved community we long for. It deepens relationships, builds bridges across our differences, promotes belonging, grows our souls, and cultivates harmony and love.

Our Unitarian Universalist principles and sources don’t mention play. Not explicitly, anyway. But the first and sixth sources of our faith are suggestive of play. The first source draws on the “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and openness to forces that create and uphold life.” Play and wonder go hand in hand. Play renews the spirit. Play opens us to creative forces. The sixth source draws on “earth-centered teachings which celebrate the sacred circle of life.” To celebrate the circle of life is to sing, play musical instruments, tell stories, enact pageants, share in rituals, share our joys and our sorrows, hear poetry, pray, and meditate. Through these and other forms of play, Unitarian Universalism calls us back to ourselves, to holy uselessness, to the spontaneous expression of true self where creativity, joy, and gratitude abound.

What would it hurt if we were to be more playful in all we do—whether at church, at home, at work? Perhaps if we let go of a bit of our usefulness and purpose we could step into another realm that was more creative, more joyful, more deeply and truly religious. Which might turn out to be our life’s purpose after all.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110044154/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_09/03.mp3

One fine day in San Francisco, nearly 35 years ago now, I found myself down on Mission Street, standing in line at the unemployment office. Not too many years earlier, as an attorney for the Legal Services Corporation, I had regularly represented people in their disputes with the unemployment office. And just days earlier, I had been the director of legal writing and research at Golden Gate University School of Law.

None of that changed what it felt like to stand in that line. And nobody in the whole place cared a hoot that I had just moved out of a very nice office on almost no notice when the Dean of the Law School decided to solve his financial problem by not having a director of writing and research any more.

When a workaholic is suddenly out of work, when somebody who has measured the value of life mainly by accomplishments suddenly has nothing to do, this is quite an experience. Now I think perhaps my six-month stint of unemployment was some of the best education I ever had. And so a decade later, when I was
studying at Starr King School, our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, exploring whether I might be called to the ministry, I decided to have a hard look at the meaning of work—what makes work good or not, and what not working means.

I have been revisiting those times here lately, as I think of those who are going through a variety of transitions in their working lives, some on purpose, some not at all on purpose, and as I find myself revisiting my own ambivalences about retirement.

When I lived in Berkeley, California, the streets were filled with homeless people with no work. I wanted to know what their lives were really like, so I spent one morning a week for about a year at the Berkeley Jobs Consortium. Each week I helped some homeless, jobless person compose a resume to get work. They shared with me the memoirs of their working lives.

There is, of course, work that’s so hard that almost anyone would welcome not working as a rest from it. There’s work that, as the song by Sweet Honey in the Rock says, brings you more than a pay check—work that brings you asbestosis, perhaps, or carpal tunnel or back injury, or the possibility that you may be shot in the line of duty.

There’s work that does greater injury to the spirit than to the body. I think of the people on the assembly line who become extensions of the machines they operate, who aren’t even allowed to stop their numbing motion long enough to go to the bathroom.

But I also think of how differently people approach the same work. Studs Terkel’s classic book called Working is a collection of interviews of people in nearly every line of work you can think of. Side by side, we see the check-out clerk who hates the job and the one who loves it. We see the woman who waits tables in a restaurant with aching feet and heart hardened by too many encounters with nasty customers—and the waitress who thinks of herself gliding among the restaurant tables as if she were ballet dancing.

When I lived in Tampa, Florida, I learned the history of the cigar factories in the section of town called Ybor City. The people who sat in long rows rolling cigars saw their work as an art. Many could not read, but they listened all day to a highly revered “lector” (reader) who sat on a high platform and read to them not only the newspapers but also the literary classics. The lector was among the highest esteemed personages in the community, and the factory owners, who didn’t speak Spanish, wiped out the system when they caught on that the lectors were reading from communist newspapers and organizing the workers.

You may know the story of the three stone masons. Someone asks them what they are doing. The first one scowls and says: “I am laboring to break up this unbreakable rock.” The second smiles and says: “I am earning a living for my family.” The third stands up and puffs out his chest. “I am building a great cathedral for the glory of God,” he says. We had better beware of hastily condemning some work as demeaning and lifting up other work as honorable.

For good or for ill, many of us regard work as a kind of self-definition. Dorothee Sölle says that joblessness is a form of excommunication—being prevented from the communication that matters. Made solitary when we are not made to be solitary. It isn’t true only of people who are fired or laid off. It may be true of people who retire as well.

My father worked for Goodyear Tire and Rubber for forty years before he retired. He knew nothing but his work and golf. He lived twenty more years, and golf became increasingly less fun for his aging body. He spent more and more time in front of the television set. I urged him to write his memoirs. Young business people could learn so much from his stories of corporate life. But he never did it. Sometimes I wish he had found himself in the unemployment line in his mid-40s.

But I hasten to say that retirement need not be like his. Not working, for whatever reason, need not be like it was for him. I also have in my memory’s eye my partner Alan, in the years when he was no longer able to work but before Agent Orange and PTSD finally took their toll on him.

Alan had been a salesman after he returned from Vietnam. He could sell anything, and over the years just about did—pole barns, jewelry, advertising, shark jaws, pistols, pieces of eight. I believe he could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge if he had tried. I used to
listen to him on the phone, taking care of business. Never hurried, never out of sorts, no matter how he was feeling, no matter what kind of day it had been.

That was his “working.” His “not working” was sitting on the dock, fishing, or not fishing. Or taking the canoe up the Santa Fe River before the sun went down. Maybe checking for the manatee at the mouth of the Ichetucknee River. Or having a ride in the old blue pick-up to Pope’s Store, checking on the neighborhood. “Come on,” he would say, “I want to show you something.” And up at the corner, we would sit in the darkness and watch hundreds of lightning bugs. There was very little talking. Alan, those last years at the river, was able to just be.

Ram Dass says if you focus on doing instead of being, you burn out. It isn’t the nature of the work that burns you out. If you regard your work as an experiment in truth, you do not burn out. Ram Dass also says you can work on yourself anywhere. You can work on yourself as easily at the phone com-pany as at the ashram.

When I finally got a job after my six months of unemployment, I wrote about tax law for a legal publishing company. For the first time in my working life, I didn’t take any work home. I started at 8:00 a.m. and left at 4:00 p.m., and I got to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge twice a day—in the opposite direction from all the traffic. If anybody ever tells you this life doesn’t put temptation in our paths, don’t you believe it. You understand—I abhor tax law, and I was making what felt like about five cents a month. But what did that matter?

It turned out to matter a great deal that the work didn’t give me any obstacles to overcome. It didn’t give me any resistance so that I could feel the strength of my being push against anything. It didn’t bring me forth.

I compared my working life with that of my friend David, living on his old boat in the Sausalito harbor. He really did make very little money in his landscaping business. He would say when he got into somebody’s yard, he felt like a musician getting ready to perform. He always wanted to get to know the people, to find out what col-
ors and textures would reflect their style. David died a few years ago, but my memories of him are still fresh. I can still picture him there, spending hours every day engaging people in conversation over coffee at the Café Trieste, walking along the docks and speaking to people as he went. He was one of the happiest people I ever knew.

The Book of Genesis would have us believe that work is our punishment for disobeying God, and that when we were banished from Eden we were doomed to labor. But some contem-porary theologians say no, not so. Rather, the creation of the world is not finished, but continues day by day, and we are co-creators with God. Well, I don’t know about either theory. But I know that my father was cursed in his not working, and my friend David was blessed in both his working and his not working.

And I know that some of the most
important work we do nobody pays us a penny for. All the volunteering. All the work of the church. I know that the hard work we do on ourselves does not burn us out—the work to know ourselves, to make our relationships healthy, the grief work, the work to free ourselves from phobia or addiction. “It may be,” as Wendell Berry says, “that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

It doesn’t matter whether we are working or not working, or not working any more. There is work for us all to do that is worthy, and we are all worthy of the work.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110044217/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_09/01.mp3

I confess I’ve never been a big fan of the concept of sacrifice. It’s always struck me as kind of punitive, like it’s morally superior to suffer than to enjoy life’s abundance. And the religious tradition of sacrifice, which is deeply engrained in a wide variety of religions around the world, strikes me as even more suspect. Why would God or gods want you to offer up something that surely a god has no use for? Why give up something so precious as a life, or even as trivial as a basket of fruit, for a god whose divine nature surely doesn’t run to eating or drinking? What kind of relationship is it when you are expected to give up something valuable for no reason other than to prove your love and devotion?

The quintessential religious story of sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac, from the Hebrew Scriptures. God tells Abraham that he must make a sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac—that he must take a knife and slaughter his own child as a way of proving his love for God. Now, when the time rolls around and Abraham raises the knife, he finds a ram caught in nearby bushes, and that ram becomes an acceptable sacrifice instead of his child. Yay.

Needless to say, this is a deeply disturbing story. Sometimes it is described as depicting human moral progress from sacrificing people to sacrificing animals, which is, you know, good. But isn’t this kind of a horrible way of God asking for proof of love and devotion? Where was Isaac’s choice in the whole thing? Where was Sarah, Isaac’s mother? Shouldn’t they both have gotten some say in whether taking Isaac’s life was an appropriate demonstration of Abraham’s love for God? For that matter, who gets to say whether God’s demand for Isaac’s life was a reasonable ask to begin with? What kind of a dreadful story is this?

Maybe it is a story that is both dreadful and true. The fact of the matter is that life continually demands sacrifices of us, some insignificant and some heartbreaking. Parenting, for starters, always involves sacrifices. Of course, there are the sacrifices that parents make for their children: the sleepless nights, the severe limitations on your freedom, the financial and emotional cost of being responsible for keeping another person safe and growing. Those are hard enough.

But there are also the sacrifices we make of our children. We walk away from a crying child to catch an airplane for a business trip. We shut down the endless barrage of questions and demands to get the ten minutes of quiet that we need to maintain our sanity. We send a child to school when another day to recover from illness might be better, because we simply can’t miss another day of work. We inevitably fail at the daily balancing act between what our kids want and what they need, or the ongoing push and pull between what we know society expects of them and the perfect freedom of expression that they deserve. And if all that
weren’t enough, we live with the knowledge that the choices of our generation deeply and inevitably affect the world that our children will inherit.

And there is just no way to do it right, let alone do it perfectly. The fact of the matter is that the world is continually making utterly outrageous demands. It isn’t nice or fair or right, but it is true. And the concept of sacrifice is one way of making sense of that painful reality. Sacrifice declares that in the face of all the impossible challenges that the world presents to us, we choose. Rather than just stumbling through whatever happens to be on our path, we try to remember what matters most.

Of course, what matters most changes from moment to moment. But the idea of sacrifice is that, at least some of the time, we are able to choose to give ourselves to what we most care about. We can give up what is lesser for the sake of what is greater. Maybe that looks like a choice to give up eating meat for the sake of the health of the planet. Maybe it looks like sitting through the raucous honking of a middle school band concert so that your child can see your loving witness. Maybe it looks like listening with soft eyes while someone berates you for a mistake you didn’t know you made.

Of course, not every loss is a sacrifice. Sometimes we really just get no choice. But the idea of sacrifice reminds us to consider when we do choose: Who or what is lost because of my decision? Who gains? What price will I pay and what will be the cost to others? What do I have the capacity to give so that someone else can thrive?

The choices, of course, are never entirely right and never entirely wrong. But the idea of sacrifice invites us to meet the challenges of the world with the crucial, ongoing question How do I serve love? and with its partner question Is there a larger love that I might serve? Maybe living in the rich and beautiful complexity of those questions is all that anyone, divine or human, has a right to ask.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063339/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/05.mp3

The roots of violence: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character,  commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.

This Gandhi quote has haunted me for years, as I’ve wondered: What does it mean to worship with or without sacrifice? Does Unitarian Universalism call for sacrifice? Is it a root of violence if we do not participate in sacrifice?

So, seeking wisdom on the matter, I tried an experiment. First I went to my personal Facebook page, and I asked my wide assortment of associates (the word friends being highly overused)—What is the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made? Overwhelmingly, the responses were about having or not having children, doing or not doing things because of the needs of a spouse or family member, paths taken and not taken for reasons other than personal choice. No one mentioned religion of any kind, including Unitarian Universalism, as a source of sacrifice.

Then I went on the “CLF Coffee Hour” Facebook page, where discussions flow on all kinds of topics, and asked, What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made? What motivated you to make it? Do you think Unitarian Universalism demands any kind of sacrifice?

There the conversation got very interesting! Here are some of the things people shared:

• Those of us who came to UU from authoritarian churches had to sacrifice certainty. No longer do we have someone to tell us what we need to believe and constantly reassure us that our doctrines are correct. But when we let go of certainty we open ourselves to seek and find wisdom and inspiration in those traditions we had dismissed as false. So the sacrifice becomes gain rather than loss.
• I feel like UUism has encouraged me to sacrifice easy answers, superficial comfort, and ingrained prejudices. (I don’t know if it has required that of me, but without it, I’m not sure I’m striving towards the principles.) It’s hard work, all this thinking and questioning!
• I would say that UUism has drawn me out of my comfort zone and has caused me to look at the bigger picture and realize that we’ve got to be out in the world to fight for social justice, interact with people and learn new ideas. It is scary at times, since I suffer from panic and anxiety and being gay in a hostile world, but I’m determined to help make a difference.
• When I was young, people told me I had to make sacrifices to achieve success in my life. So I made all the sacrifices, but didn’t get the success I was promised. So now I am very skeptical of anyone who asks me to make a sacrifice.
• We are continually “giving up” something for something else. … sometimes it’s giving up needed change to preserve our ego or comfort. Sometimes it’s giving up our comfort to bring about needed change.

That’s just a sample, and the diversity of responses is compelling, but no one answered “No. UUism does not make me sacrifice anything,” though one person, as you see above, voiced skepticism about being asked to sacrifice after having made futile sacrifices in the past.

As for me, I’m still mulling it about. It’s always easy to compare what I do with what other people do and come up feeling that I have made no sacrifices in my life, or to compare myself with others and believe that I have. But I don’t think sacrifice is a competitive sport. And what sacrifice means is subjective. Over and over, when I exclaim about what I perceive as a huge sacrifice someone else has made, I’m told that for them it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all!

When I was a UU kid and the Catholic kids I knew were giving up something for Lent—usually candy—I know that some part of me wanted to join them, despite my love for candy. When my own child grew up with Muslim friends and learned they were fasting for Ramadan, there was an immediate impulse to fast with them, to join them. I think that sacrificing in solidarity—not competitively, not to one-up someone else’s sacrifice or to have sacrifice bragging rights—can be immensely satisfying. Whereas sacrificing when others are not can be immensely infuriating.

I still wonder what Gandhi specifically meant—he who lived in poverty when he could have been rich, who gave his very life for the freedom of his people. I’m pretty sure that our UU religion does call us to some kinds of sacrifice—giving up certainty, giving up easy answers, giving up the comfort of old assumptions and prejudices that do harm to others. And it also calls us to work against the ways that our society seems all too willing to sacrifice the needs of some people in exchange for the comfort of others. I don’t know whether that counts as worship without sacrifice or not, but I’m willing to live inside of that complexity

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063359/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/04.mp3

I have learned about faithfulness and sacrifice as a result of a very strange journey I have been on since I inadvertently found some of the men who were in Vietnam with my older brother, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Christian Jr., “Bobby” to me, who was killed on April 11, 1969.

My son, Luke Christian, did an internet search for his own name and turned up a webpage where some of my brother’s Marine brothers paid tribute to him. In the years since then I have met with many of those men and even attended their reunions.

After my brother’s death in Vietnam, I saw him as a victim more than anything else. My brother joined because he received a draft notice after he graduated from college. He wrote a poem questioning war shortly before his death. The Marine Corps took a gentle young man who was taught “Thou shall not kill” in church and turned him into a killer. It’s hard for me to even speak that sentence; but, of course, that is what young Marines are trained to do. The Marine Corps part of his life was not something I wanted to dwell on and so, for many years, I did not.

The Marine Corps motto is Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful. Many of the guys end their email messages with “Semper Fi” or “S/F” and I often end mine with “Always Faithful.” We are all faithful, but to what or to whom? When this journey began, I would have said that my faithfulness was quite different from Marine Corps faithfulness. I would have said theirs is a blind faithfulness and that mine is a questioning faithfulness. I would have spoken about the differences in how we view doubt and ambiguity.

But what I have learned has both surprised and humbled me.

Marines have a commitment to leave no body behind. For these men, it meant that they would risk death to haul a body out of a rice paddy. My mom used to say, “Do not spend money on me when I’m dead. Wherever I die, dig a hole under me.” I would have also taken this to mean that I shouldn’t risk my life to haul her body out of a rice paddy.

In one conversation with a Marine, I said, “I can’t imagine my brother would have wanted someone else to risk their life to retrieve his body. I would hate to think that others might have died to do that.” He looked at me like he didn’t know where to start, because I just didn’t get it. He was right, but now I get it. Everything hinges on what we are willing to do for one another. Our willingness to sacrifice ourselves to protect one another is everything. We are all in this together. We are all we have. We are the saviors we’ve been waiting for.

The greatest sin is to put your own safety above the safety of others. The higher your rank, the greater your position of privilege, the greater the sin. When we put our own safety first, we are lost and so is everyone else. There is no such thing as individual salvation. We are lost or saved together. When we know that others will put our safety before theirs, all things become possible.

There is another part of “leave no body behind” that illuminates Marine faithfulness. You are part of something greater. It began before you and it will go on after you. You enter into a stream of history and you will be remembered. You are part of a living tradition. Your memory and your sacrifice will not be in vain. Your Marine brothers will continue to carry you with them, whatever the cost.

And my brother’s Marine brothers have continued to carry him and others who made the ultimate sacrifice. While still in the midst of war, these boys and young men contacted family members of killed and wounded brothers. They sent their own family members to visit the sick and wounded. They came home and named sons after fallen brothers. One son is named Robert Christian Ager. They made pilgrimages to The Wall just to touch a name. One of the men drove 2,400 miles to attend the memorial service of the man whose face he first saw when he woke up after losing his left arm in a firefight. Whenever they gather for Company or Battalion reunions they hold memorial services.

Another part of Marine faithfulness is that the right thing is not always the easy thing. You do it anyway. Let’s say, for example, that the sister of a Marine calls you out of the blue to ask you about a day that you have relived many times. By that, I do not mean you have remembered it, but rather that you have relived it. You were the Company Commander that day. When you think of that day, you are filled with regret and guilt and it is as if you are back in that place and time. The sister doesn’t know that even though you met your wife right after you returned from Vietnam, you have never spoken to her about it. What do you do? You sit down with her.

You ask for a piece of paper and you draw a map and you touch it several times before you can bring yourself to say, “They said, ‘Let’s put a company in there and see if it can survive.’” You look over at your wife who is hearing this for the first time. Her eyes are wide and full of tears. You tell the sister that you called her mother when you got back to San Francisco. It is like you have the phone in your hand again. You hear the mother’s voice, “My boy…. What happened?”

We need one another. Others are in need of us. We owe others a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid; it can only be honored. Doing the right thing often requires sacrifice. It is not always easy. We do it anyway. I can sadly say that the United States Marine Corps did a better job of teaching my brother those lessons than the religion of his childhood.

It is easy to say of Marine faithfulness: “Well, that sort of thing requires an enemy. It requires not questioning authority. It requires brainwashing people. You have to get them young.” At least it has been easy when I have said these things. It’s easy for me to denigrate sacrifice based on what the sacrifice is for and to even lull myself into believing that sacrifice and extremism of some sort seem to always go together. I have often trivialized what people are willing to do for their faith because I have not respected what they put their faith in or the ways in which others take advantage of that faithfulness.

I find that, in the name of liberal religion, we often trivialize sacrifice. In ways both subtle and obvious, we give the impression that sacrifice is for people who can’t think for themselves, less independent-minded sorts. Liberal religion often smacks of the old commercial which tells us “Have it your way.” Life is a buffet and you get to choose. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it. You even get to complain about what other people are eating or what is on the buffet table or how it was served. I have often heard liberal religious folks brag about how little their faith requires. Many of us don’t even want to use the word faith or faithfulness, let alone sacrifice.

We are not sure we even like “clear expectations.” Some of the most heated, emotional discussions in the congregation I served have been about what we could or should expect of members. Some are concerned that expectations might be seen as fostering exclusivity. There is concern that we might “turn people off.” We are reluctant to ask anyone for anything that they may not want to give or be able to give. This is especially true when it comes to financial support. In some religious traditions, it is assumed that people will tithe by giving 10% of their income. If everyone tithed in the last congregation I served, we would have had about an extra $900,000 dollars a year to bend the arc of the universe toward justice.

I think liberal religion can and should stimulate me to ask: What am I living for? What am I willing to die for? What am I willing to sacrifice for? What am I willing to put above my own comfort? To whom or what do I owe a debt of gratitude that can never really be repaid, but only honored? What does a life of gratitude look like? What would it mean to be faithful to what I say I believe?

I have used the word sacrifice the way it is typically used, meaning “to give something up.” But when we look at the root meanings of the word, we find that it is not about giving something up, but rather about making sacred. We might question what people are making sacred through their actions, but do we really question the act of making sacred, of finding something worthy of our faithfulness?

I think war is evil. It’s indicative of massive human failure. If we aren’t going to sacrifice for war, we had  better start sacrificing for peace and for justice. The answer is not less sacrifice; it’s more sacrifice. If sacrifice and faithfulness are only for others, then we need to be prepared to live by someone else’s faith or with the ramifications of their faithfulness. Each of us has cause to live a life of gratitude for all we have been given. We are called to work for justice and to bind up the broken. Imagine what it would look like if we, too, could say that we are “Always Faithful” to our highest ideals.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063421/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/03.mp3

Sacrifice is a powerful, ancient, evocative word that conjures images of animals slaughtered in rituals to bind a community together in a celebratory feast for a long-awaited harvest after a drought. Sacrifice can be a visual, visceral and vivid concept that attracts our curiosity but repels us morally. Sacrifice is also described as a blessed act of holy reverence, a necessary rite to cleanse the soul of an individual or restore the hope of a people.

The concept of sacrifice is a complex religious, social and political construct whose meanings derive from cultural experiences and expectations, but I want to explore sacrifice as a political act associated with social violence. These days political and social sacrifice seems ubiquitous, from the rhetorical mobilizations at the U.S. southern border; to the ideological sacrifice of austerity for the poor and largess for the rich; to the “necessary” constructs of neoliberalism and libertarianism that emphasize privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government services. We see the sacrificial environmental violence associated with the lack of urgency to address a rapidly changing climate.

Drill down into the data for an hour, and you will see that sacrificial thinking is the new normal. The motif of “sacrifice” or “blessed brutalities” and sanctioned violence permeate all layers of the social and cultural fabrics purporting to offer an explanatory framework for contemporary imperial American practices. Each instance of our blessed brutality—whether it is the execution of Quakers in Boston in the 17^th century, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of native people, or the abuse of wives in the early American republic—is all a distinct trajectory that is the bedrock of the American empire of sacrifice.

Yes, friends, today American sacrifice is an intentional machine gun mounted on a hill of lies that is aimed at the rule of law, the truth and role of expertise. Everywhere you turn, it seems, some form of sacrifice is rearing its head, demanding tribute and governed by an algebra of expected returns. The transactional nature of sacrifice creates unholy alliances and disturbing binary outcomes of either/or.

When we look more closely at sacrifice, we see that sacrifice is a form of violence that places itself in relation to a desired effect, so that the gain depends upon the loss or destruction of something—call this something the offering. The conscious act of sacrifice links the two. The offering might be a black rooster or a packet of tobacco, but it could just as well be a species, a landscape, the heart of a captured enemy or the youth of a nation. What matters is the necessity of this destruction within a logic that renders the destruction understandable—and worthwhile—as a means to some higher gain. Sometimes the terms are blunt, issued as a judgment: This species is common, uninteresting or of “least concern.” This landscape is worthless, remote or uninhabited—it can be destroyed. The minimal value of what stands to be destroyed will be recovered, many times over, in the projected return.

But friends, sacrifice also comes in the disguise of moral control. Just pay attention to the arguments that weave through the next housing development, the next culled species, the next police review board, the next military intervention, the next cut to the Special Olympics. Sacrifice is almost always a mechanism in which loss and gain have been made equivalent, the balance settled—like trading a mountain for jobs in the mining sector, a forest for a highway and a faster commute.

Derrick Bell was the first Black tenured professor in the law school at Harvard, and founder of the academic discipline of critical race theory. His 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well includes an allegory entitled “Space Traders,” which explores what happens when extraterrestrials make first contact with the United States—using a holographic projection of Ronald Reagan—and offer to solve all of the country’s economic and environment problems. As proof of their power, the aliens turn the Statue of Liberty into solid gold and clean the polluted air over Los Angeles and Denver. The extraterrestrials have a price for this service. All Black Americans must be given to the aliens, for purposes unknown.

Will African-Americans become food, pets, subjects for experimentation? Perhaps they will be feasted, protected or worshiped? The extraterrestrials provide no answers. Could this be the ultimate solution to the centuries-old “Negro Problem”? A Republican president and his administration debate the merits of the offer from the aliens and eventually decide that the American people should vote on the matter.

Of course, this outcome has the superficial veneer of being “fair,” because the outcome was “democratic.” The safety, security, and freedom of Black Americans are treated as something illusory, debatable, something that can be compromised. The historic resistance to providing Black people inalienable civil and human rights makes the results clear for the majority of white voters. “Space Traders” concludes with millions of Black Americans—much like their ancestors being loaded into the bowels of slave ships centuries before—being marched at gunpoint into the cargo holds of the alien vessels. A return is calculated, and the decision is made to execute a sacrifice.

When this book came out in 1992, I remember talking about it with Black and white friends and our reactions were reminiscent of the OJ verdict in 1995. Very different responses. Many white friends were horrified by the story, unable to believe that such a vote could happen in the year 2000 when the story was set. Many Black friends were horrified that the white people were so naïve as to believe that it could not happen. And there was still a small set of us (me included) who pondered leaving the US for what could be a better life with the aliens. Many of us said that anything might be better than this place. I was willing to take that trip on the spaceship because the unknowable future might provide me with a new hope that I lack after 400 years in America. What would it be like to live in a world where I am not vilified, minimized, objectified or pacified by a system that has struggled so desperately to obliterate me and my ancestors?

Friends, remember the basic tenets of sacrifice. The sacrificial offering must be destructible—but also, it cannot be worthless. If anything, it must be exalted, because the destruction of its value is what renders the sacrifice worthy, even heroic. Sacrifice infuses the destruction of value with value, justifying itself not only in the prospect of a return, but also in the inherent nobility of surrender. Here the idea becomes not just dangerous, but also insidious, continuously threatening to identify destructive surrender not just as moral action, but also as the very ground of morality. To be good—to be a good citizen, a good person—is to surrender what you value, what you love, for a “higher” cause. In “Space Traders,” one of the ideas floated by the government was to create a selective service for Black people to volunteer to go with the aliens as a duty to country.

As Unitarian Universalists we have the imperative as people of faith to be spiritually animated by the sacrificial violence all around us. We need to be animated enough to see the sacrificial violence in policies that appeal to our heads and ignore our hearts. We need to be animated enough to dismantle false equivalences of sacrifice. We must be animated so we can demand answers, so we can resist the duplicity of sacrifice. We must make our faith three-dimensional enough to resist sacrifices out loud. When people of faith and goodness charge head on into that sacrificial altar to destroy it, the mechanism of sacrificial thinking will be disassembled, their logic revealed, their syntax demystified, and their weapons made inoperable.

So pause for a moment at the next “justified” sacrifice you are asked to vote on or participate in, the next “trade-off sacrifice,” and dwell on these questions: What is hiding among the lines of spreadsheet calculations and seemingly innocent platitudes of this sacrifice? Where is the scapegoat and how is sacrifice being framed? How does this sacrifice hide in plain sight? Whose hopes stand to be fulfilled in this and whose losses are guaranteed? And where do I stand as a person of faith?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063450/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/02.mp3

This month we are taking on the gnarly topic of sacrifice. It is a concept that makes many of us uncomfortable, distrustful and a little bit surly, and rightly so. The religious tenet of sacrifice has kept women in abusive relationships, created the justification to wipe out whole nations of people, destroyed landscapes in an equation of loss versus gain that usually involves some form of violence or coercion, and is destructive in its nature.

But today I want to start with trees, trees that say over and over again, “How can I give my love away?” Trees that in essence live out love, and might just share some wisdom about how we can reframe and reconsider sacrifice.

In 1997 a young PhD student, Suzanne Simard, went out into her beloved forests of British Columbia, where she had been born and raised and shaped, to conduct an experiment for her doctoral project. She wanted to see how carbon moved from tree to tree. So she set up an experiment in which she planted a Douglas fir and a paper birch next to one another. She labeled the trees with isotopes, or markers. One tree got C14, and the other C13, so she could track what was being exchanged between the trees. She then went on to shade the trees with little tents throughout the multi-year experiment to create different scenarios to which the trees might respond.

In the first year of the experiment, with the trees growing naturally, the Douglas fir and the paper birch did indeed find connection with one another and exchanged nutrients and carbon in this beautiful reciprocity between species. They used the great underground highway made up of fungi or mushroom networks and their own root systems in this symbiotic communion.

Now, in the second year she tried something different. She shaded the Douglas fir to different degrees with her tents. The more the fir tree was deprived of light and air, the more stressed out the fir became, and the more nutrients and carbon the birch gave to fir tree.

This was the exact opposite of everything science had said so far, that competition was and is the driving force of nature, that evolution depended on survival of the fittest and exploitation is baked into our DNA. Instead, Suzanne was coming to understand the deeply cooperative nature of life, that one species would sacrifice for another’s well-being in some kind of great exchange.

She characterizes this pivotal experiment as elementary in comparison with what we know now, and yet it was such an important awakening in forestry and science. She recounts how people threw rotten eggs at her after her paper was published, because it so upended their notion of the order of things.

In those days no one used the word “communicate” when characterizing the relationship between trees in a forest, but that is exactly what’s going on. Scientists are coming to understand what indigenous folks have been saying for a millennium or more: the trees talk. When you step onto a forest floor there are hundreds of miles of fungal and root networks below your feet, hundreds of miles of communicating software.

• What we call a forest is actually a fraction of what a forest really is. Most of it is below the surface of the ground, far from the human eye.
• Forests have elders, trees who nurture their community of neighbors and young, and provide defense, nutrition, support and structure.
• We know that when a tree is sick or is experiencing some kind of insect infestation it sends out an alarm message to the other trees around it saying: “Protect yourself, I’m sick.” And they do.
• Forests store massive amounts of carbon, and in fact are doing their best to counterbalance the lopsided ratios of greenhouse gases.

This is not what I say as a theologian; this is what scientists are discovering about forests, and indigenous peoples have lived and breathed in their cultural and religious patterns since time immemorial.

The forests are telling us something about love, and sacrifice, and this great exchange that is available to us all if we would but root ourselves in the question How can I give my love away?

I once sat with an old priest as I was trying to figure out my path in ministry. We were talking about living life as a sacrament: making my life a visible sign of an invisible spiritual truth.

He stopped me mid-sentence and asked: “May I?” My journal was sitting open between us, so I could take notes. He took my pen and drew an infinity sign. And then he said, “Sacrament is more than making the spiritual visible. It is more than giving up or sacrificing in order to be spiritually good. There is something in the giving that increases the gift, and comes back on itself in this experience of receiving, an offering that expands the well-being, the life force in the exchange. It is the exact opposite of coercion, or violence or exploitation. It is a way into unitive living.”

I can’t help but think of the forests as I think about that conversation and the concept, the practice, of sacrifice, which means to make holy, a holy exchange. It’s about love.

Love is many things. It is energizing. It is joyful. It is intimate. It is powerful. It is life changing, and it demands sacrifice. Love has costs—that’s the honest truth of it.

I think this is what Jesus was talking about when he was describing the kingdom of heaven, or this idea of right relationship, a network of justice and peace that can emerge in the here and now of human community through love. I imagine him taking us on a walk in a forest, and talking to us about the trees, who know that you love your neighbor—all the hundred thousand species of your neighbors—as an extension of yourself, and when you do that the community is transformed, and health and wholeness of the forest abounds.

If we don’t get our heads around sacrifice I don’t know how we are going to address the huge issues staring us in the face. How are we going to address climate change without coming to grips with love for our planet that costs something? If we don’t get our heads around sacrifice, I don’t know how we as white people will ever get our heads around reparations, by which I mean, as TaNehisi Coates writes in his essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations”:

our collective biography and its consequences as the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely…more than recompense for past injustices, more than a handout, a payoff, hush money or a reluctant bribe…but a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

Coates is talking about sacrifice in its true form, an offering that comes back on itself and is experienced as unitive living.

I for one, will go to the forest. I will look for a mother tree, and ask her to teach me. I’ll say, “I am open. Would you tell me about the meaning of love, and sacrifice, and the great exchange of which you and I are a part?” And I know she will share her wisdom,    because trees talk and they know the true meaning of sacrifice.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063528/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/01.mp3

We chatted with Paula Cole Jones about building a Community of Communities.

The VUU streams live on Facebook every Thursday at 11 am ET. We talk about social justice, Unitarian Universalism, religion, spirituality, and whatever else is topical and interesting!

Hosts: Meg Riley, Michael Tino, Aisha Hauser, and Christina Rivera; production support provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063836/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu271.mp3

We chatted with Shige Sakuri about gender-related pronouns and why it is vital to use them correctly. We will also talk about how spirituality is connected with pronoun usage. Shige will inform us about International Pronoun Day.

The VUU streams live on Facebook every Thursday at 11 am ET. We talk about social justice, Unitarian Universalism, religion, spirituality, and whatever else is topical and interesting!

Hosts: Meg Riley, Michael Tino, Aisha Hauser, and Christina Rivera; production support provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu272.mp3

We chatted with Rev. Catharine Clarenbach and Seminarian Heather Petit about being Neurodivergent and UU.

The VUU streams live on Facebook every Thursday at 11 am ET. We talk about social justice, Unitarian Universalism, religion, spirituality, and whatever else is topical and interesting!

Hosts: Meg Riley, Michael Tino, Aisha Hauser, and Christina Rivera; production support provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110071153/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu273.mp3

We chatted with Quiana Perkins and Rev. Amanda Weatherspoon about what’s new in their positions as Social Justice Coordinators.

The VUU streams live on Facebook every Thursday at 11 am ET. We talk about social justice, Unitarian Universalism, religion, spirituality, and whatever else is topical and interesting!

Hosts: Meg Riley, Michael Tino, Aisha Hauser, and Christina Rivera; production support provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu274.mp3

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

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

“You saying God vain?” I [Celie] ast.

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

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

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

I love that. And the reciprocity described is what I feel when I am gardening, that the earth is offering to me as I offer to the earth, and together we co-create beauty and nourishment. Praise be!

For me, gratitude and praise go hand in hand. When I am grateful for something, I praise it. When I praise something, I am grateful for it. And when I am grateful and praising, my generosity follows naturally. Whether it’s the generosity of admiration or the generosity of attention or the generosity of support, I cannot be stingy when I am genuinely praising something or someone.

I think about when I am in a restaurant with someone and order something delicious. “Oh my! You have to try this!” is the first thing out of my mouth. If the deliciousness caused me to say Mine, all mine, it would mean I was not in gratitude or praise, but rather clinging to ideas of scarcity. Generosity comes from a place of abundance. Sharing creates more joy!

Praise generates gratitude, gratitude generates abundance.

Ideally. But those threads can break when the currency of generosity is taken instead of reciprocated. Increasingly, with pesticides and genetic tinkering and huge equipment, agribusiness does not praise the gifts of the earth, but seeks domination, a whole different form of currency.

I see it in a smaller scale when I offer a gift to someone—say, hospitality in my home—and rather than receiving thanks or generosity back, I experience the guest taking from me without appreciation, ignoring my requests or needs, concerned only with their own. My generosity, gratitude and praise can fizzle into resentment over time.

Which makes me think about Job. The guy who was living a good, faithful life, praising God and being ethical and kind, until Satan dared God to curse Job and see if Job remained faithful. So God killed Job’s family, destroyed his livelihood, and otherwise “tested” his faith. When Job finally cries out in anguish God says, basically, What do you know? I created the whole world and can do anything and you can’t do much at all can you? And we’re told Job then praises God.

When you look online for interpretations of this text you find all kinds of folks telling you what a great story it is, and how it shows that we need to praise God no matter what if we are faithful. I hate the story, myself. I loathe it. Years ago, in a religious education class, the curriculum was to share that story with fifth graders and then give them shaving cream on tables with which to finger paint what they thought about God. I needed to step out for a minute during the finger painting, and when I came back into the room they had thrown it everywhere in a giant finger paint fight.

They told me the story made them mad, and that was part of what started the foam-throwing. We talked as we cleaned the room and they were indignant that God would make a bet with Satan and be so mean to Job because of it. And I had to agree with them. The story does nothing whatsoever to strengthen my faith in God!

But maybe there’s another path besides faith in an omnipotent God to find a way to praise and gratitude when suffering profoundly. I note the people who have much, much less material comfort and wealth, societal privilege, and freedom to move about seem to manage better than I do to stay in a place of generosity and gratitude. I also realize that my own ability to remain in the currency of generosity and praise is in part the result of too much privilege. I have been awed, in my life, by the kindness and generosity of people who have reason to be much more resentful about their lives than I do. Praise and gratitude can become a spiritual path, a way out of no way, the only means towards affirmation of what is praise-worthy when none-other is evident. Spiritual practice can be born of suffering like Job’s, which is ultimately not about how great some omnipotent God is, but rather about how the holy can be discovered through blessing what is still possible.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074752/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/05.mp3

Thanks and Praise is is exactly what we have for all of our wonderful CLF members and supporters who contribute so that CLF can be there for religious liberals around the world. I hope you hear a chorus of thanks coming up from prisons and jails, from dorm rooms and rest homes, from houses and apartments and libraries or wherever people find us in print and/or online. Thank you! You’re the best! If you’d like to join in making all we do possible, we’d be ever so thankful for your contribution, either in the form of a check mailed in the enclosed envelope or a gift online at clfuu.org/give.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074814/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/04.mp3

Pity the poor dandelion. It is, in many ways, nature’s perfect plant. Its tender, young greens make a tasty addition to any salad. The dandelion’s leaves contain more beta-carotene than carrots and more iron than spinach. Its blossoms, when properly fermented, perhaps with a bit of orange or lemon, make a sweet white wine. That tap root contains medicinal properties, and can be beneficial to both the liver and the kidneys as both a diuretic and blood cleanser. It can also be dried, roasted and ground as a coffee substitute. The flower’s white, milky sap can be used to alleviate bee stings and to remove calluses and moles. Nature’s perfect plant.

Yet, plunk a dandelion down in the middle of a manicured suburban lawn and it is treated like a terrorist. Armies of lawn care professionals are dispatched with chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction to eradicate this menace. It is, after all, a weed. Americans spend more than a billion dollars a year on more than 100 million pounds of herbicides, pesticides and other
lawn-care chemicals in their attempts to rid their yards of these and other pesky plants.

What, then, makes a weed? Is a weed a weed just because we call it that? Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that a weed is simply a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Long ago we discovered the virtues of the dandelion, yet they are a public menace. In his book Second Nature, author and gardener Michael Pollan describes the strict hierarchy of plants, where the top spaces are occupied by what he calls the “hypercivilized hybrids” like roses, and the bottom tier is infested with the weeds, which he calls “the plant world’s proletariat, furiously reproducing and threatening to usurp the position of their more refined horticultural betters.” Weediness, he tells us, is determined by several factors, including how highly hybridized a plant is (the more refined and cultured, the better), the ease or difficulty of growing it (the hearty and easily adaptable larkspur is more “weedy” than, say, a fragile, delicate orchid), and, finally, its color. (White, of course, is at the top.)

Pollan goes on to tell us that there are two primary schools of thought when it comes to weeds. The first holds that “a weed is any plant in the wrong place” and the other defines a weed to be “any aggressive plant that competes successfully against cultivated plants.” “The metaphysical problem of weeds,” he writes, “is not unlike the metaphysical problem of evil: Is it an abiding property of the universe, or an invention of humanity?”

As I’ve considered and encountered weeds, I have become increasingly troubled and uneasy. For as the crops of our country’s farmlands have ripened and, in some cases, shriveled on the vine, I hear the language of weeds being used in our nation’s debate about the “problem” of illegal immigration. We, the precious flowers of our highly hybridized civilization, are under siege from these uncultured invaders. “Aliens” we call them, “Illegals.” Labels that, like the term “weed” imply that they are a scourge, a menace, to be eradicated.

When we label these people—these mothers and fathers and grandparents and children—as “illegal aliens” we dehumanize them. And once they are dehumanized it is easy to talk about them as things, as problems, as so much kudzu to be beaten back at the border, lest our garden be overtaken and all that we have cultivated destroyed. What has been lost in the debate over our immigration situation is the fact that each of the individuals who live in our country without documentation is a human being, a person with a family and a story just like us. They may not be highly hybridized flowers in the top tiers of the garden’s hierarchy (though some of them could be, I’m sure, given the chance). But nor are they weeds to be uprooted and eradicated from the rich soil of this nation.

In describing the process by which we cultivate our gardens, Michael Pollan tells us that “weeding is the process by which we make informed choices in nature, discriminate between the good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth.” We owe at least this same level of care, discrimination and intelligence to the human beings who sit at the heart of the immigration debate.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074836/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/03.mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to be grateful? Then just say thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because gratitude lives there too.

Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.

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

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

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

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

Grateful in sadness

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

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

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

“Excuse me?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

All kinds of gratitude were lifted up.

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

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

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

“I’m grateful for this program.”

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

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

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

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

Grateful in gladness, grateful in sadness.

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

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

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

When I wake up
I find myself in an environment
that’s so different from the one
I once knew.
I find I’ve not merely traveled out of society, but to a place no one warned me about.
I collect my thoughts for a moment while gazing from the
window of my cell.
The rain-slicked razor wire
in front of the housing unit is being cleaned again by nature.
I never fail to be surprised by the same landscape time and time again. Just as I perceive this,
suddenly the texture of reality has changed once more.
The transition from society has been nonstop to this Satan’s cave.
Here is where I dwell.
In a momentary lapse of reason.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110084920/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/05.mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We eat charoset with moror.

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

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

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

I have five daughters. I wasn’t always in touch with them all—and one day out of the blue my youngest wrote to me.Her name is Elise. She’s 17. A father could be no prouder. I was able to give her the gift of introducing her to the UU fellowship near where she lives.

It’s not very often that you find—or something finds you—that’s in tune with your inner being. The UU church did exactly that—it was unexpected, yet I happened to be at the right place at the right time for the UU church to come to my attention.

If the letter from my youngest daughter was unexpected, more surprising still was the first sentence she wrote: “Dad, I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life!” I will say the same thing about myself and UUism—such freedom, with limitless possibilities for spiritual searching and journeys—what could be more unexpected than that?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110085003/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/03.mp3

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

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

Expect the Unexpected.

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

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

Expect the Unexpected.

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

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

Expect the Unexpected.

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

Expect the Unexpected.

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

Expect the Unexpected.

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

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

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

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

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

I want to acknowledge right up front that the story of the Annunciation, the visitation of Mary from the angel Gabriel as described in the Gospels presents us Unitarian Universalists, with all sorts of challenges. Was Mary a virgin, or simply a young woman of child-bearing age? (It depends on how you translate ancient languages.) Is the primary role of women to bear children? What kind of message does that send our children and youth? Does God communicate with us by sending heavenly messengers?

There are many issues with this story, but I want to invite you to put them aside for the moment. I’d like you instead to hold Mary in a different light. Let’s take Mary down from whatever celestial throne she sits on. Let’s make her real, or at least more real than she is in the myths and stories that have grown up around her. Mary is a young girl, probably 13 or 14 years old. She’s from an ordinary family living in Roman-occupied Judea. Her father is probably a tradesman, perhaps a mason or a cobbler. She is to marry Joseph, the son of a local carpenter. It’s an arranged marriage. He’s older than she, but he has learned his craft from his own father and will be a good provider. Mary is resigned to her fate, knowing no other possibilities. She’s never traveled more than a few miles in any direction outside her village, and all her friends, as well as her older sister, have been married off this same way. Mary doesn’t know how to read or write. But her mother has taught her all the skills she needs to make a good home for Joseph and their family. Life, she knows, is hard. The best you can hope for is a few moments of joy within a life that is otherwise filled with hardship. She likely won’t live to see 50 and there’s a high degree of likelihood that she’ll die in childbirth much sooner than that.

So, we have a picture of this young girl living a hard life in a small village. And what happens next is, at least to me, unbelievable. In this little mud home where Mary is perhaps sweeping the dirt floor or mending a dress, there’s a flash, and an angel appears before her. Now, we have to assume she was afraid because one of the first things the angel says is “Be not afraid.” And we know she’s confused, because Luke tells us she was “much perplexed.” Really, who wouldn’t be?

Then the angel tells her that she has been chosen by God for an especially important task, to give birth to the son of God. She does question him. But Gabriel is the ultimate pitch-man, and it doesn’t take long for Mary to say yes. “Here I am,” she tells the angel. “Let it be with me according to God’s plan.” And then he disappears.

Now, I don’t want to go into what happened after this miraculous event. To speculate about how she explained this whole thing to her parents. Or even more, to Joseph. Because what matters to me most about this story isn’t what it took for her to convince Joseph to stick with her and go through with the marriage, even though she was pregnant. Or whether there was a star in the East when Jesus was born. What fascinates me about this story is that Mary said yes to the angel. Think about that. Here we have Mary, a mere teenager, betrothed to a local carpenter. Her future is mapped out before her. She will be an obedient wife to her husband and hopefully bear him many children. It’s likely that she’ll never leave the little hamlet of Nazareth, that her entire world will consist of a few square miles in and around the village. A simple life. A hard life. Perhaps it is all she ever hoped for; perhaps she would be satisfied with such a life. We don’t know if Mary was a dreamer and a hoper, or simply a do-er. But regardless, her whole world was turned upside down in an instant. In one unexpected and uninvited thunderbolt from the heavens, the course of Mary’s life was altered forever. The unseen force of the Divine intervened in whatever plans Mary had made (or had been made for her) and told her, in no uncertain terms, “Here is what you need to do.” The miracle of this story isn’t in the appearance of the angel, or the conception of the child by the Holy Spirit. The miracle was in the fact that Mary said yes. “Here I am, Lord. Thy will be done.”

I suppose it would be easy to chalk up Mary’s response to her youth, to her innocence and her naiveté. Maybe it was her subservience to authority, taught through years of watching her fellow villagers grovel before the Roman guards or watching her mother comply with anything her father said. Mary certainly could not have understood or appreciated what it was she was signing up for when she said yes to Gabriel. She could never have anticipated the life that her son would lead, and how he would be put to death much too soon. Had she known how this was all going to play out, I wonder whether she’d have agreed to take on this task? “Can I think about it and get back to you, Gabriel? I need to weigh my options.” That seems like a reasonable response under the circumstances.

Few of us are lucky enough, if you can call it that, to be struck by the proverbial bolt out of the blue. Angels don’t appear on our doorsteps. Messages from the divine tend to take other, more subtle forms. Maybe it’s a passing thought that occurs to us as we’re reading a novel. Perhaps it’s a persistent nagging at the back of the mind that’s been there since we were kids. It could be a call out of the blue from a long-lost friend. Those are the better angels, really. Our calling might also come from experiences that aren’t so nice. Being fired from our job. The sudden end of a relationship. Having a near-death experience that opens our eyes to new possibilities.

More than likely, receiving our call, or finding our purpose if you’re more comfortable with that language, isn’t a monumental encounter that changes our life forever. It grows over time. It’s the accumulation of our experiences and our responses to them. Sometimes we find it in the confluence of several seemingly unconnected events that, when pieced together in the quiet of the night, open up a pathway to us. We may at first call them coincidences but, if we’re attentive enough to discover the connections, we begin to see what some call “synchronicities.” Gregg Levoy, the author of the book Callings, writes:

When you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. Once you start noticing these synchronicities, these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere.

It’s a lot harder to answer our angels when they don’t appear before us the way Gabriel did to Mary, when they appear as subtle hints, persistent intuitions, dots that appear random and unconnected.

And that, of course, is only the beginning. Noticing the signs pointing us in a direction isn’t the same as embarking on the journey itself. Remember what I said was the real miracle of the Annunciation? That Mary said yes. Mary was able to let go of whatever plans or dreams she may have had, to step into the unknown and to cast her fate with the mystery that presented itself to her. Think of the courage that took. Gabriel as much as said to her, “You will be an outcast. Your family will disown you and your fiancé will desert you.” You can be sure that Mary knew all this and more, for under Hebrew law of the time an unwed mother could be put to death. And Mary, although confused and fearful, and surely without fully understanding what her future held, said yes. Despite all of the risk and all of the doubt, she said “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

As mere mortals, groping in the dark for the “cosmic cairns” that Gregg Levoy talks about, hoping that meaning emerges out of our disparate experiences, it’s not often possible to offer up an immediate, outright yes in response. While Mary was able to respond in the moment to God’s call, for us it may take some time. Not to delay or defer the call, but to hear it more clearly. That is what a personal spiritual practice is all about. Creating time and space in our busy lives to hear and to heed, to connect the dots, to peek down the path and prepare ourselves to step onto it. We are not, most of us, firemen trained to run into burning buildings, plunging headlong into the unknown. Nor do we possess the youthful innocence of the trusting Mary. Getting to yes isn’t automatic for us. And so we must carve out of our hectic days the time to reflect, to consider, to meditate, to pray—to find our way into hearts and minds open enough to say yes to the unexpected.

Whether we call them angels, or God, or coincidences or synchronicities, there is something calling us to achieve the fullness and the magnificence that we are all capable of becoming. We are all Marys, pregnant with possibility and potential. And, disguised though they may be, the world is full of Gabriels, heralding new beginnings, urging us in unexpected directions, and revealing unknown opportunities. If we but pay attention and notice them, even in the face of uncertainty, we can choose to respond with a faithful “yes.”

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110085107/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/01.mp3

There is a passage from the Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke, that has given me inspiration when confronted by the need to change:

Though the reflection in the pool
Often swims before our eyes:
Know the image
Only in the dual realm
do voices become
eternal and mild

I like to think of this as a formula for self-transformation. The verses are about the myth of Narcissus: the youth Narcissus, who cares only for himself, sees his reflection in a forest pool. He does not know it is his own image.

We are all like Narcissus in a way. We only know a part of ourselves, the collection of identities that is our answer to the question, “Who are you?” Yet, we are each so much more. There is an otherness within us all, facets disowned and unrecognized. Rilke counsels us to know the image, the face of the hidden other in our souls. It does swim before our eyes (though we usually ignore it), surfacing in subtle ways—odd thoughts from nowhere and behaviors, both good and bad, of which we never knew we were capable.

Narcissus fell in love with the face he saw. Without realizing it, he began to love his own otherness. This is where inner change occurs, at the surface of the pool—the threshold between our known and unknown selves. Rilke calls this the dual realm. If we have the courage to look into our own uncharted depths, we may just find something worthy of love—beautiful vulnerability, reservoirs of strength and other sunken treasure.

After Narcissus discovers he is the image he adores, the goddess Nemesis turns him into a flower. As a moral lesson, we can understand this as a curse for egotism, but on a deeper level it is a paradoxical blessing and a model to follow: we can pull up the others from our depths and let them transform us. The self and other can become one at the liminal boundary. Our identities anchor and fuse with the new otherness, just as a flower is rooted in fertile soil, constantly fed by new fresh water. The other of Narcissus was Echo, a nymph whose love he had refused. Yet in his flower state he could forever hear her voice, eternal and mild.

When we embrace our otherness, it becomes easier to embrace the otherness of people different from us. It gives us the perspective needed to change. Yet it only happens in the dual realm, the uncomfortable threshold. Albert Einstein said, “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we are born.” Many try to suppress this curiosity, but I believe Unitarian Universalism calls us to revel in it. Like Narcissus forever looking into the pool, may we forever plumb the otherness of ourselves and everyone else, letting it transform us into ever more beautiful beings, eternally listening to the voice of the other.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110095633/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_01/05.mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Threshold is an interesting word. As a maintenance clerk I immediately thought of the thing at the bottom of a doorway. Being there requires a willingness to go beyond. And then there is the literary use, which one might find in a novel: “We stand at the threshold of a momentous occasion in a brave new world….” But how do we cross the threshold?

For me it has been by accident and trial and error—mostly error. I’ve reached my error threshold because the pain of being locked up begs for relief. Prison life definitely pushes the pain number up to about a seven or so. Prison is a crucible which brings about a state of desperation which leads to actively seeking the doorway to something better.

Oftentimes in here the doorways open into fundamental beliefs which are not inviting or healing for a liberal believer. I will forever be grateful to the Divine Universe for showing me the threshold belonging to Unitarian Universalism many years ago. The kind, welcoming people who have answered my knock from inside these walls have indeed allowed me to stand at the threshold of a momentous time in a loving community.

I’ve been back on a violation for four years, and much of the initial pain, sadness and loss have subsided. I feel excitement about the day in the future when I can step foot over the thing on the door that leads to the community that supports me while I am here. I definitely have the willingness to step over into the fellowship which supports a free and responsible search for meaning.

As I stand near the threshold, waiting for the parole answer in the near future, I want to close by saying thank you for being on the other side of the threshold.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110095716/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_01/03.mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps you are familiar with the concept of The Hero’s Journey, made famous by Joseph Campbell. A Hero’s Journey is a story that is told in all mythologies and times and places, an archetype that reflects our own journey and draws humanity together. The Hero’s Journey story begins when the hero leaves the mundane world and ventures out of their comfort zone. On their way they are likely to be given supernatural aid in one form or another, given instruction from mentors, and as they travel they gather allies. But eventually it comes time to cross the threshold; it’s time for the biggest part of the journey to begin. This is when the hero leaves behind everything familiar and moves into a realm filled with mystery.

A great example of this happens early in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo has been given the ring, instruction from Gandalf, a magical sword and chain mail, and has set off with his closest friend, Samwise Gamgee. After they have traveled a while, there comes a point where Samwise stops, and he says, “This is it. If I take one more step, this will be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.” There’s great trepidation within Sam. He hesitates, and marks the moment when he crosses the threshold into what is truly unknown. Sam understands that it’s the point of no return, and if he takes even one step further, he will be committed to the adventure, and there will be no avoiding what’s to come.

Frodo tells him, “Remember what Bilbo used to say, ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step out onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’” And Bilbo was right…anything can happen, and there’s no way out but through.

Gateways have power. When we pass through from one phase of life into another, it marks a time of great change, an unfolding into something new. We know what it means to come to a gateway, face the inevitable trials, and, finally, pass through…it happens in all sorts of ways. The most common gateways are the greatest rites of passage, which happen to all of us: birth and death. This is where we pass through from the unknown and then back into the unknown. This is where most philosophies and religions are able to really spread their wings and fly around in endless speculation. These are powerful gateways and they can invoke genuine awe in those who witness them, all religion and philosophy aside.

There are other gateways we go through of our own accord—those gateways we work and plan toward, like graduations, marriages and starting a family. These are thresholds we build ourselves that are of great importance, and will stick in the mind because the results are truly life-changing. One moment you’re single, then you arrive at a church, make your vows, get a ring, and BAM! You’re married! Yesterday you were a student, tomorrow, you’re officially a teacher, or a chemist, or an economist. One minute you’ve got a giant belly and you’re screaming in pain, the next, you’re a mother, holding your new baby, and crying with joy at finally seeing that face you’ve been wondering about. The gateway is crossed in a moment, but the work to get there was probably done over years.

Then there are the all the small transitions that take place over the course of a life; thousands of tiny, great moments that change us, bit by bit. Maybe it’s realizing we have a skill, encouraging words from a teacher, a terrific new job, a special day with a parent or child, making a wonderful new friend, or finally getting to kiss that person you’ve had a crush on. These might be small events, but they go far in shaping who we are, creating a patchwork of experiences.

But every year, each of us crosses two thresholds that can be the impetus for change. One is our birthday, the way we each mark the turning of our own years. Maybe we dread it, maybe we celebrate it, maybe we do a little bit of each. One way or another, if we’re lucky, another birthday comes around. The other threshold is the turning of a New Year. Both birthdays and New Years are times when we stand at the start of something new, an opportunity to turn a page, make a resolution to improve ourselves in large or small ways.

What is it about a new year, our own or everyone’s, which makes it so ripe for change? Maybe it’s because those times of turning tend to be points when we look behind and take stock of what we’ve done over the past year, and at the same time, look ahead at what’s to come, wonder at where the journey might take us. Sort of like we’re standing on a fulcrum, caught like Samwise Gamgee with one foot in the air, knowing that the next step we take will be the start of something new. One step in any direction will be a path that opens before us and anything can happen. I think we feel the power of that potential loud and clear when we stand at the threshold of a new year, and it makes it easier to make resolutions. It’s the challenges and trials to come that will test our resolve.

And we know that’s where the gateway leads, right? No matter which direction you put your foot down on, no matter what path you take, there will be challenges and rewards ahead. There are no avoiding the pitfalls, though, and the pitfalls are what test those resolutions we make. Old habits die especially hard and comfort zones are not easily broken out of. So, maybe the key to keeping a resolution is to find a way to renew it. Find a way to make each day the beginning of something. The old chestnut to “live every day like it’s your last,” I would think, would not help us keep resolutions like eating healthier or quitting smoking. It would be more like, “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, hand me anther beer, and cut me a big slice of that cake, please!”

No, I think the power that gateways contain, the potential for growth, comes from appreciating that every day is a new beginning, a new chance to change. Perhaps if we breathe deeply and manage to stay upright as we get swept away with every awakening, we may just be able to keep to our resolutions. It’s so hard, isn’t it, though, to find a way to make every day count, the start of a new year that begins again every day? We are easily distracted and distractible people. But here’s a blessing: if we fail, we try again tomorrow. We are ever-renewed, and the journey begins over and over.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110095758/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_01/01.mp3

This week we chatted with the Commission on Institutional Change about what’s new with their work.

The VUU is hosted by Meg Riley, Michael Tino, Aisha Hauser, and Christina Rivera, with production support provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado. The VUU streams live on Thursdays at 11 am ET.

Note: This audio has been slightly edited for a better listening experience. View the live original recording on Facebook. 

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110100924/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu277.mp3

This week we chatted with the CLF Learning Fellows about CLF.

The VUU streams live every Thursday at 11 am ET. We talk about social justice, Unitarian Universalism, religion, spirituality, and whatever else is topical and interesting!

Hosts: Meg Riley, Michael Tino, Aisha Hauser, and Christina Rivera; production support provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110100953/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu276.mp3

The beloved Senior Minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), Rev. Meg Riley, has announced her retirement, effective August 2020. The CLF’s approaches to worship, pastoral care, providing spiritual resources and otherwise interacting with its congregation have been a blessing to members without easy access to a brick and mortar congregation.

An important component of the CLF mission is ministry to and with people on the margins–a deep and active commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression, and multicultural community and learning.

In addition, a robust and rapidly growing prison ministry presents both a challenge and an extraordinary opportunity to the CLF. In a world of isolation, the CLF is a place where people can know that they are not alone.

Belonging is at the heart of CLF’s ministry. 

Technical innovations and societal changes require that the CLF adapt its ministries to meet the requirements of younger generations and emerging new communities of congregants. The CLF provides a uniquely open space for entrepreneurial ministerial endeavors. Rather than conduct a traditional search process for both a senior minister and a prison ministry director, the CLF Board of Trustees is taking an open-ended, creative approach towards determining the future leadership structure for Unitarian Universalism’s “Church without Walls.” We are asking you–UU leaders–for your ideas. The CLF will be circulating a detailed request for proposals in the very near future. Applications from both individuals and teams will be welcome. The board, with assistance from appropriate experts, will then evaluate each proposal in detail and select the one most likely to ensure that the CLF and its members continue to flourish in the decades to come.

Put your thinking caps on and watch this space! Please reach out to search(at)clfuu.org with any questions. 

Yours in faith,

The CLF Search Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My colleague Jone Johnson Lewis says it this way:

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

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

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

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

Why Kaepernick kneels instead of sits:

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

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

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

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

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

In his letter Mr. Boyer writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

May we all be so courageous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CLF seeks to be a courageous voice for justice, for growth, for community amongst people who would probably never meet with-out our web that connects lives around the world. In a time of growing division, simply bringing people together is a courageous act. Please support the CLF in this important work by sending a check in the enclosed envelope, or by giving online here.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110105539/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_02/02.mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poet David Whyte says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CLF Search Team is excited to announce the release of our Request for Proposals for the next Senior Leadership of the CLF! Both individuals and teams are invited to apply! We are excited to learn more about your vision for the future of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. Please feel free to reach out to our team with questions at search(at)clfuu.org. The RFP deadline is March 20, 2020.

Request for Proposals

Download the  PDF version.

Request for Proposals

Download the Word version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics and religion.

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

Politics and religion.

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

Politics and religion.

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

Politics and religion.

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

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

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

Have you ever feared the democratic outcome?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to change the script.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come with me, and you will be, in a land full of imagination…”

If You Want to See Paradise (Don’t Ask me for a Picture)

Poem by incarcerated member Vylet

Yeah, I know you want something a little more upbeat.

And all my poems are sad.

I’d write about being happy more often,

If I were happy more often. eee, Gad!

But for you, let me try this.

It’s no big deal.

For you, I will write

What I do not feel.

With imagination it’s easy.

Word play I create.

A mind set to set minds.

In a World. Realist. State.

Happy happy joy joy.

Ahhh, forget this.

What do you want from me?

My heart is dark as midnight

And only death holds the key.

I hate people. I hate life.

I wish death, I stir strife.

I talk proper and fool people.

Sophisticated learned evil.

I wasn’t always full of resentment.

Bitterness and sorrow

Pain and depression.

But that story will not be told,

This morning or after lunch.

Use your imagination

And make one the hell up.

Ah yes,  I imagine and daydream it’s true

That one day I won’t have to imagine

What it’s like to be happy

And happily write a poem for you

1-25-2020

In light of all that is happening right now with the spread of Covid-19, our team has decided to extend the CLF Leadership RFP deadline to midnight on Sunday, March 22nd. For those planning to submit a proposal, please feel free to contact us at search(at)clfuu.org if you have any concerns about meeting this new deadline.

Beyond this change, we will be moving forward as planned with our search timeline to conduct virtual first round interviews in April and finalist interviews in early June. In May, we will make a determination as to whether we can safely host finalist interviews in person, or if we need to move these interviews to zoom.

We also recognize that many ordinations planned for this spring are currently in jeopardy of being postponed. Please know that if you have been granted preliminary ministerial fellowship by the MFC but have not yet been ordained, you will still meet the requirement of having a minimum of one UU minister per proposal.

We hope you are all staying safe and connected (virtually) to loved ones and our faith community during these difficult times.

The CLF Search Team

The CLF exists because of your generosity. Each gift we receive renews our ability to serve UUs around the world. In countless ways, from our online show The VUU to pen pal letters between incarcerated and free-world members to conversations on Facebook, CLFers renew one another’s spirits with faith and courage. Please give generously at clfuu.org/give to help continue this cycle of renewal.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110131116/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_04/05.mp3

When I arrived at North Carolina’s Central Prison I wore my fear and trepidation like an aura as I, a pallid 128-pound weakling, stepped into my worst nightmare. All conversation and card games came to an immediate halt when I walked into the dorm. My first thought was, I’m going to die tonight. I was about to learn just how misleading first impressions can be.

I never knew his real name. “Preacher” was probably in his late fifties and, despite imprisonment, carried the demeanor of one who hadn’t a worry in the world. As fate would have it, I was assigned to the bunk immediately over him. After a couple of days of observing me in my self-imposed isolation, Preacher approached me carrying a soda and a Bible.

Now, I always considered myself to be a Christian. I mean, I was brought up in the church, baptized, and “saved,” so I must be a Christian, right? Yet, I tended to view God as some sort of celestial Santa Claus who I called on only when I wanted something.

“You look like you could use a friend,” were Preacher’s first words, as he handed me the Bible and soda. My suspicions must have been obvious. Preacher tilted his head back and laughed. “Don’t worry yourself. I ain’t gonna hurt you, and I want nothing from you. My friendship and the Bible are free. You can repay the soda when you’re able to.”

My relief, as well as all of the anxiety and apprehension I’d kept bottled up inside, suddenly burst forth. Tears flowed.

“You can live in prison one of two ways,” Preacher explained. “You can serve time or it can serve you.”

Puzzled, I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s obvious. God intends for you to learn something. You have a choice now, just like you did when you committed your crime. It’s called free will. You can spend your years consumed in anger, bitterness and blaming everyone and everything else, or you can accept responsibility for your actions and make this time work for you and count for something.”

“You mean, sort of like when life gives you lemons and you make lemonade?”

“Kinda,” Preacher responded. “You have the opportunity, albeit forced upon you, to better yourself—get a handle on your problems, pursue an education, develop a talent. It’s all up to you.”

I stared dumbfounded. “It sounds as if you think I should be thankful to be here, Preacher.”

Shaking his head, Preacher replied, “No, Gary, not at all. What I’m trying to tell you is that you should make the conscious choice to not waste this time. Have something to show for it when the time comes.”

Preacher left Central Prison just a few days later. Inmates are a transient population. That was nearly 29 years ago. Since then I’ve earned four college degrees, and banked over 300 credit hours. I’ve published six books, four plays—all of which have been produced on stage—and innumerable stories and poems. Equally, I’ve developed an appreciation for art that once upon a time I would never have taken the time for—all of this while making time serve me.

Most importantly, I’ve gained a greater sense of who I am and a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God. I no longer see God as a celestial Santa Claus who I run to with a wish list of prayers. I now see God as my Creator, with whom I spend time every day.

While I am still not grateful for prison, I have come to accept it and to find renewal in making time serve me.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110131139/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_04/03.mp3

Recently a fellow climate change activist exclaimed in despair, “The world has never faced a crisis like this before!” I’m not sure how convincing my response was to her then, or how it will be to you now, but I tried to reassure her that while the world may have never faced human-made climate change before, the world has faced crises like it before. Humanity has suffered and survived global plagues and world wars that killed tens of millions and displaced many millions more, my parents included. I would not be here were it not for such a crisis. We are currently in the middle of the sixth great mass extinction, and it is going to get a lot worse. But the fact that we’re in the middle of the sixth means that there have been five others before, and the world survived. Moreover, had there not been five mass extinctions before, we humans would not be here today.

Changing climate patterns will (as they already have) create new niches, which living beings will fill in ways that we cannot predict, for worse and for better. As Buddhism recognizes, all that exists is the result of causes and conditions. Under changing conditions, creative, new ways of being will come into existence. New behaviors. New species.

To be clear, I am not saying that    everything is going to be hunky-dory, so we don’t need to do anything, or that global upheaval is “all for the best” because it will provide new opportunities, or any other Pollyanna-ish nonsense. To talk like that ignores that tens of millions of people died in those plagues and wars. That among humans who suffer and die, it is more often people of color, the poor, and other marginalized groups. That even though living species, including us, will adapt, the conditions may change so fast that we won’t be able to keep up. So many have already succumbed.

I am not saying that everything will be OK. That would be a lie. But if history and biology can be our guide, some things will be OK. Something will survive, and hopefully thrive again. While any one life is incredibly fragile, life as a whole, life as a communal web, is incredibly resilient. Even in the face of great loss and sorrow, joy and beauty We are in the midst of a great deal of turmoil—ecologically, socially, economically, and politically. You know what I’m talking about. And many of us have our private crises not known to all. You also already know that the future of the world depends on what we do right now. I don’t need to remind you of that. What I’d like to add is that the quality of our lives right now also depends on how we react. It is OK to smile at beauty even when you’re grieving, if you want to (Obviously, if you don’t want to, that’s OK too.) It is OK to do things that bring you joy even in the midst of turmoil. In fact, that’s probably the only way we’re going to get through this. Have faith that while the world needs you to act, it also needs you to care for yourself, and to enjoy the gift of your one precious life.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110131200/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_04/04.mp3

My heart sank as I watched Notre Dame de Paris burn and its spire fall. That great 850-year-old landmark which thousands of stoneworkers and glass blowers, metal workers and wood carvers crafted for over two centuries, that great site of so many musical, artistic and religious developments, had been burning already for hours. Crowds had lined the streets, singing hymns, pleading for the church to survive. But when the spire fell, I think many of us assumed the church was gone.

But then a new picture emerged, blurry around the edges, but clear enough to make out that it was of the inside of the nave, the large stone worship space inside the cathedral. It was obvious some damage had been done, but the nave was still standing, the altar somehow unscathed. Some called it a miracle. However the main body of Notre Dame managed to survive the inferno, it was certainly, to borrow Howard Thurman’s phrase, a glad surprise.

We can only imagine the glad surprise of the women in the Easter story. They rise very early and go expecting to prepare Jesus’ broken body for burial, to anoint it with good-smelling herbs and oil so that his friends and followers could gather around his body comfortably to offer their last goodbyes. They go expecting to encounter death, but instead they find an empty tomb, and a stranger with the unbelievable news that Jesus isn’t dead anymore. They don’t know what to believe. But then the story says that Jesus appears to each of them, urging them to travel far and wide, teaching the saving message of his ministry. He tells them that the true path of salvation lies not in military might and occupying force, but rather in work toward justice, mercy, compassion, and the understanding that every single person bears the image of Love.

With no dead body, no final resting place to visit, Jesus’ survivors are denied the possibility of dwelling on his death. They are beckoned into looking forward toward new hope, toward a future they believed impossible only moments before. And from there they carry his ministry forward. Jesus’ death was meant to be a humiliating deterrent. As black liberation theologian Dr. James Cone wrote, crucifixion was the lynching of the Roman Empire. Jesus’ execution was meant to shatter the threat to the Empire posed by the movement Jesus was building.

But Jesus was not defiled by his death; his ministry was not undone because the Roman government attempted to frame him as a criminal and a fake. As my colleague, the Rev. John Buehrens, explains, “… the resurrection was a vision—one deeply connected to a radical hope… that death, exile, and seemingly utter destruction can never put an end to Divine Love, to the Sacred story.” In other words, it was a vision of glad surprise.

What a blessing that we have this holiday set aside to remember again and again the glad surprises that buoy our lives and shape human history. What a blessing to have a day to honor the astonishing ways that renewal happens in the face of what seems like certain defeat. This is the day we celebrate that pain, hate, and death don’t have the final word, that something wonderful, something holy, can come out of even the worst experiences.

Many of the symbols of Easter testify to this idea. After a long winter when crops are just beginning to grow again and game is still scarce, it is the rabbits that first begin to appear in great numbers, probably because they will eat just about anything that grows. They are symbols of fertility and the abundance of spring. The egg, likewise, is a symbol of fertility and new life.

A friend recently told me about something I think is an even more powerful symbol of renewal—the Sahara resurrection plant. This plant can survive months and even years of dehydration, rolling through the desert wherever the wind blows it. It looks dead—way past dead, actually. But when it does finally roll into some water, the plant transforms from a brown, withered, tumbleweed-looking thing to a vibrant, green plant.

The Sahara resurrection plant seems an especially fitting Easter symbol. It’s kind of a hard sell to preach about resurrection in the same month as Earth Day, given what we know about how the planet is doing. Human activity has affected the planet in lasting ways, ways that could literally come to annihilate much of life on Earth as we know it.

This isn’t hyperbole, it’s science. A UN report on climate change from a year ago suggests that humanity has only 11 years to make big changes before the damage we’ve done is irreversible. This isn’t new information, it’s just much more urgent. Yet despite decades of scientists’ warnings, many governments around the world, including and most especially the US, are doing little or nothing to reduce carbon emissions, and even deny outright the mountain of evidence that climate change is caused by human beings.

Without government support, getting everyone from individuals choosing not to use single-use plastic to big business choosing to invest in renewables instead of fossil fuels seems next to impossible. The problem feels too big. It’s too wrapped up in economic and political systems. It is all too easy to feel hopeless or powerless about the planet and our future on it.

And yet, the earth has amazing powers of renewal. Like the Sahara resurrection plant, entire ecosystems revive when given the opportunity.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the harm we’ve done to the Earth can or will all be undone. Scores of species have gone extinct. Radiation from nuclear bombs permeates an entire layer of matter on the Earth’s surface. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, climate change will have significant impact on life on this planet.

In another telling of the Easter story, when Jesus appears to his followers after the resurrection, his hands, feet, and side still bear the wounds from his execution. The wounds and scars of the past will never be erased. But if Easter has anything to teach us, it is that life and love are more powerful even than death. Though the path towards a sustainable relationship with the Earth is unclear, we must not lose hope that life will find a way.

When we’ve gone in expecting the worst, only to have the opposite happen; when we’re convinced there is no hope, and suddenly it dawns, filling the empty tombs of our hearts not with the finality of death but the possibility of new life, that is the glad surprise.

That is the power of resurrection and renewal. That is Easter.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110131222/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_04/02.mp3

I’ve known the song Spirit of Life by heart for longer than I can remember.

Spirit of life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea.
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close, wings set me free.
Spirit of life, come to me, come to me.

Carolyn McDade, who wrote the song, tells the story of where it came from. I had heard through the grapevine that McDade wasn’t happy with the way that we often sing it, that it isn’t about celebration, it isn’t about triumph. If you listen to the words, you can hear that: it’s a request, a need, a longing. And when she was asked to tell the story, here’s what she said.

She was coming home from a meeting about Central America—this in the early 80s, when the US government was supplying arms to oppressive regimes, when people, including nuns and priests and activists were being massacred. She was coming home from a meeting, as she had done so many times as a life-long activist. The reporter Kimberly French records it:

What McDade remembers most clearly was the feeling she had. “When I got to Pat’s house, I told her, ‘I feel like a piece of dried cardboard that has lain in the attic for years. Just open wide the door, and I’ll be dust.’ I was tired, not with my community but with the world. She just sat with me, and I loved her for sitting with me.”

McDade then drove to her own home in Newtonville. “I walked through my house in the dark, found my piano, and that was my prayer:

May I not drop out. It was not written, but prayed. I knew more than anything that I wanted to continue in faith with the movement.”

Spirit of life, come unto me.

It’s a prayer, a longing. It comes out of that place of feeling like a piece of dried cardboard, of feeling tired, empty, spent. That we cannot carry the load by ourselves for one more minute.

We yearn. We yearn for renewal because sometimes we feel like a piece of dried cardboard. We need renewal: a renewal of faith, a renewal of hope, a renewal of joy. I’ll tell you that lately I’ve been right there—dried cardboard, ready to be blown away.

Sometimes the candle is burning low. Sometimes it goes out. Parts of my life are good, and parts are really hard. There are parts of this work of ministry, this calling, that I deeply love, and there are parts that feel like slogging through a swamp. Like Carolyn McDade, sometimes I come home from the meeting on this or that, and feel like What was the point of that? The world’s problems seem so huge, and I’m just one person, and a tired one at that.

I’m yearning for renewal, and I’m feeling like dried cardboard. We’ve all had those dried cardboard moments, haven’t we? Stretched too thin, with no more tears to fall, because we’ve used them all up? Frustrated by the injustice of the world and despairing about how to fix it?

Yearning. And we reach for a language of that yearning, that longing for renewal. And, because we are Unitarian Universalists, because we know that language points to the mystery but isn’t the mystery itself, because we are suspicious of creeds and easy answers, this is complicated.

We want to be healed by some ancient ministry of stars, but language is tricky. For a long time we just avoided the subject all together. We didn’t talk about it; or, we spoke about it in psychological terms and not spiritual ones. We spoke about justice, but less about how to cultivate the spiritual resources necessary to stay at the work over the long haul, when things didn’t go according to plan. Sometimes we even dismissed this yearning as juvenile, something we had grown out of.

But that began to change a while ago. Partly, it was women like Carolyn McDade and others, who gathered to offer each other healing and comfort and solidarity, who expressed their yearning for the spirit of life, lived in community with one another. They kept their language open-ended, and focused on the heart. Others among us resurrected the old Universalist story of a God of love and mercy for all people everywhere, who loves us without needing us to be perfect.

As the culture has become more secular, the folks who come now to church don’t come for psychology—there are plenty of therapists to choose from, after all—they come for something deeper, something, dare we say, religious. Spiritual at least.

Some 15 years ago Rev. Bill Sinkford, then president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, said we needed a “language of reverence.” He talked about his own long night in the hospital with his son, and how he reached for that language of yearning, and prayed—with open-ended language, but prayer to God—without apology. He was, by the very act of speaking of the yearning in his heart, renewed.

And he encouraged us, whatever our understanding of the holy, the sacred, the ultimate, to cultivate a language of reverence—a sense of mystery, humility, wonder and hope in how we spoke about and experienced our lives. A language of poetry.

There was a huge controversy at the time; folks thought he was saying we all had to say God, but that’s not what he meant. And when things settled down, it began to happen. Naturalistic atheists spoke about the sense of wonder and awe and community they felt when they stood upon the shore, under the stars.

The theists among us spoke of the love of God, how they prayed and yearned and felt that presence in their heart. Unitarian Universalists who were following the paths of Buddhism, Paganism, Islam and other wisdom ways of being in the world began to speak about their own languages of reverence: their yearnings for wholeness and healing and hope, their feeling of being dried cardboard, sometimes, and needing the spirit of life—however understood—to come unto them.

I’ve been feeling like dried cardboard, but I know that renewal will come. In time; you can’t force it. I know some of the things I need to do to set the stage. Reaching out to friends is one of them. Singing, that’s essential. I need to take Sabbaths. It’s really important to have that quiet, Sabbath time, because in the midst of a complicated life, when time is running down and urging us on, we need to put away our phones and lie on the hammock, and let Sabbath time renew us. We need to get out into nature and let water, sky and earth renew us for the journey, And I need to pray. To express my yearning, in the language of poetry and metaphor.

In time, renewal of the spirit, renewal of faith, will come. It was this kind of thing that we Unitarian Universalists began to talk about as part of the conversation about the language of reverence: our yearning, and our experiences of renewal.

We yearn, we seek, we long to be connected and renewed and inspired—and it’s right here. The holy isn’t gone from the world, it’s everywhere. Miracles happen every moment, if we open our hearts and minds—our friends, music, Sabbath time, nature, poetry—these things are each a sacrament, a sign of the holy in the world. In the beloved words of UU musician Peter Mayer, “Everything is holy now.”

I know there are moments that don’t feel like that, and suffering, pain and injustice are real. But even in these hard places there is holiness, there is compassion and solidarity and mercy and truth.

I may feel like a dried-up piece of cardboard right now, but these practices of holiness, of sacrament, have carried me through the journey before, and I know they will again. It’s the journey Bill Sinkford made from his son’s hospital room to the pulpit. It’s the journey Carolyn McDade made from the meeting about Central America to the piano. It’s the journey I’ve seen so many people make in their own lives, from a place of trouble and sorrow to a place of hope, solace and peace.

Each spring we celebrate renewal, as life comes back, but there really isn’t any seasonal limit on renewal. Open yourself to be renewed. Open your heart to all that is holy everywhere, every-now. Open yourself to life and love, even in your sorrow and grief, your fear and pain, for this too shall pass, and life is a gift, not a project. The Holy is here, is now, however you see it and feel it and name it— right here—so trust it will come.

And when it does, rejoice and be glad, and share your good news in this world which needs more than ever to be renewed as well.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110131244/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_04/01.mp3

This week, we talk to representatives from UUs for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME), Black Lives of UU (BLUU), UU Peace Ministry Network (UUPMN), and UU Refugee and Immigrant Services and Education (UU RISE) working to pass a business resolution at the 2020 General Assembly to strengthen the use of corporate investment/divestment and shareholder advocacy in support of human rights.

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing today’s topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Production support for this episode is provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clfvuu_latest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu282.mp3

This week, Becky Brooks and Erika Hewitt, authors of Sparks of Wonder: Theme-Based Ministry for the Whole Congregation.

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing today’s topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Production support for this episode is provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110132553/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu283.mp3

Let’s dig into how to best honor our 5th Principle – affirming and promoting the right of conscience and the democratic process in our congregations.

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing today’s topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Production support for this episode is provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clfvuu_latest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu284.mp3

This week we are chatting with Dr. Elias Ortega from Meadville about what’s up at our UU identified seminary in Chicago.

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing today’s topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Production support for this episode is provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110132736/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu286.mp3

When I Wake Up

When I wake up ,I find myself in an environment

That’s so different from the one I once knew.

I find that I’ve not merely traveled out of society,

But to a place no one warned me about.

I collect my thoughts for a moment

While gazing from the window of my cell.

The rain-slicked razor wire in front of the house unit

Is being cleaned again by nature.

I never fail to be surprised by the same landscape

Time and time again.

Just as I perceive this,

Suddenly the texture of reality has changed once more.

It’s as if the transition from society

Has been nonstop to this Satan’s cave.

Here is where I dwell.

In a momentary lapse of reason.

“Finding yourself.” Nearly everyone wants to do it, and many are willing to pay for the trip. It’s worth the effort because when you find yourself, your true self, you dwell in authenticity, creativity, and power. Right?

Not so right. Unfortunately, the Western idea of finding yourself goes only half way. After all, what we discover when we find ourselves is what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the crooked timber of human-ity.” Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

As Kant knew, what we do with ourselves after we find ourselves is the real work. After we find ourselves, there’s a whole lot of sawing and hammering and sanding and shellacking to be done. As a matter of fact, we’ve got to saw, hammer, sand, and shellac ourselves every darn day. Perfection isn’t the goal. A life well-lived is the goal.

One tool we can use is a working definition of integrity. In my mind, integrity is born out of a match between inner ideals and outer action. For example, if creating justice is my goal, I can’t just seek to discover what justice means in the abstract, I need to determine what justice means in my own actions toward the greater whole.

Sure, “finding yourself” is great. But it’s only a step in the right direction. Next we’ve got to grab some tools and work on that crooked timber of ourselves.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110135540/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_05/05.mp3

Helen was revered as a good person, and I was happy to be her friend. She was a manager, a mother, an artist, a neighbor. My experiences with her were always warm and affirming. Everyone trusted her integrity because she lived her values.

But one day we find that she has done something horrible—something offending our moral code. In an instant, Helen becomes disturbing to me. How can I trust her? The experiences we shared are erased by a biting fear that all she was is a lie.

Then Hope—an acquaintance, not even a friend—steps forward with a gift of love. Hope and Helen talk, and affirm their relationship is still authentic. With this assurance, Hope is with Helen as she answers for the harm she created. Hope sees Helen as an artist, a manager, a neighbor and a person who violated a tenet. Hope insists we all are more than the worst thing we’ve done, and should not be carelessly discarded. She forces me to ask if integrity is only the memory of unblemished experience, or if it is simply capricious perception. Hope doesn’t say it, but I admit to myself: shame on me!

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110135628/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_05/04.mp3

There’s a reason why we as a religious people covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It’s because we believe that our spiritual wholeness depends on confronting the real facts of our lives and the world we live in. We believe we can live free, awakened, and aware; we can be loving, compassionate, and kind; we can live into who we are and use our gifts to help save the world only in the presence of the truth. And from that truth we derive meaning.

And there is no question that we are living in a precarious time for the truth. We find ourselves in a world of “alternative facts” that amount to a torrent of lies from those in the highest offices in the land. How are we to respond in a way that is centered in integrity, in a way of living that is grounded in what is true and what is right? Several years ago I heard a presentation at a minister’s conference that stuck with me. The speaker argued that over the last century different memes embodying cultural ideas or practices have tended to prevail.

For example, she said, in the 1960s the predominant mode of thinking centered on the notion of rights—who had them and how they would be protected. It was a powerful driver of all kinds of things, she said, but in time its importance faded, to be replaced in the 1980s by a different idea, the rising notion that people shouldn’t look to others to make their way in the world, that we are responsible for our own destiny. She identified this with an acronym she gave as “YOYO” or “you’re on your own.”

She argued, however, that in this new century the old notion is beginning to fade and a new meme is rising that acknowledges more directly our interdependence on each other. It’s the recognition that while we are responsible for our individual lives, we can’t get by on our own. She described this with the acronym, “WITT” or “we’re in this together.”

I think that, Donald Trump notwithstanding, WITT is the acronym of our age. It embodies the recognition that we are fundamentally bound to each other and the Earth across races, ethnicities, gender identities, economic status and nationality. Every person matters.

Our work, then, involves building ties to know each other better, and exploring how to empower all people to live with purpose and meaning. It means widening our circles of concern to embrace all people, including those who today are marginalized. It is a powerful center of meaning, grounded in the truth of the unity of humankind.

But it is challenging, too. It requires adapting ourselves to difference, stepping outside the echo chambers of the narrow silos of our lives. We do this through the choices we make in how we conduct our lives, about how we spend our time, who we associate with. Let’s be honest, giving ourselves to this work is not easy.

Easy is living our quiet lives in our quiet circles. Hard is putting ourselves in places we’ve never been, in the company of people different from us. It isn’t comfortable, and yet it puts us in touch with something so remarkable and compelling that it can astonish us when we first experience it. Annie Dillard describes it as the substrate that underlies everything else in our lives: “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.” The simplest word for it is love: an elemental truth so basic, so vital that it eludes our conscious minds, as Rumi puts it, like the water that fish swim in. Choosing to love is speaking out when we see others demeaned, reaching out to neighbors when they are threatened, listening when another is in pain.

Let us say a blessing for the complexities of this world, all the imponderables that unhorse our prejudices and preconceptions, that force us to shake our heads and look again. Our human brains evolved to locate patterns and construct scenarios that distill complicated circumstances down to a few simple elements. It’s a great boon to us, but it also gets us into trouble time and again when the messy world with all of its inconvenient truths trips us up.

Thankfully, complexity forces us amid all our hubris to admit to a little humility. Ah, humility, that not-so-gentle reminder that to be human is to be fallible, requiring us to be open to correction, to learn tolerance and forbearance, and so to be open to grace. Through the power of humility and grace we find our way to love, which is the core of integrity.

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

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

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110135648/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_05/02.mp3

To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” The poet e. e. cummings wrote these timeless words in 1958. Each of us, young and old, receives messages about who we ought to be. How we assimilate these messages with who we know ourselves to be is the spiritual discipline of living with integrity.

Have you ever felt like you weren’t being true to yourself, perhaps even that you were living a double life?

LGBTQ and other marginalized people know this reality well—it’s called passing. Others of you may know this feeling when you’re at work if you can’t be your full self—there’s a divide between work life and home life. Or maybe you feel a gap between your vision of how best to live and the reality of your life currently. Or perhaps you are a proud UU at church, but “in the closet” with more conservative family members or friends.

If you’ve ever experienced this divide, you know that it’s not a very joyful or fulfilling way to live. The truth we hold within is the core of our humanity, so when we are disconnected from the soul of who we are, we can feel lost.

The Quaker writer and activist Parker Palmer has focused much of his energy and writing on the challenge of living a whole and undivided life, aligning soul and role. Essentially, he is interested in what it means to have integrity. In his book A Hidden Wholeness, he describes this dilemma using the image of a strip of paper that is white on one side, colored on the other.

The white side is your inner life—your ideas, intuitions, feelings, values, faith, mind, heart, spirit, true self, soul. The colored side is your outer life—the image, influence, and impact you project.

As adults, at one time or another, or maybe as a way of life, we put up a wall of separation between our inner life and outer life, protecting the vulnerabilities of our inner life from the world we live in. This might include parts of our identities that are not safe to share with our communities. If the paper stays with the white, inner side invisible long enough, if we live behind the wall long enough, our inner life can disappear even from our own view, and the wall becomes all we know.

But when we recognize that the wall exists, we can take a step toward integrity by trying to reorder and reintegrate our inner and outer lives, values, and beliefs. We join the ends of our strip of paper to form a connected circle. The thing about this is that there’s still an inside and an outside, white on one side, colored on the other.

So what does true integrity look like? It looks like what happens if you put a full twist in the strip of paper before you join the two ends, creating a Mobius strip.

The Mobius strip was discovered by German mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius. In mathematics, the Mobius strip is a surface with only one side and one boundary. If you trace your finger on what seems to be the outside, you find yourself suddenly on what seems to be the inside. But if you continue, you will find yourself back on what seems to be the outside.

If life is a Mobius strip, there really is no inside or outside; there is only one reality. Integrity is the state of being whole and undivided, which is why the Mobius strip is a beautiful representation of this way of living.

As Parker Palmer says, the inside and outside—of the Mobius strip and of ourselves—are “co-creating each other.” “Whatever is inside us continually flows outward to help form, or deform, the world,” he says, “and whatever is outside us continually flows inward to help form, or deform, our lives.” We travel the Mobius strip of life making choices—about what we project and what we absorb—and these choices can be “life-giving for the world, for other people, and for me”…or not.

The poet David Whyte writes: “hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with.” This is what it means to live with integrity. And when we hold to this truth it shapes our friendships, our work and our life choices in ways that are life giving, because we know and are being true to who we are.

Our integrity is constructed, in large part, by the choices we make. Even by what may seem like little, everyday choices.

The other day I was at the store buying cushions for my patio furniture. They were big cushions, seat and back attached by plastic ties, piled high in the cart, shoved in there so as to keep them from spilling out all over the floor or knocking over displays in my path. When I went to pay, the checkout person said “two?” as she scanned the tag nearest her. I paused, and said, “no, there are three.”

I could have just said “yeah” and taken advantage of the situation, having to pay for only two cushions instead of three. Some people might have jumped at the opportunity, not even hesitating. But that’s not who I am, it’s not “the center of the image [I was] born with.” I’m not someone who takes advantage of others and lies to save a buck. I’m someone who is, or tries to always be, honest.

But integrity is about more than honesty, or telling the truth. It’s about being true to who you are, what you believe, and what you say. It’s the sum total of all those small, everyday choices to be honest, choices that are life-giving instead of life-diminishing.

I think we generally expect integrity of one another. I can recall multiple times that were like the patio cushion incident. I stood at the checkout, my arms full of pool noodles or bubble wands (birthday party—what can I say?), and the checkout person just asked me how many I had, without verifying or counting. There’s undoubtedly an element of privilege at play here, and I believe there’s also something deep within us that makes us want to believe others have integrity.

We are called to live with integrity by expecting it of one another. When someone expects me to be real and true, they are calling me to hold to that inner truth at the core of who I am. There is a spiritual invitation in this exchange.

Integrity is a spiritual practice—not a characteristic or quality of an individual, but a way of being and living. The first part is to identify and listen to our core. Who am I, what is that image I was born with, my core, my soul?

Then there is the spiritual work of strengthening this core, of amplifying this voice, which we do by making choice after choice. Every time we make a choice about what we project and what we absorb it’s like we’re working our integrity muscle.

JoLillian Zwerdling, quoted in the book Emergent Strategy, writes:

From starfish I have learned that if we keep our core intact, we can regenerate. We can fall apart, lose limbs, and re-grow them as long as we don’t let anyone threaten that central disc’s integrity. We can grow so many different arms, depending on what kind of sea star we are. We have to nourish ourselves with the resources we are surrounded by…and by doing so we help keep ecosystems delicately balanced.

I love this image of us as starfish. By fortifying your core and keeping it intact you can weather whatever comes. Whatever temptations present themselves. Whatever messages you receive from this “world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” When you know and listen to your true self, you can be like the starfish, regenerating when needed. And this helps contribute to a balanced ecosystem.

If you’re like me, you may need some help with this spiritual practice. It helps to have a community who will remind you of who you are, and support you in holding to that core. A community that models integrity. This is one of the many reasons to belong to a church.

All institutions, including churches, struggle with integrity just as individuals do. Are we who we say we are? Do we walk our talk? Our actions must be reflective of the core identity we claim, and of the values that run deep in our tradition and our bones. In a time when integrity is not being modeled by those in charge of our government and most powerful institutions, we as individuals and as a church have an important role to play.

Just as the choices we make about what we put out into the world and what we take in co-create our individual integrity, I believe the choices we make as individuals and as a church help co-create a society with integrity. Each time we are honest, true to ourselves, humble about our shortcomings and mistakes, and practice discernment and fortification of our core, we model integrity in life-giving ways, helping transform the culture in which we live.

We are all surrounded by forces that tempt us to be other than who we are. But as the poet David Whyte writes: “There is only one life / you can call your own / and a thousand others / you can call by any name you want.” Let’s live our own, and live it with integrity.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110135718/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_05/01.mp3

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist will talk show discussing topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

This week on the VUU the host will talk with members of the Commission On Institutional Change.

Production support for this episode is provided by Antonia Bell-Delgado and Lori Stone.

The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110140933/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu298.mp3

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110142118/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu299.mp3

A special series on the Commission’s report: Religious Professionals, Educating for Liberation. Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110142855/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu300.mp3

A funny thing happened on the way to this Quest issue. We switched our topics from one month to another, and I neglected to notice it when I reached out to colleagues for submissions. I recruited great material for an issue on spiritual practice (which you’ll see next month), happily left for a wonderful two week-break, and thought I was prepared for our editorial meeting the day I returned.

Then, the night before I was coming back, I saw an email from Lynn Ungar, Quest’s editor, reminding the team that we’d be meeting the next day on the theme of … what!?!?!? MISTAKES!!! I had recruited nothing. I had prepared nothing. I had done…you guessed it…nothing! Except that I had lived out the theme, by making a colossal mistake!

Hastily, I reached out via social media to my colleagues to explain this ironic situation…could they please, immediately, without hesitation, send me stuff they’d written about mistakes? With love and humor and willingness, a record number of submissions were in my mailbox within a couple of hours.

My experience, and many other experiences just like it, show to me over and over that when I make mistakes, other people are ready to lean in and support me, to pick up what I dropped, to help me out. In fact, the mistake I made encouraged my colleagues to be quicker with sharing what they had written than if I had asked them far in advance to do so. My own imperfection, I suspect, invited them to send in pieces which, given time, they might judge too imperfect to share.

Of course, I recognize that part of my privilege as a white middle class person is that I am allowed to make mistakes that other people—immigrants, people of color, people who defy gender binaries, poor people—are not allowed to make without punishment. We need only look at who is incarcerated, for how long, for what charge, in order to know that not all mistakes are treated equally. And not everyone has a community ready and willing to support them in times of vulnerability.

Which is one of the main reasons I have spent my life’s work in spiritual communities. We exist, first and foremost, to provide support for one another’s essential nature, which is vulnerability. In spiritual community, mistakes aren’t graded. We aren’t ranked and valued in order of our ability to perform, to act perfect, to measure up to one another’s expectations.

Some years ago I was practicing Vipassana meditation at a retreat with the teacher Sharon Salzberg. Salzberg has brought the practice of Metta, or lovingkindness, meditation to many of us in the west. At this retreat, she said that she has come to define the act of meditation as the lovingkindness we show to ourselves when we notice that, once again, our attention has wandered. This definition brought delight to me because my attention wanders over and over and over. “Oh!” I said, “That means, the more our attention wanders, the more chances we have to be kind to ourselves about it!” She beamed at me. “Yes,” she said.

What if our communities were centered in this same way, that we understood that we were at our strongest and finest when we showed kindness to those who make mistakes? Even bad mistakes? Instead, in the United States, we have become increasingly intolerant, cruel, and judgmental about others’ mistakes, or even perceived mistakes. Too often, social media has become a platform for judgment, indictment, contempt. This is why CLF often says that we like to bring grace to the internet: we affirm people, just as the vulnerable messes of contradictions and spectacular beauty and pain and failure that we are, from birth to death and every day in between.

Can you imagine a time when everyone’s mistakes are the wake up call to lovingkindness, the type of lovingkindness that my colleagues showed to me? Can you imagine a world in which every breath is an opportunity to love again, no matter how far astray our mind has wandered again? Do you, like me, long for a world in which every one of us believes that despite all of our mistakes, we are still worthy of love? As far as I’m concerned, that’s what we’re doing here now, in our own radically imperfect way: Trying to build that world in which love is the constant through all our wandering and our wobbling.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/06.mp3

I make no mistakes. I do not err.
A charge of fault is so unfair.
While others protest in despair
I shift the blame with great fanfare,
then put on an innocent air.
I do not try, so mistakes are rare.

Mistakes are made by those who try,
those who work and question why.
They take their lumps, do not deny,
make no excuse, no alibi.
“I know more now” is their reply,
then move on without tear or sigh.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110144255/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/05.mp3

So far, I suck at this vegetarian thing.

The problem is pretty simple: I keep finding myself with a chorizo burrito in my hand, and oops, I did it again. In the first seven days of 2020, I’ve eaten far less meat, and probably more vegetables, than usual, but I am definitely failing any purity test out there. And not intentionally; it’s just that 40 years of habit is hard to break, and my specific commitment to the not-eating of meat is at the moment a shallow one.

So, deal off, right?

Not at all.

Do you at least feel like a failure?

Ha. No.

And I also don’t feel like a vegetarian, exactly. What I feel like is a work in progress, and I trust that. I trust my ability to learn and grow. I trust myself to lean toward my commitments, and I trust my body to build the muscle to do it better day by day.

I have a shallow commitment to not eating meat, at least at the moment. But I have a very deep commitment to trying to live in fuller concert with my values and with the earth. I’m also profoundly interested in exploring the question of what can be leveraged by consumer-level choices. There’s a lot holding me here in this experiment. None of which dies of imperfection.

And I’m going to level with you: the above is a true story, but I’m not telling it to you as confessional. I don’t need a witness or arbiter for my eating practices.

I’m here (and, secret: you are too) for the metaphor.

Because sometimes we suck at things at first, even when we care about the larger implications. And you know what? Sometimes your friend or neighbor or colleague does, too.

And a thing that American culture, and Unitarian Universalist theology (interesting overlap there, for sure) are both averse to grasping is that we as people can commit to a thing, and suck at doing what we committed to, and still keep going in the service of our commitment.

We are averse to grasping that it’s possible, and it is frankly alien to us to consider that this kind of try and then try better is in fact what integrity looks like where gravity is applied.

Amid this backdrop, I was recently charged with overuse of the word covenant. I pled guilty; it’s an occupational hazard. And I said that I would try to find another word; but the truth is, I don’t have one. Because where relationship is concerned, covenant is the only word I know that means that we—you and I—are going to try, and mess it up, and then we are going to try again.

Covenant is one of the most powerful tools I know in growing toward the person I want to be, because that so often means building toward—not discovering ready-made, but co-creating, month by month—the relationships I hope to have.

And I need that word, because what’s left otherwise, namely some brittle and therefore broken promises, seems unlikely to allow our best care for one another. Insufficient to facilitate the best of what I have experienced between us. Unworthy of the complexities of human love, including its concerning capacity for hate and the mystifying and magical and sometimes highly uncomfortable realms of discovery of self and other.

Without covenant, a conversational and relational right of return, what we have when we mess up is cutoff. That’s effective, in the most surface-level sense, at removing discomfort, but its ask, or our ask of it, is that we be left where it found us. It’s the opposite, in short, of change through growth.

I have pretty strong muscles for that particular process; I know it better than I wish. But it’s a limited-value tool. Walls are ok for separation, but if it’s connection we seek, we are going to need strategies for when it’s hard. For when people are, well, human. For when we ourselves are in-progress more than we wish.

Trying, and failing, and trying again.

And this is where covenant makes asks different from what our culture is used to. Where we might learn to say, “Oops, that didn’t work” and to follow that with a considered, “Let’s try this instead.”

I might, someday, be an actual vegetarian. What I am, right now, is someone willing to learn out loud, a person with tools better than shame, and a believer in the power of relationship in the pursuit of personal and relational growth.

I am not yet good at this year’s resolution, but I’m not worried. I know through long experience that my grit is made out of my practices.

And guess what: yours is, too.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/04.mp3

This past summer my husband and I celebrated our 30th anniversary by going hiking in the mountains. Being in the mountains always reminds me of an incident on our very first backpacking trip. One morning in 1990 while my husband, Michael, was building a fire to cook breakfast, we swapped stories about childhood camping trips. I told him about my favorite camping breakfast: stick biscuits. Biscuit dough wrapped around a stick and toasted over a fire, then cut open and smothered with jam.

By the time the fire was crackling, I was mixing the dough and my mouth was watering. We hunted up a few good sticks and put on the dough. But before we’d hardly gotten our sticks over the fire, dough was starting to fall off in heavy biscuit blobs. It seemed as though I had put too much milk in the batter; the dough was too thin.

We were now out of flour, so our next idea was to add a little more milk and make the dough into pancake batter. Which we did. But then we realized that we didn’t have a frying pan in which to cook the pancakes. All we had were the metal camping pots that doubled as bowls. Our last ditch attempt, and we were getting pretty hungry by this time, was to dump the batter in a pan, add some fresh blueberries, cover it up and see what happened.

The result? The most incredible blueberry muffins I’ve ever had. Granted, we had to eat them with a spoon, but, oh, they were good. The first time these muffins were a mistake, but now I know how to make muffins over an open fire. A splendid failure.

That cooking experiment was a good spiritual lesson for me. You see, 30 years ago, I had much more absolute ideas about what constituted a success or failure. And sometimes I made the judgment call too soon. My husband, being the scientist and the experimenter, brought a different perspective. In a situation like the “stick biscuit disaster,” I could have too easily given up, thrown away the batter, gotten out the granola and milk, and started the day off a little crabby. I hadn’t really learned on a gut level that, in the words of Lewis Thomas describing DNA, “the capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel.” I wasn’t always able to hear the unexpected music formed out of the moment.

But that morning in the Rocky Mountains I started learning the lesson of “splendid failures,” the lesson that even though situations don’t turn out as I had planned, they may be salvageable. So what is it that turns plain old mistakes into splendid failures?

First of all, it helps to stay in the present. I have a neighbor who works with at-risk youth. One of the tools she gives them is yoga. She teaches them yoga so that they can learn to stay focused on their breath. Because if they can learn to really pay attention to their breathing, it begins to affect every other part of their lives. They can manage their anger and their other impulses. They can learn to take time making decisions. If they can learn to stay present to their own life-giving breath, they can better handle the stress and complexities of life. They can see ways to repair some mistakes and learn to avoid others. And if they can learn to be with their own breath, they can learn compassion, for themselves as well as others. With compassion comes forgiveness.

A second spiritual quality that seems to turn failure into success is keeping an open and flexible mind. About 15 years ago we took possession of our current family home in Minneapolis. During the years of slow renovations I splurged on some beautiful but expensive fabric roller shades for our bedroom. The problem was, I made a mistake, and the fabric I chose was too sheer and didn’t block the light. Over the years it has become harder and harder for us to sleep in a too-bright room. While doing some other house projects these past few weeks I took down an old plastic roller shade that had some cracks in the material. I was going to throw it away, but then it occurred to me that I could sew sections of that “black out” fabric to the backs of my bedroom shades. Bingo! We finally have shades that darken our room. A splendid failure.

Finally, in the case of failure, perspective matters a great deal. How we label our experiences and ourselves can either diminish us or empower us. In the wake of a failure, we can get stuck in our despair or shame. Or we can go through the natural stages of failure, which are similar to the stages of grief, and then use our new wisdom to step more wisely into the future. A failure is really nothing other than our own judgment about an event. It’s not a deep truth about our character or worth as a person. It is not a permanent state, unless we make it so. Choose a compassionate frame for your failures.

When we can approach our failures with awareness, honesty, compassion, and a willingness to learn, then they reveal small miracles to us: greater clarity about our gifts and weaknesses, and our options for the future; paths that perhaps we didn’t see before; ideas that didn’t work in one time or place, but that may work in another.

When we are able to stay in the present; keep an open and flexible mind, and choose a compassionate frame to put around our failures, then we are able to truly enjoy the muffins we never meant to make.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/03.mp3

I used to be someone who beat myself up for every fault, even ones that no one else knew about. There was a compulsion to be the best, the brightest, the most admirable person I could be, and when I did something that interfered with that perception, I would dwell on it for years.

When I was about six, we were hiking, and we had a picnic lunch in a hut in the mountains. Part of my lunch was an apple, and after I ate the apple, I threw it away…but in a can that was labelled “recycling: cans and bottles only.” When I realized my mistake, I was horrified, and I realized that I should fish my apple core out and find a better place to put it. But the can was nearly as tall as I was, and it was filled with smelly trash and sharp edges. So I walked away. I am now forty-four years old, and I still remember that moment with perfect clarity. Most especially, I remember the feeling of shame that enveloped me. All over an apple core that I put in the wrong bin.

It was important to me, in that moment, to do the right thing—to put the apple core in the right bin. But it was somehow more important to me that no one know that I had done the wrong thing. So I kept this fault secret. If I had been able to embrace the fault, I would have been able to go to my parents, or to one of the people who worked at the hut. I’m certain that I could have explained my mistake, they would have said, ‘no big deal,’ and I would have skipped on my merry way.

Embracing our faults means admitting to them, telling people about them. To do this, we have to know in our bones that this evidence of our imperfection won’t keep people from loving and respecting us. We have to trust that we won’t be judged harshly. And when we are judged harshly, which we might be, we have to be able to keep that judgment from lodging in our deep sense of self. This is tricky stuff.

A common response to failure is to make excuses—blame the failure on other people’s actions, or circumstances beyond your control. The dog ate my homework. My idiot boss kept talking about golf and the potential client was so irritated, she didn’t really even see my fantastic proposal.

This is counter-productive, though it’s very human. When we tell ourselves, “Well, I would have succeeded, but all this other stuff got in my way,” we give away our power.

Another common response is to over-react. “I can’t do anything right. I always mess up when it really counts.” So we give up our power again, and stop trying. We give in to a sense of learned helplessness.

A healthy response to failure is to find a balance between these extremes—to accept that we’re supposed to fail. It’s a normal part of life.

In reality, we fail for a variety of reasons, some internal, some external. When there is no fear or shame associated with failure, it’s easier to figure out which mistakes we might have made, and what we might want to do differently the next time. We accept the things we have no control over, and focus on the things that we can change.

My first truly spectacular failure occurred in my first paid ministry job. I had a newborn and a two-year-old, and to be frank, I was terrified by the prospect of staying home with them. So I took a job as the assistant minister to families. The congregation hadn’t done their homework. The job wasn’t well-defined or well-thought-out; I didn’t even have an office or a desk. Meanwhile, I had no real experience in religious education ministry, and yet I was supposed to completely reimagine and redesign their program, all in twenty hours a week.

The longer I was there, the more out of my depth I felt. I did some really crappy ministry. Also some good stuff. But the best thing that I did in that job was to decide to resign. Suddenly, the growing sense of anxiety and overwhelm melted away, and I was able to be present to myself and the congregation in a much healthier way.

I learned what it felt like to fail spectacularly—which made me better able to minister to folks who had lost their jobs or who were struggling with failures of their own. I learned how important it was to look for a good fit, and not assume that smart people of good will can make anything work. I learned a lot about myself, my strengths and weaknesses. And I faced my fear of stay-at-home-mothering and went on to three and a half years of being there for my kids when they were little.

Embracing failure as a natural part of life helps us weather the inevitable ups and downs. When we reject the “success at all costs” model and embrace a more realistic, “you win some, you lose some” outlook, we don’t waste precious time and energy on situations or challenges that aren’t really ours to fix or face. When we embrace failure, it allows us to find ourselves at the end of the day, happy to be alive, secure in the knowledge that whatever our track record, we are successful human beings, worthy of love and able to love others in all their faults and failures.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110144412/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/02.mp3

The fundamental belief in the value of the individual has long held a central place in liberal religion, and finds a modern expression in our faith’s first principle, an affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Such a conviction comes with specific meaning, serving to counter another ancient religious principle, that of original sin.

Original sin teaches us that each of us is born in a state of sinfulness, fallen and unclean. Some interpret this as the simple imperfection of humanity, while others decry an inherent wickedness in us all. As both Unitarian and Universalism were forming in America, the utter iniquity of humanity was preached widely. Calvinist Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” serves as a prime example. He wrote:

The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire…looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire….

In many ways, Unitarianism and Universalism gained a strong foothold in American society because of their response to this horrible theology.  William Ellery Channing, considered the father of Unitarianism, delivered a powerful sermon entitled “Likeness to God” in which Channing advised:

Let the minister… hold fast… [to] a faith in the greatness of the human soul…. Let him strive to awaken in [people] a consciousness of the heavenly treasure within them.

Affirming the inherent worth of each and every person serves as our great response to one of the most damaging theologies ever spoken. As Unitarian Universalists and religious liberals, it is something we can be proud of and continue to speak loudly when the times call for it, as they sadly so often do.

Yet, sometimes, I wonder if we misunderstand the fullness of our first principle. In a very success-driven society, I think we sometimes see it as affirming not so much our unconditional worthiness as a complete goodness in ourselves, allowing us to ignore the less savory aspects of our character. Affirming our fundamental goodness has its value, but such an emphasis can also lead us to miss the most essential implication of our inherent worth—that we need not be good to be loved.

To know this truth is to be healed. It is to embrace wholeness over perfection, to honor ourselves not as we might be, but rather as we are. I think interpreting our inherent worth as our inherent goodness can lead us to be very fearful about owning up to our own mistakes, failures, and even at times, cruelty. Without a deep acknowledgement of our capacity for, to use the Christian term, sin, we lack a useful theology of accountability, forgiveness, and even love. And yes, despite our inherent worth, despite our basic goodness, we—each and every one of us—do sin. The power of our first principle is not that we do not sin, but that even in our utter failings, even in our most horrible of mistakes, we are worthy of love.

As a young man of 24, just entering seminary, I suffered deeply from an inability to embrace my failings. I resisted acknowledging all the wounds and weaknesses in myself, feeling the incredible need to be good, to be right, to be perfect in order to be loved. I went through a ministerial career assessment, a required part of the process of becoming a minister, and was very nervous. I was afraid to give the wrong answers on the psychological tests. The therapist asked me what my flaws were and I didn’t have the self awareness to answer. It was a painful three days that ended with the group facilitator telling me the therapist had placed a nickel bet with him that I wouldn’t be able to handle ministry. As hard as it was, the experience, for me, began a very painful, yet ultimately liberating, path of growing acceptance of myself not as I want to be, but as I am, even when I fail, even when I am not liked.

Life seems to test these insights. And subsequently I found myself challenged more deeply than ever before. While serving my last church in Princeton, New Jersey, I fell in love and married a woman from Bloomington, Indiana. She had two children and the three of them moved out to Princeton to live with me. Over the course of our time, I found myself consistently torn between the needs of my congregation and the needs of my family. My wife desperately wanted to return to Bloomington, but I felt a deep calling to continue to serve the Princeton congregation. My marriage suffered. My work suffered. I struggled mightily and fiercely and arrogantly to hold on to both, yet never had enough of me to do either well. After three years of struggling, at last I gave in and we moved to Bloomington to raise our family near my wife’s parents.

I learned so much about being incomplete from that experience. I was not enough. From the beginning I pressed on, hurting both my family and the church. I so badly wanted to have both, and refused to see the inevitable—that the situation was unworkable. I also had to give up something very precious to me, something that made me feel like I was a good person—not only my work as a minister but also my dream of one day being an important minister. These were humbling awakenings.

Letting go of parish ministry was perhaps the most painful experience of my life. But I surrendered to a humbler life—and I found a much deeper love inside, both for myself and for others.

In full disclosure, after four years in Bloomington, my wife and I sadly decided to divorce. Self-acceptance remains an essential aspect of this transition for me. I never thought I’d be someone whose marriage would end in divorce. Yet here I am—incomplete, imperfect… and loved.

There are a variety of things I find difficult with conservative Christianity, yet I believe the Christian story, perhaps better than any religious tradition, addresses our human capacity for failure. As the most obvious example, Jesus failed. Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah. He was supposed to take on the Romans and usher in a new kingdom of peace for the Jewish people. But instead, he died—mission not accomplished. All kinds of beliefs have evolved to turn Jesus’ death into a victory, most notably the belief that he died for our sins. But I find Jesus so much more powerful as a failure, as the man who lived and loved, struggled and hurt, succeeded and failed. Jesus, as a metaphor for God, knows us in his humanness, knows us in his weakness, knows us in his failure.

While in seminary, I had a professor, Rosemary Chinicci, who was also a Catholic nun. She told me something fascinating—she believed the resurrection came too soon, that people did not have enough time to sit in the loss, to be present to the failure. I think that’s a powerful insight.

When approaching the pain that comes with failure, we tend to find ways to pass over the experience quickly, to not allow ourselves to be present and actually feel what we’re feeling. We get busy. We criticize ourselves. We criticize others. We dive into one self-improvement project or another. We try to see “the positive side.”

When we fail, any response we make that does not invite in our simple experience of failure removes us from the wholeness of who we are. In so doing, we reject that part of ourselves that does not know success, alienating ourselves from a very real part of our humanity, damaging ourselves by withholding the love that we all deserve.

It is certainly not in our interest to use failures as a means to belittle our worth. Yet, I think it is also not in our immediate interest to take our failures and turn them into something positive—the “lemons to lemonade” approach. To attempt too soon to turn our failures into something “good” can be another way of avoiding the pain of failure, thus avoiding the healing that comes when we compassionately offer our presence to our hurt.

Twelve step programs are just one example of another way. Countless people have been transformed by openly admitting to their failures in the presence of loving community. This is why Rosemary Chinicci’s idea of more time before the resurrection makes such sense. When we fail, we need to allow ourselves the time to simply feel the pain, experience the hurt. In so doing, we allow ourselves to remain open and true to ourselves. For this is ultimately what love is all about. Compassion means to feel with. When we feel our failures, when we allow ourselves to be present to them, without trying to change them or alter them, we know compassion. We know love.

And this, I believe, is the true meaning, the greatest gift of our first principle—the inherent worth and dignity of every person. You need not be good to be loved. And I believe this extraordinary gift bequeathed to us by our ancestors compels us to continue to offer this love to each other and our larger world—beginning with ourselves. May we surrender the need to be perfect, set aside the pretense of success, and enter into the humility of our full selves. We succeed and we fail; in the midst of both, let us show love.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110144453/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/01.mp3

The Commission on Institutional Change sits down for their penultimate episode in the spring series reviewing the findings of their report, the results of a multi-year effort to examine what is required to change UU institutions to dismantle white supremacist structures upholding them.

Rev. Meg Riley, Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera, and Rev Michael Tino host this live Unitarian Universalist talk show discussing topics from an anti-racist, anti-oppressive and multicultural perspective. The VUU streams live on Facebook (or sometimes on YouTube) every Thursday at 11 am ET.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110145218/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu302.mp3

The Church of the Larger Fellowship has concluded its nationwide search for new senior leadership and is thrilled to share the news with all of you before General Assembly!

Tune in here for the live announcement and to celebrate this news on Tuesday, June 23 at 5pm PT/8pm ET.

During the ten years of Meg Riley’s leadership as senior minister for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we have changed and grown in a wide variety of ways. Embracing the motto “Always in Beta!,” Meg’s innovative leadership has taken us in many exciting directions to serve the needs of Unitarian Universalists around the globe:

• The Quest for Meaning website, with significant resources available online;
• Weekly online worship services;
• Live online vigils in response to national crises;
• The VUU, a weekly online justice-centered talk show;
• Development of the CLF Learning Fellows program, which helps seminarians and others prepare for innovative ministry;
• Covenant Groups that meet in real time through video conference technology;
• Faith Rocket—a program that shares CLF worship and religious education materials in a format designed to support small congregations;
• Blogging;
• CLF Facebook groups, including Coffee Hour;
• Immediate pastoral care in response to world-wide crises;
• Growth of the Prison Ministry program from 400 in 2010 to over 1,100 in 2020;
• In-person contact with congregations throughout the US;
• Growth of the CLF staff to include a director of technology and a communications coordinator

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152627/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/05.mp3

During the ten years of Meg Riley’s leadership as senior minister for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we have changed and grown in a wide variety of ways. Embracing the motto “Always in Beta!,” Meg’s innovative leadership has taken us in many exciting directions to serve the needs of Unitarian Universalists around the globe:

• The Quest for Meaning website, with significant resources available online;
• Weekly online worship services;
• Live online vigils in response to national crises;
• The VUU, a weekly online justice-centered talk show;
• Development of the CLF Learning Fellows program, which helps seminarians and others prepare for innovative ministry;
• Covenant Groups that meet in real time through video conference technology;
• Faith Rocket—a program that shares CLF worship and religious education materials in a format designed to support small congregations;
• Blogging;
• CLF Facebook groups, including Coffee Hour;
• Immediate pastoral care in response to world-wide crises;
• Growth of the Prison Ministry program from 400 in 2010 to over 1,100 in 2020;
• In-person contact with congregations throughout the US;
• Growth of the CLF staff to include a director of technology and a communications coordinator

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152649/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/05.mp3

It was sometime in the 1980s. We were at a UU Religious Educators retreat northeast of Minneapolis and I remember my roommate saying from the other twin bed in our room, “Ginger, I think I should let you know I am a lesbian.” My response was, “Oh, I just thought you were a graduate student.”

Well, that graduate student, the Meg Riley we all know today, has become a student of American 20^th & 21^st century culture beyond all expectations, and a religious educator extraordinaire.

At that early RE retreat Meg Riley was creating programs to help young people feel like they belonged and that they had worth. Her entire ministry has focused on that—helping people of all ages and from all circumstances of life feel like they belong and have worth.

I remember when she invited me to lead a workshop at GA on supporting youth advisors. It was my first GA and she thought I had something to offer. Today she doesn’t so much create programs as she embodies them, as she nurtures others in their innovative creativity. She pulls people into the midst of the fray and holds them up and has their back. The song “Lean on Me” comes to mind.

When she became the Director of the UUA Youth Office she identified young leaders, took a chance on them and supported their development. Many of them shine today in our congregations and in our movement. And from her role at the Washington Office, look what “Standing on the Side of Love/Side with Love” did for the voice and identity of Unitarian Universalism—of understanding who we are and the impact we can create in the world.

As an outstanding student of our culture, Meg has challenged us and sounded the alarm again and again. She was an early prophet studying and warning about the dangers of the radical religious right and alerting us to the rise of white supremacy. She was early at calling out our role in the white supremacy culture. With love and compassion, she has consistently been willing to make us uncomfortable and to call us to task when we seemed oblivious or wanting to ignore hurt, pain, injustice and evil. Meg is present in the world as it is.

This enables her to listen, comfort and share the pain and longing with many of us when we lose heart. Many have called her a “ministers’ minister.” I think it is fair to say hundreds of disillusioned ministers, religious educators, administrators, youth and congregants have called and emailed Meg to be heard and to be understood. Another song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” comes to mind.

All of the above is why Meg has been such an outstanding leader of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. It is Meg’s being and wisdom that has enabled the growth of our prison ministry, of our support for our military chaplains, of creating a home for innovative learning fellows and a sanctuary for those longing for Unitarian Universalism but not yet able to find it in their immediate environment.

It has been a gift to have Meg Riley as the senior minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. We will do all in our power to continue the strength, purpose and heart that Meg has given us. She has been our prophet, our teacher, our minister, and yes, our friend. Thank you, Meg. And may the world continue to be blessed by your wisdom, your strength, your empathy and your love.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152709/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/04.mp3

A spiritual practice is something which you repeat regularly that grounds you in depth and connection. For the CLF, supporting us by making a regularly scheduled donation not only builds the depth of our connection, it gives us a vital stability and capacity to plan for the future. You can sustain the CLF by scheduling a monthly or quarterly donation online, or you can call the CLF office at 617-948-6150.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152731/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/03.mp3

A spiritual practice is something which you repeat regularly that grounds you in depth and connection. For the CLF, supporting us by making a regularly scheduled donation not only builds the depth of our connection, it gives us a vital stability and capacity to plan for the future. You can sustain the CLF by scheduling a monthly or quarterly donation online, or you can call the CLF office at 617-948-6150.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152752/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/03.mp3

I grew up in a music school—that is to say, our home was filled most afternoons and evenings with music teachers and students playing scales and études. A couple of times a year our living room was transformed into a recital hall for those students to show off what they had learned, and to practice performing.

Over those 16 years I studied music at the Hegvik School of Music, I would occasionally ask my mom if I could quit. We argued the various merits of learning to play an instrument, but ultimately she believed there were benefits to studying music beyond the music itself. One of those was being able to stand up in front of people confidently, and the other was learning how to practice.

As a child growing up in a house full of music students, I heard examples every day of the most common misunderstandings beginners have about practicing (one I often made myself). Folks think “If I want to learn to play this piece fast, I should practice it fast.” What we don’t realize at first is that what we are actually doing by practicing this way is training our fingers to stumble and trip. However, if you slow it down until every note is just the way you want it, your body and mind are creating neural pathways to play it just the way you want it. Another mistake beginners make is that they want to play the piece the whole way through over and over, mistakes and all. Again, by doing that we are training those mistakes into the brain and the muscles. At some point you just have to stop and do the thing in little bits and pieces until body and mind really understand. Then, and only then, do you put it back together in bigger and bigger pieces until is second nature.

Gradually it dawned on me that if you practice a piece without beauty, without tone, without feeling, that is how you perform it. If we practice joylessly, the music we make will be joyless. If you hate practicing, it’s time to make a change. It’s so much easier to sit down and practice a piece you love than one that doesn’t speak to you. Sometimes it’s more fun to collaborate with friends when our solo practice has lost its vitality. Sometimes you just have to practice goofing around, improvising spontaneously, making silly sounds. If we want joy and creativity in our music, we must practice bringing joy and creativity into our music. This is the opposite of what so many young musicians learn—they somehow learn that playing music should be difficult, joyless work, and it’s no wonder they quit.

Perhaps the most important lesson is not to get attached to your mistakes. I would so often hear moans and groans from the lesson rooms, and have myself many times slammed my fingers down on the keys of the piano in frustration. Practice is specifically time to make mistakes. We must learn compassion for ourselves, and patience while we practice; we need a safe space to make ugly sounds, to play things imperfectly as we begin to smooth and polish and shape.

Knowing how to practice is useful in unexpected parts of our lives. I remember when we got a brand new video game called “Spyro,” and all my friends took a turn playing it. Most of my friends, when it was their turn at the controller, raced forward toward their goal until they plunged accidentally off a cliff and had to start over with a new life. When my friend Akire, who had studied classical cello for many years, took the controller, she pulled over to a meaningless clearing and started running in circles and making little jumps into the air. “What are you doing!” we all cried impatiently “there’s nothing over there!” “I’m practicing” she replied. Her strategy was to learn to jump and glide in a safe area where death would not be the consequence of messing up.

In fact, the skills you learn practicing apply to just about every part of your life. This is never clearer than watching a toddler practice walking, or obsessively opening and closing doors, or putting things into a box and then dumping them out and starting it over. It takes hours of repetition to develop skills that now seem second nature to us—walking, talking, closing and opening doors, putting keys in your pocket and taking them out again later when you need them. This is why we do fire drills—so that in the moment of an actual emergency the procedure is second nature. I went to a master class many years ago with the great singer Leontine Price. When a student asked if she thought about technique while she performed, she told the packed house that the time for thinking about technique is in the practice room. When you perform you just think about the music you are making and the character you’re playing.

Spiritual practice is no different in this respect than any other kind of practice. Some days it will not seem like much is happening, but things we repeat day after day have a way of sinking down deep into our muscles and spirits. There are many stories among healers and ministers of visiting an elder who has lost much or all of her memory. She doesn’t recognize family or friends, but when the old hymns of her childhood are sung, or the rosary beads placed in her hands, something old and deep wakes up. Her fingers start to move on the rosary, she nods or even sings along with the hymns. What we practice most we know in a deep way; our bodies remember even when our minds are distracted or    diminished.

There was a funny headline in the satirical paper The Onion the other day: “Man Who Downloaded $2.99 Meditation App Prepares to Enter Lotus Plane of Eternal Serenity.” This could have described me at my first meditation class. I, like many other new meditators, was constantly frustrated by my early attempts. I wanted to power through to enlightenment the same way I had, as a beginning flute student, wanted to power through to the end of the piece, without taking time in the difficult spots so they could become smooth and clear. I chose forms of meditation that were very challenging for me right off, rather than choosing forms that were enjoyable, so I dreaded my spiritual practice rather than looking forward to it. I was so miserable in my meditation practice at one point that I took a class called “Removing Obstacles to Meditation,” which was full of other people who were also having trouble meditating. The best advice the teacher gave in that class was “encourage yourself” —it turns out beating yourself up for your perceived failings in your spiritual practice is not actually helpful. It’s important to be compassionate with yourself as you practice.

Then I discovered yoga, which I looked forward to and dreamed about. No matter how much I practiced I wanted more. I took a break from meditation that lasted almost a decade. I realized that meditation was just one of many spiritual practices. Sure, the Buddha realized enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi Tree, but meditation is not temperamentally or developmentally appropriate for everyone.

Perhaps it was because of all those years practicing music that I took so readily to practicing yoga. I was reminded of the power of repetition. As I entered Down Dog pose the other day, I considered that if I have been practicing yoga for about 12 years, at least three times a week, and took Down Dog about ten times each class, I had been in the pose about 20,000 times. When you do something 20,000 times, not only do you learn it more deeply, it changes you. Not everyone is going to be able to twist themselves into all of those yoga pretzels you see in photos, but everyone will change and grow with practice.

One yoga teacher called this “slow surgery,” because the capacity it has to change muscles and joints and connective tissue is so powerful. This is why form and alignment are so important in yoga. Yes, if you practice carefully you can become more flexible and strong. But if you don’t practice mindfully you can easily blow out a shoulder or acquire an array of injuries.

Think of all the things you have done 20,000 times so far in this life. That probably includes brushing your teeth, which is why the humans alive today have better teeth than any humans who have ever lived before. It also probably includes sitting at a computer, which is why we have problems like carpal tunnel syndrome that millennia of humans have never had in this magnitude before.

Even if you don’t practice ukulele, or meditation, or yoga, you are practicing something. You already have a spiritual practice right now, whether you think of it that way or not. The question is—what are you practicing? Some people might not realize they have a spiritual practice, that they have shown kindness, or shared a warm smile 20,000 times. It now comes so easily to them they don’t even have to consciously choose to be kind; it arises naturally out of habit. Some folks notice the natural world around them on their daily run or their walk to work, or watch the slow growth of a tree through the kitchen window while they sip their coffee. They know just by looking at the fresh, green shoots whether spring is early, or what tree is fighting off parasites. One spring when birds and butterflies come back in reduced numbers, they notice the change and wonder what is wrong—they have become that in tune with their eco-system through years of practice.

Practice is the patient expression of our intentions. In the same way that devout practitioners in Hinduism, Buddhism

or Catholicism use a rosary to help them stay connected as they repeat prayers to the divine, so can our repetitions of scales, Downward Dogs or compassionate acts help us stay connected to ourselves and to our intentions to grow and bloom. Depending on our intention, the action itself becomes a prayer. In fact, many UUs understand their work helping others, or working for social justice, as their spiritual practice, as their prayer.

Every life is filled with repetition. All those thousands of repetitions of simple things when taken all together have power. Like drops of water that wear away a stone, we are shaping ourselves every moment with the simple repetition of our daily lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. Let us choose carefully what we practice, because that is what we are becoming.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152814/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/02.mp3

I grew up in a music school—that is to say, our home was filled most afternoons and evenings with music teachers and students playing scales and études. A couple of times a year our living room was transformed into a recital hall for those students to show off what they had learned, and to practice performing.

Over those 16 years I studied music at the Hegvik School of Music, I would occasionally ask my mom if I could quit. We argued the various merits of learning to play an instrument, but ultimately she believed there were benefits to studying music beyond the music itself. One of those was being able to stand up in front of people confidently, and the other was learning how to practice.

As a child growing up in a house full of music students, I heard examples every day of the most common misunderstandings beginners have about practicing (one I often made myself). Folks think “If I want to learn to play this piece fast, I should practice it fast.” What we don’t realize at first is that what we are actually doing by practicing this way is training our fingers to stumble and trip. However, if you slow it down until every note is just the way you want it, your body and mind are creating neural pathways to play it just the way you want it. Another mistake beginners make is that they want to play the piece the whole way through over and over, mistakes and all. Again, by doing that we are training those mistakes into the brain and the muscles. At some point you just have to stop and do the thing in little bits and pieces until body and mind really understand. Then, and only then, do you put it back together in bigger and bigger pieces until is second nature.

Gradually it dawned on me that if you practice a piece without beauty, without tone, without feeling, that is how you perform it. If we practice joylessly, the music we make will be joyless. If you hate practicing, it’s time to make a change. It’s so much easier to sit down and practice a piece you love than one that doesn’t speak to you. Sometimes it’s more fun to collaborate with friends when our solo practice has lost its vitality. Sometimes you just have to practice goofing around, improvising spontaneously, making silly sounds. If we want joy and creativity in our music, we must practice bringing joy and creativity into our music. This is the opposite of what so many young musicians learn—they somehow learn that playing music should be difficult, joyless work, and it’s no wonder they quit.

Perhaps the most important lesson is not to get attached to your mistakes. I would so often hear moans and groans from the lesson rooms, and have myself many times slammed my fingers down on the keys of the piano in frustration. Practice is specifically time to make mistakes. We must learn compassion for ourselves, and patience while we practice; we need a safe space to make ugly sounds, to play things imperfectly as we begin to smooth and polish and shape.

Knowing how to practice is useful in unexpected parts of our lives. I remember when we got a brand new video game called “Spyro,” and all my friends took a turn playing it. Most of my friends, when it was their turn at the controller, raced forward toward their goal until they plunged accidentally off a cliff and had to start over with a new life. When my friend Akire, who had studied classical cello for many years, took the controller, she pulled over to a meaningless clearing and started running in circles and making little jumps into the air. “What are you doing!” we all cried impatiently “there’s nothing over there!” “I’m practicing” she replied. Her strategy was to learn to jump and glide in a safe area where death would not be the consequence of messing up.

In fact, the skills you learn practicing apply to just about every part of your life. This is never clearer than watching a toddler practice walking, or obsessively opening and closing doors, or putting things into a box and then dumping them out and starting it over. It takes hours of repetition to develop skills that now seem second nature to us—walking, talking, closing and opening doors, putting keys in your pocket and taking them out again later when you need them. This is why we do fire drills—so that in the moment of an actual emergency the procedure is second nature. I went to a master class many years ago with the great singer Leontine Price. When a student asked if she thought about technique while she performed, she told the packed house that the time for thinking about technique is in the practice room. When you perform you just think about the music you are making and the character you’re playing.

Spiritual practice is no different in this respect than any other kind of practice. Some days it will not seem like much is happening, but things we repeat day after day have a way of sinking down deep into our muscles and spirits. There are many stories among healers and ministers of visiting an elder who has lost much or all of her memory. She doesn’t recognize family or friends, but when the old hymns of her childhood are sung, or the rosary beads placed in her hands, something old and deep wakes up. Her fingers start to move on the rosary, she nods or even sings along with the hymns. What we practice most we know in a deep way; our bodies remember even when our minds are distracted or    diminished.

There was a funny headline in the satirical paper The Onion the other day: “Man Who Downloaded $2.99 Meditation App Prepares to Enter Lotus Plane of Eternal Serenity.” This could have described me at my first meditation class. I, like many other new meditators, was constantly frustrated by my early attempts. I wanted to power through to enlightenment the same way I had, as a beginning flute student, wanted to power through to the end of the piece, without taking time in the difficult spots so they could become smooth and clear. I chose forms of meditation that were very challenging for me right off, rather than choosing forms that were enjoyable, so I dreaded my spiritual practice rather than looking forward to it. I was so miserable in my meditation practice at one point that I took a class called “Removing Obstacles to Meditation,” which was full of other people who were also having trouble meditating. The best advice the teacher gave in that class was “encourage yourself” —it turns out beating yourself up for your perceived failings in your spiritual practice is not actually helpful. It’s important to be compassionate with yourself as you practice.

Then I discovered yoga, which I looked forward to and dreamed about. No matter how much I practiced I wanted more. I took a break from meditation that lasted almost a decade. I realized that meditation was just one of many spiritual practices. Sure, the Buddha realized enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi Tree, but meditation is not temperamentally or developmentally appropriate for everyone.

Perhaps it was because of all those years practicing music that I took so readily to practicing yoga. I was reminded of the power of repetition. As I entered Down Dog pose the other day, I considered that if I have been practicing yoga for about 12 years, at least three times a week, and took Down Dog about ten times each class, I had been in the pose about 20,000 times. When you do something 20,000 times, not only do you learn it more deeply, it changes you. Not everyone is going to be able to twist themselves into all of those yoga pretzels you see in photos, but everyone will change and grow with practice.

One yoga teacher called this “slow surgery,” because the capacity it has to change muscles and joints and connective tissue is so powerful. This is why form and alignment are so important in yoga. Yes, if you practice carefully you can become more flexible and strong. But if you don’t practice mindfully you can easily blow out a shoulder or acquire an array of injuries.

Think of all the things you have done 20,000 times so far in this life. That probably includes brushing your teeth, which is why the humans alive today have better teeth than any humans who have ever lived before. It also probably includes sitting at a computer, which is why we have problems like carpal tunnel syndrome that millennia of humans have never had in this magnitude before.

Even if you don’t practice ukulele, or meditation, or yoga, you are practicing something. You already have a spiritual practice right now, whether you think of it that way or not. The question is—what are you practicing? Some people might not realize they have a spiritual practice, that they have shown kindness, or shared a warm smile 20,000 times. It now comes so easily to them they don’t even have to consciously choose to be kind; it arises naturally out of habit. Some folks notice the natural world around them on their daily run or their walk to work, or watch the slow growth of a tree through the kitchen window while they sip their coffee. They know just by looking at the fresh, green shoots whether spring is early, or what tree is fighting off parasites. One spring when birds and butterflies come back in reduced numbers, they notice the change and wonder what is wrong—they have become that in tune with their eco-system through years of practice.

Practice is the patient expression of our intentions. In the same way that devout practitioners in Hinduism, Buddhism

or Catholicism use a rosary to help them stay connected as they repeat prayers to the divine, so can our repetitions of scales, Downward Dogs or compassionate acts help us stay connected to ourselves and to our intentions to grow and bloom. Depending on our intention, the action itself becomes a prayer. In fact, many UUs understand their work helping others, or working for social justice, as their spiritual practice, as their prayer.

Every life is filled with repetition. All those thousands of repetitions of simple things when taken all together have power. Like drops of water that wear away a stone, we are shaping ourselves every moment with the simple repetition of our daily lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. Let us choose carefully what we practice, because that is what we are becoming.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152836/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/02.mp3

In college, I majored in Women’s Studies. My sense that I lived in a world that objectified and devalued women was strong. And, like many college students, I was passionate about social justice issues. On Saturday mornings I stood outside an abortion clinic to counter-protest the anti-choice group that met there. I went to campaign rallies and protest marches. I went to hear justice speakers and panels on campus. I was involved.

In the spring of my last year in college there was a scandal that high-school-age boys at a California school were using a point system to keep track of and compare their sexual attacks, including attacks on very young girls. This group made national news, and the boys were treated like celebrities. They were arrested at one point, but were not ultimately prosecuted.

I was deeply affected by this news. After four years of college and activism, this felt like the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. The world seemed overwhelmingly terrible to me. These high school boys treated girls like they were nothing, and nobody seemed to really care. I cried and cried.

So when I graduated college, which is already a stressful time, I welcomed the chance to unplug from social activism. I was busy looking for a job and figuring out big questions like what do I want to do with my life, and with whom, and where should we live? I did look into meeting with the League of Women Voters, but their meetings were at a time I couldn’t attend, so…that was that.

To be honest, justice work had exhausted me, and I was glad to retreat from it. I remained a responsible voter, but when it came to other kinds of involvement and activism, I wasn’t involved. There are names for this withdrawal. Activism fatigue. Activist burnout. Compassion fatigue. I certainly reached a point where I felt recovered from the exhaustion and hopelessness I had felt, but the memory of it stayed with me. I didn’t want to go through all that again. I felt like I had learned that I shouldn’t do justice work.

It was just over ten years later that I joined a UU church and began once again to be involved with something bigger than just my own life and concerns. It was a big deal for me to join in protest again, but this time was different. In religious community, our gathering began with an interfaith prayer service. And then we marched in silence through Balboa Park, carrying signs to convey our commitment to peace and our opposition to war. It didn’t just feel good to take action, it felt nourishing. I didn’t feel depleted by our protest, I felt restored.

I continued to get involved, joining a group at the church called Allies for Racial Equity, committed to doing anti-racism work together. I wasn’t a justice leader as a congregant, but I was involved when I felt called to be involved.

So what was the difference? At the time I would have said that it felt different to do justice work in community, but then, I was in community in college. I was surrounded by people I knew, doing justice work with friends. Or I might have said that I was simply more emotionally mature, that there’s some wisdom and balance that comes with age. There might be some truth to that.

But as I look back, I see more clearly now that what made the difference for me in making justice work and activism more sustainable—and making me more resilient—is that I had a regular spiritual practice. I attended church every Sunday.

Regular spiritual practice has been shown, again and again, to have many benefits. These include increased clarity, focus and equanimity; improved mood; and stronger self-awareness.

Okay, but what is spiritual practice? The idea of spiritual practice gets thrown around a lot these days, and there’s a tendency to describe almost anything as spiritual practice. I’ve heard that washing dishes can be a spiritual practice.

There are many different criteria used to define spiritual practice, but here’s mine: an activity whose primary purpose is to quiet the mind and bring us into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence. Spiritual practice is intentional, can be performed daily, and—this might be the most controversial part—is nonproductive.

Let me say those again: The primary purpose is to quiet the mind and bring us into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence. Spiritual practice is intentional, can be performed daily, and is nonproductive.

By nonproductive, I mean there’s no reason to do it except that it’s a spiritual practice. Your practice may produce something—a piece of art, for example—but you create the art because doing so quiets the mind and brings you into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence.

This is why something you enjoy doing—like creating art—so often stops being fun when you decide to do it for money. Once it becomes a productive task, it loses some of the benefits that spiritual practices bring. Spiritual practices are things like prayer, meditation, worship, journaling, chanting or singing, playing music, sitting in silence, dancing, walking a labyrinth.

For me, things like washing dishes are not spiritual practices, because their primary purpose is not to quiet the mind and bring us into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence. Their primary purpose is practical matters like clean dishes.

I think we tell ourselves that washing dishes is a spiritual practice because we want to check off the box that we have a spiritual practice, but we don’t have much time, and we have to get the dishes washed, and if we could just make that one thing, wouldn’t that be convenient?

But spiritual practice isn’t really meant to be convenient. It’s not even necessarily meant to feel good. Sometimes it does, but ask anyone who meditates regularly. They’ll tell you: a lot of meditation is sitting, convinced that you’re doing it wrong, or not good enough, and how much longer do I have to sit here?

It is the daily aspect of spiritual practice that is ultimately so powerful and transformative. Now, you’ll recall that I said attending worship every Sunday was my spiritual practice, and I do count worship as a spiritual practice. I don’t attend worship every day because that’s not an option, but the hourly gathering, attended weekly, can also have a transformative impact on people’s lives. I know that from my own experience, and I know that because other people have told me it’s their experience.

My spiritual practice was to attend church every Sunday. Not many Sundays. Not almost every Sunday. Every Sunday. We did not wake up on Sunday to see how we felt and then decide whether or not to go. We just went. It was a discipline. That’s what made it a spiritual practice.

Church attendance is still my spiritual practice, but I’m also working on a daily prayer practice. And I want to encourage you to consider developing a regular spiritual practice if you don’t have one already.

Here’s why—because the news is terrible. Every day that you open the newspaper or turn on the news or look at your phone or computer is a struggle to stay hopeful. Because we’re so tired and busy and everything is different and it’s a challenge to go to the grocery store and it’s easy to feel completely knocked over by small things.

It’s called “spiritual practice” because what we’re doing is practicing. We’re practicing what it is to try and be calm and quiet and centered because so much of the time, we aren’t calm and quiet and centered. We practice and we feel awkward and like we’re not doing it right, but if you keep at it, like building a muscle, you’ll find that you do not feel so knocked down by what life throws at you.

Your practice doesn’t have to be long, just a few minutes a day. Whatever practice you might like to develop, start small and build up. The discipline of daily practice is more important than the length of what you’re doing. Five minutes of meditation each day is better than an hour of meditation once in a while.

We’re carrying a lot these days. Which is why spiritual practice is so important. Please don’t wait until the day you feel you cannot get out of bed. Find a daily practice to work on. Do what you can to take good care of yourself. Do the dishes, but also take care to refresh your heart and soul so that you have the strength to move forward in this difficult world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152857/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/01.mp3

In college, I majored in Women’s Studies. My sense that I lived in a world that objectified and devalued women was strong. And, like many college students, I was passionate about social justice issues. On Saturday mornings I stood outside an abortion clinic to counter-protest the anti-choice group that met there. I went to campaign rallies and protest marches. I went to hear justice speakers and panels on campus. I was involved.

In the spring of my last year in college there was a scandal that high-school-age boys at a California school were using a point system to keep track of and compare their sexual attacks, including attacks on very young girls. This group made national news, and the boys were treated like celebrities. They were arrested at one point, but were not ultimately prosecuted.

I was deeply affected by this news. After four years of college and activism, this felt like the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. The world seemed overwhelmingly terrible to me. These high school boys treated girls like they were nothing, and nobody seemed to really care. I cried and cried.

So when I graduated college, which is already a stressful time, I welcomed the chance to unplug from social activism. I was busy looking for a job and figuring out big questions like what do I want to do with my life, and with whom, and where should we live? I did look into meeting with the League of Women Voters, but their meetings were at a time I couldn’t attend, so…that was that.

To be honest, justice work had exhausted me, and I was glad to retreat from it. I remained a responsible voter, but when it came to other kinds of involvement and activism, I wasn’t involved. There are names for this withdrawal. Activism fatigue. Activist burnout. Compassion fatigue. I certainly reached a point where I felt recovered from the exhaustion and hopelessness I had felt, but the memory of it stayed with me. I didn’t want to go through all that again. I felt like I had learned that I shouldn’t do justice work.

It was just over ten years later that I joined a UU church and began once again to be involved with something bigger than just my own life and concerns. It was a big deal for me to join in protest again, but this time was different. In religious community, our gathering began with an interfaith prayer service. And then we marched in silence through Balboa Park, carrying signs to convey our commitment to peace and our opposition to war. It didn’t just feel good to take action, it felt nourishing. I didn’t feel depleted by our protest, I felt restored.

I continued to get involved, joining a group at the church called Allies for Racial Equity, committed to doing anti-racism work together. I wasn’t a justice leader as a congregant, but I was involved when I felt called to be involved.

So what was the difference? At the time I would have said that it felt different to do justice work in community, but then, I was in community in college. I was surrounded by people I knew, doing justice work with friends. Or I might have said that I was simply more emotionally mature, that there’s some wisdom and balance that comes with age. There might be some truth to that.

But as I look back, I see more clearly now that what made the difference for me in making justice work and activism more sustainable—and making me more resilient—is that I had a regular spiritual practice. I attended church every Sunday.

Regular spiritual practice has been shown, again and again, to have many benefits. These include increased clarity, focus and equanimity; improved mood; and stronger self-awareness.

Okay, but what is spiritual practice? The idea of spiritual practice gets thrown around a lot these days, and there’s a tendency to describe almost anything as spiritual practice. I’ve heard that washing dishes can be a spiritual practice.

There are many different criteria used to define spiritual practice, but here’s mine: an activity whose primary purpose is to quiet the mind and bring us into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence. Spiritual practice is intentional, can be performed daily, and—this might be the most controversial part—is nonproductive.

Let me say those again: The primary purpose is to quiet the mind and bring us into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence. Spiritual practice is intentional, can be performed daily, and is nonproductive.

By nonproductive, I mean there’s no reason to do it except that it’s a spiritual practice. Your practice may produce something—a piece of art, for example—but you create the art because doing so quiets the mind and brings you into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence.

This is why something you enjoy doing—like creating art—so often stops being fun when you decide to do it for money. Once it becomes a productive task, it loses some of the benefits that spiritual practices bring. Spiritual practices are things like prayer, meditation, worship, journaling, chanting or singing, playing music, sitting in silence, dancing, walking a labyrinth.

For me, things like washing dishes are not spiritual practices, because their primary purpose is not to quiet the mind and bring us into deeper connection with the interdependent web of all existence. Their primary purpose is practical matters like clean dishes.

I think we tell ourselves that washing dishes is a spiritual practice because we want to check off the box that we have a spiritual practice, but we don’t have much time, and we have to get the dishes washed, and if we could just make that one thing, wouldn’t that be convenient?

But spiritual practice isn’t really meant to be convenient. It’s not even necessarily meant to feel good. Sometimes it does, but ask anyone who meditates regularly. They’ll tell you: a lot of meditation is sitting, convinced that you’re doing it wrong, or not good enough, and how much longer do I have to sit here?

It is the daily aspect of spiritual practice that is ultimately so powerful and transformative. Now, you’ll recall that I said attending worship every Sunday was my spiritual practice, and I do count worship as a spiritual practice. I don’t attend worship every day because that’s not an option, but the hourly gathering, attended weekly, can also have a transformative impact on people’s lives. I know that from my own experience, and I know that because other people have told me it’s their experience.

My spiritual practice was to attend church every Sunday. Not many Sundays. Not almost every Sunday. Every Sunday. We did not wake up on Sunday to see how we felt and then decide whether or not to go. We just went. It was a discipline. That’s what made it a spiritual practice.

Church attendance is still my spiritual practice, but I’m also working on a daily prayer practice. And I want to encourage you to consider developing a regular spiritual practice if you don’t have one already.

Here’s why—because the news is terrible. Every day that you open the newspaper or turn on the news or look at your phone or computer is a struggle to stay hopeful. Because we’re so tired and busy and everything is different and it’s a challenge to go to the grocery store and it’s easy to feel completely knocked over by small things.

It’s called “spiritual practice” because what we’re doing is practicing. We’re practicing what it is to try and be calm and quiet and centered because so much of the time, we aren’t calm and quiet and centered. We practice and we feel awkward and like we’re not doing it right, but if you keep at it, like building a muscle, you’ll find that you do not feel so knocked down by what life throws at you.

Your practice doesn’t have to be long, just a few minutes a day. Whatever practice you might like to develop, start small and build up. The discipline of daily practice is more important than the length of what you’re doing. Five minutes of meditation each day is better than an hour of meditation once in a while.

We’re carrying a lot these days. Which is why spiritual practice is so important. Please don’t wait until the day you feel you cannot get out of bed. Find a daily practice to work on. Do what you can to take good care of yourself. Do the dishes, but also take care to refresh your heart and soul so that you have the strength to move forward in this difficult world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110152929/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_07/01.mp3

I have to say that I feel like I am writing this to you from another country. Our Quest publication schedule is such that I am writing in March for publication in September. Which is generally not too much of an issue, except that March 2020 feels like a date that will go down in history, like the War of 1812, or 9/11. At the moment I am writing this, all of California, where I live, has been told to stay home to avoid spreading COVID19. I imagine the rest of the country will follow. I imagine that we are just at the beginning of enormous loss of life. I imagine hospitals in the US will soon be overwhelmed the way they already are in Italy. We are all, right now, pretty much in shock, but I imagine grief is on its way.

I imagine, but I don’t know. This is a message in a bottle, sent out to the future. I imagine (but don’t know) that by the time you read this in September, the worst of this crisis is past. I imagine being able to dance with my friends, to sing together, to go out to dinner or to a play. When you read this, you will either think “Of course!” or “How could she be so naïve!” I don’t know what September will bring, but I can imagine.

And perhaps that need to imagine is the real blessing in this time of crisis. Usually we go about our lives assuming that one day will be very much like the next. Some lousy days, some special treats, but generally all of a piece. Then a novel virus comes along and it’s all, well, novel. New. Unpredictable. We have some models based on the experiences of other countries, and the reasonable predictions don’t look good. But maybe we will have a medical breakthrough. Maybe people will be so careful for one another’s sake that we will stop this thing in its tracks. You know the answer, although I don’t.

But what I do know is that in this time of crisis an enormous amount of imagination is being required from us. Churches are re-imagining worship in a world of enforced social isolation. Musicians are re-imagining what a concert is as they continue to try to share their music with the world. Parents whose children are home from school are re-imagining education and family time and work and leisure and what a day might look like.

At this moment I am furious at the US government for what I would consider a criminal lack of preparation. But the rest of us have no choice but to be unprepared. We couldn’t imagine the place where we are now. But we’re working on it. I have to say that I am wildly impressed with the creativity and generosity of spirit that I am witnessing. So far this week I have done Zumba with a man who was live-streaming from some unknown country, attended a couple of virtual house concerts and watched live on Facebook as a friend drew a Venn diagram for her dogs to illustrate appropriate and inappropriate barking. The dogs watched studiously.

When everything is different, we have no choice but to live imaginatively, to create things that have never existed before. Radical disruption invites radical imagination. So now I am wondering just how radical our imagination might become. I wrote this poem today:

Imagine

Imagine with me for a moment—

don’t worry, I’m not saying it’s real.

Imagine, if you can, that there has been

not a calamity, but a great awakening.

Pretend, just for a moment,

that we all so loved our threatened earth

that we stopped going on cruises,

limited international flights,

worked on cherishing the places

where we already are.

In this pretty fantasy, everyone who possibly can

stops commuting. Spends the extra time

with their kids or pets or garden.

We have the revelation that everyone

needs health care, sick leave, steady work.

It occurs to us that health care
workers

are heroes. Also teachers.

Not to mention the artists of all kinds

who teach us resilience and joy.

Imagine, if you will,

that we turned to our neighbors

in mutual aid, trading eggs for milk,

checking in on those who are elderly

or alone. Imagine each of us

felt suddenly called to wonder

In this moment, what does the world

need from me? What are my gifts?

Yes, I know it’s just a fantasy.

The world could never change

so radically overnight.

But imagine.

Whatever life looks like in the world of September, I’m sure that we will still be imagining a better world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172652/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/05.mp3

When I was a boy, I had a vivid imagination. Some might have even called it overactive. It found expression in many ways and my parents, along with our neighbors, encouraged it, as long as it didn’t stray in the direction of fabrication.

Long before our family owned a car, my father began replacing our potholed asphalt driveway with concrete. He did it a patch at a time, cutting away the failed asphalt down to the gravel base and replacing it with concrete that he mixed by hand in a wheelbarrow. Each slab was irregularly shaped and their sizes varied. He tinted each batch of concrete a different color. After pouring each slab, Dad finished the surface with a corn broom for texture and then carefully edged it with a smooth trowel. Over the course of a summer or two, he made his way up each side of the driveway, leaving a remnant of asphalt in the center. The result looked a little like the shape of San Francisco Bay—without the Golden Gate channel. The asphalt was the bay while the concrete was the surrounding landscape, albeit a prairie terrain rather than a mountainous one.

It didn’t take long before I was using the edging as “roads” for my Dinky Toys and Matchbox cars, which fit perfectly along the roadways Dad had created. The textured surface on the rest of each slab made perfect fields, not unlike the wheat fields we passed on the real highways. I had a few hundred miniature vehicles—I was a bit spoiled!—so it didn’t take long for traffic jams to develop around Riverbend Bay as I laid out my toys. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a car to park on the driveway, although I did have a toy or two crushed by vehicles turning around at the end, seemingly unaware that this particular driveway was alive with imaginary people and places.

Stories unfolded in my imagination as I drove my vehicles up and down the roadways. There were wars and disasters, deliveries and country drives—every conceivable circumstance that a youngster’s imagination could dream up. I spent hundreds of hours in this landscape, my imagination running wild. I’m 60 now, but I still keep some of those toys I played with when I was six in a box downstairs, and whenever I take them out, my imagination still overflows.

I graduated eventually from toy cars to a paper route, but that didn’t interfere with my imagination. Delivering papers is boring work, so there was plenty of time to think as I pulled my wagon filled with newspapers from house to house. Along the way, I would talk to myself out loud, sing or whistle, and keep my mind occupied by letting it drift to other places. Some of my customers would just shake their heads as their daydreaming, tow-haired paperboy meandered along the street—usually late—delivering the day’s news. Other customers actively engaged my imagination, encouraging my storytelling and singing, playing along with me when they could.

The curious thing in all of this is that I grew into who I am through the unfettered growth of my imagination. Looking back, I realize that the values I treasure were shaped through my imaginary wanderings as a child and refined through my experiences as an adult. But whoever it is that I am today, that person can be glimpsed in a boy who played on the driveway and delivered papers. If I am impatient with the world as it is, it is only because I learned to dream of a better world as a child. And I’ve never ceased believing that the world of our dreams could become a reality if we pursued our dreams with imagination instead of caving in to so-called common sense and practicality.

In The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed.” I agree that we live most fully when we live by our imaginations, and I acknowledge that, as a child, I was surrounded by heaps of illusions. But if my imagination and illusions have been disturbed, it’s only because, as adults, we allow ourselves to become disenchanted and estranged from our imagination, which happens to be where our better angels reside.

Imagination, whatever our age and circumstances, is vital.

Which is why I am so excited to see a new leadership team come on board at the CLF. The board and the search committee were bold in imagining the CLF’s future—a future that responds to the urgent call of justice that we feel in the present moment. They were bold in imagining ministry as something that goes beyond those who are ordained, and chose a leadership team that includes two religious educators as well as an ordained minister. And I am so eager to see what the vivid imaginations of the CLF’s new lead ministry team—Aisha Hauser, Christina Rivera and Michael Tino—will bring us as we imagine the future together.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172715/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/04.mp3

We live in a world that seems bereft of potential, a world that seems to have lost its imagination.

I read recently in a Connecticut newspaper that: “at least 1,967 students age 6 and under were suspended last school year—almost all of them Black or Hispanic. According to a report from the Connecticut Department of Education, the number of students suspended is actually higher, but privacy issues restrict the state agency from releasing information.” That’s preschoolers we’re talking about—the article also mentions a seven-year-old being arrested.

I could never have imagined this. I would never want to imagine this.

We are in an endless war on drugs and terrorism…and no one seems willing to imagine what the end of those wars might look like. We face unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide in the air, and yet we cannot imagine a world without oil and coal.

I wonder at times if we are so cynical that we have lost the capacity to imagine a different kind of world. I wonder at times if we are so deadened that we cannot lift our head from the cold, hard concrete to look at what is around us.

When I am feeling most cynical, most hopeless, most helpless, when I am feeling most desolate and alone, when I have no vision beyond my bed at night and only the thought of doing it all over again tomorrow, I can be overtaken by hopeless boredom, and the monotony of helplessness and lost creativity.

Where has my imagination gone?

When I was a child, I remember playing for hours in the fields around my house. Imagining we were swimming with sharks, exploring the ocean, climbing the highest mountains and tracking lions and elephants. The top of the slide at the play ground was a rocket to the moon. The sand was quicksand—don’t slip and fall in! Don’t fall in….

Pay attention. Watch where you step. Stay awake. Don’t fall in…. I guess a lot of us fell in, and fell asleep.

Where are the dreamers, the lovers, the poets, the artists—the ones who cause us to see the world with our head cocked to one side, or standing on our heads, our left finger in our ear? These are the ones who awaken us. They do not wake us with dire predictions of death and destruction; that only causes us to want to drink more Koolaid, to check out—Why strain ourselves? It’s all going to crash and burn; I might as well sleep through it.

No, the dreamers are the ones who see a light. They are the ones who see the world as a giant ball of possibility. The ones who shake us gently and whisper in our ear: Wake up! Look around; it’s so beautiful here. Hey!—another gentle nudge—Hey, wake up. Look at all this endless possibility. Look at this awe and wonder!

The dreamers invite us to wake up and participate in the world. They inspire us, by their own faith, to see the invisible and to wonder about the future.

We slowly open our eyes and allow them to focus, and we are invited into the world of endless fascination. The dreamers ask us to participate in its creation, to consider its intricacies and its diversity. We are invited to wonder at the options and imagine the possible future outcomes of the choices we make. The artists, the musicians, the writers, the dancers, the poets, the actors invite us to consider together the world that we are bringing into being.

Imagine for a moment that the binary world no longer exists—because it doesn’t. There are instead shades and tones in a spectrum of life—human identity spilling over and filling many cups at once. Each cup a moment of memory, a snippet of story, a wellspring of wisdom. Each cup a new opportunity to share ourselves with others, to inspire deeper understanding and to develop deeper wisdom about this thing we call life.

Imagine for a moment that our ancestors matter, that our history matters, that our culture matters, that all cultures matter. Each culture is an aspect of us as human beings, inspiring curiosity and respect for our complex nature, as well as the complexity of all life.

Imagine for a moment that all paths to the holy are sacred, and we hold each other’s paths in the palm of our hands. Would you hold your palms open to guide others on their way, or close your fists so you can get there first?

We can imagine we all belong, because we do. We can imagine that we are all loved because we are. And we invite others to belong with us because we know the pain of being unwelcome, of feeling unloved.

Imagine for a moment a world of peace—but with an element of chaos. (I don’t mind a world of chaos, so long as the chaos isn’t violent.) Perhaps like the chaos of an English garden: lush and colorful, a surprise in every corner, a seemingly random cacophony of color and texture. Imagine a world not without conflict, but one with ingenious and inspired ways of responding to the conflict. Ways that honor and value the dignity and inherent worth in all life.

Each choice we make shapes the world, creates new possibilities, brings love or pain. Each choice is made with intention or made in deep sleep. The artists, the dancers, the puppeteers ask us to wake up, to pay attention, to consider and to think. They remind us of our interdependence, the cause and effect of life lived.

Nothing we do in the world is done in a vacuum. Our actions ripple out beyond ourselves in ever-widening circles that intersect the ever-widening circles of life all around us.

The poets and dreamers have invited us to look behind the curtain, to see beyond the veil. Tu-shun, the First Patriarch of Huayan Buddhism, offered the image of the jeweled net of Indra: a net that stretches across the universe, with a jewel at each juncture of the net. Each jewel reflects all the other jewels in the cosmic matrix. Each jewel represents a living being, intrinsically and intimately connected to all the others. A change to any one jewel is reflected in all.

We are intrinsically and intimately connected to one another, reflected in each other’s eyes, the beauty and grace of the divine spark shining in each of us. We are buoyed by each other’s dreaming, imagining together a future we have set in motion. Our children and our children’s children will live in a world so different from our own we cannot even begin to conceive of it.

Their world is shaped by our actions today. Imagine one year from now, five years from now, one hundred years from now, seven generations from now. What kind of world will our actions leave them seven generations from now? If we are awake, we teach them to walk gently on the earth. If we are awake, we teach them to care for the smallest, and recognize the sacred and profound in all life. We teach not just with our words, but also by our actions, by our example.

If we are awake, we see that we must help awaken others, because our children and children’s children live in a world that is shaped by our actions today.

The painters, the sculptors, the dreamers, the songwriters shake us and call to us in our sleep—disturbing us, stirring us, rousing us to participate thoughtfully in the creation of the future. Calling us away from the love of power and towards the power of love.

The poets remind us that our intentions, thoughts and actions carve the world into being each day. But if we are in deep sleep, we may act as though we are awake but tumble through the world stumbling and tripping, hacking away at the life around us. We hear the news of war and death, of terrorism and fear. We hear of children sold as slaves, children forced to fight wars, children with little opportunity and even less hope.

And we sleep…unable to dream except in restless dreams of no, no more, of what if? and I’m only one…. And then we feel that tugging on our elbow, that persistent ache, that nudge at the edge of our consciousness calling us awake. The artist, the singer, the poet, the song, inviting us to try something new, to take a risk and open our eyes, to experience the world again from a new and different perspective. Inviting us to imagine together a world in which we can be both awake and be in deep joy. Singing a song of love and peace, inviting us to imagine a world beyond our wildest dreams, calling us to imagine what the world would be like if we lived our lives on the side of love.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172734/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/03.mp3

When I was in college, a professor began the term by assigning a novel set in a dystopian future, where everything was grim and hope was absent. I diligently read the book, a science fiction story by Ursula LeGuin. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person thinking that the term was already heading in the direction of being a serious downer. But the professor surprised me. When we arrived back at class the next week, he split us into small conversation groups, asking that we reflect on our ideal society. Get as far away as possible from the world the book imagines, he urged. In the utopia of our personal dreams, what would life be like?

We had some interesting conversation. One of the cool ideas I remember being tossed out was free public transportation, locally, and also globally. Can you imagine that? One fellow student in my group had recently interned with a collective that built housing using environmentally sustainable materials like cob (which is a mixture of clay, sand, straw, water and earth that’s similar to adobe). He shared a long convoluted plan about everyone getting to create their own one-room living space that would adjoin huge communal compounds he described as being like beehives. I was 19 and remember thinking it was very sophisticated.

But I have been forever haunted by the comment of a smart, thoughtful young woman. She was very quiet and listened to all the ideas presented. Then she said, “In my version of a perfect and ideal culture, anyone who abused or mistreated anyone, especially children, would be severely punished.” That’s the only contribution she made during that assignment.

I hope I will always be first in line to advocate for accountability when wrong has been committed, especially against another person, let alone a child. But in my dreamland of total bliss and complete equality, people would not be harming other people. Couldn’t we at least even fantasize about what it might mean to inhabit a place where children were not violated? Where we did not have to fear for the safety of our littlest ones?

This experience, of being confronted with an intelligent and worldly person who had so little capacity to dream big and think outside the box when the opportunity presented itself, helped teach me that imagination is complicated. It can be hard to imagine.

In Unitarian Universalism, one of the ways we have access to imagination is through Humanism. The worldview of Humanism can help us imagine. This might seem incongruent, but it’s not! Humanism often gets a bad rap because it can be mistaken for an overly rational perspective, one that is too literal and rigid for expansive beauty and joy. That is one kind of humanism, but I would characterize the flavorless and crotchety kind as secular in nature. In other words, it’s not interested in religious questions, and it can even be a fundamentalist sort of humanism.

By calling it fundamentalist, I mean that it’s an absolutely certain viewpoint, unable to allow for the mystery of the world or the possibility that another truth might be valid in another context or for another person. There’s no imagination in that.

Religious humanism is not confining in this stereotypical way; rather, it’s one of the least limiting forms of religious expression available to us. The reason it’s long been one of the most imaginative religious forces is because it says yes to so much! It asks us to accept that our physical and spiritual lives are the result of vast and diverse influences, including science, history, human thought and natural beauty. It even holds a place for those mysteries that have not yet become known to us. All these perspectives—philosophical, biological, environmental—are resources. They’re tools that we can use to fashion lives of worth and dignity for ourselves.

For the religious humanists (and in the past hundred years religious humanists have also tended to be Unitarians), imagination is the key that provides hope to alleviate suffering. Rather than imagination being rooted in privilege, it’s the opposite. When times are hard (even oppressive), that’s when it’s most important. This was a new idea to me, that suffering could be addressed by imagination.

The Rev. Lewis McGee called this “creative imagination.” Although he was born into an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) family in Pennsylvania in 1893, by 1927 Lewis McGee was connected with the burgeoning humanist movement and its many illustrious Unitarians. These included signers of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933, which outlined humanist principles in a splashy fifteen-point platform. Here are some highlights in brief:

Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant…. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained…. Believing that religion must work increasingly for joy in living, religious humanists aim to foster the creative in man [we might broaden that language today but I think the fact that all the signers were straight white men somewhat limited their perspective]….

The goal of humanism [it continues] is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. [My favorite part:] Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.

Lewis McGee loved this. He wanted more. But when he eagerly approached a Unitarian minister of his acquaintance about entering the ministry, he was told candidly that he would have to supply his own church since it was of course out of the question for a Black man to serve a white congregation—and there were only white Unitarian congregations in existence.

He bided his time, not giving up on Unitarianism, but not able to move forward with it either. Finally, when he was in his mid-50s, he entered Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago to prepare for the Unitarian ministry. And then, in 1948, he did start his very own Unitarian congregation, a predominately Black but somewhat multiracial congregation called the Free Religious Fellowship, located on Chicago’s South Side.

Imagination is an idea that was central to McGee. This is how he summarized his theological beliefs: “We believe in the creative imagination as a power in promoting the good life.” For him and for other Black humanists of his time, creative imagination wasn’t an abstract, theoretical concept too vague to be pinned down. It was clearly, tangibly, irrevocably located in human capacity. Imagination helps to resist suffering.

So, according to McGee and his contemporaries, here is how the world works: We, flawed yet mighty humans, contain within our minds and bodies the capacity to solve individual and social problems. These African American theologians were understandably motivated to address, in particular, white supremacy and racism. They didn’t see the suffering that resulted from oppression as an opportunity for redemption. Since they didn’t believe in a God who called the shots (and they reasoned that only a twisted, sadistic slave master type of God would force suffering on people for their own good), they blamed white racism and other forms of unfair pain and sorrow on human folly. Instead of participating in what they termed a collective God delusion, humankind should quit shirking the task of righting the wrongs caused by evil behavior.

Human effort and moral struggle are the only ways to alleviate oppressive conditions and rebuild a kinder and more just collective existence. The task of social progress is ours and ours alone, since humans and not God possess the agency to make change happen.

Nor is this a fools’ mission; with imagination, our world can actually get better and more livable. McGee and Black humanism are clear that by dint of human effort and wisdom our world can and will improve. We’ll get there eventually if we are committed. This process itself is important. McGee wrote that inherent in existence is a “continuing search for truth” and so he called life an “adventurous quest.” Our creative imagination is a necessary travel accessory as we embark on the adventure of lifework that must always include addressing suffering. Henry David Thoreau, another Unitarian from a different time, geographical region and social location, put it this way: “The world is but a canvas to our imagination.”

In a way, the dystopian novel I was assigned years ago tells the truth. The world can feel grim, and hope can seem absent because the reality is that many people are suffering, nearby and around the planet. It can be tempting to succumb to the idea that all we could ever hope for is to contain the damage by keeping life from degenerating even more.

We might swiftly impose consequences for unacceptable behavior, but not restructure society so that our children are born into a society where they are safer. The “shared life in a shared world” demanded by religious Humanism will not be easily realized. We are going to have to work for it—and we are.

People all across the globe are striving for it, but the task is immense. It’s so huge that in the meantime, in order that we not forget what it is we’re struggling for, we must imagine it. Lewis McGee reminds us that the creative imagination is a powerful aid in promoting the good life. Our brains and sweat and a whole lot else is required. But without imagination, how will we know where we’re going?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172756/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/02.mp3

One of the best ways I know to get things moving when I’m facing significant change is to engage my imagination. The facts of my situation, and the logic and reason I use to arrange them, will only take me to the edge of what I know. Even using my five senses will only extend as far as the range of my sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. But imagination has the ability to reach farther by accessing the deeper well of the unconscious and creatively rearranging what I’ve known before. The uniquely human capacity to imagine is a valuable threshold skill that can open a way into and through the unknowns of a future filled with change.

When we cling to what we know, it is easy to forget about the massive storehouse of knowledge hidden within each of us, a vast library filed away behind a door aptly labeled “the unconscious.” It is there, in the back stacks of the mind, that our experiences first get shelved. Cognitive scientists tell us less than one percent of that material gets transferred to our conscious mind. Like a “closed stack” library where patrons submit requests for materials to be retrieved by librarians, our unconscious stores an expansive collection of knowledge entirely out of sight. Some of it is also out of reach of language itself, collected and shelved as pre-verbal feelings, sensory experiences and images that constitute the knowledge we call intuition. Dream worker and author Jeremy Taylor called this knowledge “not-yet-speech-ripe,” using an old Anglo-Saxon term for the unconscious.

Fortunately, accessing the treasures of the unconscious does not require mastering the Dewey decimal system or turning to a librarian. Rather, we can be assisted by the colorful cast of characters appearing in our dreams at night, or by any piece of music, poetry or art that speaks to us. We only need to pay attention to anything flinging open the doors to the unconscious and beckoning us in to wander among the hidden stacks, often without knowing what we are looking for.

Imagination, dreams, ritual and the arts are all tools for accessing this larger pool of consciousness. In dominant culture today, these ways of knowing are often disparaged as less reliable and useful than science and historical fact. But any scientist worth their white coat knows that exploration begins with a dance between curiosity and imagination. We need to access a larger body of knowledge, especially when facing an unknown future. Our imaginations, creativity and dreams all extend our awareness to do just that.

Wang Maohua, a tai chi master in Beijing, once gave me an important lesson that changed my understanding of tai chi and now also guides me on the threshold of change. He began our time together by asking me to show him the tai chi I practiced at home. But soon after I launched through several forms, he stopped me. I was pushing myself through the moves, he observed.

“Try to focus your attention on the space above your head and below your feet,” he advised instead. “Extend your awareness to the space beyond your fingers.” He then led me in a meditative journey through my body, awakening me first to the space within my body and then beyond it. He told me to stop pushing my body. “Instead,” he said, “let your body move by a gentle intention into the space around it, where your awareness is already waiting to meet it.”

We can borrow this practice of “gentle intention” when living on the threshold, casting our awareness across the gap of the unknown. By imagining ourselves on the far side of our threshold, we are actually stretching our attention beyond the limits of our senses. Gentle intention will open our awareness, allowing us to perceive what lies beneath the surface of things. It is a way of open-ended wondering, imagining what we are moving toward. Then, having imagined ourselves on the far side of the threshold we are crossing, we look up to find our own self waiting there, encouraging us on, and welcoming us as we arrive in a place where we have never been before.

excerpted and adapted from Living in the Between: a thresholder’s guide to personal and global change, by Karen Hering, to be published by Skinner House in late 2020.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172819/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/01.mp3

Grief is more than just an intense form of pain. It is the emotion triggered by severe loss—a loss of a part of the self. The part has many names, but let’s just call it ego. Ego makes meaning in life by defining itself in relation to its surroundings. Some of those surroundings—such as a spouse, a parent, a child, a longtime intimate friend—are so incredibly close that the ego experiences them as part of itself. When one of those critical parts is lost, the ego is shattered. Its job is to manage life, and it suddenly cannot do that job.

A grievous loss does not necessarily involve a loved one. It could be a calling, such as music, lost by a physical trauma that makes that form of musicianship impossible. It could be something we think of as merely a backdrop in life, like the expectation that people and things around you will not be blown to bits. It could be something that just happens to you, like fate, shattering the bedrock expectation that things happen for a reason and life is fair. Or it could be a loss that flows from your own obliviousness to what is happening in your life, such as hurting someone close and causing a relationship to come crashing down.

What, then, is to be done with this shattering? Often, the ego’s immediate impulse is to do anything to shut off the pain. Left to its own devices, without deeper sources of meaning, the ego traffics mostly in seeking pleasure and comfort, and avoiding pain and suffering. Our market economy has responded impressively to this impulse, with anesthesia and distractions of every description.

Many books about grieving counsel strongly against acting on this intense desire to turn away from the pain. They advise engaging with the grief and experiencing it fully as a healing process. Engaging with the grief means inviting in the full awareness of how much you cared about what you have lost, instead of pushing it away.

No matter how much you appreciated whatever or whomever you have lost, grieving brings more gratitude for it. Along with that awareness comes a heightened sense of gratitude for what remains with you of the person who is gone—and even further, a greater appreciation for all of life. Grieving also calls for separating out what must be held on to from what we must let go. This process brings a heightened ability to be present to life, rather than living in the past that has become never again or in the future that has become never shall be.

It’s hard to separate anything out, of course, if you’re standing in the dark. And that’s where grief puts you—in a dark cave with the winds of painful emotion howling in your ears. Part of the work of grieving is to learn to trust that you do actually have a kind of spiritual night vision, which allows you to treat the dark not as an enemy, but rather as a place where something new and valuable can be cultivated.

The spiritual practice of grieving entails intentionally doing whatever will sharpen, rather than dull, the edges of loss. This practice is likely to include a mixture of solitude and companionship, particularly with people who have known grief. Companionship might also be found in poetic voices that can give words to your sorrow when your own words won’t come, such as these by Tennyson in a poem called “A Farewell”: But here will sigh thine alder tree, and here thine aspen shiver; and here by thee will hum the bee, forever and forever. A thousand suns will stream on thee, a thousand moons will quiver; but not by thee my steps shall be, for ever and for ever. No more strolls by the river with that one who has departed. How sharp the sweetness of those strolls becomes.

Moving from grief to grieving calls for hard work at the very time when you have been laid low, but it can bring great rewards. It is tempting to think of the spiritual practice of grieving as basically a matter of pacing, of regaining one’s balance without trying to “bounce back” too soon. But after a grievous loss, things will never be like they were.

The results of the grieving process—a heightened capacity for gratitude, a sharper sense of presence to life, and the ability to see your way in spiritual darkness—represent a foundation on which a newly constituted ego can arise from the wreckage of the shattered one. This is the destiny toward which grieving shows the way.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110180745/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_10/05.mp3

When you lose someone you love, there are some things that are just really hard to hear: They’re in a better place. Time heals all wounds. I know how you feel. These are probably the three least helpful things for someone who is grieving to hear.

Maybe they are in a better place, but it doesn’t make me miss them any less. Maybe time will heal the pain of their loss, but right now it still hurts. And maybe you have felt the pain of losing another, but if you really knew how I felt, you would not say any of those things to me right now.

That’s how I felt when I lost my mother 21 years ago, when I lost my father six years ago, and when I lost my best friend four years ago. And I imagine that’s how I’ll feel each and every time a loved one dies. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

People deal with grief in different ways. Some get angry, some get sad, and some pretend that everything is all right. None of those things are the “right way,” and none are the “wrong way.” It’s just the way we deal.

I can’t offer those grieving any great advice on how to get past the grief. And, honestly, most of them don’t want to hear it anyway. But for those who know someone who is grieving, I do have some great advice: They don’t want to hear it.

What they do want is someone they can cry with, someone whose steady presence will help them move past the anger, sorrow, pain and loss. You don’t need words for that. You don’t really need to do anything. Just be there. No words needed.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110180805/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_10/04.mp3

The movie Gravity, which came out in 2013, is about grief. And it’s worth watching with this in mind, because what Alfonso Cuarón, the director and co-writer, and Jonás Cuarón, the other co-writer, have to tell us about grief can help us through it.

When we first see Dr. Ryan Stone, she is floating in space. She doesn’t seem to belong there. She’s fighting nausea, and she’s not an astronaut or engineer by training—she’s a medical doctor. But she has a reason to have signed up for this space-station repair job. Her young daughter died from a fall in a playground, and ever since then, Ryan has tried not to touch the ground.

Gravity has not been good to Ryan. You can see why she wants to leave it behind. Of all the things that could kill a person, drowning or poisoning or a car crash, the writers chose a different fate for her child: she fell. She died from gravity. That moment of gravity inflicted upon Ryan one of the weightiest losses a person can endure.

And then there’s the very word gravity, so similar to grave…. Gravity, grave, and grief all come from the same root, the Old English for dig. Earth holds us, which is all very well when we are happy. But when grief comes, we may want to float above everything. It is so, so hard just to be awake, to be aware, to continually encounter the solid reality of a world that reverberates with absence, because the one we love is nowhere to be found. There is no escaping our feelings, we know that, but if we could just float, maybe we could float away and never feel anything again….

Ryan gets her chance, because the mission goes wrong, and suddenly it is very likely that she is going to die up there, that very day, in space. Alone and unmoored, she is tempted to just give in and give up.

But by the close of the movie, she wants to live. And in its final moments, she digs her hands into the earth, grateful just to be here, and when she stands up on those shaky legs, the camera looks up at her as if at a colossus. With that shot, Cuarón is telling us that Ryan Stone is heroic, and she is. She hasn’t saved the world from invasion or her city from destruction. She has simply done what each of us must do at some point, when even to be on earth, of earth, is excruciatingly painful. She chooses life, the whole weight and heft of it.

When sorrow comes for us, we may want to just float. And that can be good medicine. Music, sleep, the shadow worlds of movies or books, might give us some relief for awhile. In the end, though, we are creatures of earth, and we need gravity. We must remain tethered to reality and all the pain it brings, or else float forever in a half-existence. As the introduction to the movie says, as the camera pans an unimaginably large, indifferent expanse, “life in space is impossible.”

When we realize that we cannot float forever and we find it unendurable to touch the ground, friends can be the bridge we need. The touch of a hand, the sound of a voice, good food made by good friends, tether us gently: not demanding that we return to gravity’s relentless pull until we’re ready, but letting us know that we are of this life, this earth. Creating something together, whether a cantata or a conversation, offers threads of connection when we still feel as if a stronger one would hurt too much. When others express their griefs and losses, never as a comparison or competition, but humbly, out of their own need, they anchor us to the life we share. And bit by bit, we may follow that lifeline back to healing and joy.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110180846/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_10/03.mp3

One of the many ways to carve meaning out of grief is to honor the memory of those we have lost. We welcome gifts to sustain the work of the CLF made in honor of those who are gone from this earth, but remain in memory. To arrange a memorial gift, please call the CLF office at (617) 948-6150.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110180907/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_10/02.mp3

When you’re a capable, confident, 28-year-old child of privilege and experience, then you are accustomed to taking the challenges that come up in life and simply…managing them.

By the time I was 28 I had lived in three countries by my own initiative, and several others by tagging along with my parents. I had been married for six years and was a mother for two, and had gotten a BA in psychology and a master’s degree in sociology. My husband, Stefan, who was 29, was a chief financial officer for a division in his insurance corporation. As a result of his job, we moved from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Minneapolis, with all the attendant tasks and responsibilities an international move entails. In addition to those events, I was seven months pregnant with my second son at this time, so I was also busy finding myself somewhere to have a baby in a strange city. So as you can imagine, at this time Stefan and I had a major to-do list, but nothing that two people with skills and resources wouldn’t be able to manage.

And I swear to you, although it may seem ridiculous, that when Stefan was diagnosed with a brain tumor right in the middle of all this, in some very practical ways taking care of his illness became simply more items added to the list of to-dos. Granted, these to-dos were scarier, and the stakes were higher. But we used the same system, you see, to manage the illness that we had always used to manage our lives together.

Gather resources. Get educated. Make decisions. Take charge. Do the right thing, so you’ll get the right outcome. Assume that everything will work out fine.

This methodology was our foundation, our grounding. We had the energy and efficiency needed to tackle a ridiculous list of to-dos. And when Stefan’s energy flagged with his disease and the treatment, I took over everything. The list never came to an end, but I didn’t notice because I knew my job was to be in charge. Not only did the list not come to an end, but it increased exponentially as we went along.

We did extensive research and decided on a course of treatment. Brain surgery led to unexpected paralysis on Stefan’s right side, which necessitated its own course of research and treatment. I had my baby, Jake, and continued to care for my two sons on my own. I got settled into our community and new house, availed myself of at-home-mom resources, and found preschools.

I managed Stefan’s care, including his radiation and fifteen months of inpatient chemotherapy, which involved a surgical procedure every five weeks. Blood tests every week. Periodic setbacks with low blood counts. Doing the dance of making sure the medication balances were correct. Periodic seizures when they weren’t. All this in a town, a state, with no family, and no friends except for some brand new ones, no church, just us.

Any normal person, especially one involved in ministering to others, can tell you that this all is just too much for the 20-years-ago me to be in charge of, to be expected to manage. But I was not normal in that time period, and I was not involved in ministry, and this is what I thought the world was like: You were in charge of the success and failure of your own life. Problems were unfortunate, and they called for extra competency, and so you rose to the occasion. This is what life is, decided the 10-years-ago me. I am in charge, and the degree to which I can’t meet the challenge is the degree to which I fail, and let my family down. That was inconceivable. So, simple enough—meet the challenge. Always.

After the first six months in Minnesota, things sort of leveled out for me and my family. After a year and a half, Stefan completed his course of chemo treatment, and was declared cancer-free. He was weak from the treatment, skinny and bald, and still used a cane. We were told that this sort of cancer does tend to come back; but really, that was an issue for another day. For now, the to-do list was complete. Time for the next one.

We began to plan our return to “normal” life, still thinking such a thing was possible. In our rush to get through this whole event as efficiently as we could, we hadn’t noticed the ways in which we had already fundamentally changed—and not for the better.

We hadn’t noticed that although Stefan and I were still quite a team when it came to his treatment, in other areas of our relationship things had started to slide. We hadn’t noticed, or at least I hadn’t, that I was wound tighter than a drum, and was nearing the end of my capacity to ignore my own needs in order to deal with babies and health concerns.

And we certainly hadn’t noticed, or at least I hadn’t, that we actually already knew that our belief that we could manage and fix anything was wrong. After all the major drama, we weren’t giving ourselves the space to see that we had been in the wilderness this whole time, a new place entirely. We were still in the desert, and being in the wilderness called for a new perspective, a new game plan. We were like people in the middle of the Sahara with nothing but a bottle of sunscreen, telling ourselves we were having a beach vacation. Or at least that the rescue chopper would be there very shortly.

Things did not stay calm. Stefan fell and broke his hip in December of 2001. While waiting for surgery, he fell into a coma, and no-one was sure exactly why. I pulled out my best medical management expertise, talking to doctors and organizing treatment, figuring out the best course of action.

And herein lies that moment when it all changed, and I saw that I was in the wilderness, had been in the wilderness, lost in the desert for real, and it was time for something new.

I was on the phone with some doctor or another, and they were reporting in. No change in consciousness. A shadow on the MRI—was the tumor returning? Probably not. Why the coma? Sometimes the brain shuts down for a while—that’s a good thing. He could pop out of it just fine. We’ll monitor this. We’ll take a look at that. Oh, and by the way, Stefan has osteoporosis, likely caused by the steroids he’s been taking for years to help with the seizures. That’s why his hip broke when he fell. And on to this. And on to that.

There was something about that osteoporosis part. I remember how I was standing—I was on the phone in the front room of my house with my head bowed, one foot up on the sofa. But inside of me, my body did something else entirely. Inside, inside my spirit, when I heard about the osteoporosis, the one last straw, I opened out my hands.

I let go.

This is too much for me. This may turn out fine or it may turn out terribly, but You’re in charge. Who I might have been talking to, I did not know, but it didn’t matter. It is Yours now, Hand of Fate or whatever is out there. You take it.

Faith is like a mustard seed, Jesus said. It’s just a speck, the smallest of all the seeds on earth, and yet it grows a shrub so large that birds can make nests in its shade (Mark 4:31-32). My experience on the phone was the mustard seed of my life.

It could have been just a temporary thing, a brief respite from a path that didn’t change at all from the one I had been on. But as it turned out, it was not a temporary thing at all. That seed of letting go became the foundation of everything I then did, the foundation by which I experienced all that was to come: Stefan’s death and the choices I made, first in coming to DC, and then in getting re-involved with Unitarian Universalism, and getting remarried, and then in choosing to go to seminary, and all the rest. It’s the foundation I use now, and I don’t think I could be without it if I tried.

I open my hands. It’s Your show, not mine. I turn it over. You’re in charge. Show me what’s next, and that’s what I will do.

The Tao Te Ching says that trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, Lao Tzu tells us, when you handle the tools, chances are that you’ll cut your hand. Hands off the tools. They aren’t yours.

I couldn’t know at the time the blessings and miracles that would grow out of this moment of transformation. I just let go, and walked off into a different kind of wilderness, one where, like Jesus in the desert, I was waited on by angels. I hope, when it comes to your wilderness, that you have seen them waiting on you, too.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110180929/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_10/01.mp3

What could a convict have to say about possibilities? At a time before prison, I would have thought Not very much. Then, there I was, no longer free, in jail, asking myself: How could this happen? How is this possible? Who takes the time to consider such a thing, especially before the fact?

On the other hand, what are the chances of simply having a negative thought—and acting on it? Well, there I was, one of many behind those walls, enclosed, confined.

Possibilities are essentially pathways, alternative spaces, but jail is, by design, restriction and stagnation. In such a place I was surrounded by others who had exercised bad thoughts followed by bad actions. This kind of environment is, on the surface, full of hostility and wickedness, trickling falls of futility and hopelessness flooding in like bad waters, pooling up bit by bit, rising.

Prison brings physical harm, but also psychological damage. Consider the favored prison wisdom phrase: “It is what it is.”

Think about that string of words. What do they convey? I have always cringed at its sentiment, considered it unhelpful at best and unwise at worst. It implies that there are no alternatives, and its essence is surrender.

No alternatives? This could not be so. I needed options, second chances. I heard that arrogant phrase of so-called wisdom, with its absolute conviction, over and over again, and watched as others lived by it. Try and understand the context of such a mindset in the prison environment: What’s done is done. My limits are what they are. My reality is what it is.

No, no, no, I thought. That is the wrong way to view our situation. The mantra stank of defeat, and defeat means that it’s over and can’t be undone. There was a feeling of being lost, with no sense of direction or even destination. I kept replaying the past in my head, wondering. Things had appeared so set in place, so inevitable. Refusing to give in to the flow of my surroundings, refusing to filter life through a layer of impossibilities, I had to admit to myself that the path taken—the one that led to prison—was not the only option I had. Wrong thought and wrong action on my part had kept me on a single course. I had been my own worst enemy. I was following poor directions, and could not afford to continue.

Okay. So in the past I had had options, but didn’t heed them and wound up here, in prison. What now? Inside, dealing with the rising swells of obstacles, what remained? At first it seemed that the answer was bleak. I struggled as waves of stress and doubt trapped me, threatening to drown me.

I was ready for anything, and without realizing it, I had found a life preserver—only it didn’t look like one, at least not at first. Help came as soon as pen met paper. When I came across an address, any place offering resources to the incarcerated, I responded. I wrote letter after letter. Using the written word, I extended my consciousness beyond the perils of prison, seeking reprieve.

Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus lists several words as related to or synonyms for possibility. These words were reflected in my actions: My thoughts were potentiality. Paper and pen, stamps and envelopes, were attainable. Writing and corresponding were practicable. Fortunately, too, I had available family and friends who supported me. Soon I had several correspondences. And momentum.

From the seclusion of my bunk I could very easily have stared at the fuzzy ceiling, raised a white flag and given up. Instead, I learned from my past, acknowledged my terrible choices, maintained right thought during tough times, and discovered that possibilities could still happen. Writing became an opportunity for me, a way of having control and exercising better principles, like empathy and sharing and being proactive. This is a new journey I look forward to, but is it an easier trek now? No. I see it this way: the journey will always have its difficulties. Had I focused my outlook on a limiting philosophy, gotten lured in, I could easily have been hooked and sunk by its impossible weight.

Possibilities are hope and hope is possibilities. Sometimes those are closer than we realize. Mine was right under my nose. In most cases it was cheap, if not free, and became easier to find and more rewarding with each new word. It is what it can be—if we are willing to believe. Don’t give up. Keep searching. Keep trying. Keep the hope alive and keep your outlook open because the possibilities are out there, even in the toughest of circumstances.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110184055/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_11/05.mp3

In February of 2015 I went to the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association Institute for Excellence in Ministry, and I had the opportunity to spend a week in a workshop with activist, eco‐philosopher, writer, and spiritual elder Joanna Macy.

Joanna is well‐known in spiritual and ecological activism circles. Her work focuses on Work that Reconnects, naming ways that we have been disconnected and how that feeds despair and apathy, and working to build community and connection in response to the reality of ecological devastation and destruction.

We know that our world is facing a climate crisis. And there is much that could be said about the science, the statistics and the rising temperatures and the extreme weather events and the NASA reports and parts per million. I’m not here to talk about any of that. My own eyes start to glaze over at the numbers, and when I zoom out, I just feel my own helplessness and overwhelm welling up inside me until I want to shut it all out and push it away, pretending I never heard any of it.

So here was Joanna Macy, 84­year‐old spiritual elder, grounded in the Buddhist tradition, brilliant and effusive and leading this workshop alongside the young activists of Movement Generation, an environmental justice organization led by low income young people of color committed to a just transition away from profit and pollution and toward healthy, resilient and life affirming local economies.

Throughout the workshop, Joanna kept saying “What a wonderful time to be alive!” And I found myself thinking “Yeah, right, Joanna, have you read the news lately?”

Joanna had us begin in her four‐step process of the work that reconnects, which begins with gratitude. And let me tell you, I wasn’t feeling too much of that, so I thought it was a particularly annoying place to start. Mostly, what I was feeling was anger.

That anger was primarily directed at my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The generations immediately preceding me had not left things in better condition than they had found it. I felt a sort of “What on earth are we supposed to do with all this mess?!”

So gratitude wasn’t quite happening for me yet.

Then Joanna asked us to honor our pain for the world—and that I could do. Pain at the ways we see violence and oppression destroy families and communities, pain at the ways that we see suffering all around us, pain for the ways we are so disconnected from one another, from our natural world, from God, from our own deepest desires.

And then, Joanna announced that we were going to time travel—we were going to talk to a descendent from seven generations into the future—which is estimated to be about 200 years. She assigned half of us to be present day beings, our own selves (I was in this group) and the other half of us would be seventh generation beings—humans from around the year 2215. She then facilitated a conversation with imaginary ancestors and descendants, talking together about this time we live in.

We present‐day ancestors began. The future beings—our imaginary descendants, asked us a series of questions about the time we, all of us, live in here and now. The questions were along the lines of “ancestor, I’ve heard stories about the critical time you live in—how much of a crisis your world was in. What was it like for you to live with that knowledge every day?” and “You must have felt confused and lonely at the beginning. How did you get started in helping our world to heal?” and “You must have felt scared and discouraged throughout it. Where did you find the strength to continue?”

Those of us embodying the role as present‐day beings each answered these questions, and then we got to hear from these pretend future beings, reflecting back what they had heard about these hard times we live in.

This was when my moment of personal transformation happened. Because in my answering of these questions, I felt defensive, like it was me, my generation, young adults who won’t be young adults forever, trying to offer an explanation for the world we might leave to the future beings. And yet all of these people in the workshop—the ones role­playing our descendants, who in reality were older than me—were part of a generation of people I had just hours before felt that flare of anger toward. And then, all of a sudden, I had this rush of compassion, a flood of transformative understanding and patience and deep knowledge of the critical questions the next generation might hurl toward mine.

My point is this: none of us alone created our climate crisis, and in part it was created by a very short view of time—a view that expects immediate profit or loss, a view that can’t fully comprehend the consequences of our choices beyond our own lifetimes. And it wasn’t until I was invited, albeit skeptically at first, to literally converse with our descendants that I had an emotional connection to the future that allowed my moral imagination to take root.

We need a moral imagination of the possibilities we hold if we are going to stop ourselves from exporting our problems to the future. We need this sense of deep time when we think about problems that span across generations, and when we are making choices that will affect future generations.

In this, there is cause for hope. Joanna Macy again: “Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to bring about what we desire. Active hope is about becoming active participants in what we hope for. Active hope is a practice…it is something we do, rather than have.” Joanna makes very clear that active hope does not require optimism, but rather a clarity about the outcome we would like to see, letting our intentions and our values, rather than our calculations of likely success, be our guide. Active hope cannot be discovered in an armchair or without risk. In active hope, we choose our response and act on that choice. In active hope we not only envision new possibilities, we create them for ourselves and for generations to come.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110184122/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_11/04.mp3

Back when I was still new to Texas I met up with black eyed peas for the first time. I was not impressed. Despite the seasonings, to my Upper Midwestern palate they tasted like dirt. So I avoided black eyed peas for several years, until I was talking with a friend from Alabama and the subject of the peas came up. I probably wrinkled my nose and said “I don’t get what the fuss is all about. They taste like mud.” My friend tipped her head and said “Well, that’s part of their charm.” Hmmmm… Once I realized that it was part of their charm, I tried them again, but this time approached them as if that muddy taste might be charming—and within a few more tries, I was hooked. Now, I might love a red bean or a butter bean a bit more, but I have truly found the muddy charm of a black eye pea.

Living as if flies against strict rationality that tells you to deal with only and exactly what is, and encourages you to consider what might be. I consider it a way to break up my certainty and remain flexible in this world.

Consider something that is uncomfortable, annoying, muddy-tasting, or flat-out ominous, and go exploring into how you can engage or respond to it differently. In psychotherapy, this practice is called “reframing.” Cognitive reframing consists of identifying and then displacing certain thoughts with ideas or thoughts that are more positive.

It’s a useful way of reducing the power that fears have over us. Examine your thoughts and see if you can shift them in a less fearful, more affirming direction. Dreading an upcoming conversation? Think about how it might go well, how you will probably learn something that you didn’t know before, about who you want to be after the conversation. And then go have that conversation as if all of the positive things are possible. It might still be difficult, but you will have more control over how you respond to and interpret the outcome.

What about an impending snow storm? What if it gets icy? What if, while going out to pick up the newspaper, I slip on the ice and bust my backside? Yes, that is possible. But, instead, I can reframe my anticipation of the cold weather differently. If it gets icy I can stop to marvel at the ice patterns on my windows and notice how the sunlight is broken into a million shimmering rainbows on the grass in my front lawn. Perhaps then I will walk as if this world is filled with beauty instead of danger. I might also just wait for the snow to melt and read the news online, or take a cue from the weather and just not pay attention to the news for a day.

What might this mean in terms of our interactions with one another? Do you find yourself disappointed by other people on a daily basis?

How would you go about your chores and errands as if every person you will meet today has a gift—including you? What would be different if you acted as if each person matters—even a person who is really different from you? What might be different in your interactions with that person? Can you still see a spark of the divine in them, or a gift, or their simple desire to be a good person?

If your life was made difficult by another person, consider living as if that person had been trying to do their best. Most people are. They might have harmed you and made a wreck of things, but unless they were seriously unwell, they probably thought they were doing the best thing. It might take some visits with a counselor and some serious reframing work, but in time the pain can be eased.

Here’s another way I practice living as if: When we do some of our Tai Chi forms, we move in a way that imitates animals and elements of nature. We imitate birds and snakes and tigers. We create waves of water, grow like trees, rise up like mountains, and blow like the wind. I know that I am not a tree, an ocean, or a snake, but in moving as if I were, I come to understand them better. By drawing the shape of branches and leaves, or moving my arms like wings, I have more awareness of what makes a tree beautiful and what makes a bird powerful.

What would be different if you lived as if animals have feelings and important concerns? Would you have to adjust how you interpret their behaviors and your own? Would you eat them differently?

How would you conduct yourself, living as if your life were an ongoing process of discovery?

What might happen if you carried on as if there were a Great Mother who was with you during the awful moments? A love that abides with you and laughs at you and nudges you to be your best you?

What would be different if you prayed as if prayers you utter were heard by the universe and manifested as change within you and ultimately out into the world?

What might happen if you went about as if the world wanted you, was expecting you? Would you show up and participate more fully? Could you dance more freely and say “yes” more sincerely when a flower blooms at your feet?

I would suggest that all these are possibilities. It’s worth a try.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110184143/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_11/03.mp3

Working at Greensboro Health Care Center, a nursing home, was a rewarding experience for me in many ways. Not the least of these was meeting David. David came to work at the home after I had been there only a short time. Possessed of a quiet countenance and mild demeanor, David worked as a custodian. He treated every person, without regard for race or age or resident or staff, with dignity and respect.

David was a nature lover, and often took his lunch outside, where I would find him reading Thoreau. I would frequently lunch there myself, simply to have an excuse to join him and listen to his wisdom on the beauty of God’s gifts to be found in nature. Our friendship grew, but still remained a casual work-related one, so I was quite surprised when one day in late January of 1983 David asked me to join him for breakfast on the first of February at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter. Although I’m a history buff, I must sadly confess that the date and occasion of our breakfast didn’t register in my mind as significant. That would change forever.

You can imagine my shock when I walked into the Woolworth’s on February 1^st to find the lunch counter packed, and reporters and camera operators from all the national television networks focusing in on David and three other African-American gentlemen. What in the world…? I asked myself. David caught my eye, smiled, and motioned me through the throng of on-lookers and media to take a stool beside him.

“David,” I whispered, “What is all this about?”

“Gary, I wanted you to join me for an anniversary breakfast.”

“Anniversary? Whose anniversary?” I asked.

“Today is the 23^rd anniversary of the Woolworth sit-ins,” David replied.

“You mean…you?” I asked in awe.

David just shyly smiled and nodded. I quickly learned that David, the same man who would take the time out of his busy day to read to an elderly nursing home resident, was David Richmond, one of the four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro who, on February 1^st, 1960, demanded equal service at Woolworths. The icy winds that swept down North Elm St. in downtown Greensboro were second only to the icy reception that David Richmond and his fellow students received at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. Taking stools at the counter, they endured fierce stares from bankers, clerks and lawyers having lunch.

David said, “Sure we were afraid. We were four scared college kids challenging the status quo. Separate but equal was being defied. Jim Crow, nearly one hundred years after our emancipation, was on his deathbed. We were four very frightened young men, but our quest for recognition as equals allowed me and my fellow students to overcome that fear. We were not alone. The spirit of our fathers—their bondage, their blood, their tears and sweat from which this republic was built; their sacrifice made both at home and on the battlefields overseas—their courage was in us.”

There were only four, but soon there would be ten, then 50. The numbers were growing daily that would merge into one voice, one message, one song: equality.

David Richmond passed away in 1991. His friendship, guidance and belief in equality of all people will forever remain a part of my heart, mind and soul. His quiet wisdom, thoughtful perspective, rare insight and deep understanding of the human condition is one I shall always miss.

Although I was just a baby during the turmoil of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, I can well recall the hope in the words, songs and speeches of the era’s heroes. David Richmond was such a hero, who held a vision of the possibility of justice for all.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110184205/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_11/01.mp3

“Darling, the body is a guest house;
Every morning, someone new arrives.”
— jalal ad-din rumi

I do not espouse the theology that “everything happens for a reason.” I simply just don’t believe that. I don’t believe that pain and sorrow in our lives is deserved, even if it is a part of the universal human condition.

I don’t believe that suffering is redemptive or that God (or any other larger purpose) calls us to endure it. Too much damage has been done to people’s lives because of the belief that passively accepting pain and suffering purifies our souls and makes us worthy in the eyes of the divine. Way too much damage.

I do, however, believe that the hardships of our life can be opportunities for spiritual growth. To paraphrase Rumi, 13th century Persian mystic and poet, sometimes sorrow is a guest that sweeps our house clean so that joy may enter. Listening to our pain and learning from it is not the same as letting it take us over. Of course, we have to learn how to encourage the guests of sorrow, malice, and meanness to move on when they’ve overstayed their welcome.

The practice of moving through a labyrinth is very much a process of opening ourselves to feeling whatever is present for us, learning from them, and then releasing those things. You begin the process with an open mind—sometimes with a question, sometimes with an ache in your heart, sometimes with uncertainty, but always with an open mind.

As you make your way through the winding pathway towards the center, you must pay attention. To the lines. To the twists and turns. To lose that attention is to get lost in the labyrinth—it is the only way you can get lost, actually, since it’s just one pathway.

And keeping that attention with an open mind allows in the guests. Some of them—like the guests of joy and companionship and community—are ones we want. Some of them—grief, sadness, despair—are ones we didn’t invite but have to learn from anyway.

And then you get to the center.

In the center of the labyrinth is a chance to pause. A chance to sit with the guests that have come into your soul during your journey. A chance to listen to what they have to tell you. And a chance to make peace with the fact that they’re visiting you.

After whatever time you need to do this, you make your way out, following the same, solitary, serpentine path. The way out requires the same focus as the way in. And that focus signals to our guests that it is time for some of them to move on. I have found that moving through a labyrinth on a regular basis is a clearing, cleansing, and balancing ritual for my spirit.

The finger labyrinth included in this issue of Quest can be a spiritual practice you use anywhere you can have a piece of paper. Rather than walk or roll through a large labyrinth set on the ground, trace the line with your finger. The intention is the same. The practice is the same. I hope our Quest labyrinth allows you some measure of balance in your spiritual life.

How to use a Finger Labyrinth

1. If you can, try to find a quiet spot where you can sit down and put the labyrinth on a flat surface.
2. Sit still and quietly until you can focus just on the labyrinth. If you have the option, you could try ringing a chime, playing calming music, or humming a single note.
3. Start with your finger where the path opens to the outside of the labyrinth. As slowly and carefully as you can, trace your finger over the white path, until you get to the open space in the center of the labyrinth. Take your time; it can be hard to keep your place on the path.
4. If you wish, when you are tracing your finger along the path, you can try to focus your mind on thanks, regret or hope. Or, allow your mind to find its own focus for your meditation.
5. Pause when you get to the center of the labyrinth. When you’re ready, follow the same path back out. How did it feel to go on this journey?

We are so glad that so many people are receiving and loving Quest Monthly.

If you are not yet a member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, please reach out to us to discuss whether church membership may be the right fit for you or your family. The CLF is a vibrant and growing congregation where over 2,400 adult members and hundreds of children and youth share the mission of building a global spiritual community. It would be an honor to formally welcome you into our faith family.

Learn more about becoming a free-world member at clfuu.org/join. You may also email us at clf@clfuu.org or call us at 617-948-6150.

If you are currently incarcerated, send a letter to CLF Worthy Now; 24 Farnsworth St. Boston MA 02210, and we will reply with more information about what’s included in membership and how to join.

I believe that our job as Unitarian Universalists is to love loudly. Louder than the hate in the world. Louder than the broken ness, the despair, and the darkness. We have to love so loud that everything else sounds like white-noise. This is my style of Unitarian Universalism. This is what draws me to this work. I want to be a part of a ministry that calls us to unleash a bold, fearless, and brave kind of love—a courageous love.

Growing up, I could never do Unitarian Universalism subtly. It just wasn’t my style. Even when I was really little, I have such distinct memories of 6-year-old me in 1st or 2nd grade telling all my classmates that “my church was the coolest church ever.”

That passion and vigor never really went away. In middle school, I was practically obsessed with drawing chalices on everything. I would doodle on my arms, my shoes, assignments, and a million other things. In high school, I started to figure out what it meant to be a faith leader. I served on committees at my home congregation (which is like a right of passage for any UU, right?), I became an active leader in the youth community, and had the opportunity to do some really amazing work with really incredible religious leaders.

At age 16, I served on the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Board of Trustees. Seriously, I could not do Unitarian Universalism subtly. It was just not my style.

This is the call that led me to become a religious professional and eventually led me to the Church of the Larger Fellowship. When I heard about the mission and vision of this community, I could not turn away.

I’ve recently joined the church full time, my job, in this new role, is to help people find and connect to the Church of the Larger Fellowship. Wherever they are, however they are, whoever they are. I am here to welcome them—to welcome you—to our church.

I’m living my 6-year-old self’s dream. It is literally my job to show people the tremendous power of Unitarian Universalism. If we haven’t already, I hope that we cross paths. I am so excited to serve this congregation in this role, and I know that together we will love so loudly that the whole world will know who we are.

Since the bricks-and mortar congregation I serve first affirmed that Black Lives Matter and hung a banner with those words, we have had a steady stream of push-back to that phrase.

 Most of the people who object do so in anonymous letters and phone calls, and most of them argue that we should affirm instead that “all lives matter.” This is the public response I wrote to those people. Perhaps you, too, will find this helpful.

Of course all lives matter to us. Respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person is the very first principle of Unitarian Universalism. And yet, all lives are not equally threatened by violence in our society. To simply state that “all lives matter” ignores the very real inequities faced by many.

It is easy to issue a blanket condemnation of all violence. It is harder to realize that a good deal of that violence is tied to systems and institutions that must be changed or dismantled.

It is easy to say that all relationships should be free of violence. It is harder to understand that the victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly women, and that the misogyny in our society contributes to every blow.

It is easy to say that all children are precious. It is harder to understand that LGBTQ+ youth are given such negative messages about their self worth that they are six times more likely than straight or cisgender youth to attempt suicide.

It is easy to say that we value a diverse society with people from all nations and ethnicities. It is harder to understand the anti-immigrant bigotry behind calls to separate and isolate poorer, browner schools filled with children of immigrants from wealthier (and mostly white) ones.

It is also easy to say that no one should be shot dead for a broken taillight. It is harder to understand that systemic racism leads us to a reality where unarmed Black men are seven times more likely than unarmed white men to be killed by police in a traffic stop.

I do not blame individual officers for this. I would imagine that there are very few police officers who signed up for their jobs with the explicit intent to perpetuate the racism built into our society. And yet, once you look at the reality of policing in this country, it’s clear that is overwhelmingly what is happening. The white supremacy baked into our society is endemic also in institutions given power and weapons by our state.

“Black Lives Matter” is a declaration that an emergency exists, not a statement that we value one race more than another. The emergency is that the lives of our Black siblings are being taken at an alarming rate in a society that systematically devalues them. The killing must stop. The dehumanization must stop.

All lives cannot matter until Black lives matter.

The Church of the Larger Fellowship is a vessel for change. We are continually evolving and adapting as we learn more about how we can best serve our congregants, parishioners, and faith community as a whole. We allow ourselves to reshape in ways that will make us able to serve the movement of Unitarian Universalism better. From funding innovative ministry to finding new ways to embody the ministerial search process, to increasing the resources we put into our Prison Ministry Network, we continue to build on a foundation of progressive and bold leadership as a model for how Unitarian Universalism can thrive while centering liberation, justice, and love.

As we embarked on this journey of learning and change together, we noticed that Quest, our monthly print publication, was not serving all of our readers as well as it could have. We saw that not all voices were being heard, ministered to, and given the platform to speak to their experience. That’s why you might notice that this issue is different. You will read reflections from our members, see opportunities to respond to thinking prompts, have the chance to interact with activities on the pages, and even vote on important church business. Our vision is to create a monthly publication that adds value to your life and connects you to your church. A magazine that is interactive, relevant, and made by and for the community who reads it.

We are inviting you, the reader, to submit reflections on a range of ideas and topics. Topics you could write about:

• Why do you love the CLF?
• Why are you a Unitarian Universalist?
• How do you put your faith into action?
• What theological and spiritual questions do you grapple with?
• How can we more intentionally minister to and with CLF Worthy Now Prison Ministry members?

Email submissions to editors@clfuu.org or mail them to the Church of the Larger Fellowship; 24 Farnsworth St. Boston, MA 02210.

We know that not everyone can access our online resources. This is especially true for CLF members in prison. We hope that between the pages of Quest Monthly, you find a place that connects you to your Unitarian Universalist faith. Wherever you are, however you are reading this, and whenever you get this, know that it was created with you in mind—the marginalized, the lonely, the left out, the little bit different. Whoever you are, you are welcome here.

We hope you enjoy this inaugural issue of the new Quest Monthly. We made it just for you