Reading Before the Message

Our story today comes from a real-life incident related to us by Rachel Naomi Remen, a medical doctor whose special focus is counseling those with chronic and terminal illness.

The story is about a teenager named David. David was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes two weeks after his seventeenth birthday. He responded to it with all the rage of a trapped animal. He flung himself against the limitations of his disease, refusing to hold to a diet, forgetting to take his insulin, and using his diabetes to hurt himself over and over. Fearing for his life, his parents insisted he come into therapy. He was reluctant, but he obeyed.

After six months of therapy, he had not made much progress. But then he had a dream that was so intense, he didn’t realize until later—–after he had woken up——that he had even been asleep. In his dream, David found himself sitting in an empty room without a ceiling, facing a small stone statue of the Buddha. He was not a religious person, so he didn’t know much about Buddhism. All he knew was that he had a feeling of kinship with the statue, perhaps because this Buddha was a young man—-not much older than himself.

The statue’s face was very still and peaceful, and it seemed to be listening to something deep within David. It had an odd effect on him. Alone in the room with it, David felt more and more at peace himself.

David experienced this unfamiliar sense of peace for a while when, without warning, a steel gray dagger was thrown from somewhere behind him. It buried itself deep within the Buddha’s heart. David was profoundly shocked. He felt betrayed by life, overwhelmed with feelings of despair and anguish. From his very depths, a single question emerged: “Why is life like this?”

And then the statue began to grow, and grow, and grow, so slowly at first that David was not sure it was really happening. But it was. This was the Buddha’s way of responding to the knife.

But its face remained unchanged, peaceful as ever. And though the Buddha grew,  the steel gray knife did not change in size. As the Buddha grew larger, the knife eventually became a tiny gray speck on the breast of the enormous, smiling Buddha. Seeing this, David felt something release inside him. He could breathe again. He awoke with tears in his eyes.   

Here ends the story.

 

Four Noble Truths (2019)

Many years ago, my 23 year-old-self was in graduate school taking a seminar on Philosophy of Mind. Socrates was my philosophical hero, and his dictum of “the unexamined life is not worth living” was my guide. So I entered the seminar excited, because here, I thought, I would get to the heart of the matter about what it meant to be a spiritual being having a human experience. Consciousness is central to it all.

Class began. In walked the professor, and conversation began. Something like: “Available teleosemantic theories are truth-referential and are usually regarded as competing with use-theories that are motivated by deflationary views of truth and reference. I argue that we need the basic-acceptance account independently of the fate of deflationism and that it can be articulated in truth-referentialist terms. Additionally, I argue that we need to combine it with teleosemantics.”

What!?

Very soon I felt a fire in my belly: Life wasn’t being examined in this seminar! What am I doing here? I actually asked this out loud, right there in the seminar.

Back then I believed that philosophy has value only to the degree that it helps people become more alive and creative and resilient in the messy situations of our living.

I believe that even more today.

You also need to know that all those years ago, I was coming to the seminar with more than Socrates on my mind. Part of this had to do with having read books about Hinduism and Taoism and Buddhism, and stories like the following were par for the course:

The guru sat in meditation on the riverbank when a disciple bent down to place two enormous pearls at his feet, a token of reverence and devotion. The guru opened his eyes, lifted one of the pearls, and held it so carelessly that it slipped out of his hand and rolled down the bank into the river. The horrified disciple plunged in after it, but though he dived in again and again till late evening, he had no luck. Finally, all wet and exhausted, he roused the guru from his meditation: “You saw where it fell. Show me the spot so I can get it back for you.” The guru lifted the other pearl, threw it into the river, and said, “Right there!”

I read stories like this, and I felt again the old thirst to know why life was the way it was.

I wanted to know more about the suffering that would send a person in search of a guru, to seek release.

I wanted to know more about why humans suffer and the games we play that guarantee that (like the disciple’s attachment to his pearls).

I wanted to know if suffering is our fate, or if something truly better can happen for us.

And if something better was possible, I wanted to know what was in my power to do, to help manifest it. To be less the disciple and more the guru.

I thirsted to know! And this thirst was already old in me, because I had grown up (like every one of us) under conditions of suffering, and the yearning to be released from it.

The experience of trauma is a human universal.

Its sources are many.

One is evolution itself. The bloody and messy story of the struggle of our biological species to survive is written into our brain and body structures. As psychiatrist Russ Harris puts it, “Our minds evolved to help us survive in a world fraught with danger. […] The number one priority of the primitive human mind was to look out for anything that might harm you—and avoid it. The primitive human mind was basically a ‘don’t get killed’ device.”

In other words, evolution has tuned our minds towards the negative. Saber-tooth tiger threats are long gone, but these days we can be constantly worried about the other shoe dropping in the form of an IRS audit, or the kid bullied at school, or being diagnosed with some disease.

Evolution has also taught us to be wary of exclusion from the group, because group membership means safety. So today we can be constantly worried about doing something that might get us rejected, or of not fitting in, or of making a fool of ourselves. Our minds are busy comparing ourselves with others. Am I too thin? Too fat? Too tall? Not tall enough?

“Evolution,” says psychiatrist Russ Harris, “has shaped our brains so that we are hardwired to suffer psychologically: to compare, to evaluate, and criticize ourselves, to focus on what we’re lacking, to rapidly become dissatisfied with what we have, and to imagine all sorts of frightening scenarios, most of which will never happen.”

And then he says: “No wonder humans find it hard to be happy!”

No wonder any of us might search for some kind of guru, to seek release!

And this is only one flavor of trauma that is inflicted upon us.

Another is being born into an identity that society marginalizes and oppresses. So is being born into an identity that society privileges. It’s never about you personally. You, personally, deserve none of the prejudice and none of the privilege. But you get it anyway, for reasons that are completely arbitrary. Color of your skin. Structure of your plumbing. Shape of your nose! The impersonal social system injects bias in us, injects -isms and so distorts character and diminishes humanity, and the result is a world of haves and have nots, and that is a world full of suffering, I guarantee you.  

Call this sort of trauma “systemic.”

But then there’s the sort of trauma that is personal. Being born with juvenile diabetes, as is the case with David from the story from earlier. The death of a parent when you are young (or any age, actually). Family poverty. Abuse from someone you trusted. Which is often because they suffered from mental illness or addiction–which also becomes a source of trauma.

“Happy families are all alike,” said the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy; “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

But to complete this compressed taxonomy of human suffering, I must mention collective event traumas. The environmental disasters, the wars, the famines, the 9/11s, the depressions that come upon communities and nations and scar them. They are collective scars. One of these in particular is the anti-democratic, unrestrained capitalism of 21stcentury America that is making the super-rich richer at the expense of 99% of the rest of us, and it is a deep scar in the American psyche we must find a way to heal.

All this suffering! Systemic, personal, and collective: the thirst to know what to do with it was already old in me, by the time I was 23! Not that I could articulate all these dimensions—no, that’s part of what 12 years in this pulpit has helped me to do.

And to do more than that. To know more about why humans suffer and the games we play that guarantee that.

Now, what I have just said might, on the surface, strike some folks as absurd. Why humans suffer? What? You’ve just articulated why, in the form of three flavors of traumatization!

But here is a great gift that comes from Buddhism and other world wisdom traditions: the insight that physical distress and physical pain are one thing; but how people receive that, what stories people tell themselves about the significance of what’s happening, where people sink the anchor of the their fundamental sense of safety and vitality—ah, that is another thing entirely.

I did a lot of extracurricular reading as a young man in graduate school, and one of my favorite finds was a book entitled Zen Flesh, Zen Bones—a book that, story after story, helped me to see the big difference between the mere fact of pain and the variety of spiritual responses to that, one of which could be suffering, but there could be other responses too. For example:

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut, only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. “You may have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Just wow. Clearly, Ryokan anchored his safety in something far beyond his possessions—or the security of his house. And the purpose of his life was something far beyond “what’s in it for me.”

He experienced something we would all agree was physically jarring—but the result to him was not spiritual suffering. Not at all.

Which is in stark contrast to the thief, who is in a place of spiritual suffering, deeply so, to do what he was doing.

Poverty has traumatized the thief, has stolen so much from him, and he is stealing what he feels he’s owed, back. It’s all unfair, from beginning to end. So why should he care about the unfair pain he inflicts on others?

Stealing, for him, is like a survival strategy. Besides being the means of his survival, it is a way of protesting the unfairness of a society that allows for and enables poverty, and it is a way of shoring up a sense of personal dignity and value.

Do you get that language of “survival strategy”? It’s what we spiritual beings having a human experience do to cope with trauma. Trauma jars us, and because we don’t yet know that our true safety can be anchored in something that the hard knocks of life can’t touch, we interpret what is happening to mean that we are in deep danger, we must do something to take care of ourselves. In my case, I learned to take care of myself in the face of my deeply mentally ill and abusive mother by adopting a tripartite survival strategy: (1) I would put on a mask to the world that proclaimed I was an achiever, I was excellent, I was successful, I was a “nice guy,” no scary skeletons in my closet, nuh uh, no way, nothing to look at here, move along, move along! (2) at home I would make my personal needs disappear, everything revolved around the borderline personality disorder chaos of my mother and trying to manage her crazy, but as for what I needed–I became like the wallpaper; and (3) I learned how to abandon myself and its needs, and whenever my needs tried to assert themselves in all vulnerability and authenticity, I disciplined myself with a dose of shame. Shame was the cattle prod I learned to use to keep myself in line.

It worked! I survived. But the thing about survival strategies is that there gets to be a time when you discover that it’s bringing you way more unhappiness than happiness. That’s it’s really not working anymore.

Or maybe a Ryokan comes into your life, and you just do your survival strategy thing, whatever it happens to be, and his response to you in no way plays by the rules of your game—you’re playing a finite game and he’s playing an infinite game—and you are bewildered, you slink away, and maybe it gets you to wondering if, perhaps, your life could be different than you’d ever imagined?

The title of this sermon is “Four Noble Truths” and by now we have covered the first and second.

The first is, “Life is suffering.”

The second is, “Suffering is caused by stuck behavior patterns that seek to bring about happiness but don’t really.”

Which leads to the third: “Life doesn’t have to be this way.”

Growing up, I knew with inexplicable yet irrepressible certainty, in a part of myself untouched by the rest of my life, that suffering wasn’t the last word and the core of human existence. I felt this in the midst of nature, its beauty and peace turning me on to a spark deep within myself. People talk about the sacred—and from the first I have believed it to be an ordinary, every-day kind of sacred, inherently present in nature and in human life. When we tap into it, when we mindfully connect with it, we find that we are changed: our relationships are strengthened, our creativity is unleashed, our possibilities are expanded. The way is opened up to larger realities in life, of reverence, gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, and justice.

When we tap into it—or when it taps into us. David, suffering because he equates his true wellness with the health of his body, suffering because he rages against his juvenile diabetes, one night has a dream. He dreams of a statue of the Buddha. David wasn’t a religious person in a formal sense; he didn’t know much about Buddhism at all. It’s just that something wise deep within him felt a kinship with the Buddha image and used it to say, “Here I am!” Wellness, deep within, which didn’t have to be installed but was there already, from the very beginning, hardwired in.

Moses has his burning bush, but David had his dream….

And the dream told him his story. His physical sickness was like a steel grey dagger, thrown into the heart of something innocent—the Buddha statue. David’s response to this in the dream was like his response in real life: anguish, rage. But then the Buddha statue changed, and in a way that echoed the countercultural wisdom of a Ryokan. It just grew. The statue grew bigger and bigger.

Meaning that while our egos play out their survival strategies and rage and curse at adversity, the inner Buddha in every one of us responds in a very different way. TO GROW. It’s not that the physical pain of life is ever taken away. The physical daggers never go away. But in the face of death, illness, natural disasters, tragedies of every sort, our souls can grow, our vision of ourselves and what the world means can grow, and so finally every dagger assumes its proper place and proportion in the scheme of things. The spiritual suffering decreases. Compassion and peace increase. All the tension within us, the way we hold our bodies as if we’re just waiting for life to ambush us at any moment—we can let that go. We can live in this world and say Yes to it. Accept all that it brings, all the ups and downs. And our eyes will fill with tears. Our hearts will soften, our eyes will fill with tears. Love will grow here, in our hearts.

The Four Noble Truths was the Buddha’s very first sermon. It was one of my first to you. And it concludes with a very long description of the Fourth Truth, which articulates the various disciplines and practices that, essentially, can turn a thief into a Zen Master. The Buddha called it “The Noble Eightfold Path.”

But here, all I will say, as this my last sermon to you ends, is that grace is real. By that I mean, we can be working so hard to find meaning and purpose that we are not paying attention to the meaning and purpose that is already all around us, just waiting for us to stop trying so hard.

Even when we are not seeking, or don’t know how to seek, we are sought after. Sometimes we are just like the thief, just mechanically living out our survival strategy du jour, but it leads to a Ryokan unexpectedly coming into our life, and the result is everything changing.

I give thanks for how you have so often been Ryokan to me, in my life.

And then sometimes, we are so deep in our suffering, that suffering is all we are, and it seems no one can help; but there is deep wisdom and wellness in each of us—which is the anchor of our true safety that nothing external can diminish. Perhaps it has already made itself known to you, as it did to David.

If not, practice wise silence, let the clutter in your mind fall away, allow your deep wisdom to find you. Allow yourself to be found.

Knives are always being thrown. Change happens and pain happens.

But know this best of all philosophies: You are fundamentally Buddhas.

Even as you seek, you are sought after.

Don’t despair. Just grow.

 

The story is told about the famous American painter James McNeil Whistler who, in the 1850s, was at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. One day his instructor assigned him to draw a bridge. He responded by drawing a romantic stone one, complete with grassy banks and two small children fishing from it.

“Get those children off that bridge!” ordered the instructor. “This is an engineering exercise.”

Whistler got the kids off the bridge, drew them fishing from the bank of the river instead, and resubmitted the drawing. The instructor was not pleased. “I told you to remove those children. Get them completely out of the picture!”

Whistler’s next version did indeed have the children “completely out of the picture.” They were drawn buried under two small tombstones on the riverbank.

**

This is not the story of you and me over the past twelve years, thank the Gods.

When you called me in April of 2007 to be your Settled Senior Minister, your charge to minister alongside you and inspire Unitarian Universalist aliveness among you did not come as an order, but as an invitation.

For twelve years, I have tried to do that, in the context of around 140 board meetings, 600-ish all staff meetings, 1800 staff one-on-ones, and who knows how many meetings with various committees and teams. In each of these administrative contexts: presenting a drawing of our Unitarian Universalist values and aspirations which can be the bridge allowing us to cross over troubled waters.

And then there were the countless pastoral care moments, where I have met with people in times of confusion and hurt and we have wondered together and prayed together about what the bridge might look like in their situation.

And then there were sermons. Around 350 of them.

It is said that any given preacher preaches only one message, really, though over the course of years they might present it a thousand different ways, employing a thousand different anecdotes and stories, in service to addressing a thousand different topics.

Only one message, really.

Mine, I would say, is, Be fully and deeply alive here and now.

I have preached that, as I have said, about 350 times now, and the bridges I’ve portrayed have featured all sorts of fanciful children, and you have received the eccentricity of my style and taste graciously and even with interest. I’ve felt free to preach as my heart and conscience and aesthetic sensibility led me, and I thank you for your openness.

I thank you that I’ve never had to protest by killing the children and burying them under tiny tombstones.

Which is critical, because this is a spiritual community, and the children of all our hearts and all our spirits are welcome. What we are all about is not some secular engineering exercise. Even in our most administrative, bean-counting moments, we can’t forget that we are about Unitarian Universalist aliveness here and now, we are about building sacred space, we are about building bridges across troubled waters.

One of the pieces of liturgy we used in worship services several years back expresses this so well:

As we conclude this time of prayers for our lives, let us all join hands.
The hand in yours belongs to a person
whose heart is sometimes tender,
whose skin is sometimes thin,
whose eyes sometimes fill with tears,
whose laughter is a beautiful sound.

The hand you hold belongs to a person seeking wholeness,
and knows that you are doing the same.
Today, tomorrow, and beyond,
let our hearts remain open
let our voices stay strong
and let our hands remain outstretched in love.
Blessed be, ashe, and amen.

More recently, our Embracing Meditation time invites us to

put hands on hearts, feel the warm connection.
Let love in this moment flow.
Say to yourself, silently:
“I will love myself, I will love others,
and that love will heal the world.”

And then we conclude by inviting in the silence, which is an opportunity to bring awareness to that which is larger than ourselves. As participants in this Unitarian Universalist worship, it is up to you, what image you bring to mind, which represents the something larger that inspires you to grow in love and service.

Let silence be our sanctuary, now.
We take in a big breath, and then we exhale.
We gently surrender to something larger than ourselves.
We enter into the wise silence….

Someone once asked me, “Why is the silence wise?” I don’t remember what I said in reply. I could have quoted Albert Einstein, who said, “I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”  

Tell you what. Someone ask me again, and that’s what I’ll say.

The silence is wise.

And our world is so very noisy! Therefore we must never forget that in essence a congregation like this serves to be a countercultural force of revolutionary love. To invite individuals and families into this love so that their aloneness can be replaced by solidarity and community.

Inviting people into revolutionary love, that releases each and all to be fully and deeply alive here and now.

Which is most definitely different than what the following story portrays. After thirty years of watching television, a husband says to his wife, “Let’s do something really exciting tonight!” Instantly, she conjures up visions of a big night on the town. “Great!” she says, “What shall we do?” He says, “Well, I thought we would switch chairs.”

Revolutionary love is not about merely switching chairs.

I think of my personal path over the past twelve years, and OMG it’s not at all been like merely switching chairs.

• My mother died in 2007, just months before I accepted this congregation’s call.
• I was divorced in 2012, after almost 22 years with my ex-wife Laura.
• In 2013, I reverted back to my birth surname of Makar, after 24 years of calling myself Anthony David, which was a way of protesting against the injustices of my birth family.
• I began coaching figure skating in 2015, which was such a beautiful surprise for me.
• I began yoga in 2016, which was yet another beautiful surprise.
• In 2017 I turned 50.
• My daughter Sophia married in 2017.
• In 2018 I took up abstract painting and just yesterday a gallery in New York reached out to me to let me know that they are interested in showing my work.
• Now I am moving to Cleveland and starting a completely new chapter in my life and I am excited and afraid all at once.

It’s just as poet William Blake puts it: “joy and woe woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine.”

But now think of the past twelve years of your life, all your joys, and all your woes.

Think on them.

They are the agitation that jars us out of sleepwalking.

They are the wake up calls that help us remember who we want to be.

Very definitely, they are unsettling enough to give us good reason to seek out a congregation like this one, which can help us grow beyond what we once were, into souls that are wiser and more joyfully resilient and more thoughtful.

What I will say about the past twelve years for myself is that all the agitation has fed my sermons. People have so often said, “What you said in your sermon—it was as if you were reading my mind. You spoke right to me.” But you must know that the real audience of my sermons is me, where I am in my living. I am trying as best as I can to demonstrate one person’s struggle with the truth. Just that.

And I am grateful that through this authenticity, a bridge is built over troubled waters for us all.

But beyond the personal, there is the collective. The collective path of this congregation, over the past twelve years, which also has been full of joy and woe and therefore of transformative experience.

Together, we experienced the election of the very first African American President in American history, and we witnessed his character and his statesmanship, and we rejoiced.

Together, we navigated the Great Recession of 2008.

Together, we have engaged police violence in communities of color, poverty, women’s rights, trans rights, positive masculine identity, marriage equality, Black Lives Matter, womanism, care of the earth, so many other issues.

Together, now, we are grappling with the election of Obama’s successor, whose values and behavior are so at odds with our Unitarian Universalist values. I have called him by name. I have called him “he who must not be named.” I am struggling and will continue to struggle. Maybe you join me in that struggle.

But we’re doing it together. It’s the collective journey we’re on. Becoming a part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation means that you are plugged in to realities and considerations that might be far larger than the ones you deal with at home–realities and considerations that initially you may know little about. But you are challenged to become aware of all that you don’t know you don’t know. Which, despite all your not knowing, still impacts you.

All the way from 1963, while in the Birmingham Jail, Dr. King writes, “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

I first came face-to-face with this inter-related structure of reality when, in seminary, I met for the first time an openly gay man, and through him I realized I can’t be what I ought to be as a straight man until he can be what he ought to be as a gay man. Through him I have come to learn things about myself and about his world and it has changed me forever, he is my brother, my life would not be the same without him.

Unitarian Universalist spaces do that for us. Get us out of the smallness of narrow places and knowings. Get us out of privileged spaces and into spaces of struggle for the human worth and dignity of all.

Dignity of the planet, too. Do you remember UUCA’s Sustainability Initiative from 2008 to 2010? One of the things we did was invite congregants to take “Happiness Pledges.” Some were weekly, and we’d introduce them in worship with the sound of a duck call. Because it got people’s attention, made them laugh, and it was cool.

This was the run-up to the big ask, which was for each person to take a single, year-long Happiness Pledge. One person committed to getting seriously involved with community gardening. Another person committed to riding their bicycle to work on a regular basis, rather than driving. For myself, I committed an entire year to not eating meat of any kind. I committed to pescatarianism. This was revolutionary for me because I came from a family of big meat eaters. For the first time, I really got into vegetables, and I stopped feeling like a victim if dinner happened to be vegetarian. Good for me, good for the planet.

Point is, together we have been finding ways to get larger in our knowings and to engage the inter-related structure of reality!

And so, in 2014, at a time when it was unclear how long it would take marriage equality to come to Georgia, we just up and decided to take a stand as a religious people and affirm its sanctity, no matter what the law of the land happened to say. What is legal is not necessarily what is right. So we held a service at UUCA which invited ministers from local UU congregations and others, to affirm marriage equality.

Then, in 2015, when marriage equality actually became the law of the land, we held another service in which same-sex couples were married. That picture you saw of me blowing bubbles from the pulpit. That’s where that comes from.

So beautiful.

You may remember that, the day marriage equality was declared legal, June 26, 2015, I was downtown there at the steps of the State Capitol, officiating same-sex weddings, and I was representing the faith and commitment of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. No other congregation in all of Atlanta was represented down there. Just this one.

All of Atlanta, through the news media, got to see what our faith stood for that day.

But something else big for us happened in 2015: our Remembering Selma event. 50 years ago from that year, Dr. King had broadcast far and wide his call to clergy of all faiths to join him and thousands of marchers in Selma, to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge for racial justice. Literally hundreds of Unitarian Universalists did, together with concerned lay people. One of those ministers, the Rev. James Reeb, lost his life, and so did one of those lay persons, Viola Liuzzo. They made the ultimate sacrifice, for justice.

We remembered this powerful moment in Civil Rights here at UUCA, by inviting icons of the Civil Rights movement to speak, together with the entire James Reeb family, who lit the chalice in that service. Powerful.

I will never forget.

But actions speak louder, so on May 15, 2016, after months of collective education and reflection, the congregation voted to affirm a resolution calling for UUCA to become intentional about being an antiracist, anti-oppressive, multicultural institution:

WHEREAS, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta (UUCA) has a proud heritage of anti-racism, anti-oppression, and multiculturalism (ARAOMC) work upon which we now build;

WHEREAS, prejudice remains a universal part of the human experience which, combined with power and privilege, harms us in varying ways as individuals and as a community;

WHEREAS, the journey is often confusing and the work often deeply painful, our principles and our theological tradition compel us to stay on the journey and continue the work of ARAOMC;

WHEREAS, with humility we acknowledge that we will err in this work and that none of us will ever be done with this journey; and

WHEREAS, we are determined to continue in this work, confident that by doing so we will deepen spiritually and thrive as a fully engaged, relevant faith community that brings healing to the world.

THEREFORE, recognizing that actions are more powerful than words, UUCA resolves to…

Together, we have been resolving and acting and engaging the inter-related structure of reality, and the work continues….

Someone dare convince me that a community like this isn’t needed in this world.

We need more communities like this, and we need to become more involved in THIS community because THIS community IS a community like this!

Transformative love bringing us into greater aliveness than we ever though possible!

And there is one more instance of this I will mention today. So many things I could say about a ministry that has lasted twelve long years, which we have engaged in partnership, together….

But this one last thing I will mention started with a certain sermon I preached on February 2, 2014, entitled, “What It Means to Move.” Our Unitarian Universalist headquarters in Boston had themselves just moved, from their historic site at 25 Beacon Street to 24 Farnsworth Street, and the sheer seeming impossibility of this ever happening made me wonder out loud in your presence if a similarly seemingly impossible thing might happen for us. After all, the Cliff Valley Way building had long been rendered practically invisible to the larger world by the construction of the I-85 overpass, and it was a tough location to find by those who were not already a part of the club. Other problems included the stadium seating of the sanctuary, which was an accessibility nightmare we simply could not wake up from; also water leakage in the basement level which had been a problem from the very beginning and we could never solve it no matter how much money we threw at it; also the million dollar expense it would take to repair the parking lot (and other items), which would tie us to a building that was beloved but remained very flawed.

I wondered aloud, in your midst, about what it would be like for us to move. I said, “We have to be sure our building is working for us. This place is ‘a cradle for our dreams, a workshop of our common endeavor.’ It is home. We love it and I love it. But remember this: it’s our fifth home, not the first, and it need not be the last. We the people are the congregation, not the building. Mission trumps building. UUA headquarters is moving into the Innovation District. It is time for us here in Atlanta to follow their lead and do the same.”

This was the sermon that riled the most people up, in all my twelve years.

My ministry among you has never been about merely switching chairs.

I hope and pray that you keep this spirit of boldness alive among you.

If you look no higher than the floor, you will never see how well stocked your pantry really is.

Live into your abundance, UUCA.

Be fully and deeply alive. Let the children of your hearts and spirits come out to play.

Be fully and deeply alive here. Build bridges over troubled waters.

Be fully and deeply alive here and now.

When death speaks, it does not speak about itself.
It does not say “Fear me”.
It does not say, “Wonder at me.”
It does not say “Understand me”.
But it says to us:
“Think of life;
Think of the privilege of life;
Think how great a thing life may be made.”

What makes membership in a congregation so very special is that we muster strength in togetherness for listening to a voice that is very hard to listen to. It does not matter how beautiful the voice’s message is about the preciousness of life.

For with the voice comes the necessary loss of illusions we have about the permanence of the things of life that we have grown attached to. The voice calls us to see them as they are—imperfect, fragile, fleeting—and this is so very hard, emotionally, to do.

So we create a space where what is so emotionally hard to do alone can be done together.

Together, we do what the poet Carl Sandburg says:

Gather the stars…
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women.
Gather for keeping years and years.

And then, together, we:

Loosen … hands, let go and say good-bye.
Let the stars and songs go.
Let the faces and years go.
Loosen … hands and say good-bye.

I am so grateful for membership in congregational community, where we are made resilient for the spiritually paradoxical task of gathering and loosening, gathering and loosening. Through membership a person is literally declaring for themselves this: how the community represents their deepest values and highest aspirations which they want to gather to themselves and to all whom they love; how this community supports them in life and they want it to be the place where they are remembered in death; and here are their people, the people they promise to support in their living and to remember when they die, and then to learn how to let go and say goodbye.  

The ultimate expression of this is the memorial service. The gathering of stars and songs and faces. The loosening of hands, letting go and saying goodbye.

The ceremony unfolds, and we Unitarian Universalists call it a “Celebration of Life.” Not just because death is what gives life meaning and urgency, but also because we must celebrate or acknowledge or witness to the Mystery of how any life ultimately defeats nothingness, which it most certainly does. As Unitarian Universalists we will tell different stories about this. Some Unitarian Universalists will speak of reincarnation. Others will speak of there being no afterlife at all. But the one story we can all share in the telling of is how light sent from a star that has long since collapsed continues shining and streaming; and how actions of people who have long since died still reverberate, still influence the world. To paraphrase Rev. Peter Raible:

Foundations have been laid, which we did not build.
Fires have been lit, which we did not light.
Trees have been planted, which we did not plant.
Wells have been dug, which we did not dig.

Any person who has lost a loved one knows that this is true, that death does not end a relationship so much as inaugurate a new beginning for it, a new way of growing through it, a new way of appreciating it.

Death is not an end but a doorway.

And this is the Mystery which Unitarian Universalists celebrate, in the Celebration of Life memorial service.

Lots of storytelling takes place. The focus is not about God or the afterlife or if you’re right with Jesus. There are no altar calls. The only call is to attend to the story of a precious life that has walked through the doorway of death. The only call is to listen, and learn, and

Think of the privilege of life;
Think how great a thing life may be made.

And then, when the service is over and all the punch and finger foods at the reception have been consumed, you go out into the world and lean into the one, precious, wild life that you’ve been given, which, by the grace of God, is still yours.

I’ve officiated at 55 of these services during my twelve years at UUCA, and right now I want to share with you some of the stories that called me to live more vibrantly in my own life.

Maybe you’ll hear something today that will do this for you too.

One story comes from Bill Buckley’s memorial in October 2008. Bill was a detail-oriented, get-stuff-done kind of person. A practitioner of the to-do list–and I personally saw an entire stack of them. On the backs of old envelopes: his careful handwriting, small and precise. Also detailed lists of things to do and schedules to keep. For example:

9am: UUCA to do inserts for the order of service
Noon: Lunch with a friend
1pm: Publix to purchase a cake and some salad fixins
Home afterwards: to wash the laundry and vacuum the floor.  

Stacks and stacks of these to-do lists, schedules to keep, phone call scripts. Also, short sayings which I also found written on the backs of those old envelopes, sayings like  

“Being discouraged is a luxury I cannot afford”

“Go to heaven to get my ‘reward?’ Nonsense. I’m getting my reward here—good friends, good health, and waitresses that spoil me.”

“I take responsibility for my life as it is now”

“Row row row your boat—not somebody else’s boat”

“Happiness is something you plan on”

“We can learn something from everybody”

Then this one, which is classic Bill, where he quotes from the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi: Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace (opportunities are everywhere).Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Following this, he writes, in all capital letters: DO IN CALLIGRAPHY AND SEND AS CHRISTMAS CARDS.

He died working, thinking, giving. But, quiet and steady and behind-the-scenes as he might have been, he had a definite sense of humor, as well as a passion for justice.  

With regard to the humor, here’s something that Bill wrote on one of those envelopes:

“What do you get when you throw a hand grenade into a French kitchen? Linoleum Blownapart.” And this: “Sex is a misdemeanor. The more you miss—the meaner you get.”

That’s the Bill Buckley story, and it led me to wonder, What is the eccentricity about me that makes my life sweet and charming? Am I too Puritan and regimented in my world?

Are there ways I can let it all hang out just a little bit more, to make life more worth living?

Stories about Oreon Mann took me there as well. Remember Oreon? He died September 2018. He will be missed–because he never stopped wearing open-toed sandals even when there was ice and snow on the ground.

He will be missed–because he could be counted on to show up at the annual Inman Park holiday party in his festive Scottish kilt where he would show off his moves on the dance floor and no doubt show off a bit too much skin too.

He will be missed–because he had this habit of going swimming at the public pool, and then, right before he got in the car on the way home, he’d attach his bathing suit to his car antenna and by the time he arrived, his suit would be all dry.

We love people not just because of grand and glorious things, but also for their eccentricities, which make them so endearing.

And there are stories underneath some of the eccentricities which, once you know them, your heart just melts.

The story that comes to mind here is from Lorraine Spaulding, whose memorial was right smack dab in the middle of my candidating week with you all back in April of 2007.

Lorraine loved gardening. Her garden was important to her, and I was told by Karen Lindauer that at times her attention to garden details could lean towards the perfectionistic. One fall day, Karen came over to visit Lorraine at her home, and there was Lorraine, picking up the leaves spread all over her yard, one by one. One by one. Now, what Karen saw was a million leaves to pick up and she wondered to herself, Why bother? Don’t worry about it! But the details were important to Lorraine. That garden was going to be perfect, no matter what!

When Karen shared this with me, we laughed, and then immediately a huge lump began to form in my throat. Tears started to form in my eyes, because by that time, I had learned something else about Lorraine. Lorraine’s birth mother was mentally ill with bipolar disorder, and when Lorraine was just six months old, she had Lorraine placed in a foster home, for the sake of her safety. And while Lorraine’s foster parents loved her and took great care of her, Lorraine grew up feeling a basic insecurity about who she was. Others experienced her as so strong and so caring, but it was only after Lorraine died and her diaries came to light that it was clear how terribly she struggled in her world. Terrible struggles in her youth to feel OK just as she was. Fear was pervasive for her—that if she messed up, her foster parents might send her away.” After all, she saw foster children like her come and go.

So perhaps the perfectionism that Karen saw one day, in the way Lorraine was picking up the leaves in her garden, was an echo, down through the years, of Lorraine feeling like she had to work very, very hard to earn a sense of security in life.

The real question this takes me to is, how compassionate am I with the perfectionism and other survival strategies I bring to my world, which definitely give me an edge of eccentricity but they are also survival strategies, meaning they worked at one time but maybe, now, they are creating unhappiness. Can I create better coping skills? I want that, yes, but I can’t dare hate myself for ways I tried to survive bad times.

And what I about you? Can you acknowledge your survival strategies and balance a desire to evolve more helpful coping mechanisms even as you honor those old survival strategies for how they saved you in bad times?

What’s for sure is that we spiritual beings having a human experience turn our experiences of adversity into a capacity for service. The greatest healers among us have themselves known hurt. The greatest empathizers and listeners among us themselves know first-hand how important it is to be empathized with and listened to. So it is no wonder why Lorraine found herself drawn to counseling as a profession. No wonder she was such a source of stability and strength to so many others.

So Lorraine’s story urges us to listen carefully to what Leonard Cohen sings:

Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack, in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

On to another story, that comes from the life of Joseph Greenberg, who is the Rev. Marti Keller’s father. Joe died April 2008, and from his service we heard a great story about his grandmother and how she dealt with an impossible situation.

Apparently, Joe’s grandmother once told him that he was her absolute favorite grandchild—but completely unknown to him, she went ahead and said the same thing to all the grandchildren. They were all her absolute favorites, but—not knowing this—each grandchild would look upon the other with a secret smile, feeling special, feeling favored above the others. For years, Joe held this feeling close to his heart, and it gave him enormous strength and courage in his life. So you can imagine his surprise when, many years later, in adulthood, Joe’s sister came clean and shared the secret she had successfully kept for years. “NOT SO!” Joe shot back. Joe couldn’t believe it, and wouldn’t believe it, until one of his cousins disclosed that HE was their grandmother’s favorite. This is when his sense of irony kicked in, and he realized—with deep appreciation—how his grandmother beat the system in a way that worked for all. Her offering was by no means perfect. But light got in.

Forget your perfect offering.

Over and over again, the stories of eccentricity and imperfection that did not prevent success but only prepared the way for it, or gave it soulfulness, come back to me, across the years.

How greatness in our living is about being unreactive to and nonanxious about the imperfection. But creating through it, building through it to a better way.

Boyd McKeown was so good at this. His memorial service was in April 2018. Once, this music educator par excellence was on a trip to New Zealand, where he and his partner were touring a middle school. They happened to stop at the music class, where the students were playing xylophones, but Boyd instantly saw that they were holding the mallets all wrong. But instead of pointing it out in front of the class and shaming the teacher, Boyd simply went up to one of the students and said, “Could I try that?” He took her mallets and he started playing, and the teacher realized “Oh! They’ve been holding them incorrectly.” And he played a little bit with the students, and then he walked out the door…” And that’s that.

I want to frame this story and put it on my wall.

This is what astonishingly great leadership looks like, leadership which is not about ego but about the good of all.

And then there is the great leadership of Ed Mangiafico Jr, in the matter of managing his own dying. The imperfection that life put before him was brain cancer.

His service was in March of 2018, and one of the readings he asked to have in his service was Billy Collins’ poem entitled “The Lanyard.” Do you know it? A lanyard is a cord or strap worn around the neck, to carry such items as keys or identification cards. The poem is about the complete cluelessness of the child who makes a lanyard for his mom at summer camp and presents it to her like it is the most precious sacrifice imaginable.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard

[…]

“Here are thousands of meals,” she said,
“and here is clothing and a good education.”
“And here is your lanyard,” I replied.

For me, the real question is, How can someone who is enduring something as grim as brain cancer muster up any appreciation for the wry wit of this poem?  

Or more to the point: How do you live every day, every moment, without allowing the knowledge of your inevitable death to spoil all those preceding moments?

Ed has something to teach all of us about how healing of the spirit can still happen, even in the face of inevitable death.

“The fact is,” he said in 2016, “that getting my head around this illness, so to speak, has opened a window of opportunity for me to embrace honesty in and dedication to our relationship better than at any point over the seven-plus years since we met.” He’s saying that to Barbara, his wife—and then he says something that appears meant for everyone, for you and for me, in his funny, witty way:

“I’d recommend couples’ counseling before jumping off the Brain Tumor Bridge to get this done. But you might consider getting it done before something bites you in the ass.”

First time I read that, I exploded in laughter—and then I sighed. I wish it could be so. I wish that each of us (myself included!) could be more proactive about being more vulnerable, more open, more available to the people we love without adversity as the trigger—and yet, often we aren’t.

Ah. Forget your perfect offering.

We are grateful to Ed for the example of his life, where he teaches us that true wellness is not necessarily an absence of pain or illness. It’s about the presence of larger vision and meaning. Physical suffering is just not the worst thing that can happen to us; the worst thing that can happen is to stop living, to stop trying, to stop loving when there is yet more time available to live and to try and to love!

In wholeness is the meaning of our lives, and illness or aging can be a doorway to it. It challenges us to get clear about the hope and the purpose that will get us up out of bed each morning. Suddenly the Why? question we shake like a fist at God or at the Universe changes, because who can tell why bad things happen? Who can tell with certainty why this person gets cancer and another does not? There are all sorts of theories, but we just don’t know for sure.

We must feel our anger and our grief. We cannot cut ourselves off from that. But when we have felt our anger and our grief enough and we sense that there’s another step we can take, perhaps that step is to ask, not Why? But, What now?

How we respond is up to us. The “what now?”–THAT’S in our control, even if the occurrence of cancer in our bodies (or some other kind of fragility) is not.

Even for the healthiest among us: All of our abilities: only temporary.

How we respond is up to us.

Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack, in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

So ring the bells that still can ring.

**

Ah, and now it is past time to end. So many more stories gathered, so many more stars and songs and faces. But now we must loosen hands, let go and say good-bye.

Goodbye Bill Buckley.
Goodbye Oreon Mann.
Goodbye Lorraine Spaulding.
Goodbye Joe Greenberg.
Goodbye Boyd McKeown.
Goodbye Ed Mangiafico Jr.
Goodbye, to so many others.

Thank you for laying the foundations, which we are building on.
Thank you for lighting the fires, we are warming ourselves by.
Thank you for planting the trees, under whose shade we sit.
Thank you for digging the wells, which we drink from.

And thank you, UUCA, for sustaining this community with your time and energy and money so that there is a community to be a member of, lasting over the years, generating so many blessings which are beautiful legacies to be received.

Hear the voice of death!

It does not say”Fear me”.
It does not say, “Wonder at me.”
It does not say “Understand me”.
But it says to us:
“Think of life;
Think of the privilege of life;
Think how great a thing life may be made.”

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Theological labels: theist, agnostic, atheist—Christian, Buddhist, Jew—on and on. How many of you tend to feel that such labels tend to be confining? That it doesn’t have to be exclusively either/or but it could be both/and? 

That, furthermore, your sense of the spiritual search is free and open-ended, and maybe you strongly identify with one particular label today, but who knows about a year from today?

If this describes you, then welcome to the Unitarian Universalist way! This is our religious style. We don’t want to be pigeonholed in a way that falsifies the richness and the complexity of our personal spiritual identities. 

We want freedom to grow as the Spirit prompts. As experience teaches. As life leads. 

But having said all this, I still want to affirm the usefulness of labels insofar as they can stimulate deeper self-reflection about what it is we do and do not believe. Does agnosticism express who I am better than something else, at this time in my life? Do I find greater personal resonance with the teachings of the Buddha than with Jesus? 

How can these labels and categories help me get a clearer sense of what my heart years for, what my head tells me is reasonable, what my soul says is true? 

Maybe the story my heart, head, and soul tell will be different in the future, but the task of life is not to live in the future but to live deeply right now.  

I’m talking about honest self-understanding about one’s personal credo. It’s what Socrates talked about long ago, how the examined life is the one truly worth living. And this, too, is integral to the Unitarian Universalist way. Deeply knowing who we are. Not being controlled by unconscious attitudes and taken-for-granted assumptions. 

Cultivating theological authenticity. 

Which brings us to my message today. I want to offer up my own personal credo. Why I am a Theistic Humanist. I do this because I have always seen the preaching art as simply this: demonstrating one person’s creative struggle with the truth. If what I offer up is flawed (and every message inevitably is), my only hope is that it will inspire and energize your own creative struggle with truth, in whatever direction is right for you, whether or not that direction aligns with mine. 

As we Unitarian Universalists say like to say: “Free pulpit, free pew.”

I’ll start with the theistic part. I am a theist. I believe in God. Now before I go any further, I need to tell you all the ways in which I am an atheist too. Because, in fact, it all depends upon the version of God you are talking about. There are lots of versions out there that simply do not ring true to my philosophical training and conscience and intuition. 

Take, for example, the God that somehow stands outside of the natural order of the universe, who intervenes supernaturally in ways that favor one person over another or one tribe over another. I’m an atheist relative to this kind of God. I’ll never understand prayer as the act of persuading God to do something God might not do otherwise; I’ll never understand worship as the act of currying special favor withheld from others. 

It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Or take another conception of God. The God that has become locked inside the metaphor of maleness. The God that is male and therefore legitimizes exclusively male leadership in society and in churches. The God that could never be seen from a feminine angle and so the thought of the universe as being birthed organically into existence seems completely ridiculous. The God that must be addressed only as Father. 

I’m an atheist towards this kind of God. 

Or consider yet another understanding of God. God as all-powerful, with unlimited ability to act. Well, tell me how this God can create a boulder that is so heavy that even God can’t lift it? Or create a square circle? 

Or take one of the most serious objections of all time. If this all-powerful God is also an all-good God, then how can God remain passive in the face of all the pain and all the suffering this earth has seen and sees now? How can God remain silent? I’m not talking about the kinds of suffering that lead to soul-making—the kinds that a good parent must allow his or her child to fall into, so that they might learn wisdom first-hand, which is the only way it can be learned. No. I’m talking about excessive, out-of-proportion suffering. The murder of six million Jews. The excruciating death of a single, innocent, beautiful child. Does the suffering of this earth need to be so awfully extreme for us to learn our lessons? Isn’t there a limit? 

When is enough enough? 

I’m an atheist towards the kind of God that has unlimited ability to act, and is all-good, but doesn’t act to save us from kinds of suffering that unmake our souls, crush them, rip them apart.  

All these ideas about God. I don’t believe them. But even so, even so, I still experience within me a longing for the Infinite, a yearning for Ultimacy, a spiritual intuition of a Larger Life—and together, they tell me that there is far more to this universe that meets the eye of the flesh and the eye of common sense intellect. Just as the wings of a bird point to the reality of air and wind (and would be evolutionarily absurd and inexplicable otherwise), so the wings of my heart and soul point to the reality of a Higher Power. They point to a Being that is in and beyond all things and is known by many names around the world: Brahman, Adonai, Allah, Ram, Great Spirit, the Peace that Passes Understanding, the Still Small Voice Within, Love, Goddess, God. From around the world, from all times, there is the testimony of prophets, saints, mystics, wise men and wise women who have seen and know that there is a Reason for why anything at all exists, rather than nothing. 

There is a Being that the spiritual yearning in our hearts points to. 

I read the Hindu saint and mystic, Ramana Maharshi, and he says, “God’s grace is the beginning, the middle, and the end. When you pray for God’s grace, you are like someone standing neck-deep in water and yet crying for water. It is like saying that someone neck-deep in water feels thirsty, or that a fish in water feels thirsty, or that water feels thirsty.”  

I read the Unitarian saint and mystic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he says, “When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.”

This is my credo. I affirm the label of “theist” because it is the way I have to travel to understand and articulate my deepest knowing. It is awareness that God is ever present and the only question I ever need to ask myself is, “But where am I?” It is responsibility to cease from tradition and from rhetoric whenever it obscures the God who can fire the heart with God’s presence. 

God helps me to understand who I am, here and now, on this earth. 

So what idea of God do I prefer? It comes from a contemporary theological tradition known as process theology. In snapshot, soundbite form, here it is. 

Wriggle your fingers for me. As you do that, you have demonstrated the reality of the consciousness within you that is over and above your body. You and I feel our bodies and think about them; we hope things for them and envision goals and futures; and it’s the same thing with God. 

God has a conscious side, and this complements God’s physical side. God is the physical body of the universe, the substance and the process. Process theology tells me that it is all sacred: galaxies and stars, trees and animals. You are I are cells in God’s body. 

The world is in God, and God is more than the world, just like we human beings show up in physical forms, but then our minds transcend the physical and have hopes and dreams and plans for our bodies. 

This is the snapshot version of process theology that I first encountered at seminary in Chicago when I discovered the work of a fellow Unitarian Universalist called Charles Hartshorne, who happens to be one of the most distinguished American scholars of the 20^th century.

And there are tremendous implications that his theory has for how we understand what it means to be a spiritual being having a human experience. 

One of these implications is that God simply cannot force the universe to do whatever God wants. Accidents happen. Evil happens. God’s power is not unlimited. The universe has creative independence and freedom, just like your own body when it ages, or gets sick. Your mind doesn’t want your body to develop liver spots (perhaps); your mind doesn’t want your body to get sick, but it does anyhow, and we must learn how to deal with that. You can’t supernaturally will your liver spots away, or stay 22 years old forever. Similarly, God simply can’t barge into the world and supernaturally violate the laws of physics and biology and stop this and start that. 

What God can do, however, is influence the world from the inside, just like, for example, how cancer patients might participate in their own healing. Cancer patients visualize their immune system as strong, as powerful, as potent, and the immune system responds. Similarly, God visualizes blessing and healing for this world, and if we (the cells in God’s body) are open to it, we can respond and receive. 

Nothing supernatural here at all. 

God influences the world from the inside, showers continual blessing up on us, impartially, universally, and does it without us having to ask. But the world has creative independence too, and so the blessing might not be received, we might not practice spiritual disciplines like forgiveness or meditation that cleanse the doors of our perception and open us up. God is right here, right now, but where are we?  

This is simply the reality and risk of freedom.  

Process theology takes freedom seriously. 

And now I must stop here. There’s so much more that could be said! The process theology vision of God works in this age of science, and its ideas are far from the tradition and rhetoric that Emerson spoke of, which stifle passion.

But now it’s time to explore the rest of my credo. I am not just a theist, but a theistic humanist! 

But what is humanism? As with theism, there are all sorts of varieties of humanism. Often the word “humanism” is coupled with atheism or agnosticism, but not for me. 

For me, humanism completes my theism and gives it direction. It gives it hands and feet.  

Here’s what I mean. Start with the humanist emphasis on religion making a difference here and now, in this world. It’s the insight that runs like a golden thread through the central mission of all healthy and growing Unitarian Universalist congregations: to change lives. It’s the gold test for the validity of any spiritual idea or practice: how is it helping me be a better person? How is it strengthening me and motivating me to challenge evil and injustice in this world? 

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Every world religion says this, all the great saints and sages. But because I grew up in North America, in a land where Christianity looms large, I learned this first from reading stories about Jesus. That great humanist. Once a man came to him and said, “Master, what must I do to be saved,” and Jesus said, “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The emphasis was always compassion over legalism. 

Always. 

This is one way in which my humanism gives my theism direction. Express your love for God through acts of love towards people. If you are hateful towards people, how can that be authentic spirituality?   

But then my humanism says to me, Pay attention. It says, Be careful. It says all this because even though religious ideals and commitments have inspired some of the best examples of human behavior, they have also inspired some of the worst. At times it has made people into saints, at other times it has made people into beasts. 

We see it in the news every day. 

The humanist theme here is that of the dangers of ignorance and superstition, which of course afflict humanity in all its affairs, not just religion. Yet religion is one of the most powerful and persuasive forces on earth. On earth, it can create heaven, or unleash hell. And religion is not going away. It is here to stay. 

So this is another way in which my humanism gives my theism direction. It makes me suspicious of any kind of religious community that denies me elbow-room for doubt or skepticism. It turns me into a critic of any system of God-belief that serves false idols like absolutism, or blind obedience, or end-time prophecies, or Holy War. It sends me into this world wanting to show people a better way of thinking and talking about God, or of reading the Bible, that is not based on authoritarianism, or fear. It inspires me to do what I can to maintain the separation between religion and state, or between religion and tribal forces—for when social and political forces take over religion, only bad things can happen. 

We see it in the news every day. 

My humanism says to my theism, Take responsibility. Show a better way of theism that dissolves ignorance with insight and superstition with truth. Show a way into more Freedom, more Reason, more Tolerance. Yes, religion has inspired some of the worst examples of humanity, but it has also inspired some of the best. 

So let’s have some more of the best, and less of the worst. 

These are some ways in which humanism gives my theism hands and feet. Completes it. And there is one way more. I’m talking about the reverence that is at the heart of humanism. 

Philosopher Paul Woodruff describes reverence as essentially a capacity to appreciate and be in awe of things higher than oneself. Which means that it is also a capacity for feeling shame, when arrogance and pride have caused us to imagine that we ourselves are God and that the world must dance to our tune. We cry out, “Why did this bad thing happen to me!” but that reflects a serious sense of entitlement, and it is also a waste of time. It is a distraction from the better question which is, “What now?” 

If reverence calls us out of equating our personal egos with God, it also calls us into humane relationship with the living earth surrounding us and all its creatures. To the degree that any creature is conscious, and capable of determining its own living purposes and ends, we must step back from treating it like a mere tool, to satisfy our own wishes and wants. We must not enslave. We must not hijack. 

As much as we are in awe of the starry universe, we must be in awe of each other, and the fellow creatures that share our planet. 

What humanism says to my theism is this. It says, Anthony, if your theism can’t help develop your potentials to live deeply and fully into the one wild, precious life you have been given—if it leads you to violate the wild and precious lives of others—then throw it away. 

Theistic humanist that I am, I say to you today, whatever your chosen labels happen to be, words from that wonderful poem by Max Ehrmann, called Desiderata: 

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive God to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. 

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.

AMEN

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It’s been another grueling week in our country, which culminated yesterday in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as the Supreme Court’s 114th justice despite serious concerns about his honesty, temperament, and treatment of women.

Another grueling week, which saw thousands of protestors in Washington and millions around the country, protesting the fact that their bodies and stories are not being respected, not being believed.

Grueling, in that we also saw the story spun in a way that was calculated to enrage the conservatives of our country. That story being one of a politics of personal destruction that ended up ruining a good man’s name.

Our country is full of collisions. Has been full and is even fuller than before.

So how dare I even touch my topic for this morning, which is gratitude?

When the problems feel so big, what’s there to be grateful for?

Doesn’t gratitude at a time like this even smack of self-indulgence?

Well, I want to invite your attention to something that happened at the U.S. Capitol last Friday morning, after Senator Jeff Flake announced his support for Kavanaugh. Senator Flake was in an elevator, about to ride away, when two sexual assault survivors confronted him on video. They blocked the elevator doors. They had their say. Their names are Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher.

Here’s part of what they said:

(Ana Maria Archila): On Monday, I stood in front of your office [inaudible]. I told the story of my sexual assault. I told it because I recognized in Dr. Ford’s story that she is telling the truth. What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit on the Supreme Court. This is not tolerable. You have children in your family. Think about them. I have two children.

I cannot imagine that for the next 50 years they will have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been accused of violating a young girl. What are you doing, sir?

(Maria Gallagher): I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me. I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them you are going to ignore them. That’s what happened to me, and that’s what you are telling all women in America, that they don’t matter. They should just keep it to themselves because if they have told the truth, you’re just going to help that man to power anyway.

That’s what you’re telling all of these women. That’s what you’re telling me right now. Look at me when I’m talking to you. You are telling me that my assault doesn’t matter, that what happened to me doesn’t, and that you’re going to let people who do these things into power. That’s what you’re telling me when you vote for him. Don’t look away from me.

Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me, that you will let people like that go into the highest court of the land and tell everyone what they can do to their bodies.

That’s part of what they said. It would be for them one of the first times they had ever publicly shared their sexual assault story. They did that out of gratitude to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s courage in doing the same.

And we know what happened later. Senator Flake surprised everyone by calling for a week-long independent FBI investigation of the charges against Kavanaugh. I know that there are serious questions about this investigation and its effectiveness. But it was something, and he was moved to change his mind by these two brave women.

And I am grateful, grateful to them, for saying, repeatedly, Do not look away.

Are you grateful to them too?

Now hold on to that feeling of gratitude. Breathe into that gratitude, deepen into it.

What is the energy of gratitude? What work does it do on our lives?

For one thing, it creates hope.

Someone has said that even the smallest boat can ride rough waters if none of that water gets inside.

Gratitude is what bails the water and keeps the inside of the boat dry. Gratitude is what makes for buoyancy.

In a time when the waters of our nation are incredibly rough, hearing what those women did makes me feel like our little boat isn’t going to sink, that hope is not lost, that maybe we lost this fight but that doesn’t tell the story about who will win the war, and who will lose.

Gratitude is powerful.

It’s also powerful because it reminds us, second of all, that the work of justice is not on our shoulders alone.

Remember the words of the Rev. Ralph Helverson that we heard earlier? “We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining, or self-derived.”

Gratitude towards those two powerful woman means that we honestly acknowledge that we can’t do this work alone. We can’t be everywhere all at once. We have to count upon others. We have to trust others. Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher were in the right place at the right time, and they said words that needed to be said, and we can trust that there will be others who will do the same.

Did you, by the way, notice how the two women did what they did out of gratitude to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony?

Which suggests yet a third way that gratitude is powerful. It inspires generosity. They were moved to give their gift of witness, because she did.

When we are helped, and feel thankful for it, we effortlessly offer our help to others.

There are scientific studies that actually demonstrate this. In her amazing book Active Hope, Joanna Macy shares the some of the research of American psychologist Alice Isen. It’s from back in the 1970’s, so her experimental set-up includes a form of technology that is going to sound strange to some of you: pay phones that you put coins in, to use.

In this experiment, “coins were left in public phone booths so that the next person using them would get a free call. When the person had finished and was leaving the phone booth, one of the experimenters appeared to accidentally drop a file of papers just in front of the subject. The process was repeated near phone booths that hadn’t been primed with coins. People who received the unexpected lucky gift of a free phone call were much more likely to help the experimenter pick up her papers.” Joanna Macy concludes: “This experiment, and a host of others like it, suggests that our willingness to act on behalf of others isn’t just attributable to some people being good-natured and others less so. Our readiness to help others is influenced by the level of gratitude we experience.”

By now, has your mind changed if you thought that feeling gratitude in a time like this is self-indulgent?

A little bit of gratitude goes a long way, and that way is beyond our isolated egos and towards connection with something larger than ourselves. Love persists, despite all, when we hold on to a hope beyond ourselves, when we trust others, and when we are generous.

There is a reason why gratitude is at the center of the spiritual life. It’s not something that comes after everything else, as an afterthought. It comes first, and from it, all good things flow.

So now we turn to the question of how to practice gratitude.

It’s the question that looms large in the story for all ages we heard earlier, “The Happy Man’s Shirt.” This old Italian folktale introduces us to a King and a Queen of a prosperous kingdom, and it so happens that the King finds himself irritable and angry all the time. The Queen is relentless in her investigation as to why. Is he physically sick? No, say all the doctors, from near and far away, and then one doctor raises his voice and pronounces the King a victim of “melancholia”: a sickness of the heart and spirit.

And THEN this doctor prescribes the cure: find the shirt of a truly happy person. Take it from him, put it on the King, problem solved.

Hearing this, the King says, “Oh, that’s easy!”

But is it? As easy as retail therapy—and we know how quickly the good feelings from retail therapy vanish away. It’s not going to be effective in healing the King’s melancholia, or anyone else’s for that matter.

The story drives the point home as it ends with the discovery of a truly happy person, whom we hear say, “I am grateful for everything I have, and I don’t desire what I cannot have.”

This man wears no shirt at all.

The King, and everyone, must learn how to generate happiness—gratitude—from within.

The key is learning to extend appreciative attention out into the world. To do this regularly and reliably.

A poem by Mary Oliver, entitled “The Summer Day,” is a beautiful illustration of this:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

That’s the poem. Gratitude is like an electricity that builds and builds the more one attends to what is actually happening around oneself, and leaving nothing out. Mary Oliver is 83 now—she is still alive—and she lives in an America where Kavanaugh has been confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, and that still hurts, but that is not going to stop her from attending to the miracle of a grasshopper on her hand, eating sugar, moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes…

It’s a bit like the proverbial fish learning how to become more aware of the water that surrounds it, which proverbial fish are supposed to take for granted. It’s reversing that. It’s looking again at your old world with new eyes, and paying attention.

It doesn’t have to take the form of poetry. It doesn’t have to be about grasshoppers in nature. One beautiful gratitude-raising activity can happen, for example, around the dinner table. Each person seated around the table is invited to share one thing for which they are grateful. It can be for that day, for the last week, or just in general. Sometimes folks can go around the table a second time, and they can play off of or build on what the others have shared.

This is a great gratitude-raising practice, and if you do it, you’ll feel the positive electricity lift your spirit and give it buoyancy and give it a sense of connection to something larger.

Or try this: learn about more of the story. Learning about the two women confronting Jeff Flake in the elevator added, for me, a precious positive detail to the whole sad story about Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, and we need to hear those details.

But one’s quest to learn more can be about anything. For example, take the case of your skin. Religious scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz writes about this, saying, “It has been found that the skin and brain develop from the same primary tissue layer in the fetus–the primary ectoderm. As this layer unfolds, it begins to contact the larger universe through the skin in the effort to organize our entire nervous system. … That is, the organization of our neural pathways seems to proceed from outside-in rather than inside-out. This means that our touching, feeling, sensing and making sound as infants is, in large part, an attempt to organize our nervous systems through a contact with “out-thereness.” This model also accounts for the common, but previously unexplained, phenomena of infants “wasting away” due to touch starvation. So-called “sensory malnutrition” prevents the nervous system from properly organizing itself by [cutting off] contact with the rest of the universe.”

Now just listen to that. A direct brain-skin connection. Who knew? The revelation makes me look at my skin with different eyes now, grateful eyes. From now on, when there is an infant among us in this space, and they are wriggling about and making noise and perhaps being a distraction, we may just need to pause and witness a holy thing unfolding: a child attempting to organize its nervous system from the outside-in, on the basis of what they are feeling on their skin….

As with skin, so with everything: everything has hidden depths which are ready to amaze, if we are willing to take a closer look.

Every story we hear has more to the telling, if we are willing to lean in.

And the resulting astonishment and awe that well up within us is like a pressure that moves us to ask, with Mary Oliver

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Despite all the problems in this world, so many gifts from so many directions are coming to us, to sustain us, to bring us to this very moment here and now. If we are paying attention, with gratitude on our hearts, we must ask of ourselves, “Alright, what will my gift back to the world be?”

In the face of injustice, who must I confront, to whom must I say, “Do not look away”?

In the face of beauty, how must I pay attention, and praise?

In the face of what I just think I know, how will I look deeper, and come away amazed?

Never forget, the life you have been given—it is wild, and it is precious.

What will your gift back to the world be?

This has been a tough week. Every week since November two years ago has seemed tough, every week has seen some knock against our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Values, but this week was something else.

I get Washington Post notifications on my smart phone. They pop up and say things. Friday morning I woke up to this notification: “In the fight over Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, the only consensus is the that Senate—and the nation—have hit a new low.”

That is truly what we saw this past Thursday, in the events unfolding in Washington before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford described her allegation of being sexually assaulted by Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

For so many women around the country, it was an excruciatingly painful ordeal. For every survivor who goes public with their story, there are hundreds of others who never will. Yesterday, Dr. Ford’s brave voice was the voice of millions. Millions of survivors are remembering their own traumas and how their lives were changed in an instant by sexual violence.

On Thursday, Acting Associate Minister Taryn Strauss created a vigil space, here in the Treehouse, for folks who needed to step out of isolation and be known and loved. Taryn tells me that two women came to the vigil yesterday who had never come to UUCA before and their rape stories came pouring out of them the second they saw her.

I know that we are a country of due justice, where it’s not fair to be pronounced guilty without due process. The FBI investigation that is underway will help, hopefully, with that. But my main point here is that we cannot allow male discomfort to distract us from the real focus right now, which is how women continue to be treated as second-class citizens by other men and, yes, by some women too.

Imagine what America would do to a female judge who yelled and cried her way through Senate testimony.

That’s the other side of things. How Kavanaugh responded to the allegation, with anger and tears and absolute denial and also conspiracy theory accusations against the Democrats for setting up a so-called “search and destroy mission” via Dr. Ford’s accusations.

What we did not see was thoughtfulness, which is what we want from a Supreme Court judge. Any thoughtful person can put two and two together. It is well known that Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker, and that he bragged about sexual conquests in his yearbook, and that boys of his generation tended to see sexual assaults as mere horseplay. Put two and two together, and it seems reasonable that he did in fact do what Dr. Ford says he did, but he just doesn’t remember. Because he was stone drunk at the time. Because it was just horseplay, just fun that bros have together.

Some kind of fun, right, that ends up being, as Dr. Ford said, “Indelible in the hippocampus.” “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter and their having fun at my own expense.”

Agh. We could go on and on.

But the Washington Post wasn’t done with me yet.

As I was devouring news about the Supreme Court hearings, another notification popped up on my smart phone, and it read: “The Trump Administration sees a 7-degree-Fahrenheit rise on global temperatures by 2100.”

Let me ask you, do you know what this means, if true?

Scientists say that if global temperatures rise just FIVE more degrees Fahrenheit, what we will have, in effect, is a totally different planet, with extinction consequences comparable to what happened 65 million years ago when a giant asteroid collided with the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.

If that’s just FIVE degrees, then what will SEVEN degrees do?

But the Trump administration projection also means this: they are assuming that the planet’s fate is already sealed. That investments in carbon neutral sources of energy are not worth our time and energy. That the business as usual way which devours our planet and despoils it is the way we should continue going.

Ugh. Once again, we could go on and on.

But right now I want to stop and simply ask you a fill-in-the-blank question: “When I consider the state of the world today, I feel…. That’s where you fill in the blank, with a feeling word.

Is it “overwhelmed”?
Is it “discouraged”?
Is it “scared”?
Is it “enraged”?

The Washington Post notifications—the New York Times notifications—the whatever-news-sources-you-read-and-trust notifications: they just keep coming, endlessly.

Scholar and spiritual activist Joanna Macy hits the nail on the head when she says that feelings of uncertainty and despair are the “pivotal psychological reality of our time.” All of us in this room are alarmed about the future we are headed into.

And then she says that, as a result, ‘We often hear comments such as ‘Don’t go there, it is too depressing’ and ‘Don’t dwell on the negative.’ “The problem with this approach,” she continues, “is that it closes down our conversations and our thinking. How can we even begin to tackle the mess we’re in if we consider it too depressing to think about? Yet when we do face the mess, when we do let in the dreadful news of multiple tragedies unfolding in our world, it can feel overwhelming. We may wonder whether we can do anything about it anyway.”

This is the pivotal psychological reality of our time.

And there has got to be a better way through.

And that is what our new worship series is all about. The Active Hope way. A better way through the mess we’re in.

It begins with clarity about that little thing with feathers, as poet Emily Dickinson once described it: hope.

Hope can be passive, in the sense that our preferred outcome is likely to happen, we know that up front, and so we are hopeful, and so we act accordingly.

But then there is another kind of hope, one that is more about our desire for what we want the world to be like, and our acting upon that desire without any up-front guarantees.

Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to guarantee the result, and only then do we act.

But active hope is that feeling deep within you that you are alive, and that in this particular time and place, the only thing you need to concern yourself with is what you do next. Refusing to prejudge. Not needing to know the effects of your actions up front. Not needing optimism. Just get out there. Just keep showing up and showing up and showing up no matter what.

It is a practice, this active sort of hope. What is beautiful about Joanna Macy’s work is that she shows us what the parts of the practice are.

And each sermon in this series is going to articulate them.

Starting with, as she puts it, “following the thread of adventure.”

It’s really a way of reframing what’s going on, in the largest sense. Tuning your imagination so you can comprehend the big picture of what’s happening and thus see the details with greater meaningfulness.

I tried to do some of this this past Wednesday, when I was at the State Capitol at a press conference, speaking on behalf of an environmentalist initiative called Stand4Forests, which is supported by over 250 national organizations, elected officials, and thought leaders from across the country. The essential message is that standing forests are crucial, not only to mitigating the impact of natural disasters, but to reducing the CO2 burden in the atmosphere, protecting diverse habitats, and providing clean water and air.

And what I said, before I got specifically to the part about standing forests, addressed the big picture meaning of the huge crisis that climate change represents for us.

I said that we don’t have to be afraid of crisis. The human species was born out of crisis. We know crisis. Some people, when there’s not enough crisis in their lives, create some just to keep life from getting boring.

There is a reason why every culture on this planet—all places, all times—tells some version of the hero’s journey, which begins in circumstances that are ordinary; and then crisis hits, which is at the same time the call to adventure; and the hero goes, and they encounter dangers and strange things and meet new friends and fight all sorts of monsters; and then they find what they were seeking, a knowledge, a treasure, a changed state of being; and then they return home and nothing is ever the same again.

Crisis is in our bones, and our mythology, which arises out of our deepest instincts, proves it.

Odysseus and his Odyssey
Demeter in search of her daughter Persephone
Arjuna in the chariot with Krishna
Buddha under the bo tree
Jesus Christ

Frodo on his way to Mordor, ring of power in hand
Celie in The Color Purple, and all she endures
Luke Skywalker against The Empire, and Darth Vader
Harry Potter, Hermoine Granger, and Ron Weasley in the fight against Voldemort
Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games

Yesterday and today and forever we will be telling stories like this because we love them, we thrill to them, they feel realer than real to us, and that is because we are no stranger to crisis.

We don’t have to be afraid. We can step towards crisis, rather than away.

We are stronger and braver than we know.

That’s what I said, there at Wednesday’s press conference, speaking for the trees, and what I was doing was following the thread of adventure. “If you ever feel,” says Joanna Macy, “that the odds are stacked against you and doubt whether you’re up to the challenge, then you join a time-honored tradition of protagonists in this genre. Heroes almost always start out seeming distinctly underpowered.”

But what makes the story, she goes on to say, “is the way the central characters are not put off. Instead, their tale sets them on a quest in search of the allies, tools, and wisdom needed to improve their chances. We can think of ourselves as on a similar journey…”

It is the journey of active hope.

But, now, what are some of the ways we can improve our chances?

For answers, I found myself looking into something that might seem entirely unrelated: video games.

Stay with me here.

What is undeniable is that people love video games. The Entertainment Software Association, an industry coalition, reports that forty-two percent of Americans play video games for at least three hours every week. Three-quarters of players are adults, and forty-four percent are female.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer who argues that we can learn strategies from video games to help us in our real-world lives, says that the amount of time people around the world have collectively put into World of Warcraft (a very popular online gaming platform) is 5.93 million years, which is roughly the time since our ancestors first stood erect.

And then she says: Imagine if that level of engagement had been turned to real-world problems….

Which is what her book SuperBetter is all about. In the introduction, she shares a personal story of her horrendous case of post-concussion syndrome after hitting her head in 2009. She suffered through near-constant vertigo, headaches, and nausea. She had trouble speaking and remembering names. She was depressed. But determined to recover, she had an aha! moment and tapped into what she knew best—video game design. She renamed herself “Jane the Concussion Slayer,” and she went looking for allies in family and friends, and she also sought out power-ups (or quick actions that make a person feel better and more energized). In short, she tapped into the ancient, archetypal hero myth but gave it up-to-date video design elements. She said, “I felt like I was finally doing something to get better, not just lying around and waiting for my brain to hurry up and heal itself.”

She was practicing active hope, video-game style!

And as we live out active hope journeys together—

… as we witness all the ways that women are treated as second-class citizens—

…as we witness all the ways that people in power are throwing in the towel in the face of climate change—

…as we witness everything that creates anxiety about what our future will be like, and brings us deeply into the pivotal psychological reality of our time—

I want to ask: what will your secret hero identity be? Secret identities, says Jane McGonigal, can remind you daily of the personal strengths you bring to a challenge, or the ones you’re not so good at but you hope to get better at them.

Want to know my secret identity? DO NOT TELL ANYONE

It’s Tortoise Man. I am–I want to be–Tortoise Man. Crisis is happening all over, but I’ve got thick skin, and it all just bounces off. My shell is magical, meaning that it can expand to become as large as I want, and I can carry forward the people and the issues that need carrying, no matter how big. I am above all relentless. I may be slow,  but I know where I need to go, and just like the song Woyaya, I believe we will get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will.

What’s your secret hero identity, that will express your active hope?

And then there’s this: power ups. Pac-Man had power pellets, Mario in Donkey Kong had a hammer, and and Link in the Legend of Zelda had fairies. As for what we have in the real world, to stimulate a mood boost, power ups could include: talking with a friend, or playing with your pet, or exercising, or taking a walk, or sending someone a gratitude note, or watching a funny animal video on Youtube.

Yes, even that. Washington Post notifications need to be balanced by funny cat videos on YouTube.

Lots to say about Jane McGonical’s work, but to close, I want to take us back to our video clip from earlier, from one of my all-time favorite adventure movies, “The Princess Bride.” The Peter Falk character is the grandfather who comes to visit his grandson, who is sick and just happens to be playing video games to pass the time. Grandfather brings a book with him, and grandson asks, “Does it have any sports in it?” And grandfather says, “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders… Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”

If God exists, and God is anything, God brings life to us in all manner of varied forms just like this, and in the list we need to include climate change, and we need to include mysogyny and sexual abuse, and we need to include everything else, but let us not forget the parts about goodness, and bravery, and truth, and passion, and miracles.

Let us not forget the part about active hope, and how each of us has a secret hero identity to bring to the challenges of life, and maybe all the terrible problems get solved, maybe not, but no one will ever say of us that we stepped back, that we ran away.

No.

They will say of us:

We showed up.
We showed up.
We showed up.

In the 19th century, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had a personal revelation about what it means to be human in community.

The image that came up for him was that people are porcupines, covered by the quills of their “prickly and disagreeable qualities”—that’s his phrase.

But people as porcupines are living in a cold world, and to stay alive, they must seek warmth, and so they seek it by coming close together, and in this closeness genuine warmth is created, and for a time all is well.

But the inevitable happens. The “prickly and disagreeable” qualities come out. People as porcupines prick each other, and it hurts, and so people as porcupines back away, get out of there. But then the people as porcupines start getting cold again, and what else is there to do but come back together again?

And back and forth and back and forth, and so on, and so on, and so on.  

Arthur Schopenhauer has gone down in the history books as one of the most pessimistic philosophers ever.

Nevertheless, it’s hard not to acknowledge his point.

We all do have prickly and disagreeable qualities. Sometimes we are unkind. Sometimes we are thoughtless. Sometimes we smell.

Doesn’t matter if we didn’t mean it or mean to. The consequences add up to one thing: prickly and disagreeable.

Sometimes someone can say the nicest thing but we are so deep in negative sentiment override that we interpret their genuine kindness as a poke.

That’s us being prickly and disagreeable, but we make it about the other person.

It’s hard to not acknowledge Schopenhauer’s point.  

But let’s not forget about the part about the world being cold. He’s on point there too. For example, today’s Environmental Protection Agency is firmly in the pocket of business and is steadily undoing all the gains of the past decade and is doing the exact opposite of protecting the environment.

That feels very cold to me.

Or consider the headline news about Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation has been put on hold because Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has come forward to say that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. What’s feeling very cold to me are all the voices insisting that the confirmation process needs to run full steam ahead anyhow, without a full investigation; or that Kavanaugh is a good guy and couldn’t possibly have done it; or that it’s just a matter of boys being boys; or it doesn’t matter anymore; or what’s wrong with the accuser and why didn’t she report it long ago? Meanwhile what we know is that many women are reluctant to come forward and report sexual assaults to authorities exactly because of what is unfolding right before our eyes, in the context of headline news.

As a people of faith, who affirm Seven Principles, we see our Principles trampled upon continually.

The world can feel so cold.

How, then, can we not turn to each other, as a people possessing common values, to huddle against the cold and to generate the sort of warmth that gives life and inspires growth?

This is the full porcupine dilemma.

Sure, you can guarantee not getting pricked if you avoid getting close enough to anyone. But this intimacy-free, pain-free state of so-called perfection is also sterile, and it stifles. You don’t learn. You don’t grow. Learning and growth happens only when we dare to be intimate with others, which means daring to be vulnerable, which means daring to be hurt.

True community is not easy.

How do we do it?

The short answer is that we need to be strong. We need to be strong in order for community to be true.

And that’s on us as individuals.

But what does that mean, to be strong?

Strong, in part, means being able to define personal boundaries and to pay attention to signs of discomfort when your limits are being violated.

Different people will define their boundaries differently. Personality and cultural background play major roles here. One person might feel that bluntly challenging another person’s opinion is a healthy way of communication, but to another person, this might feel disrespectful.

The need is to own the fact that we each have a different design when it comes to personal boundaries, and to know what that design is so we can teach others how we want to be treated. So we can articulate our discomfort if we’re feeling it.

If we do that, and the porcupines around us hear us and respect us, then we know we’ve found our right prickle (that’s what a group of porcupines is called, by the way). But if they don’t care—if they keep on poking and poking—then self-respect means we need to find a different prickle.

I really want to underscore this. When “prickly and disagreeable” qualities are not just annoying but truly abusive and making you feel unsafe, draw the line. Say your truth. If the particular prickle of porcupines you are in doesn’t respond, doesn’t care, you are not obligated to put yourself back into the line of fire. Love and take care of yourself.

Find a different prickle.

The porcupine dilemma is one thing; your physical and psychological safety and wellbeing is something else entirely.

Be strong in your self-respect.

Strong also means this. Feeling the pain of being pricked, and telling yourself a different kind of story about what’s happening.

You see, when we’re all huddling together, and porcupine number one pricks porcupine number two, porcupine number two instantly generates a story in his head about what just happened, and why porcupine number one did what they did, and what it all means. The effect of this story on porcupine number two is instantaneous and takes the form of feelings. Depending on the story, the feelings could be mere annoyance, or they could be shock, outrage, desire for revenge.

These instantaneous stories we tell ourselves, in the infinitesimal gap between something happening and how we feel about it, are so powerful.

I suggested all this in a sermon several months back, while talking about male psychology and how the “look of love” is one of the most potent forces in it. Men crave to be seen like this by their intimate partner. To be seen like this is to look into a mirror that reflects back an image of a man who is sexy, smart, competent, important, wanted. Men give so much power to this look, that when it does go away, when something is said or done that could be interpreted as criticism, it feels like you’ve been stabbed through the heart.

Thus the need to be strong and aware of the stories we’re telling ourselves. If we find ourselves pricked, so often the instantly, unconsciously generated story is “She said the thing she said because she wanted to make me feel bad!” “He did the thing he did because he wanted to hurt me!”

Tell a story like that, and of course, you’re going to feel stabbed in the heart.

But what if we were able to disrupt the instant, unconscious storytelling that we do—what if we were able to press pause and create a space for consciousness—what if we were able to tell a different story that is way more reasonable: as in, “We’re in this thing together. She or he is in a foul mood and has been under a lot of stress lately. It won’t be like that forever. It’s just temporary. She’ll bounce back. He’ll bounce back. We’re partners. We’re in this thing together.”

Humans as porcupines who are capable of this degree of consciousness and are capable of telling this second kind of story are capable of making the porcupine dilemma manageable. Yes, we all have our prickly, disagreeable qualities BUT let’s not forget that we are comrades in a world full of challenges, with complex lives of our own, worries and fears and flaws of our own, and sometimes because of that we poke others, but not because we’re intentionally taking aim and wanting another to bleed.

We are comrades in a challenging world.

Holding to that story no matter what is strength.

And, finally, is the strength that Schopenhauer himself saw as a way of making the porcupine dilemma more liveable. Elizabeth Gilbert in the video from earlier alluded to it: the challenge of creating one’s own heat. Having enough heat self-created, so that you don’t have to get so very close to the other porcupines. You never stop needing the collective heat that the group of porcupines generates—that is for sure—but the need is not so desperate anymore. You don’t have to go all co-dependent to get love.

I want to call the self-creation of one’s own heat “self-compassion.” Self-compassion is learning how to soothe difficult feelings without relying on anything that’s destructive, like alcohol, or shopaholism, or workaholism, or other kinds of addictions that distract you, that take away the pain, yes, but in a hypothermia, freezing-yourself-to-death sort of way.

Consider some forms of self-compassion, which come from life coach Cheryl Richardson:

• You give yourself a nap or put yourself to bed before you feel overtired.
• You take a “time out” when you feel frustrated, angry, or impatient so you can settle down and think clearly.
• You speak gently to yourself when you’ve made a mistake.
• You reassure yourself that everything will be okay when you get scared or when you feel lonely.
• You remind yourself to be kind, not only to others, but also more importantly, to yourself.

Here’s how you create your own heat. Ways like this.

Somehow, many of us got the idea that self-criticism is an effective motivator. The source was, you better believe it, BAD mothering and BAD fathering. Porcupines that poked us and poked us and poked us until we learned to feel uncomfortable and strange if someone wasn’t constantly poking at us.

So we came to believe that harshness towards ourselves gets the job done.

So we learned to be avid pokers of ourselves.

But do we really want this?

Losing faith in yourself. YAY!

Maybe you do accomplish great things, but you feel completely miserable. HOORAY!

People say nice things to you, but you can’t take any of that inside you, but then you feel empty and unappreciated and unseen. WOO HOO!

This will make a person so cold that they have no choice but to cling so tightly to the other porcupines that the experience can hardly be endured, and the result is terrible cynicism and bitterness and worse.

Self-compassion is the better way.

On a regular basis, send yourself outside in the fresh air to walk and just to enjoy. Give yourself regular treats like an afternoon movie or a game with friends. Pay attention to what inspires your enthusiasm and generates vitality, and do more of that.

Schopenhauer offered the world a revelation about what it means to be in human community, and years later, Robert Frost would write a poem he actually entitled “Revelation.” Here’s what he says:  

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

‘Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

That’s the poem. And oh, we know why “we make ourselves a place apart” and why we hide.

We know why the heart feels so agitated when we do hide.

But then Robert Frost says that we need to “speak the literal to inspire / The understanding of a friend./“ We who are hidden need to speak and tell people where we are.

He is saying, be strong. Strong in our boundaries to teach others how we wish to be treated, strong in our storytelling so we are telling ourselves more reasonable stories about what is happening, strong in our self-compassion so we can be friends to ourselves and generate some heat all on our very own.

This is what it means to speak the literal!

Do that, and the porcupine dilemma of true community is something we can relish rather than suffer.

Yom Kippur comes with urgency. Once it ends, the verdict on our fate for the upcoming year, firmly and finally, is sealed by God. 

Therefore we say, “Today we promise to change for the better during the coming year. On other days of the year, we talk much and often, but today we think.”

This is not just any old sort of thinking. The thoughts we think today are what God seals us in with. 

Our fate will follow our thinking.

So today we must think thoughts that help create positive change in our future. 

Today we must think thoughts that welcome in new horizons. 

So think about this story. Two friends are walking down the sidewalk of a busy city street. Noise surrounds them: wind, cars, people talking. One of the friends suddenly turned to the other and said, “I hear a cricket!” To which her friend responded, “No way! With all this noise? Besides, I’ve never seen a cricket in the city.” 

But the first friend insisted and said, “No, really—I really did hear a cricket.” At which point she led her friend across the street to a big cement planter with a tree in it. She pushed back some leaves, and there’s the little cricket, resting on the topsoil. Her friend is all like, “How did you do that? You must have superhuman hearing!” 

The first friend replied,“There’s nothing superhuman involved at all. Watch this.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out a handful of loose change, and threw it on the sidewalk. Instantly, everyone within thirty feet swiveled toward the sound of falling money. “See,” she said, “it’s nothing superhuman. It’s all just a matter of what you are listening for.” 

What are you listening for, as you think about the new year? 

The story asks this profound question, and so would one of our Unitarian Universalist ancestor prophets, if he were here thinking with us in this Yom Kippur time of urgency. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson.   

In one of his essays he says, “There is a soul at the center of nature, and over the will of every person, so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when we accept its advice; but when we struggle to wound its creatures, our hands are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.” 

All of what Emerson is saying is distilled in the image of the cricket. There is saving wisdom to be had in this world and in our hearts. It is above all natural. But so often we can feel cut off from it. But faith is a power to listen for it. Faith makes lowly listening possible. Lowly listening brings us back into the grace of life and makes us prosper.

Who knows what the new year before us will bring. The universe will be what it will be. And on Yom Kippur God requires us to think about how WE will act and react in the future, even though we have no clue whatsoever of the specifics of that future. 

Whether or not God is being unfair in requiring this of us is another sermon. 

But what is certain is that we are faithful in our thinking if we focus on two things: (1) cultivating a spirit of acceptance that we are going to be surprised a lot, and (2) cultivating a spirit of trust that guidance will come when we need it, in the form of some sort of cricket, and that cricket is going to say the right words we need to hear, and all we need to do is learn how to be listening for it and not distracted by the clash and smash of metal coins on pavement. 

That’s the key piece right there. Learning how to listen to the right things. 

The story tells the truth. Imagine a net that catches fish. In a similar way, our attention works to catch perceptions and ideas. But often the holes in our attention nets can be too small to admit the most important things, which are large, like a sense of meaning, a sense of mission and a willingness to serve. But these big things can be strained out, and what comes through is just the mundane small sound of coins falling on concrete.

Sometimes what makes the holes in our attention net too small is getting caught up in time-crunched, dog-eat-dog lifestyles in which there’s no room to breathe. We want to be better people but we are simply too busy! There is a famous psychology experiment that was conducted on students studying for the ministry. They were told that they had to discuss the story of the good Samaritan in another building on campus. On their way to that other building, they encountered a homeless person who needed help. Some of the seminarians stopped. Others hurried on. Just like in the gospel story.

But the difference between the two groups of seminarians wasn’t about anyone being a bad person. They were preparing to be ministers, for Buddha’s sake! But the seminarians who stopped to help had been told that they had plenty of time to get over to the next building and didn’t need to rush. The seminarians who didn’t stop had been told that they were late and needed to hurry. 

How often do we fail to be the change we wish to see in the world because we are in a hurry? 

Sometimes, being available to hear the lowly word of the cricket means slowing down. Just that.

And always, being available to hear that lowly word means letting go of resentments, letting go of regrets, letting go again and again and again.  

Some of us are exiting the old year and entering the new one with bodies or souls in pain. And we are shaking a fist in God’s face, demanding to know why. 

We must for sure feel our anger and our grief. We cannot cut ourselves off from that. But when we have felt our anger and our grief enough and we sense that there’s another step we can take, perhaps that step is to ask, not Why? But, What now?

Especially in the most terrible of times, the soul at the center of nature that Emerson talks about has advice to offer. True wellness is not necessarily an absence of pain or illness. It’s more about the presence of larger vision and meaning. Physical suffering is just not the worst thing that can happen to us; the worst thing that can happen is to stop living, to stop trying, to stop loving when there is yet more time available to live and to try and to love! 

But resentments can harden. Hardening, the holes in our attention nets shrink down, and all we end up perceiving and thinking are things to resent. If the hurts and failures and disappointments of the past dominate our vision, then the new future spreading out before us won’t be new at all, and will just repeat the past like a broken record. 

No inner silence, no inner poise, no inner peace. 

Ultimately, the story of the cricket is telling us, Trust life. Trust in its Mystery and Wonder, which come as naturally as any cricket. Enter into the Mystery and Wonder fearlessly. Enter into adversity with hope to learn again what true wellness really means.

From the inside-out, we will live every moment of every day until we die. 

So—what ARE you listening for on this momentous day? What are you listening for in your personal relationships, in your family, in your job, in your life as a citizen of Atlanta and Georgia and these United States? What are you listening for in the congregational life here at UUCA? 

Think hard on this, today, for God seals us in with the thoughts we think today.

Yom Kippur comes with urgency. 

A passage from Alice Hoffman’s book called Here on Earth has been working its way through my heart lately. The book’s main character is returning to the town she grew up in. On the way to her old house which she hasn’t seen for twenty years, she drives by a stone wall, and a memory […]

Figuring out if your magic worked is a process of comparing what you got against what you were trying to get. If that’s not what you really wanted, the problem isn’t your magic. Figuring out if your magic worked is a process of comparing what you got against what you were trying to get. If that’s not what you really wanted, the problem isn’t your magic.

Some of you know that in September of last year I was 6000 miles away in Transylvania, visiting sites that are sacred to our Unitarian Universalist religious history. There were many fascinating learnings but none were as surprising as this: that there’s no church shopping there. People go church shopping here all the time. But […] Some of you know that in September of last year I was 6000 miles away in Transylvania, visiting sites that are sacred to our Unitarian Universalist religious history. There were many fascinating learnings but none were as surprising as this: that there’s no church shopping there. People go church shopping here all the time. But […]

“You do not have to be good,” says poet Mary Oliver. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That’s what “embodied spirituality” is about. Let the soft animal of your […] “You do not have to be good,” says poet Mary Oliver. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That’s what “embodied spirituality” is about. Let the soft animal of your […]

Neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili say something fascinating in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. One of their many experiments involved injecting radioactive material into people practiced in meditation and prayer. The radioactive “stuff” was injected only when the folks meditating or praying said that they […] Neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili say something fascinating in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. One of their many experiments involved injecting radioactive material into people practiced in meditation and prayer. The radioactive “stuff” was injected only when the folks meditating or praying said that they […]

Tales of Albion is a collection of eight stories of ancient Britain and Ireland, organized around the Wheel of the Year. It was made by the same group who made the excellent film The Spirit of Albion in 2012. How well does it compare? Tales of Albion is a collection of eight stories of ancient Britain and Ireland, organized around the Wheel of the Year. It was made by the same group who made the excellent film The Spirit of Albion in 2012. How well does it compare?

This is another hymn I suspect many of us bypass because of the not-really-the-title title; it’s been honestly off-putting to me and I suspect others.  But it is an intriguingly appropriate pairing with Nancy McDonald Ladd’s sermon from General Assembly last year. As Kenny Wiley reported in UU World, McDonald Ladd’s sermon lamented the “fake fights we ... More → This is another hymn I suspect many of us bypass because of the not-really-the-title title; it’s been honestly off-putting to me and I suspect others.  But it is an intriguingly appropriate pairing with Nancy McDonald Ladd’s sermon from General Assembly last year. As Kenny Wiley reported in UU World, McDonald Ladd’s sermon lamented the “fake fights we ... More →

Everyone in this space has probably heard of Unitarian Universalism’s Seven Principles, but have you ever heard of the Seven Anti-Principles? (The answer is NO, because I cooked them up just yesterday.) Anti-Principle Number 7: The only existence that matters is human existence. (This is the opposite of “Respect for the interdependent web of all […] Everyone in this space has probably heard of Unitarian Universalism’s Seven Principles, but have you ever heard of the Seven Anti-Principles? (The answer is NO, because I cooked them up just yesterday.) Anti-Principle Number 7: The only existence that matters is human existence. (This is the opposite of “Respect for the interdependent web of all […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But again and again, lessons contradicting it came.

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

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

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

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

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

And he’s just too smart for that.

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

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

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

Look at your drag.

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

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

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

And he’s not alone in that.

**

**

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Shepard.

Pulse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Head exploding sound]

[More head exploding sound]

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

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

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

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

Don’t let anyone steal that.

Take that power back.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The underlying pain of that question is unbearable.

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

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

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

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

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

And there is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More unites us than divides us.

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

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

Kolozsvar
Deva
Gyulafehervar
Sibiu
Sighisoara
Homorodkaracsonyfalva
Szekelyudvarhely

I will never forget:

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

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

All of this. All of this and more.

There is only one way to end my message today.

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

Everyone get inside the circle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Wednesday, 9pm, Budapest

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

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

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

 

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

This pilgrimage has personal reasons behind it, too.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Uuuuggghhhhhh…. Can’t sleep.

gghhhhnnnnnnUUUUUUU

uuuggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhHHHH

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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

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

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

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

Second story:

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

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

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

Goodnight …

 

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

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

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

 

Saturday, Sept. 3, 6:02pm, Kolozsvar 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like life.

 

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

Politics (William Butler Yeats)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

No sunroom here. Everything is carefully laid out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we got through without incident…

[Disco disco disco disco disco disco disco]

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

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

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

The hotel Victoria:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what the worship was like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Check out examples of Kolozsvar graffiti:

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The marker at the site reads:

But I want you to see something very curious:

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

Sigh and tears.

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

How do you enter such a place? How?

I come in, and this is what I see:

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

We wander around and eventually come to see this:

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

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

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

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

Here’s the prison, closer up:

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

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

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

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

The evening ended with a magnificent dinner and this dessert:

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

What a day.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never made this connection before.

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

Until recently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Unitarian Universalist superego is showing

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

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

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

 

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

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

Some images for you:

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: Vlad Dracul! Sighisoara is his birthplace!

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t that something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crabmeat/mayo combo, anyone?

 

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

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

For now:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something is always trumping theology, right?

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

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

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

Reader, tell me: where is God?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

The group then sang some songs for us:

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be bacK home soon–

 

 

 

 

 

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

I was 22 years old.

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

Still, I craved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work out your salvation with diligence!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMEN

 

 

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

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

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

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

Is this truly what tolerance requires of us?

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

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

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

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

Does tolerance demand that we pretend nothing happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must be gentle/angry people.

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

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

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

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

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

The justice kind.

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

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

Justice says no to assassination jokes.

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

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

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

Justice says no to the bully.

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

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

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

Justice is the precondition of tolerance.

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

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

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

Be gentle/angry people!

AMEN

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

You just feel lit up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

Why DO we gather in? Why DO we ingather?

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

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

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

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

This is home. This is our spiritual home.

Let it light up our lives.

“Failure is impossible.”

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

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

Other times: “He cancelled lunch. Again.”

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

Charlie Ravioli was always too busy to play.

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

Because: people are too busy.

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder Charlie Ravioli is everywhere.

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

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

No wonder it is the Age of Loneliness.

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

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

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

We’ve got to turn loneliness around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Blow is right. We dare not ignore them.

This is the time of testing.

Soul-of-a-nation questions.

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

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

Don’t let hate motivate.

Don’t feed the fears.

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

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

No one left out.

AMEN