Past Services

A Teddy Bear/Stuffed Animal Christmas pageant, with some soft and beloved friends.

Special thanks to

casting director and scene designer, Delaney Sherr, who was assisted by Greg Sherr and Rev. Kevin
René Wiley for the idea and invitation, as well as for prop wrangling
Jordan Thomas-Rose for the music, with an assist in this edition from Julie Tillinghast and Kate Canan
All those who shared their beloved stuffed companions, including Anita’s 93-year-old teddy bear, purchased by her grandmother.

The narration used in the pageant is based on Rev. Dan Harper’s adaptation of the “No-Rehearsal Christmas Pageant,” which he based on text borrowed from Rev. Jory Agate, who got it from “someone else,” . . .

Here’s the video of the pageant itself that formed the center of our early Christmas Eve service.

A Solstice Celebration to celebrate the dark and the light as we pause to mark the turn around this edge of the year. Chanting, poetry, story, silence and ritual. Have your candle and your noisemaker ready!

Share the link with your friends who might appreciate the service, and take time to settle in yourself.

Beth Karow guides us through the hour, with storytelling by Rev. Karyn Packard, music by Jordan Thomas-Rose and Kate Canan, Beth Karow and Rev. Kevin, a poem by Holly Rice, a stunning solstice altar, Carmen lighting the Cauldron, raucous celebrating and more…

 

 

Find a Stillness in the Wholeness and Holiness of the Season

Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
December 13, 2020
via Zoom

Video of Full Service

A STORY

A story I read about ten years ago has stayed with me.

Shortly after her father dies, a woman’s 8-year-old son begins having severe health issues, which are eventually diagnosed as a form of lupus. For a few years the boy is in an out of the hospital with many, shifting, severe and painful symptoms, and dangerous reactions to the medications that treat the lupus, including heart attacks. He is close to death numerous times, especially while he is in a comma for three months, and not expected to live. Yet, when he is once again awake and alert he is, as much as he can be, his usual, funny, clown of a self.

In the midst of trying to hold herself together and make sense of holding both the joy and the terror of having a beautiful and funny son who is often in pain and not likely to live too much longer, Evelyn, who described herself as a secular nothingist, bumps into a rabbi who had offered a reading at her father’s memorial service. When the rabbi asks her how it’s going, she tells the story, the real story, including of the many well-meaning people she encounters in the hospital who offer religious platitudes and explanations for her son’s illness that are no help and that make no sense to her.

After a meaningful conversation about what religion is and is not, and what causes illness and what does not, the rabbi says, “I have an idea. Why don’t you try celebrating Shabbat on Friday. I’m not trying to convert you. Just clear your table, put on a white tablecloth, get out your nice dishes, the ones you save for company or special occasions. Serve something special or order out, light a couple candles, pour some wine and toast each other.”

So, that Friday evening she makes taco delight, even though it’s messy to make and to eat, knowing that her family likes it. For the first time in a long while they roll their son up to the table. He is being fed through a tube at that point and can’t eat. But when it comes to toasts each other, he toasts, and toasts, and toasts, and they laugh and keep toasting and Evelyn said it was like celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas and their birthdays all at once, all the holidays they had missed while he had been ill, and they so enjoy these moments with each other that they don’t even watch TV that night and instead the kids play goofy made-up games with each other into the evening.

So, they do it again the next Friday.  And the next.

Evelyn said that in the middle of all the tremendous pain, and worry, and messiness, every Friday they celebrated beauty and joy and each other. It transformed them and their experience of what was happening.

Her son dies about 6 weeks after that first special meal. He dies on a Friday. Friends bring them dinner and they once again hold their family Shabbat as only they know it.  At the gentle invitation of the rabbi, who had been with them in the hospital earlier that day when her son was dying, she attends the Shabbat service at the synagogue for the first of many future times.

(Kathryn Armstrong’s story in Berman, Phillip L.. The Search for Meaning: Americans Talk about What They Believe and Why. United States, Ballantine Books, 1993.)

I have long valued rituals in my life, and when I read this woman’s story years ago, I was taken by the power of such a simple ritual act – a weekly meal set aside to be different from all other meals, an act invited and undertaken without any overtly religious meanings or words attached to it at the time. I was taken with the value of time set aside, repeatedly, regularly, physically, sensually dedicated to simple intention and attention and connection.

Just… just that.

THIS YEAR

Usually at this time of year, the holidays come barreling down upon us with all their frantic expectations, and in some ways they are coming up mighty quickly and with pressure, but there is also new space around them this year, opened up by stay-at-home orders that give us a chance to look anew at what we’ve always done and that invite us to consider what we really want to happen this year and in the future. They can invite a special kind of internal stillness and integrity this time, amidst the losses we are grieving. A stillness from within which we can see and sense what’s around us more clearly and openly.

It’s been an anxious year, for many of us, and it’s likely to be angsty for a while yet. If we want to find stillness in this season, we probably can’t simply will ourselves there, though a few among us do have tried-and-true spiritual practices to draw upon for centering. The rest of us may be able to draw on the familiar rituals of the season to help, the physical rituals themselves, freed from outside expectations and anyone else’s meaning that might interfere – candlelight, fire, singing, food, a nice table and meal, Christmas tree lights and decorations, conversation, even over Zoom or the phone, breathing more slowly. All of these have value, even outside of any explicit meanings we give to them.

THE EYES HAVE IT

A set of detours. And then I’ll swing back ’round.

First, I learned recently that the retinas in our eyes are a piece of our brain. Not merely attached to our brain, but a piece of the brain itself. These windows to our souls, found a way to get outside of our thick skulls so they could take in light, not first in order to see objects, but first to register the rhythm of daylight and darkness, the rhythm of the sun, which then sets all of our internal clocks to match the season and synchronizes our internal organs’ processes, our circadian rhythms. Birds’ skulls are thin. Light can shine right through them and they, like reptiles even have a hole in their skulls that allows even more light to shine through to reach the pineal gland that registers it. Our human skulls are thick, which protects our brains, but does not let the light pass through.

(from interviews on YouTube with Dr. Andrew Huberman, including this interview with Lex Fridman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktj050DxG7Q&pbjreload=101)

Through our eyes, we are tuned not only to each other, but first to the light of the season and its rhythms. It is no accident that candles and fire and light figure so prominently in the holidays and holy days of December in the north. They are not merely symbolic representations of something we miss. Human beings figured out long ago, by experiment and experience, which activities help surface feelings of hope and connection and joy and possibility when the nights are longest and food production has dwindled for the year. I think it’s in the gospel of Luke, Chapter 11, where they address seasonal affective disorder. Or maybe it’s the Tao Te Ching.

MOUTHING THE WORDS

A second detour. I’ve come to realize that I self-soothe sometimes by eating, I’ll eat handfuls of something before I realize how much I’ve eaten and without taking time to enjoy the taste after the first bite or two. I’ve learned to try to eat one small piece at a time so I can keep the eating going for longer. I’ve learned that an important part of what soothes us, in the act of eating, isn’t the content of the food itself, as much as the use of our mouths. The movement of our mouths and facial muscles is associated, neurologically, with connecting to other people, particularly in determining whether another person is safe to be with and communicating whether we are safe to be with. Chewing, talking, singing, reading aloud, using our mouths and facial muscles has a calming effect all its own that communicates to our body and therefore our entire being that we are safe, that all is well.

Singing, humming, eating, talking, speaking words out loud have value even outside of the meaning we give them.

SOFTLY, SOFTLY

One more detour. There is a practice in some Buddhist meditation traditions of holding a soft gaze while meditating.

The idea is to look at something without really focusing on it – to hold a soft gaze, kind of like those mystic eye photos that require you to look without focusing in order for the three-dimensional object hidden within them to lift off the page and become visible to you. When we are anxious past a helpful, motivating level of stress, and we start to feel in danger, our vision narrows – our physical vision and our spiritual, emotional, intellectual vision narrow, to zero in on the threats we perceive, closing down our ability to see the rest, our ability to see possibility. It’s a survival move. But it works in the other direction as well.

When we soften our physical gaze, when we look at something gently without zeroing in and focusing on it, our eyes start to take in more of our surroundings, and beyond that, by taking in more of what’s around us, gently, calmly, we start to gain a sense of ourselves within that larger picture – not separate from it looking at it, but part of it. All of which helps us feel more calm, and therefore more open, and able to see dimensions we couldn’t perceive earlier.  Our smart phones and zoom screens, in contrast, keep our eyes zeroed in at specific distances, and so, keep us on alert.

I realized what when I look at my lit Christmas tree in the evening, I use a particularly soft gaze. Occasionally I zero in on an ornament to remember its story, a person, and a part of my life, but most of the time I look at that lit tree for long stretches with a soft, calming gaze.

And I’ve already mentioned that breathing slowly, and extending our outward breaths has a profound calming effect for most of us.

AND?

So, to come back ‘round…

The intellectual, rational side of our tradition, particularly the Unitarian side, comes at things through our heads, analysis, information and our conscious thoughts.

The emotional, compassionate side of our tradition, particularly the Universalist side, comes at things through our hearts and empathy and the powerful engagement of our feelings.

What is so often missed, are the ways that the activity and engagement of our bodies, influence our thoughts and perceptions and our ability to analyze, and influence our feelings and emotions. We are embodied creatures, and though we think we are in conscious control, so much of the time in truth the tail is wagging the dog rather than the other way around. Recent neuroscience simply confirms what human beings have figured out over the centuries, and built into religious traditions, spiritual practices, and our holidays and holy days.

In this week’s wonderful conversations about being a community in these times we asked people to name what we’ve lost this year. So many people named the importance of the physical connections and interactions, the importance of the physical rituals we were used to sharing. We are being given the gift of understanding those needs and benefits more deeply.

The richness of the holiday rituals offers a feast of possibilities for soothing ourselves so that we might find the stillness in the season, and so see more openly and clearly, even and especially while we are sequestered in our separate homes.

Some of us will be held by the miracles in our lives, the oils that we thought could not last, that somehow sustain us and light our way still. Some of us will find joy and guidance toward lives of goodness, truth, love and justice modeled by a courageous and charismatic leader born into poverty in the most humble of places. Some of us will gather and sing and maybe even dance around fires to link ourselves directly to the rhythms of earth and sun and so know ourselves intimately part a turning world that stretches into time long before and after us. Some of us will follow our breath, again and again returning to the moment, that we might awaken more fully to what is, including ourselves. Those of us who already find meaning in the holy days and rituals of the season have doorways to the available stillness.

I invite us all to enter the wholeness and the holiness of these days with a soft gaze. Let your menorah, or kinara, your solstice bonfire,  your Christmas tree or your neighbor’s yard display become the gentle object of your visual meditation. Let special light enter your eyes to feed your spirit. Bring in only the meanings that serve, that center.

Sing carols or chants or nursery rhymes, hum, speak, read stories aloud, call somebody, get on Zoom, let the movement of your face and your lips remind you that all is well. Just remember to lift your eyes and look away from the screen every few minutes.

Dance, move, stretch, reach like nobody’s watching,

And even if it’s only you, consider getting out a nice tablecloth, your good dishes, a candle or two, a glass of a special beverage, and toast a gratitude. Maybe every week.

And to connect yourself explicitly to this community of fellow travelers and its shared hopes, I invite you to light your chalice as a source of light and an object for your soft gaze.  If you don’t have a chalice, I encourage you find a special candle holder, or a treasured bowl or cup. Know that it represents, a community that holds you, or that could hold you. Light a candle or an oil lamp within it. Let your gaze upon it be soft, take in your wider surroundings too, see yourself part of the larger picture, part of the scene that will, in time, lift off the page into whole new dimensions we have yet to see.

I invite you to use what is already in front of you, to find a stillness in this season, in yourself, and in the seasons to come.

So may we be.

Sources

Berman, Phillip L.. The Search for Meaning: Americans Talk about What They Believe and Why. United States, Ballantine Books, 1993.

Dana, Deb A.. Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). United States, W. W. Norton, 2020.

Huberman, Andrew: Neuroscience of Optimal Performance | Lex Fridman Podcast #139
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktj050DxG7Q&pbjreload=101

Sermon only:

E Pluribus UUnum

Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
October 25, 2020
via Zoom

How are you doing? Have you voted?

Next Sunday is the Sunday immediately before the presidential election, but that is so close to E-Day that we’ve chosen to take time this Sunday to check in, to ask how it is with your spirit, to breathe together for a while, to anchor ourselves in what matters, and to steel ourselves to “keep going on” in the direction of our hearts and our values, no matter what happens.…

For so many people on both sides of the political chasm – and I am thinking of people I know and love on both sides, as I say this – that anywhere near half the nation could think and feel so differently is terribly disturbing, disheartening, and frightening, clearly! And for those of us who identify as progressive in some way, particularly those of us who are white and middle class, it is disorienting. It shakes our somewhat sheltered and optimistic faith in humanity and in the promise of the United States as a nation…

The election is being framed as not about a president, but rather about the soul of the nation. And it does feel that way, doesn’t it? If ours were a democracy, rather than a democratic republic – in other words, if every individual person’s vote counted equally and a simple majority determined the outcome – (then) this election would reveal the current soul of the nation. But given the use of the electoral college, and lord knows what other legal and political pathways this time, the election will actually choose the soul of the nation at some level, determining how the soul and spirit of the nation will be shaped for the future as long as most of us gathered this morning will live it.

The soul-shaping stakes do feel very, very high.

AND…given the national identity divide, the work of shaping our selves, our communities, and our nation toward compassion, toward equity, toward justice, toward kindness, and courage will be ever more necessary and important, no matter the outcome of this election.

Me? I much prefer to feel comfortable, thank you. I moved to a new home recently, and what I really wanting to be doing is nesting – putting things away and settling into a quiet, nurturing, comfortable and comforting space. But outside of home, in this larger, social journey we share, I think that the “feeling comfortable” option is off the table for a while for all but the most spiritually enlightened among us.

So, this morning, I want to say:

Let’s trust that we will find our way, no matter what, and no matter how difficult the path.
Let’s (prepare to) keep our hearts open, during and after the election, as challenging as that may be.
Let’s each work like hell for the next nine days toward the election outcome that we seek.
And let’s ready ourselves, steel ourselves, perhaps, for the possibilities to come and the work ahead.

Possibilities?

I’ll start at the end.

A group of colleagues surfaced what they believe are the three most likely election scenarios come November 3rd-ish.

A huge win for one of the candidates. A clear, decisive outcome that is not contested and that both major parties acknowledge.
An outcome that is not clear right away – due to slow returns and ballots still being counted – but that’s looking like it’s going to be clear enough eventually.
An outcome that is clear, but contested or “thrown” into some new scenario (Trump refuses to leave office, for example, or there is violent militia style action by supporters,

This group of colleagues is preparing for that entire range of outcomes, with the expectation that outcomes 2 or 3 are most likely. They are preparing for the possibility of violent voter suppression on election day and violent action afterward. They are going so far as to stock medical supplies, to identify places to bring the injured and to shelter the vulnerable. Just in case.

On the one hand, I want to share that without being alarmist or feeding our fear unhelpfully. On the other hand, I believe it’s important to our emotional preparedness and wellbeing, to at least acknowledge those possibilities enough, and ahead of time, so that should events unfold in chaotic and frightening ways, we can say to ourselves, “Okay, I knew something like this could happen. What do I need to do now? What do we need to do now?”

As one way to give yourself a compassionate and reassuring task, I would encourage you to decide ahead of time, who you are going to check in on, and perhaps, who is going to check in on you. Make a definite plan to find out about someone else’s wellbeing in whatever ways you can.

As a community, look to email from UUCM, to the website, M&F look to uucmConnect, and meanwhile think about ways our community resources might serve safety and wellbeing here for ourselves and for others.  On election night we’ll be holding an open Zoom room all evening so you can stop in any time to touch base, in small groups. We’ll do something similar the next day. On Thursday we’ll host our Singing Meditation, and on Friday our weekly check-in. Watch for opportunities to connect and to conspire as events unfold.

Between now and then, I invite you to work like hell for the outcome you desire. UU the Vote continues its invitations to phone bank right up through Nov 3. Even it that scares you a little, consider calling Florida and Wisconsin voters to make sure they have the information they need to cast their ballot safely and overcome any attempt at voter suppression.

Closer to home, I invite you to ask every person you interact with between now and the night of November 3, “Have you voted?” Offer to help get information if needed. Contact the folks you think might not vote without a little extra encouragement.

Find and share with each other ways to invest in the election during these remaining nine days.

I happy to report the final tally for UUCM’s Vote Forward letter writing effort – UUCM members and family and friends wrote and mailed 4710 letters to voters! Thank you!

As to keeping our hearts open, no matter what:

Given the high stakes of the election, and given that the destructive actions of the current president violate so many progressive values so egregiously – it’s difficult for many not to demonize the people who support him, or at least it’s tempting to place them on another planet or in another species in our understanding of humanity.

I struggle with this. So, when someone’s social and political stance feels inconceivable to me, which happens often, I try to remind myself that my views are surely just as inconceivable to them, and then, when I’m at my best, I ask myself, “Why would a kind, caring, well-meaning human being hold views so different from my own? Which of their fundamental needs are being met there?”

When I watched the Republican convention, and listened to a few everyday speakers from around the country, I recognized and felt, beneath their words, some of the heart and the hurt of members of my own family. People harmed, terribly, by the shortcomings of government bureaucracy, people whose grounding world view and values are challenged and shaken by same-sex marriage, trans rights, the idea that racism pervades their lives, the painful surfacing of US history from the indigenous perspective that topples the founders and the founding of the nation from their bedrock pedestals, the sense of being looked down upon by the permissive, highbrow societies on the coasts….people whose very identities are challenged by an unavoidably changing world.

In an exploration of how congregations are handling the election, Scott Tayler named the wisdom that “If you don’t give someone a chance to say ‘I hurt,’ they will end up saying ‘I hate.’”

Most of the time, the answer to my question, “Why would a kind, caring, well-meaning human being hold views so different from my own?” involves recognizing, eventually, a set of hurts and unmet needs. One of the reasons for the depth of the national divide at this moment, is an inability to recognize, acknowledge, and speak to the hurts and needs on the other side of the chasm. No matter what happens around the election, this is a piece we will need to learn if we want to hold together and if we want to move forward,

Which is not to say we don’t need to place clear limits on people’s behavior along the way, and to protect the vulnerable in our midst, and to resist and protest as necessary. We will want to be ready for these things too.

AND… 

I don’t know how well or how badly people will behave come November 3 and afterward.

Indications are…worrisome.

These are some severe growing pains for this adolescent nation of ours, and there is no way to get around being part of them. It’s our nation, struggling to grow into its promise. In many ways we will need to “make it up as we go.” We, here, will have each other, I trust. We’ll have the values and the principles we say matter to us to draw upon, and we will have our own tradition’s practice in trying to hold theological diversity within a sense of unified community.

Though it’s not the official motto of the US, as many believe, “E pluribus unum,” captures the crux of our history and our challenge.

“E pluribus unum,” it says on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782. “From many, one.”  –  a reference to the original 13 colonies finding a way to join together into a single entity. But the deeper weaving of many into one has always been difficult and incomplete and, like our own religious pluralism, aspirational. As Langston Hughes wrote from within his experience as a black man in the U.S., “America never was America to me.” More and more of us are learning how America has never fully been America to many.

The most encouraging aspects of US history trace the efforts to include more pluribus in the unum. The most painful aspects of US history capture the efforts to exclude people – right up to this day. This is the soul of the nation around which US citizens are voting.

My hope and prayer is that these are indeed the intense national growing pains of a nation in the process of becoming, ultimately, more healthily unum. And that no matter how much America has or has not been America to each of us, we will say with Langston Hughes, as he continues his poem – “And yet I swear this oath – America will be!”

It’s going to take commitment, courage and action on our part.

May we commit, together, to help it be so, come what may on Nov 3-ish and afterward.

Remember, you are not alone, and that we will be finding our way, we will “keep going on,” together.

 

Dreaming of Rain when the Fire Comes First

Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
September 6, 2020
via Zoom

RENEWAL?

Here at UUCM we use monthly themes facilitated by the Soul Matters organization.

This summer, as I was looking ahead to these September services, I struggled to connect with the planned theme of “renewal.” Given the ongoing pandemic, the rising racial reckoning, the only-going-to-get-more-and-more-maddening presidential election, I felt that the real theme for September ought to be “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a wild ride.”

As lovely as “renewal” sounded for this moment, it felt too early. I sensed renewal as a future we are heading toward, a point on the horizon toward which we must aim who we are and all that we are doing. Right now, the needed focus is more about resilience, I believe, more about becoming increasingly flexible, about finding and holding onto the threads of our essential selves and our essential values, and letting go of so much of what we usually try to cling to for a sense of security. Just when grasping feels most urgent.

Like the rain in Jan Garrett’s song, “I Dreamed of Rain,” renewal is coming, eventually, but we’ve got some steep miles to go.

The spiritual need, it seems to me, is to ready ourselves for renewal – and to help each other stay heart-centered and open-hearted on the rough, anxiety ridden, and transforming roads ahead – so that we are prepared for deep and transformational opportunities for renewal whenever portals open to them. Therefore, we’ve chosen to focus on heart-centered renewal as our theme this month, our theme for the year, really, with that larger, ongoing journey in mind and heart.

When Gail and I first brainstormed images and symbols that might embody the theme of renewal, Gail named the phoenix: that mythological bird that lives for five or six centuries in the desert, and then burns itself on a funeral pyre in order to rise from the ashes with renewed youth, to live through another cycle.

When Gail named the phoenix, I remembered a line in a song by Ben Abraham and Sara Bareilles, titled “This Is On Me.” It’s a song about the impending end of a relationship and the tentative possibilities of saving it in a new form. It’s a very tender song. Ben and Sara sing, “Some phoenix MAY rise from these ashes, but the fire comes first.”

That’s exactly how I feel about renewal and the future these days. Well, almost exactly. My hopeful self sings, instead, “Some phoenix will rise from these ashes, but the fire comes first.”

The fact that we have had so many fires since that conversation, including a fire right here, affecting some of you very directly, and close enough to put UUCM’s building in the evacuation warning zone, has heightened the strength of that image for me… and the depth and power of the journey between this moment and renewal to come.

WARBLING

Christy’s wonderful stories about Birding the Burn, about chronicling the abundant bird life that burn snags invite, sparked memories for me of a particular variety of bird from my childhood: the Kirtland’s Warbler.

The Kirtland’s warbler was one of the first species protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. They’d always been very rare since first identified by Europeans in 1841, but by 1974 their population was down to 167 singing males (which is how they count these birds, by their singing). At one time there were only 7 square miles of breeding habitat available to them.

Kirtland’s warblers winter in the Bahamas, and 95% of them nest in only one place on Earth – in the middle of the Michigan mitten, not far from where I grew up. They have one of the most geographically restricted breeding distributions of any bird in the continental United States.

The thing is, Kirtland’s warblers nest almost exclusively in jack pine trees.

And only in jack pine trees that are between 5ft and 16.5 feet tall.

And only in jack pine trees between 5ft and 16.5 feet tall growing close enough to each other for their branches to overlap, so as to hide the birds’ low nests.

This means that Kirtland’s warblers need relatively young, dense stands of jack pines, before the trees get too tall. Which means they require that new jack pine forests are getting started at least every 15 or 20 years, so they always have trees of the right height for nesting.

And there is one more catch.

Jack pine pinecones only open and release their seeds under extreme heat. Once in a very great while, the weather in Michigan can get hot enough to do it, but most of the time, it requires fire. It has required that Jack pine forests burn periodically in order for Kirtland’s Warblers to survive as a species.

OTHER KINDS OF FIRES

I expect that you have your own stories, your own metaphors and parallels, for this awareness: that in order for something new to arise, the old has to come apart enough – maybe even completely – in order to make the new possible. The truth that sometimes, things must burn or otherwise be destroyed in their current form, in order for new life to take shape, or even for existing, rare and precious life, to continue. The knowledge that sometimes it takes a while after the coming undone, before new growth reaches the right, sweet-spot height for giving birth.

You may know of relationships that wither, or die of starvation or thirst, or that implode or explode before people have enough energy to change their behaviors or take enough action toward something better. You may know of organizations and institutions that come crashing down or that slowly fade into silence, releasing people and resources to invest in something new, more in tune with current values and needs. You may know first-hand of dreams and expectations that have to be released, or dashed, or sometimes ripped away before a truer path and a truer self can be seen.

At the time, such painful endings seem the worst of all the possibilities. Until later… looking back, one recognizes the necessity of the ending for the beginnings and all the benefit that came after, eventually.

RAISING THE HEAT

In seminary, one of my teachers, Thandeka, who grew up as the child of a preacher in a black church, pointed out that the white protestant religious traditions, which is where UUism came from, tend to want to keep things cool, and reasoned, and orderly – emotionally and spiritually calm. Historically, we don’t want to get too worked up and we get anxious when it’s otherwise.

When what’s actually needed to bind us together meaningfully as a theologically varied community, what’s needed to reach into and transform our hearts, what’s needed to make room for the movement of the spirit, what’s needed to allow us to “love beyond belief” – as Thandeka would put it – is to raise the heat. She tried to teach us quiet, bookish, cool, reasoned ministerial students, to raise the heat in our services and our ministries.

The challenge, in general, is to raise the heat enough for transformation, but not so much that people get burned, or everything destroyed. The challenge is to manage a controlled burn, which, as you know, can’t always be controlled – for better, for worse. Or it’s important, at least, to recognize the value of the heat.

In my own internal journey, I’ve been extending this metaphor of necessary heat to the racial reckoning underway in the United States, as the nation faces in new ways its original sin of slavery. Nothing about racism and white supremacy will change significantly until there is enough heat and pressure to melt or burn what holds the current structures and behaviors in place.

Personally, I prefer that things happen calmly, peacefully, smoothly and without confrontation, but I know that addressing something as foundational to our nation’s heritage as racism will require some mighty powerful heat. Perhaps “the fires this time” will burn hot enough, or long enough, or in the right enough places, to open up more genuine possibility of liberation for all of us. Even Trump’s latest edict trying to ban racial sensitivity training in Federal agencies only adds fuel to that fire.

I find myself applying this heat metaphor to all of national politics these days, and the current threats to democracy as we have known it. As viscerally frightening as some of the possibilities feel, the way that I’m able to hold hope and to face the disorienting evening news each day, is to understand that these fires, too, may provide the heat needed to better “confirm America’s soul,” as Kathryn Lee Bates put it in America the Beautiful, and to lead the nation, ultimately, into more of its promise.

AH, BUDDHISM

I picture the Buddha smiling at all of this, at all of us, in our angst. The Buddha, who passes down through myriad lineages the truth that everything is, always has been, and always will be uncertain, unpredictable, and in disorienting flux. Guatama Buddha taught that we suffer when we deny and struggle against instability and change, in other words when we struggle against the nature of existence.

And, oh, my friends, I know, we are being gifted with a lot to struggle with lately.

Our greatest suffering might not come from what’s happening and what frightens us at the surface, but from our very human resistance to the truth that everything is always in motion, “that we [ourselves] are always in transition” As Pema Chödrön puts it, the “ordinary and obvious truth of change (24 The Places that Scare You).”

There, for me, is a pathway to hope: to learn to let go enough to enter the uncertainty with an open heart and open expectations, looking not backward to some sort of return to the familiar, but forward to some yet-to-be-revealed possibilities. To understand that even a burned forest is not truly barren. At least not for long.

With so much in our lives uncertain right now, this cannot help but be a time of deep anxiety, heartbreak and tenderness. These feelings come with the experience of this kind of in-between moment, and we’ll need to hold each other in all of the nurturing ways that we can, so that we might learn, as Rev. Doug Kraft invited us in his offering of Buddhism’s essential teachings: the invitation to turn toward our pain -instead of away from it – and to feel and see it on its own terms. The invitation to relax into our suffering in order to know it more honestly and more deeply. The invitation to settle into and savor the tenderness that is always underneath our angst and suffering, where, with openness, we might discover an experience of freedom.

As Doug said to us, “the only path that works in the long run goes through the suffering, [the] tenderness, and [the] openness rather than around them.”

AND?

Christy Sherr has shared with me that many people she talks to about burn snags expect that there is nothing there, in those forests after a fire, nothing of worth, but Christy knows from experience about the abundant life that arrives in a fire’s aftermath, and she lights up when she talks about it.

You’ll be glad to know that with controlled burns, and many other kinds of on-the-ground work, there are now 2300 breeding pairs of Kirtland’s Warblers. The recovery numbers exceeded expectations for 16 years in a row and Kirtland’s Warblers have been taken off the endangered species list.

It’s difficult to imagine with any sort of clarity life beyond the fires, the pandemic, the economic unknowns, the presidential election no matter how it turns out. We can’t know this future.

At this entrance to the church year – I invite us to stay heart-centered and open-hearted, and to dream of rain, yes. To dream, as much as we need, of rain coming down soft and easy, sweet and clear… Without any need to rhyme it with fear. We need the respite.

The rain will come, eventually.

And, in order to cultivate our resilience and our honest hope, for our own lives and for a world genuinely more compassionate, more sustainable, more just, I invite us to know also that, chances are, the fire comes first. And that that, may be just what’s needed to release the seeds of a future closer to our vision – seeds that despite all our previous efforts are still trapped inside impenetrable shells that will open only with high enough heat. Seeds for the next grove of growth and new life, in time.

So may it be, my friends.

So may WE be.

 

Mobilizing our Collective Compassion
Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
July 5, 2020
via Zoom

Our Journey with Compassion

How has your journey been, on the path of compassion?

We’ve been exploring compassion over the last 5 weeks – what compassion is and ways to cultivate our compassion – as if, like Black History month is often treated, compassion is a once-a-year, one-month focus. But Buddhist teachers remind us that the point of cultivating our compassion is so that compassion might become more than a temporary theme or a practice, that compassion might become a way of perceiving the world, a way of being in the world, a way of relating to all that is, was and will be, including ourselves.

Drawing on the Loving-Kindness or Metta Meditation from the Buddhist traditions we’ve been moving outward, from compassion for ourselves, to compassion for those with whom we have loving relationships, to people we don’t really know, to people whose behaviors and perspectives challenge and irk us.

Two Sundays ago, we invited you to find the growing edge of your compassion, to notice where you are holding someone just outside the circle of your active care and concern, and today we consider the possibility of extending our compassion fully, to encompass all beings and all that is, messy, painful, beautiful, exasperating, exhilarating and unpredictable as life and the universe and its inhabitants are.

I’ve held off naming the root meaning of the word “compassion,” which originates in ecclesiastical or church Latin in a word that meant “to suffer with,” to recognize and empathize with, to feel another’s suffering. As one person put it compassion, “… is the heart’s response to suffering.”

It begins not in response to some abstract idea of suffering, but to very particular and personal experiences of suffering that move us.

PR personnel for non-profits know this. Speaking of starving children in general, or of a war-torn nation in general does not generate the compassionate and generous response that a photo of one particular suffering child will, or the story of one particular suffering family.

Compassion begins in the specific, and that’s where we first need to nurture it, in our heart’s natural response to suffering.

Moving Outward

When we can extend our compassion outward into this final, all-encompassing ring in the Metta meditation practice, compassion toward all, we move beyond our empathetic response to particular suffering, toward a more abstract sense of compassion and a desire to lessen suffering in the world in general, wherever we find it.

As Thutpen Jinpa puts it, “Compassion [at this level] arises as our response to suffering; period. Whose suffering it is should not matter (232).”

Now, there’s compassion at its largest.

Jinpa quotes Shantideva (the 8th-century, Indian, Buddhist monk, scholar, and poet):

Simply because it’s suffering,
it must be warded off.
Why is any limitation put on this?
No one disputes and questions
why suffering should be prevented.
If [suffering] must be prevented, all of it must be.
If not, this goes for oneself and everyone.

Jinpa says that this is where justice and compassion come together: when we can extend our natural compassion for specific suffering, outward into a wider, more open responsiveness to all suffering, including compassion for those whose suffering leads them to cause suffering.

“Whose suffering it is should not matter.”

Collective Compassion

As Allison and I thought through this series of services, we wanted, here, on this final Sunday of the theme, to look at our Collective Compassion – the compassion that we share, that we cultivate in each other, that we focus and channel outward together to relieve suffering in the wider community. We wanted to bring the theme ‘round to “justice,” (which “is what love looks like in public,” according to Cornel West), justice which is calling so loudly these days for our attention and our action, even from our homes.

UUCM’s mission names compassion as the first of the reasons that this congregation exists at all, and the reason members cultivate various strengths: in order “to create a world more compassionate, sustainable and just.”  It is right that compassion is named first, because a more compassionate world demands a more sustainable and more just world. It’s strategic to begin with compassion if we want justice, compassion for all who suffer!

It’s a mission worthy of a religious community’s heart and soul and commitment, a mission worthy of the Universalist legacy we inherited which was rooted entirely in compassion. Our Universalist ancestors could not imagine that anyone ever would need to suffer for all eternity.

This congregation’s mission is a mission that demands that compassion be central, that compassion be the grounding for everything this congregation does and how it does it, from washing the dishes, to communicating via email, to disagreeing in a meeting, to showing up at rallies for black lives – with our masks on.

Collective Compassion

I caught up with a friend from seminary this week, who began a ministry on the east coast at the same time my ministry with you began here at UUCM. As part of our conversation my colleague named the challenge that most every UU congregation I’ve ever known faces.

He explained that he’s been trying to help the congregation he serves to collect and focus its social justice energies and resources in ways that will channel and amplify the members’ individual voices into something greater than the sum of the parts, but as different people have different justice causes that speak to their heart most strongly, they have not been able to get beyond the usual set of people doing separate good work in many different areas of the community, wondering why more members aren’t joining in their particular cause.

UUCM has faced that dynamic too, and leaders here have sought to focus the justice work of this congregation through a set of task forces – right now, one focusing on addressing climate change, one focusing on challenging white privilege, and one focusing on supporting and being in right relationship with the local indigenous people, the Nisenan.

This has indeed helped to focus congregational energies and resources in helpful ways, and I encourage you to lend your support and energy toward one of them. Pick one, and join others in that effort.

What’s needed

As I reflected on what would help deepen and strengthen this congregation’s collective justice work, its ability to channel and focus its capacity to speak truth to power, its ability to draw on its own members’ power to change systems in ways that could relieve suffering, – help its compassion flourish into solidarity, and its solidarity bear fruit in justice – I realized that it is the same thing that’s needed to deepen and strengthen the congregation period.

It is the need to cultivate compassion explicitly as the primary anchor for every aspect of this congregation’s life and liveliness. Not simply to name compassion as important or even as central, but to grow compassion, practice compassion, support compassion, expect compassion, live compassion with each other and as many rings outward as we possibly can, even and especially in the midst of putting ourselves on the line for the sake of justice in our community and nation.

The dominant cultural influences in this nation will continue to try to pull us toward a selfcenteredness that serves no one’s true well-being. Even in the midst of a pandemic that ought to be bringing us together, divisiveness reigns. It is counter cultural and challenging to prioritize compassion, to cultivate it courageously, patiently, deeply with each other. But informed and powered by well-developed individual compassion and group compassion, focusing compassion outward together would transform everyone involved, and truly help us use our power to lessen suffering in all the worlds we touch.

What Would it Take?

So, what would it take to cultivate compassion with that kind of clarity and commitment?

That’s one of the important questions before us, one that will require our creativity and our focus to answer together, as a community. Thupten Jinpa sheds light on a few aspects of the foundation.

He shares that the CompassionLab at the University of Michigan has been studying for 15 years now “how compassion can become organized and spread throughout an organization. . . .  Researchers at CompassionLab have found three, interrelated factors that allow compassion to take hold.” In this moment they each have a unique poignancy.

“The presence of networks of people who know each other well enough to share their pain;”
“Established routines within the organization … [that foster regular … human contact;]
[A shared set of values that supports compassion.]

Let’s start with the easy one, the values. We’re good there. UUCM’s got the values, at least in aspiration, in the hearts and minds of its members and friends, and in the Principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Compassionate Warriors

I’ve been reading Dr. David Campt’s Compassionate Warrior Boot Camp for White Allies – the UU edition. Dr. Campt has been studying dialogue, inclusion and racial equity for 25 years. He specifically teamed up with UU Allison Mahaley to create a UU-centered resource for would-be allies, because he found that the values, principles and interests of UUs matched his approach to allyship unlike any other predominantly white organizations he had worked with.

Dr Campt’s approach to racial equity is rooted in developing and acting from compassion – rather than confrontation – in order to effectively engage the white people in our lives who are influenceable, but who are not there yet.

He takes some heat for this, from people who suggest that using compassion to address white supremacy risks coddling us white people in our white fragility. He makes a very clear case for why, in his experience, compassion is the most effective one-on-one path to a change of heart, and why he was willing to create a Spiritual edition of his white ally workbook for UUs because of the values to which we aspire.

As for Establishing routines that foster regular human contact; That’s going to take commitment, creativity and action from all of us over this next while, as the virus remains a factor in our lives. Online connections work well for some of us, and not for others.

René Wiley, with Family Ministry, and the Caring and Membership Teams, is initiating an invitation to everyone to make safe one-on-one connections with each other this summer, whether by phone or snail mail, or a driveby, or a fun quarantinable delivery, or a masked driveway visit.

Watch for an invitation from René. And however you might choose to do it, I would ask you, please to reach out to others, to foster some form of safe human contact, for your own sake and for the sake of the congregation.

Eventually, I trust, we’ll be able to find that contact more readily and directly in person. Meanwhile, we’ll need to work at it.

The first factor, too, will warrant our creative attention now: nurturing networks of people who know each other well enough to share their pain.

UUCM’s Soul Matters Circles are meant to foster that kind of knowing, but ideally we are investing ourselves in that kind of knowing – at least a little –  in every gathering, every conversation, whether online or in person, in opportunites to reveal ourselves honestly and be seen for who we are, and the opportunity to witness, with care and compassion, who others are when they reveal themselves honestly. You are not alone.

I encourage you to lean courageously into the ways you might get to know others here well enough to share their pain, and for others to know you well enough to share theirs. Even while our physical in-person contact is limited.

Values, regular contact, networks of people who know each other well enough to share their pain.

The pandemic challenges these foundational aspects of compassion in religious community life, at least as we have known them, but I believe that they are still important and available, with some creativity, some flexibility, some intention, and some commitment on all our parts.

I’m about to take time for study leave and vacation. I’ll be thinking about how I might best cultivate compassion in myself and how I might best support compassion in the life of this congregation.

I invite you to do the same…with courageous love, and a sense of wonder…as you are reaching out to one another, as you are getting to know each other well enough to share your pain, and as you are working toward a more just world in the ways that you can.

I believe that if we truly center compassion as the key, our collective compassion can indeed “flourish into solidarity,” and our “solidarity can bear the fruit of justice.”

So may it be.

Let’s Do

Each week we’ve invited you to do something that cultivates or strengthens compassion. This week, I invite you to take part in a justice effort that is right now drawing on all three of those aspects named by CompassionLab, and involving all three Justice Task Forces.

Thanks to Reine Thibeault, every Thursday between now and early November, at 4:00, via Zoom, members and friends gather to complete the handwritten portion of letters which will later be sent to infrequent voters around the country, particularly underrepresented voters, through the VoteFoward program. This is a tactic that has proven successful in other elections.

Rather than simply writing those letters alone, people connect and support and get to know each other while taking on this COVID-safe way to seek a more just world. Often there will be a theme or an artist or an additional activity. This past week, Tom Wernigg serenaded the group with his songs – on his Birthday, no less! Thanks, Tom.

I would invite you to take part, at least once and hopefully many times.

UUCM’s goal is to prepare 3000 letters by November.

For more information, Check out the events page at uugrassvalley.org

Or Contact: new board member Reine Thibeault with question, or watch the echalice for the link and passcode.

 

Resources consulted, cited, recommended…

Campt, David W., and Mahaley, Alison. Equipping Anti-Racism Allies Unitarian Universalist Edition: Fighting Racism…One Conversation at a Time. N.p., I Am Publications, 2020.

Jinpa, Thupten. A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives. United States, Hudson Street Press, 2015.

CompassionLab: a group of organizational researchers who strive to create a new vision of organizations as sites for the development and expression of compassion.

Vote Forward: Write letters to increase voter turnout, particularly among underrepresented populations.

 

Reflection I

The Language of Compassion
Allison Rivers Samson
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
A reflection delivered June 21, 2020
via Zoom

AllisonRiversSamson.com

When most folx consider compassion, the first thought is extending it to other people. However, there are often limits to whom we offer that compassion. For example, it can be easier to feel toward children; people who experience crime, tragedy, illness; or those who might be considered “victims.”

Oftentimes, we’re more compassionate to those who are like us, shutting out those we see as “other.”

Radical welcoming is one of our Unitarian Universalist spiritual practices. One of the ways we express this is by honoring someone’s preferred pronoun. We set ourselves free of the binary of she or he. And thankfully, society is catching up and moving past the mandate against using they as a pronoun for a single person.

What about when we refer to non-humans? The most common pronoun is “it” when speaking of a spider, ant, or even a dog. It creates a distance, a separation. It goes against our UU 7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

As I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, I learned about the grammar of animacy. Animacy is a way of respecting non-human beings by expressing that they have a spirit, are alive, and sentient. The grammar of animacy would never use the pronoun “it” to describe a living being, just as in English, we wouldn’t use “it” when speaking about a human.

The author gives the example of seeing your grandmother in the kitchen and saying “It is making soup.” Sounds strange, right? This is because it goes against our fundamental sense of respect and reduces a person to a thing—someone to something.

As a personal practice, I’ve long been using the language of someone, not something, and saying them instead of it in reference to non-human animals. I had no idea I’d been speaking the language of animacy!
Dr Kimmerer sums this up, “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.”

Every genocide begins with dehumanizing language. Once we move someone outside of what we believe is humanity, it becomes possible to do anything to them.

That’s not the only way that our language can lead to annihilation. Years ago, I learned that our communication is unnecessarily embedded with violence.

Has anyone ever said to you, “I need to be brutally honest.” Why add brutality, when honesty will do? Other common phrases are killing time when there’s space in our schedules, bite the bullet when we’re being courageous, and shoot from the hip when someone is being direct.

These expressions are so normalized that their aggressiveness might be easy to miss.

And just listen to the sayings we use that include non-human animals: kill two birds with one stone, more than one way to skin a cat, and don’t beat a dead horse.

Why such violence when we could feed two birds with one scone, use more than one way to peel a potato, and know that there’s no need to feed a fed horse?

Is it possible that cruel language hinders our compassion and shuts down parts of our souls?

In his book, Helium, Spoken Word Poet Rudy Francisco writes of being asked to kill a spider in a poem titled, Mercy. Recognizing that the spider is simply living their life without being a bother, Rudy instead chooses a cup and a napkin to relocate and free the spider. He says that if ever he is found in the wrong place at the wrong time just being alive, his hope is to be met with the same kind of mercy.

Not a casual hope for a Black man in this country.

Although I consistently relocate spiders, my compassion can get sloppy when it comes to mosquitos. And sometimes I’m too hasty to treat ants with the mercy I would like to receive myself. When I don’t take the time to act with care, I feel guilty. It comes at a great cost to my integrity when I override my natural states of empathy and compassion.

Seeing someone not something is a way to look with the eyes of compassion.

Our capacity isn’t limited. The more we learn, open ourselves to the hard things, and empathize, the more our compassion can grow.

Using the language of animacy can help us be more inclusive.

By changing the way we think and speak, we can change the way we live and act.

Sources cited, referenced, consulted…

Mercy by Rudy Francisco  iamrudyfrancisco.com

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. United States, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

 

Reflection II

Compassion at the Edge
Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
A reflection delivered June 21, 2020
via Zoom

One More

Poet Marge Piercy, writing of oppression and solidarity and unity, concludes her poem “The Low Road” by writing:

It starts when you say we
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.

That is the call that comes with cultivating compassion: Saying “we,” knowing who you mean, and each day meaning one more. It is the call of the compassionate side of every life-enhancing religious tradition, including our Unitarian Universalist tradition, which asks that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or, as some have already expanded it, the inherent worth and dignity of every being.

The Vertical and the Horizontal

Religion is sometimes framed as having both a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension.

The vertical dimension of religion is the transcendent dimension – which has do to with one’s sense of connection and relationship to what is ultimately beyond us  – to God, to Spirit, to life itself, to evolution, to the unfolding universe, to random chance.

The horizontal dimension of religion has to do with our relationship to each other, to humanity, to other animals, to the world, on this concrete, interactive, plane.

Cultivating compassion extends the range of our care and concern, our sense of who we really mean by “we,” on the horizontal dimension. It is anchored in and inspired by our transcendent sense of the nature of the world and existence, but it manifests and plays out in the widening circles of whose well-being we care about, on this horizontal – currently COVID-19 graced – plane, where our compassion is as our compassion does.

The Changing Edges of our Compassion

Those of us who have been around for a while have had chance to extend our circle of care and compassion, and so we know that the boundaries are not fixed, and that how far our compassion extends is up to us. We have had chances to learn of other persons’ and other cultures’ edges in ways that ask us to question our own arbitrary limits.

I appreciate the story Hey, Little Ant, that Lindsay read earlier, and I appreciate Allison’s sharing with us at other times her own ethical framework for her eating decisions.  Our relationships to insects and eating are two great places to start.

I confess have killed many insects in my lifetime, because they were bothersome, or worrisome, or dangerous or painful. Though I still rarely have immediate qualms about swatting a mosquito, I do keep a plastic cup and a stiff piece of cardstock on hand to sequester and carry and liberate most critters that find their way into my apartment.

Then I think of Jainism, of the most ancient religious traditions, which teaches that the highest religious duty, without which a religion is useless they say, is not to kill or harm any being, any life, such that not only are Jains vegetarian, but the most devoted Jains sweep the path in front of them as they walk, lest they unknowingly step on an ant or any form of life, and some wear a cloth over their nose and mouth, not to prevent the spread of a virus, but to prevent the possibility of accidentally inhaling or ingesting a gnat.

A contemporary Jain nun living in London explained that she was obligated to eat every bit of food she was given, because if any of the food were thrown into the garbage, microorganisms would grow on the food, and then those microorganisms would die in the trash bin.

I know, that sounds extreme – or at least like way too much work and bother – to many of us, but it points out that the edges of human compassion are not universal and that the range is wide.

I remember being challenged years ago when I first learned that some people in some places eat dogs and cats and insects. I remember photograph in a National Geographic magazine of a giant walking stick, a walking stick almost 2 feet long, and on a leash. The young man in the photo was raising to become a meal. I was shocked and disgusted. And that kind of encounter asked me to ask myself why? Why not eat dogs and cats and horses and rats and walking sticks if one is going to eat cows and pigs chickens and escargot snails and horse-hoof gelatin. Who draws the lines?

The lines are not universal, as I had assumed when I was young. They are shaped by the norms of our families and our communities, by our religious traditions and by our own experience. So the question is where do I draw the lines of my care and concern? What are the front and growing edges of my compassion?

Black Lives Mattering

You don’t have to move very far at all, to get from those questions to the Black Lives Matter moment that’s on fire right now. Who do we mean when we say “we.” A national legacy of enslaving other human beings and centuries of continuing enculturation work against those of us who are white people learning to include black persons in our meaning of we. Built into our governance, our politics, our economics, our stories, and our many systems, are associations of fear and disgust, danger and illness with black persons and other non-white persons. It’s playing out even now as some claim that it’s black people’s behavior or unique physiology that accounts for the higher rates of COVID-19 infection in black communities.

It’s perpetuated in our language, as Allison has noted. Here’s one important example: the shift from using the term “slaves,” to using the term “people who were enslaved.” More reporters and commentators are catching on, but not all.

To label someone a slave is to say that being a slave is an inherent, intrinsic part of that person’s nature. That’s who they are, by nature, a slave. It places the cause of their enslavement on their own shoulders.

To speak, on the other hand, of “people who were enslaved” retains the humanity of those persons, identifies them as “we” and puts the responsibility for their enslavement where it belongs, on the enslavers, on the people who chose to enslave other human beings. A small change in wording, with tremendous implications for how we portray and see black people, and for shifting the line of care and inclusion.

Where Is the Edge of Your Compassion?

This third Sunday exploring compassion, as we move from self-compassion and compassion for other people in our life, to expanding who we mean when we say “we,” our invitation to you is to locate one growing edge of your compassion, where the line is being challenged, or tested, stretched or loosened, or opened….and to consider whether and in what ways you are being called to extend your compassion out a little bit farther.\

Maybe the current edge of your compassion has to do with which animals, or which life forms you are able to feel empathy with, such that you want them not to suffer, want them be happy, healthy, at ease.

Maybe the current edge of your compassion has to do with an entire group of people – a culture, a race, a gender, a political persuasion, a nationality, a clique –

Maybe the current edge of your compassion has to do with someone very near, a family member or a friend or a person whose behavior grates on your nerves….

The indicator or clue that you are at an edge might be that someone, some being, is just outside the ring of your inclusion, just outside your sense of we, someone you are holding just out of reach in the category of “other” – and that you are not feeling entirely right or at ease about that.

We invite you to spend some time and attention at your edge this week. Some of the options:

Use the Metta/Loving Kindness meditation practice.
Practice using a different pronoun, something other than “it,” for example
Notice the language you are using and hearing. Is it unnecessarily violent, or does it inaccurately claim to capture someone’s essence, like the word “slave.”
Get a cup and stiff piece of paper out, have at the ready, to liberate the critters you don’t really want to share your space with at the moment
Choose not to step on that ant or watch your path more carefully as you move down the sidewalk.
Make different choices about what you eat this week.

Cultivating compassion – practicing compassion – changes us, not only on the horizontal dimension, but also, as our heart and awareness shift and expand, on the vertical dimension, in  our sense of relationship to all that transcends our individual life and self. And when that shifts, who knows what else could happen toward the good.

May you know self-compassion, compassion for the others, compassion for the widest circle of “we” that you can hold.

So may we be.

Sources cited, referenced, consulted…

Jinpa, Thupten. A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives. United States, Hudson Street Press, 2015.

Piercy, Marge. “The Low Road,” published in The Moon Is Always Female. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Interview with Samani Pratibha Pragya on BBC Radio World Service’s “Heart and Soul.” The Incredibly strict diet of a Jain monk. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-32037919

Offering our loving kindness is easy when we like the person on the receiving end. And we can stretch, without too much effort, to encompass the stranger about whom we feel neutral. Now, the person whose behavior irks or angers us? Hmmm….  

From the self-compassion we cultivated the previous week, we continue our journey along the path of the Buddhist Metta meditation, extending the circle of our loving care and concern a few rings outward. 

 

 

 Note: This service came the week after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, the week the protests and riots began, and the week the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States passed the 100,000 mark.

 Rev Kevin’s opening at the beginning of the service included the following:

 “This past week has stacked heartbreak upon heartbreak, stoked fear upon fear, piled discouragement upon discouragement. It has brought a terribly heavy load for the heart and for the spirit, and I know that some of us are feeling buried beneath the weight of it.

. . . beneath the death of George Floyd, yet another black person held under the knee of yet another white person, long enough and visibly enough this time to tear your heart and your hope for humanity, . . .killed in a way that horrifies most, but that shocks only those who have not looked deeply beneath the veneer that light skin and privilege cast over everything on this continent, a veneer that has required a white knee on the neck or back of every person of any other color for more than 500 years.”

Tongues of Fire
Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
A sermon delivered May 31, 2020
via Zoom

[Watch for the video of the sermon soon on UUCM’s YouTube Channel.]

I had originally thought to use this morning to invite us to look forward, as a congregation, from this sustained, external limbo, this liminal threshold from which the view of the future is rather clouded. That will have to come another time. The week is requiring something different.

Like New York Times columnist, David Brooks, who I mentioned earlier, I am feeling short on words this week. Like some of you, I am a person who must turn first inward in order to express outwardly, and there is so much to take in lately. I need to feel if for a time before I can speak to it fully.

Maybe it would be helpful and “enough” to rage cathartically today against the injustices, the systems, the particular behaviors that are so destructive to what we value, and I may yet.

Have you been swearing as much as I have lately, when you receive the daily news stories? Or crying?

I’m raging a fair amount these days, in my home-bound introverted way, but beneath my own anger and my fear, my learning about racism, white supremacy, and U.S. history no longer leads me to see individual police officers or departments, or trios of murderous white vigilantes, or frightened and frightening dog walkers, or even individual self-obsessed people in high national office as the true source of the destruction, or the useful targets of my rage.

Their behaviors must be stopped, yes, using all the means we have or can create, and persons and institutions must be held accountable for their actions, yes. That would be a genuine move forward!

And…. while we are doing that, we have to see that they are, in important ways, racism’s decoys, part of white supremacy’s slight-of-hand that diverts our attention to the shocking and the horrifying as if the latest tragedy is an aberration, focus our attention on the individual bad actors we can rage against safely and righteously, distancing ourselves from them, while the real dynamics are stoked and sustained every day out of sight where we don’t see them, including within ourselves.

Racism is a shape-shifter, my teachers have taught me. It hides in plain view and keeps mutating to avoid detection, so I’ve become wary of the obvious.

Another Kind of Virus

As we members of UUCM’s Challenging White Privilege group are trying to learn and take to heart, we are carriers of the virus of racism, all of us, even when we don’t recognize having symptoms, and we transmit the infection without realizing it, in myriad invisible droplets.

Quarantining a few obviously symptomatic “others” will not ultimately protect people of color or ourselves. Thinking that it will helps to keep racism in place.  It’s going to take massive and widespread changes of heart and behavior, with enough of us “in it” together, and we are each responsible for starting with our own awareness and behaviors.

I went to a hardware store on Memorial Day. I know, not the smartest move. A busy hardware store that day. I did not see a single employee wearing a mask and only a very small percentage of us shoppers wearing masks. This, on a weekend known for out-of-town travel. It’s a story I heard many of you repeating from your experiences in other local stores and businesses.

The disturbing Memorial Day weekend party behaviors – the unmasked, undistanced, seemingly oblivious behaviors relative to the COVID-19 virus – give a symbolic tiny hint at the scale and the scope of challenging racism and white supremacy.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent words to John Hopkins University students come to mind: He said to them:

“All of you, directly or indirectly, will be [must be, I would say] doing your part together with the rest of us to come out from under the shadow of this pandemic.”

“All of you, directly or indirectly, [must be, I would say] doing your part together with the rest of us to come out from under the shadow of this pandemic [of white supremacy.]”

And as Dr. Fauci said to students at the college of the Holy Cross:

“Now is the time, if ever there was one,  for us to care selflessly about one another.”

Who Is This About, Anyway?

Getting angry and loud and righteous, as white persons, or feeling the pain personally, quietly and deeply are important and can be useful IF they strengthen our empathy, our connection, our compassion, our resolve, or motivation, or our solidarity.

In my experience they sometimes risk keeping us focused on ourselves rather than on those who are suffering most, and they risk serving as release valves that help those of us who are white to feel better emotionally, without asking much of us, and without lasting or helpful effect. Righteousness and despair are luxuries that only those of us with privilege can afford.

So, rage, and cry, and worry, and despair even, for a moment, if you need and if it will help – those are valid and appropriate responses to the events of this past week, the past four years, the past decade, the past century, the past 500+ years. And as soon as you can, while you are doing that, notice where your rage, your worry, your despair is focused. Is it on one of the decoys, or on a true, more subtle, much more widespread, near, and viral source? Is it leading you to action, or inaction?

I’m just starting to learn, as a white man, to not let shame or my perfectionism, or my desire to be seen as good to get in the way of accepting the infectious, viral nature of racism and its presence in me. I’ve got a long way to go. Denial and resistance are trademark symptoms of this virus and there is no vaccine in sight.

We’re going to have to do this the personal, sustained, imperfect, over-the-long-haul way, as daunting or discouraging as that may feel to us – like the thought of a long road of sequestering ahead. It’s yet another invitation of this extraordinary time, when just maybe, things will be shaken up enough, when we will be shaken up enough, for something new to be possible.

Pentecost: Preparing for a Blessing

To invite us into this moment more poetically and prayerfully, I would like to close by preparing us for a blessing…a blessing for Pentecost Day, which is today, written five years ago and exactly for today by Jan Richardson. It was published in her book Circles of Grace: Blessings for the Season. Beth Karow shared it with the Worship Team (Thank you, Beth!), and it is a gift in this moment.

For those who are not familiar with Pentecost, it is first a Jewish holy day 50 days after Passover, thus “Pente-cost,” meaning “50th day.” It is rooted in earlier celebrations of the first wheat harvest of the summer. In Christianity, it marks the 49th day after Easter, the “50th day,” if you include Easter.

According to the story – and I invite you to hear this story as a story, in the ways that allow you to hear its truths – the followers of Jesus were gathered for the Jewish holy day of Pentecost. Their beloved and radically inclusive teacher had been killed violently, had appeared to them for a time, and had ascended to heaven, leaving them on earth, having promised that he would at some point send his spirit to guide them. They were waiting, lost, afraid, uncertain, …heart-broken.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,” [the story says] “and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

 Acts 2: 1-4 NRSV

It is in that moment that those brokenhearted and fearful followers found courage and confidence and direction, and began to take their beloved teacher’s message of love and radical inclusion out to a wider world. In Christian communities, it is celebrated as the beginning of the Christian church.

I invite you to receive this blessing through the events of this week and all the related events that have preceded it.

I invite you to receive this blessing through the values of this Unitarian Universalist tradition and congregation.

I invite you to receive this blessing through the lens of Tikkun Olam and the shatterings that have split love into countless fragments that we are called to gather up one by one.*

I invite you to receive this blessing through the lenses that best open its gifts to your heart and your mind in this moment.

This Grace That Scorches Us
A Blessing for Pentecost Day
by Jan Richardson

http://paintedprayerbook.com/2014/06/01/pentecost-this-grace-that-scorches-us/

 

*  A reference to Amy Petrie Shaw’s free retelling of the Shevirat haKeilim (from the Kabbalah), offered earlier in the service. Find it at https://www.uua.org/worship/words/story/shattering-vessels

 

 

 

 

 

UUCM member Chuck Champlin invites us to recognize the legacy we’ve inherited from our Transcendentalist ancestors, and the thresholds they invite us to cross.