Past Services

Flower Power and Radical Welcome

A message delivered via Zoom, May 17, 2020
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

For pdf of sermon text click HERE.

Reading  Open Up the Doors by Rev. Lindasusan Ulrich

https://www.uua.org/worship/words/opening/open-doors

Opening Doors

I know, the metaphor of opening doors is ironic, even painful, at this moment, when for everyone’s safety the doors of our homes now mark a threshold that we do not let most people cross. It becomes a metaphor this morning for opening these virtual doorways or these Zoom windows as our current community doorways. It can also be a metaphor for the very personal doors we are opening in our inner life and awareness.

The Unitarian Flower Ceremony

In the annual service we might have held today, everyone would have been invited to bring a flower, or a blossoming stem, or a twig to create together a big, beautiful, eclectic bouquet or set of bouquets made up of our individual contributions.

It is an annual ritual begun in a Unitarian church in Prague in 1923 by Norbert Capek. After seeking political safety in the U.S. between the world wars, and after discovering Unitarianism here, Norbert and his wife, Maja, returned to their native Bohemia, which by then had become part of Czechoslovakia, and they started a Unitarian church that twenty years later, was the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with 3200 members.

In the beginning, however, in the early 1920s, it was a small, simple, unadorned church. Norbert created a ritual to bring beauty and at the same time to embody a foundational awareness in Unitarianism – the idea that every person has beauty and value, (worth and dignity), that every person brings something unique and vital to the community, if we will let them, and that when we all contribute who we are, as different as we are, something extraordinary can be born, something sweeter than we know.

I’m missing today that annual physical ritual of creating those bouquets, and it’s been wonderful to see the photos of yourselves in the midst of your beautiful flowers and at your home doorways. I invite and encourage you to be part of the readings and the images that we bring into Sunday mornings each week now. Keep watching for the invitations and send your photos or recordings in. If that sounds daunting or you do not have the equipment or are not sure how to do it, Please check in with us. We may be able to help.

We are needing, these days, to find new ways to bring who we are to this shared community, and it looks like we are going to have time to get very thoughtful and creative and good at this.

The Long Road Ahead

The president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, wrote to us this week offering an update on the Association’s guidance regarding in-person services. Based on consultations with public health officials and other experts, the leadership of our UUA continues to recommend that congregations not gather in person. They also recommend that “congregations begin planning for virtual operations for the next year (through May 2021).”

Immediately after that statement, Susan wrote, “Take a moment to breathe. I know this is significant.”

I invite you to take a moment to breathe. A whole year yet. Breathe……

As President Frederick-Gray points out in her message, approaching the future this way will allow us “to be creative with our long-term planning while still being flexible if conditions change significantly.” If things get safer sooner, we can adapt to that!

I know that most, if not all, of you will agree with her that “Our care for the well-being and safety of our members, [friends and] staff must be a priority in this pandemic.” If we did not realize it before, we are reminded each day in the news that “our actions directly impact the health and well-being of our neighbors.”

Susan goes on to point out that” religious gatherings are considered highly contagious events. The acts of singing, the familiarity of people across households, the multigenerational community of children, youth, adults, and seniors—the things that make our congregations so special—also create more risk for spreading the virus.”

From a different angle, I love the idea that our religious gatherings are highly contagious events! May ours be so!

And if we are to open up the doors more, wider still, as far as they will go, we’ll need to figure out how to open them up in new ways virtually. One of the gifts already of being entirely online as a congregation is that geographic distance is no longer a barrier to participation. It’s been great to see the familiar names and faces of people who have moved, and it’s been wonderful as well to see you who are new to this community. If you are wanting to know more about UUism or UUCM, please let us know. With the long haul in mind, we are looking for ways to open the doors and to connect meaningfully.

Meanwhile, while we are all looking out our separate doorways, for the next year perhaps, we can be looking inside and growing our internal commitment to become, together, ever more radically welcoming in heart and mind.

The Rest of the Story

The flower ritual that Norbert Capek created doesn’t end with creating the shared bouquet. At the end of the service he invited everyone to take a different flower or twig home with them as symbols of the gifts they received from each other. If we understand and take to heart the Unitarian Universalist values beneath that ritual to their fullest, we will seek to value the gifts that each person brings, even those whose presence stretches us and invites us to change.

Stephanie Spellers writes in powerful and practical terms of the notion of radical welcome. I was introduced to an adaption of her work in a course I took recently in trans-inclusion from Zr. Alex Kapitan and Rev. Mykal Slack, a course in becoming truly welcoming to transgender and non-binary persons. I’m drawing on their work and using some of their language this morning.

Today, I simply want to share the progression of welcoming – from invitation, to inclusion, to radical welcome – so that as we are learning to live and to celebrate community in new ways together, we can also be imagining community in new ways together.

Invitation and Inclusion

Briefly, welcome begins with Invitation

At the level of invitation we say that everyone is welcome, regardless of…fill in the blank. We invite everyone in, “whether or not we are prepared for their presence” – whether or not we are prepared for their spiritual views, their oddities, their political views, their smell, their mental health challenges, their marginalized identities, their difference.

At the level of invitation we offer a general and broad welcome, assuming that our being friendly is enough for someone to feel welcome, and we give the job of welcoming to the greeters. At this level, of invitation, the underlying message is, “You will be assimilated”…to the extent you are willing to be like us, to believe like us, to behave like us. We invite you into our like-minded community.

Sound familiar?
It’s an important starting place – in our personal lives and in our community life,.

At the next level of welcome, the level of inclusion, we work a little harder at incorporating those who are different in some way. We are more specific in our welcome, we name LGBTQ persons, or that Black Lives Matter. We make surface changes to reduce the barriers  – we have all-gender restrooms and appropriate signs, we put in ramps for wheelchairs, we put our preferred pronouns on our nametags, we include photographs of people of color in our visual elements.

We work at the welcoming, but only up to the point where we might have to change our culture, have to change the way we do things around here in order for new folks to feel truly welcome, onnly up to the point where we don’t have to give up the things that we like in order to help someone else have the things that are important to them: our style of music or our style of services, for example, our kinds of social events, and ways of meeting, the language we use…

Sound familiar?
It’s an important move to make in our personal lives and in our community life, moving from invitation to inclusion.

Radical Welcome

Radical Welcome, then, genuinely embodies the belief that each one of us is better off when all of us can be ourselves and express ourselves fully, when we can learn from one another. People outside the majority norms aren’t merely tolerated, but centered, integrated and valued fully for who they are and the unique perspective and the life-changing gifts they bring. When offering a radical welcome, new, out-of-our-ordinary people, especially people typically marginalized in some way, are not only invited and accepted and incorporate, their presence transforms the community, liberates the community from its assimilating sameness.

Radical welcome is about allowing out-of-our-ordinary people to change us.

So, a quick Caveat: There is a boundary when it comes to behavior that is destructive. Not anything goes. We cannot welcome all behavior. But radical welcome asks us to discern carefully whether a person’s behavior is truly destructive, or rather simply uncomfortably but helpfully disruptive.

Why Now? 

While this may all seem rather removed from the stay-at-home realities of the moment, a year staying at home (or however long it turns out to be) is going to ask us to get increasingly clear about what community is, what community means, and what community can be, at its best.

My hope is that if we plant the seeds now for thinking about who we are and how, about who we welcome and how, we might be able to open our doors wider still, to grow our vision for what UUCM can be in this community. We can look for the ways to live toward that vision now, even while otherwise staying at home. We can live toward it in all the choices we make about how to connect and gather and act in the world, even from our individual living rooms.

In the course, we spoke of something as seemingly simple as the welcoming words we use in our services. As in many other congregations, we often say something like, “We welcome you, whether you are young or old, theist or humanist, whether you walked in or rolled in, etc. The point here being that WE welcome YOU.

Radical welcome, instead, invites “we” language.

“We are young, we are old. We are comfortable wealthy, we are struggling to make ends meet. We are at many places long the spectrum of gender identity. We are frightened, we are content. We are humanist, we are theist. We are the bearers of white privilege, we are targets of harm because of the color of our skin.”

Not WE welcome YOU, but WE are US. We, as we are, are already included.

Such a small turn in language and framing, for such a significant difference in the meaning and the sense of community.

In Radical Welcome, everyone takes responsibility for fostering belonging and for building relationships, and members grow deeper in their faith and in their humanity as a result.

Stephanie Spellers suggests that Radical Welcome is not about liberating those who are coming in the doors. It’s about liberating those of us who are already inside.

Open up the doors, my friends, 
Lest we keep the stranger out 

Open up the doors, my friends,
and in so doing, let yourself in.

So may it be.

So may we be.

Sources cited, referenced, consulted…

Open Up the Doors by Rev. Lindasusan Ulrich
https://www.uua.org/worship/words/opening/open-doors

Frederick-Gray, Susan. Pandemic time recommendations from the UUA, in a “special announcement” email, May 14, 2020.

Grohsmeyer, Janeen K.. A Lamp in Every Corner. Unitarian Universalist Association, 2004. – “A Plain and Simple Beauty: The Flower Communion”

“Transgender Inclusion in Congregations” (online course) by Zr. Alex Kapitan and Rev. Mykal Slack of the Transforming Hearts Collective.
https://www.transformingheartscollective.org/
https://www.transformingheartscollective.org/online-courses

Morgensen, Faye. Ancient Stories for Modern Times: 50 Short Wisdom Tales for All Ages. United States, Skinner House Books, 2016.

“Milk and Sugar” from the epic poem, Quissa-I Sanjan, 1599 by Bahman Kaikobad Hamjiar Sanjana.

Two other versions of the “Sugar in the Milk” story:
http://www.parsicuisine.com/sugar-in-the-milk-a-parsi-kitchen-story/
https://www.npr.org/2008/03/20/88505980/sugar-in-the-milk-a-parsi-kitchen-story

Spellers, Stephanie. Radical Welcome: Embracing God, the Other, and the Spirit of Transformation. United States, Church Pub., 2006.

 

Our Mother-Ship

A message delivered via Zoom, May 10, 2020
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

To see the video click HERE.

For pdf of sermon text click HERE.

Mother’s Day Beginnings

Unitarian Julia Ward Howe is best known today for writing the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” [sing a portion], a song meant to spur on the Union troops in the Civil War. But in her time, Julia Ward Howe was known for her work to end slavery, to promote international peace, and to secure women’s right to vote. She hosted the first convention of Unitarian women ministers, and she was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She is also the founder of Mother’s Peace Day in the U.S, an anti-war event which was later turned into the Mother’s Day that we know. In her original proclamation Howe wrote,

“As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council . . . to promote . . . the great and general interests of peace.”

For Howe, Mother’s Day wasn’t about honoring mothers with flowers and cards and brunches, nice as that can be, it was about honoring the important life-saving perspectives and voices that women bring, perspectives and voices so often ignored, or discouraged and discounted, as they were in her marriage.

This Mother’s Day, I am, of course, glad to celebrate and appreciate each of you mothers and motherers, Happy Mothers Day! However, in this transformative, pandemic-suspended time my thoughts turn this morning to the root of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day, beneath the anti-war focus even, to the importance of the voices, perspectives, and leadership of women if we are to move into a more life-sustaining future.

I want to acknowledge up front both the narrowness of this female/male binary that does not serve those who do not identify as male or female, and that here I am, a male-identified person talking today about the importance of honoring the voices of women. I’ll come back to that….dissonance.

The 19th Amendment Nearby

 I’ve been meeting with a group of almost all women to plan an event in August honoring the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment which guaranteed, on paper, the right of all women citizens of the United States to vote.

The event is the vision of Nevada City mayor, Reinette Senum, whose hope has been that this community learn more of the untold stories of the suffrage effort – the painful stories, the hidden stories, including those related to racism – and that the community draw on that learning to envision a sustaining and sustainable future for Nevada County into the next 100 years.

In the late 1800s, Nevada City resident Ellen Clark Sargent served as treasurer of the National Woman Suffrage Association. She was a close friend of Susan B. Anthony, after whom our UUCM library is named. With Ellen’s urging, her husband, Aaron, a U.S. Senator in 1878, proposed a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. As you know, that amendment did not pass in 1878, but it was reintroduced every year for the next 40 years until – in the midst of the worst pandemic of that century, the worst on this continent since the smallpox epidemic that killed so many indigenous people – it took hold and was enacted in 1920 as the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Our group started last fall planning a big, interactive three-day event at Miner’s Foundry for the amendment’s anniversary coming in August. And then… the corona virus arrived.

In our conversations, we navigated not only the sudden changes needed in our event plans, but also our individual unfolding reactions to the pandemic. We spoke of our personal fears, the dangers and the likely hardships ahead.

We spoke also of the potential transformation that could come from our world being shaken drastically enough to really change things. We spoke of opportunities opened by the upheavel to find truly new ways forward. We spoke of the vital importance of the vision, knowledge, skill and leadership of women in finding that new path forward and avoiding a return to business as usual.

In the process we became more clear about the focus for this now online event, an event that draws on local and national history to lift up the voices and leadership of women, including women marginalized in other ways, as we look for a path into the future that is more compassionate, more sustainable, and more just, to put it in the words of this congregation’s mission.

More information to come about that event, but today it inspires me to lift up a few of the known influences of women on our UU story – some of the mothers of our living tradition.

Judith Sargent Murray

Judith Sargent Murray, for example, a very early Universalist on this continent, essayist, poet, writer of likely the first play by any American author to be produced on stage, and with her essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes” in 1790, the first published American advocate for women’s rights.

Advancing the notion of “Republican Motherhood” she argued, very shrewdly, that “the success of the new nation required intelligent citizens—and since the education of patriotic sons rested with mothers, women should be educated.” She educated her own daughter at home and helped open a female academy south of Boston in 1802.

Her lifelong advocacy of women’s rights aligned with her Universalism, which claimed that if God loves everyone absolutely, who are we to see anyone as excluded from opportunity, or as higher or lower than any other person. Whether or not we hold a belief in God or divinity of any kind, it is a value to which we UUs still aspire and toward which UUs work to this day.

Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley

You have likely never heard of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, born three years after Murray’s essay on the equality of the sexes was published.  Sarah, a scholar, did not leave writings behind, nor did she found institutions. Instead, she quietly influenced a generation of the coming Transcendentalists who did!  Sarah taught and tutored and otherwise ran the household for the students at a boarding school run by her husband – students like young Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose views later shaped not only Unitarianism, but American culture broadly. Emerson and his friends vied for a place around her kitchen table to seek her wisdom, knowledge, and counsel as well as her food. Emerson wrote, “talk on what you will she can always give you a new idea – ask her any philosophical question, she will always enlighten you by her answer.”

Sarah embodied the explicit use of reason that came to characterize Unitarianism, the use of reason, no matter where it led. Ralph Waldo’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who had taken Sarh under her wing earlier, credited Sarah with what she saw as Ralph Waldo’s downfall into what became known as transcendentalism.

Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley is an example of who knows how many women we will never know. Women denied the opportunity of professorships and ministries. Women whose scholarship was quietly channeled toward women and men who we do know and remember.

The Iowa Sisterhood

70 years after Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley was born, Universalist Olympia Brown became, in 1863, one of the first woman to be ordained as clergy with the consent of her denomination, consent denied her at first. Just 12 years after Olympia’s ordination, Julia Ward Howe was organizing that Women’s Ministerial Conference, and 21 Unitarian women were connecting with each other for mutual support as they served churches throughout the Midwest and plains states.

Known in time as the Iowa Sisterhood, they took the hard jobs out on the rough and tumble frontier, a prospect that scared off most of the male ministers from the east. Not only did these women serve and found successful and rapidly growing congregations, they changed the nature of church in America, from a place where one heard liberal religious ideas to “a church that provided comfort, hospitality, community, education, cultural enrichment and social service (Peterson, 74).”

Caroline Bartlett Crane

Caroline Bartlett Crane, for example, built huge new church building in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a building that looked not like a church, but like a very large home. She helped change the congregation’s name to “People’s Church,” which is still the congregation’s name.

Caroline wrote,

“This church cannot be a place where we are merely to come together once a week and enjoy our doctrine and congratulate ourselves that we have a faith free from superstition. We must do something for others, as well as for ourselves. And the more we have done for others, the more in the end, we shall find we have done for ourselves.”

These women held classes in reading, writing, sewing, finances, home economics, cooking. They put classrooms in their church buildings, as well as homelike parlors with fireplaces. They attended to the entire life of their members, not just their theological ideas and ideologies.  You see their influence still in many protestant churches.

But by the turn of the century, as those areas of the country became more developed and appealing, and as the nation exerted a return to more masculine leadership in general, the men who held power in the institutions of the east withdrew their support and effectively pushed the women out of their ministerial roles and into retirement, or more often, into civic roles, where these women continued to invest in the strength and health of their communities.

130 Universalist and Unitarian women were eventually ordained in that era, but by 1960, there were no Unitarian women ministers, and only 3 women ministers serving Universalist congregations.

The UUA Merger

That was the reality the year before the 1961 merger of the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association which resulted in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. Our association.

This Tuesday marks the 59th anniversary of that merger, a merger for which the Universalists and the Unitarians had top hammer out a set of principles that would be acceptable enough to members of both groups. Those original 1961 principles referred to “the dignity of man,” “ideals of brotherhood,” and “men of goodwill.”

So, in the late 70s, in the midst of second wave feminism, Unitarian Universalist women strategized about how to eradicate the sexism from their own religion, how to affirm women, and how to show respect for the earth while they were at it.

Their efforts led to a 1985 rewrite of the UUA purposes and principles, the addition of a seventh principle (“Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”), and a push to update the UU hymnbook and its sexist language.

The Numbers

In 1972, at the beginning of that wave of feminism, only a couple dozen UU ministers were women, 3% of all UU ministers.  Six years later, in 1978, the numbers had doubled – there were 57 women ministers, 6%. When I first joined a UU congregation in 1989 eleven years later, the numbers had quadrupled to 276, or 25% of UU ministers. Then by just 10 years later, in 1999, women outnumbered men in UU pulpits. In fact, it made the front page of The New York Times: the Unitarian Universalist Association became the first Protestant denomination in history in which congregations employed more female than male clergy in their leadership.

With the women ministers came more focus on shared ministry and collaboration, room for more varied senses of spirituality, more personal openness, a focus on relationships and connecting. They opened the way for Gay and Lesbian ministers, and eventually transgender, queer, and gender non-conforming ministers.

Three years ago, Susan Frederick-Gray became the first woman President of the UUA, a milestone guaranteed by the nominating committee’s commitment to force UUism across this threshold. They did it by nominating only women candidates for the role.

Since then, women and gender non-conforming persons have led the way in our Association’s significant and long overdue effort to decenter whiteness and to center the voices of Black persons, Indigenous persons, other People of Color, and other historically marginalized persons.

So What? Now What?

So, with that very little bit of UU herstory in mind and heart on this Mothers Day, I ask, “What does it mean?” and “Where is it leading?”

This is a much larger conversation, but I want to plant the seed for it today.

One of the messages I take from our history – as we find ourselves suspended in the significant disruption of this moment, aware of the enormous and growing disparities in wealth and power and aware of the destruction of our environment – is that if we want to find our way into a future that is meaningfully different from and better for more people than our past (a future that is genuinely more compassionate, more sustainable, and more just), it is women who can best lead the way,  women, particularly marginalized women, and others who have been held out at the margins of society and power.

We who have power (we men), by virtue of the power we have been granted, cannot help, as leaders, but in subtle ways to feed a slide toward business as usual, no matter how progressive and well-intentioned we are. It’s similar to what we are learning about what it means to be white in a culture that privileges and prioritizes whiteness.  Even when we are trying not to, our behaviors often support and shore up the status quo.

I know, this a tough pill for men to swallow. You might ask, “Wouldn’t equal leadership be the true ideal, our vision of Beloved Community? Not either/or, but both/and? Wouldn’t it be helpful to be gender blind?”

Well, in theory, …eventually, yes, that is the ideal. But to get there from here, to shift things, to avail ourselves of the opportunities at this particular threshold, it’s going to take some correction, and I believe that the role for us cis-gender men at this point in humanity’s journey, is to learn to stay in the room and be willing to be led.

On Men Leaving the Building

 I’ve been thinking about this over the last couple of years as I’ve watched my white male colleagues of a certain age struggle with a sense of feeling lost as our Association seeks to decenter whiteness and traditional holders of power – to de-center white men, in effect – as women have now become the large majority of our seminarians and our ministers.

We men have been encouraged and trained to lead from front and center, and to do good in the world from that location. When we are not front and center, we’re not quite sure what to do.

I’m watching my white, male colleagues, many of whom deeply support the decentering of whiteness and maleness, decide that their job then, must be to get out of the way, to be helpful by leaving the room and making space for a new set of leaders.

But when we white men leave the room entirely, we take our power out with us, withdrawing it as a resource that could serve and support those new leaders.  I believe that our job for the foreseeable future, our job as men and as white people, is to learn to stay in the room and be willing to be led by others and by their vision for the future.

Otherwise very little will really change.

To Be Continued…

I’m still figuring out what this mean and looks like for me.  As I am wont to say, “to be continued.”

The Mother’s Day that we know, as lovely and loving as it is, bolsters the traditional roles and places of women and men in our society. Julia Ward Howe had a vision for Mother’s Day of women’s perspectives turning the status quo on its head. Many Unitarian, Universalist and Unitarian Universalist women before and since – including many of you, I know – have held hope for similar possibilities.

This Mother’s Day, the disrupted state of the world may be opening up a rare opportunity.

May we answer the opportunity of this moment, knowing that what we introduce now might not get ratified for another 40 or 50 years. May we know that it is nonetheless, the important and the right thing to do.

So may we be.

Resources consulted, cited, recommended…

French, Kimberly. “Thirty Years of Feminist Transformation.” UU World, Summer 2007. www.uuworld.org/articles/thirty-years-feminist-transformation Accessed May 7, 2020.

Goodwin, Joan W.. The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley: The Life of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley. Lebanon, Northeastern University Press, 1998. Print.

Howe, Julia Ward. “Mother’s Day Proclamation. www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/199339.shtml  Accessed May 3, 2020.

Lewis, Jone Johnson. “Unitarian and Universalist Women.” ThoughtCo. www.thoughtco.com/unitarian-and-universalist-women-3530635 Accessed May 7, 2020.

Owen-Towle, Carolyn S.. “Doors opened to women.” UU World, Summer 2011. www.uuworld.org/articles/women-uu-ministry Accessed May 7, 2020.

Peterson, Polly. Missionaries, Builders, and Pathfinders: Unitarian and Universalist Stories from the Midwest, West, and South, 1830-1930. United States, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2014. Print. Accessed May 5, 2020.

Sangrey, Dawn. “The Feminization of the Unitarian Universalist Clergy: Impacts, Speculations, and Longings” www.meadville.edu/files/resources/v2n1-sangrey-the-feminization-of-the-unitarian-uni.pdf

Tucker, Cynthia Grant. Prophetic Sisterhood. United States, iUniverse, 2000. Print.

A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism: From the Beginning to 1899. United States, Skinner House Books, 2017. Print.

A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism: From 1900 to the Present. United States, Skinner House Books, 2017. Print.

Judith Sargent Murray: Prominent Essayist and Advocate for Women’s Equality. History of American Women website. www.womenhistoryblog.com/2011/10/judith-sargent-murray.html Accessed May 3, 2020.

Walleser, Lauren. “Celebrating UU Women in History.” UUA website. www.uua.org/pressroom/stories/celebrating-uu-women-history  Accessed May 2020.

The Most Sacred of Times: Life, the Universe, and Everything

A message delivered via Zoom, March 29, 2020
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

 

See the video HERE.

This morning’s service was to have been a service celebrating the end of our annual Stewardship campaign – our annual pledge campaign here at UUCM – and it was also to have been a service welcoming our newest members. These are both still important things to do and so we will accomplish them in other ways, including incorporating some of our newest members in these online services.

But given the nature of our lives right now, a couple weeks into the closer presence of the COVID-19 virus, with its waves of ramifications, it feels important to be present this morning to this life-changing aspect of our journey.

The title of this service, when we planned it a couple months ago, was then simply “Life, the Universe and Everything.” It was, yes as some of you might expect, a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with its humor around the search for meaning. In light of the current moment, the encouragement on the book’s cover – “Don’t Panic!” – takes on added meaning.

More seriously, it was a reference to the reasons that members commit to support this congregation and its mission to create a world more compassionate, sustainable and just, and a reference to the reasons people join a community like UUCM in the first place.

Although we understand it and frame it in many different ways, in the end religious community is always about the search for meaning and connection, whether we, ourselves, sense meaning most directly through the world of ideas and concepts, or values and commitments, or through the visceral experiences of our bodies, or through our heart-centered emotional relationships with one another. The shared journey of this congregation is a never-ending discernment of what matters most and why, and therefore how best to live our days.

And Then Some Other Stuff Happened

In The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything is revealed. For those who don’t know, spoiler alert, I’m about to tell you (in the event that a person near you hasn’t called it out already): it is the number 42.

I once heard the book’s author, Douglas Adams, explain that as he was writing the series he would pause frequently in his writing process, and take the most outrageously distant idea or image that popped up randomly in his mind, and then he would insert that thing, prominently, right into the story line. That’s why a towel figures so prominently, for example. And a Chesterfield sofa.

Life feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it? With its random reversals of fortune, and arrivals of unexpected items that suddenly figure prominently. The current moment feels a bit like that, though people have been warning for many decades that a pandemic would arrive at some point, and that we ought to be prepared, not surprised, when it did.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, the answers to the “meaning of life” questions are not spelled out for us and they are not permanent. The answers are continually being discerned by each of us, in community, dancing with the questions together.

When I talk about my closest friendships and the friends whom I feel able to be most vulnerable, I say that when we talk, “we talk about life, the universe, and everything.” The point being not only the wide scope of our conversation topics, but more important, the deep quality of our conversing, no matter what we are talking about.

In UU congregations, a key spiritual goal is to cultivate the quality of our conversing, no matter the topic. Right now, more than ever, faced with the danger of a life-threatening, world transforming virus, the meaning questions come flying to the surface – what really matters? and why? how shall we live in this world now? –  what meaning does my life have, and what meaning shall we make of it all?

So, an important part of our work is to find ways to continue our shared searching and conversing while we are each relegated to our newly separated spaces, to connect meaningfully while we are traveling this new road.

The Most Sacred of Times

At the same time, the introvert in me sees that we have an important opportunity to honor the spaciousness of this time for its invitations and its gifts.

A couple Sundays ago I shared Rev. Lynn Ungar’s wonderful piece titled Pandemic. Rev. Lynn begins, “What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath – the most sacred of times?”

This morning, I’d like to extend Rev. Ungar’s invitation to approach this sequestered, life-altering time not first as a nuisance, or a mistake, or a terror, but as potentially, the most sacred of times. A once-in-a-lifetime prolonged orthodox sabbath, outside our usual ruts and distractions and automatic pilot behaviors. A sabbath set aside for us to face in deeper, more honest, more frightening (probably) ways our selves, and the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

To jump traditions for a moment, I feel like we have all been placed, without being asked, in a remote Zen monastery of sorts for an extended and rather severe retreat. A retreat, not simply because we are away, sequestered in our separate spaces, with simplified amenities, and away from our usual distractions, but because in this kind of space, for this amount of time, with these kinds of worries and questions on our minds, we will be confronted, increasingly, by the most elemental aspects of who we are. I know that I am already seeing more of who I am – as a minister, as a leader, as a neighbor, and as human being faced with an external, human-delivered danger.

One of the first times I went to type the new portion of this sermon title – “The most sacred of times” – I transposed the “a” and the “c” in the word “sacred’ and instead typed, “the most scared of times.”

I love typos! –  for what they reveal, or for the new perspectives they can inspire. Maybe I was feeling more frightened than I was letting myself realize.

This may be, for many of us, the most scared and the most sacred of times.

Sacred, not because it is scarey, or because this time is inherently any more or less sacred than any other time, but sacred because of what we will have a chance to make of it IF we are willing and able to enter it fully, with awareness, and attention, and reflection.

It is so powerfully disorienting, that it is already inviting us to reorient ourselves and our priorities. I can scarcely imagine what it will invite in several weeks.

As we take shelter in our homes, reaching out to connect in the ways that we can, let’s also allow the distances and spaces and whatever spiritual, emotional, intellectual reversals of fortune we are experiencing, to affect us meaningfully, through our intentional internal work, our spiritual practices, as well as through the ongoing conversations about what matters that have moved now to texts, and phone calls and email and Zoom sessions.

Taking Refuge

It’s tempting to take refuge, to seek comfort and safety, to try not to be too affected by what’s happening, and that will be important, at times, for our wellbeing, but I have found myself thinking about Doug Kraft’s re-take on refuge and the 3 refuges in Buddhism as one set of doorways we might use to enter this as a sacred time.

Doug Kraft is a minister emeritus of the UU Society of Sacramento, and a student and teacher of Buddhist meditation.

Traditionally there are three refuges in Buddhism: one takes refuge in the Buddha, in the Dhamma, and in the Sangha.

Doug writes that “the most obvious understanding of these [three] is: taking refuge in the historic Buddha Gautama as a guide and teacher,[taking refuge] in his teachings [and wisdom] (the ‘Dhamma’) as a practice, and [taking refuge] in the community of fellow seekers, (the ‘Sangha’).”

But, Doug adds, since the Buddha insisted “that we take our own deepest experience as our ultimate guide,” – as we do in UUism – and since “we each have our own Buddha nature that we can rely on if we listen deeply enough,” we can think of the first refuge as “taking refuge in our own true nature.”

Now that we are so much by ourselves, the invitation of our sequestering and our reactions to what is going on, will be to discover and uncover more of our true nature…the most real you.  I bet you are catching glimpses already. I know I am.

“The word ‘Dhamma’,” Doug writes, “literally means ‘law – but not human laws, rather natural laws, “the truth of how things actually work,” and so he reframes the second refuge as taking refuge in the truth of how things really are. An unlikely refuge it would seem, at the surface. Facing what is, is a challenge. AND, when we are seeing what truly is, we are indeed in a safer space.

The invitation of the virus and everything that is unfolding in response to it is to see beneath the surface of our expectations and assumptions and the relative ease of our lives, to see with newly open eyes the truths of the world, the full range of how things really are. When we can do that honestly, without denying it, or turning, or running away, we are indeed in a refuge that will serve our spirits well.

And the Sangha? That refuge we know well…the refuge of our community of fellow seekers after the meaning of life, the universe and everything, which for Doug includes all those who have traveled this path before. If absence is ever to make the heart grow fonder…it will be now. We will not return as the same persons who went into our homes with our dry beans and our packs of toilet paper (if we could find some), into these refuges that invite not ease, but courage and depth.

The invitation of our physical distancing is to discover the more subtle aspects of our need for social connection for the sake of our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual health. It is to expand our sensitivity and our ability to connect. We are being invited to learn new ways to connect.

As Rev Lynn Ungar put it, “We are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful….you could hardly deny it now.” Here too we have a chance to come out the other side reoriented toward the most true in us, when we gather in person once again.

Extraordinary Days

In our reading earlier, Theresa Soto pointed out that “People wake up to ordinary days all the time (60).” But, of course, these are no ordinary days, my friends.

If we can find it in us to take perhaps uneasy refuge in our own true nature as it is revealed to us,

if we can brave taking refuge in the sobering, magnificent, inconvenient truth of how things really are without running from it,

if we can take refuge in this, our very human, imperfect and vulnerable community of seekers, our companions on this journey, even now,

this could indeed become for each of us the most sacred of times.

May it be so for you.

May it be so for us.

May it be so for humanity.

 

So may it be.

Amen.

 

Sources Referenced, Quoted, Consulted

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. , 2017. Print.

Kraft, Doug. Getting Out of the Way: Reflections on Essential Meditation Insights that are Easily Forgotten. 2016. Print.

Soto, Theresa I. Spilling the Light: Meditations on Hope and Resilience. , 2019. Print.

 

What is Given From the Heart
(The title and some recurring lines are rooted in the book,
What is Given from the Heart by Patricia C. McKissack, Illustrated by April Harrison.)

A message delivered March 1, 2020
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

At Christmas, in my family, all eight kids and two parents each gave every other person a gift. That meant at least 90 presents crowded under the Christmas tree in our living room on Christmas morning. We opened those gifts one at a time, oohing and ahhing at the thoughtfulness, the creativity, the artistry, and/or the sense of humor. Almost all of the gifts were homemade every year, in part, because that was what we could afford, but also because making those personal gifts was an important part of each gift – given from the heart, reaching the heart.

My youngest sister was only about three years old when she saw all of us in our separate places busily making and wrapping gifts before Christmas, and she did not want to miss out on the action, she did not want to miss out on the giving. So, she went to the toy box and chose pieces of toys to wrap, which meant sort of crumpling a piece of paper around them. She chose just single pieces: One checker. One very chewed up, gray, plastic brontosaurus. The smooth beige ear or the bright red shiny lips of Mr. Potato Head. At the age of 3, she was onto the joy of giving. She could feel it in us, and in herself – from the heart, reaching the heart.

[Holding up a piece of wood] This is the gift one of my younger brothers made for me one Christmas. He went out to the woodpile, grabbed this rough-sawn “Y” destined for our wood stove, glued a carefully cut out piece of red felt on the bottom, and drilled six holes in the side to make…a pencil holder. It is my favorite pencil holder – given from the heart, reaching the heart.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of a very similar spirit in her family, with their similarly homemade gifts. As a child, she writes, she “thought that was the definition of a gift: something you made for someone else (24).” Writing of her family and reflecting on the earth’s abundant annual gift of wild strawberries, she explains that she “experienced the world . . . as a gift economy,” pointing out that “gifts establish a particular relationship between people,” a “feeling-bond between two people” (quoting Lewis Hyde). Comparing gifts to things that we purchase, she writes, “The nature of an object . . . is so changed by the way it has come into your hands.” Unlike most purchased objects, which lose value the moment one buys them, gifts “move, and their value increases with their passage.”

There is an often-told story about the origin of money. It goes something like this:
(Rooted in Bill Maurer’s interview with Shankar Vedantam on “Hidden Brain.”)

In the beginning, there was no money, only a formless void.

On the first day, someone who had a lot of fish and who wanted acorns, but who had no acorns, went to sleep disappointed.

On the second day, that person met a person who had lots of acorns and who wanted fish, but who had no fish. They both went to sleep disappointed, but thoughtful.

On the third day, the two people figured out that they had a “double coincidence of wants,” and so bartering was born, and they deciding together how many fish were worth how many acorns, and they traded and went to sleep happy and well fed.

On the fourth day, the two people encountered a third person who had lots of strawberries, but who was allergic to both fish and acorns. The first two people so wanted some strawberries, but had only fish and acorns to barter. They all went to sleep feeling frustrated.

On the fifth day, after a night of vivid dreams, they held a long brainstorming session, during which the three people invented …money, which they decided should look like a fancy shell, or a stone with special markings. And the person with the fish and the person with the acorn traded a shell and a stone, respectively, for strawberries, and the third person took the shell and the stone with them, to trade for what they really wanted.

On the sixth day, they each convinced a few more people to go along with this whole idea.

And on the seventh day, …they each went shopping.*
  (*Jordan Thomas-Rose’s addition)

As Bill Maurer puts it, the traditional story says that “humans wizard up . . .this magical substance that can put all things on one scale of value, and [they] use that as sort of their measuring stick, then, to make . . . transactions” of many kinds, for all those times when people don’t just happen to have a double coincidence of wants.

But, Maurer says, there is a problem with this story.
Direct barter is not to be found around the world or in the archeological record.

“What we find instead,” he told Shankar Vedantam on the Hidden Brain podcast, “are systems where people are taking some kind of object – . . . [like] a big shell – and using it to mark relationships . . . among people… [They] serve as a kind of indicator of enduring obligations that people have to one another. It’s …like an open-ended IOU.”

He puts it this way:

“If I give you this big shell thing, then that implies for us, but also for everyone around us, that we have a bond. We have a relationship that will essentially allow us to have a flow of goods between each other and between our families for the rest of our lives, essentially.

     So, it’s not so much that I’m giving you this shell so that you give me some pigs. It’s I’m giving you this shell so as to say, hey, someday I’m going to need some pigs. Some other day, I might need your help in the field. Some other day, you might need me to help you out with something.

     This shell . . . marks that relationship. It signifies to everyone around us that we have these ties of enduring obligation and responsibility.”

As we enter this annual Stewardship campaign – “stewardship” from an Old English word meaning “keeper of the hall” – I invite you to think about money not as a tool for shopping and purchasing what you want here, but rather as the big shell that you offer to signify, to yourself and to others, your enduring relationship with this community.

In our tradition, congregation members are Member-Owners. This is your religion co-op. You aren’t buying something with your pledge of time, of talent, and of treasure, you are signifying and investing in a relationship for the long haul.

There’s a clever slogan used when asking people for financial donations. It is, “Don’t give until hit hurts, go beyond that, give until it feels good.”

But what’s underneath that truth-based slogan is a deeper message, “Don’t give until it hurts. Give until it helps.” Until it helps you, until it helps the cause of the congregation’s mission, until it does both of those things by deepening your sense of relationship to this community and what it values.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, again:

“If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow.
When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become (31).”

This year I invite you to give until it helps, until you know yourself deeply connected, until what is given from the heart reaches the heart, your own heart first of all.

I invite you to give until you are wealthy.

So may we be.

Works Consulted, Works Cited

Kimmerer, Robin W. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Print.

Mckissack, Patricia C. What Is Given from the Heart. New York: Random House USA Inc, 2019. Print.

Vedantam, Shankar, host. “Emotional Currency: How Money Shapes Relationships.” Hidden Brain, NPR, 13 January, 2020.  www.npr.org/transcripts/795246685

 

When the Winds Have Shifted, When the World Comes Undone *
(* phrases from the song “Resilient” by Rising Appalachia)

A message delivered February 16, 2020
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

 

Our Heritage of Optimism

Universalists and Unitarians over the centuries have been, by nature and thus by theology, an optimistic lot. We’ve expected things to turn out pretty well, in the end.

Historically, the Unitarian view sees human beings as essentially and inherently good at heart. Not perfect, but gradually perfectible – given the right care, the right support, the right awareness, the right circumstances. Our job, then, is to cultivate the good within us and within each other, to cultivate our character.

The Universalist view sees God as essentially and inherently good at heart. Not an angry and punitive patriarch/judge/prison guard/military general, but rather an infinitely loving father/mother/presence who, most of all, wants us to know ourselves as loved and loving, and who would sacrifice everything in order for us to realize that in the end. Our job, then, is to love the “hell” out of the world.

These two ways of perceiving ourselves, our existence, and our purpose arose in and separated themselves from the dire doomsday warnings of their religious parents. Our people left their religious home, rejecting the reigning message that the sky is perpetually falling, and we that we inherently flawed human beings are falling with it, helplessly, inescapably.

Our people have been people with a can-do, MacGyver-style confidence in ourselves, in human nature and in God’s nature or the nature of the universe. We’ve fortified ourselves with the WD-40 lubricant of universal love and the duct tape of science and human ingenuity, and we’re good to go! No matter how dire things look, we expect things to turn out reasonably well in the end.

This is a product of our mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly American experience of things turning out reasonably well in the end.

Until…

And so when things don’t go as we expect, “when the winds have shifted” and “the world comes undone” (as the song we heard earlier put it,) we’re often at a loss, not at all sure what to do. Whether we have the kind of personality that’s triggered to get out there and fight, or the personality that wants to flee before the coming storm, or the personality that freezes and pulls protectively inward, suddenly it seems like the sky is falling. And since our inherited theologies rooted in an optimistic view of humans and history have not prepared us for such a calamity, we are prone to experience a crisis of faith when things aren’t turning out as we hoped.

When the human cruelty of World Wars I and II challenged not only our collective confidence in human goodness but also in God’s goodness, Unitarians and Universalists were led to examine the truth of their message and their expectations. That crisis of faith led many away from belief in God, giving birth to the humanist movement within our traditions in the 1930s.

More recently, after having had our first African American president, and certain that we were about to elect the US’s first woman president, the 2016 election of Donald Trump, its daily aftermath, and the nation’s potent and seemingly permanent polarization have called into question our confidence in humanity’s forward trajectory, such that, for many of us, it’s not merely a question of U.S. politics, but of human survival on earth. An ultimate concern.

When I shared today’s service title with Anne, who creates weekly Facebook ads for our services, Anne came up with this background image.

It does capture the feelings of some of us, doesn’t it? It’s the look of the last three and half years for some of us.

What does our faith tradition offer us for resources in such a time?

Well that depends on what you think the need is. Is the need to calm our fears? Or is it to help us live into and to navigate our fears?

You will not be surprised to hear me say that I believe we need some of each.

If we are feeling so unsafe that we are trapped in a perpetual state of alarm, we will not be able to access the openness and creativity we need to see possibilities and opportunities and the paths out of the danger. That’s the physiological reality of feeling unsafe, part of us shuts down so we can focus on sheer survival.

So, we need to find ways to calm ourselves enough to access our higher, more creative functioning, and we need to stay alarmed and alert enough to search for and find the road leading through this time to a future infused with more of the values of sustainability, compassion, justice, kindness, openness that we hold so dearly.

Being together in communities like this – being together in person in connecting and supportive ways – is an important part of helping us stay calm enough to see the possibilities and the paths. It’s important to know that you are not alone, and to know it in your body and your heart, not just in your head. And even though the winds have shifted and the world we thought we knew seems to be coming undone, the world might not be ending.

Anne added this image to the background.

It’s almost playful. It could be someone riding the wind, Mary Poppins, style, or it could be someone about to be dashed by the storm. Hard to tell.

The Long View

At a meeting here a couple weeks ago, when people around a table were voicing their laments and fears, Joel looked around the table and said something to the effect of, “It’s been worse.” It was worse in the 60s and 70s, he explained, when King, the Kennedy’s, Malcom X and others were assassinated, when families were divided by the U.S. war against Vietnam. “It’s been worse,” Joel communicated.

That longer view reminds us that this will be neither the first nor the last time the world will appear to be coming undone, no matter how unique this moment feels to us.

It’s the glass half-full approach that can keep us from despair.

One of the most hopeful perspectives for me lately arrived a week and a half ago, in this room, as we listened to the encouragement of George Lakey, a quaker and sociologist who’s been active in and studying direct action campaigns for 60 years. He takes the long view. He pointed out to us that deep political polarization opens up opportunities for significant change. “Necessary change happens during tumult,” he teaches, not during times of tranquility – tranquility, with its tiny, incremental, essentially insignificant changes – “often keeps unjust conditions stuck in place.”

“[Yes,] we’re frustrated and saddened by the first impact of polarization,” he empathizes: “relationships fracture, racism becomes more overt, violence more frequent. However, the volatility also makes positive change easier to get. In the polarized 1930s, [for example] progressive movements got changes they could only dream of in the ‘20s, like unions, labor laws, Social Security, conservation, electricity for millions, bank regulation and better policies for family farmers.”

Lakey referenced the history of extreme polarization in Nordic countries that led them, eventually, to become today’s gold standard for quality of life, economic equity, and shared commitment to the common good.

Lakey shared with us his metaphor of a forge, in which iron is heated up in order to form it. When a society heats up, as painful and as dangerous as that can be, he told us, it becomes much more pliable than when everything’s calm. And being pliable opens the possibility for a society to bend – to bend in very scary direction, yes, OR at long last, in the direction that people have been longing for.

Keeping Our Cool

In one of my first a seminary classes, our professor, a woman of color, pointed out to us that most white, protestant European cultures in the U.S. – the core of our UU congregations historically – like to keep emotions at a cool, contained level. We don’t like to things to get too heated. We have Robert’s Rules of Order to keep things from getting out of hand. We don’t like people to raise their voices or express too much anger, or in fact to express too much emotion of any, kind. Cool, ordered, reasoned calm is our white, protestant culture modus operandi. Or else we get uncomfortable and anxious.

It’s made it difficult for us, over the years, to listen to people of color when they’ve raised their voices in anger, finally, after not being listened to again and again and again. And, our professor taught, it means that in our congregations we are likely to miss out on the emotions that feel good as well, and the emotional strength and depth that are vital for keeping our intellect grounded to the common good and our own spiritual health. Our job is often, she said, to raise the emotional heat, not to lower it.

Moving in the Heat

So here we are, like half of our fellow U.S. citizens, dismayed, frantic even, at the polarization in the nation, wondering and fretting about how to bridge the divide, how to calm the rising tension, how to bring everybody together, when what may be most needed first is to let the heat get hot enough long enough to soften the hell-bent ways of our rising economic inequality and the disregard for wellbeing that comes with it. And then, while all the usual structures are softened, even failing and falling apart, to bring our forces to bear to bend the moral arc of the nation toward justice, toward equity, toward sustainability.

Lakey points out that polarization follows the curve of income inequality, and that income inequality is rising at a faster and faster pace, now larger than it’s ever been. In other words, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. However, the growing high-powered polarization will make genuine change possible, says Lakey. Not certain, but possible. “Where these pliable times take us,” he adds, “[will depend] on the movements we can build,” the sustained, direct-action, non-violent movements we can build.

“[Since the current] division expresses an economic arrangement,” says Lakey, “it’s not something we can fix through urging more civil discourse,” through being nicer to each other. “Even though [we will] want to use our conflict resolution in order to cope, we can also expect more drama at the extreme ends of our polarizations, and more ugliness and violence.

And yet he writes, “I feel lucky to be alive now because this is the best chance in my lifetime to make really big progressive change.” He calls the powerful conditions emerging under the surface and opening new possibilities, “signals of emergence.” “I see evidence, right now, that these trends will give us a chance to gain victories [we’ve never] been able to reach before in this country.”

“Progressives need to breathe deeply,” he writes, “and to make our peace with the reality.”

In These Times

In the Sunday service after the 2016 election, I quoted UUA staff member Sue Phillips. Though the meaning then was slightly different, in this current light it takes on new relevance. Sue wrote:

It will be tempting to hunker down (in the face of these divisions), to retreat into spaces where we might be soothed; our realities affirmed and unchallenged.

Those of us who are mourning must, of course, grieve. But in our grieving we must not hide, or we risk being unfaithful to the call at the very center of Unitarian Universalism: to co-create a world of love and justice….

Creating beloved community is messy, gritty, fearsome, and hard. This is the time we have been practicing for.

The only faithful response to this moment of extraordinary division is to show ourselves and our communities that another way is possible….

My friends, we were made for this work. And now we have to actually do it.

At the time I thought “doing it” meant mending the rift. Now I think it means first utilizing the dynamics that come with the rift.

The very same U.U. optimism that can get in our way can also allow us to look for opportunity in the chaos.

Fixing polarization actually is our job, says Lakey, but it doesn’t look the way we expect. The job of the middle class, and middle-class institutions like ours, is to bridge the dynamics between the poor and the wealthy, to keep them from straying or staying too far apart. And we’ll need to do that through genuinely radical change and new ways of being, through the communities of care and hope in which we bind ourselves, through the connections and coalitions we cultivate, and through the sustained non-violent action we undertake in the midst of the heat.

Addressing the huge and growing discrepancy between those with the most and those with the least cannot happen through simple, small, quiet, calm band-aid fixes or the legislative processes of the current system, says Lakey.

We will need to face directly into the winds, not away from them.

We will need to face into the winds together, drawing on each other while we build new ways forward in the midst of the storm and the heat. We cannot simply wait for it all to pass or to get better on its own.

For the moment, this imagery brings to mind a flock of birds, on the ground or in the water facing into the wind, ready to take off at any moment, counting on the wind coming at them for the lift they will need.

A crisis of faith is also always an opportunity, when the winds have shifted, when the world comes undone, we just might, together. find our most important resilience yet.

So may it be.

So may we be.

Primary Resources Cited, Consulted, Recommended

“Can now really be the best time to be alive? A dialogue across generations” by George Lakey and Yotam Marom. WagingNonviolence.org  December 26, 2019.

“Polarization can bring about real political change. Our past proves it.” by Nathan Schneider. America: The Jesuit Review. AmericaMagazine.org  January 14, 2019.

Lakey, George. How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning. Brooklyn New York: Melville House, 2018. Print.

Connected Beyond Belief

A message delivered January 12, 2019
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

“Ultimately, the only freedom adequate to human dignity is the freedom to do what love asks of us. And the greatest blessings of life come to us and through us to all the world when, with intimate and freely bonded companions, we are trying together to live with the integrity of faithful love.”     – Alice Blair Wesley in Our Covenant

 Anchored in Covenant

Our Unitarian and Universalist theological history  – the history of our ideas about how things are and which things matter – goes way, way back, but, as Alice Blair Wesley points out, our institutional history -the history we can trace through institutions like congregations – begins in the 1630s, when our religious ancestors in New England, on their way to the American Revolution, made a decision to base membership in their communities not on a creed or a set of beliefs, but on the promises they made to each other about being a member and about being a community. It was about loyalty to the community and its cause.

They rooted themselves and their future in covenants, in mutual promises, rather than statements of belief, and we here in Grass Valley are one of their futures. Just like children who learn the values of their parents but take those values to places their parents never dreamed of, our religious ancestors would not recognize us as related to them, except that: to join this community is, as it was for them, to commit to become “long-term partners in the business of living with integrity,” as Wesley put it (Wesley 17-18).” Living with integrity wherever it leads us, I would add: spiritual integrity, emotional integrity, and intellectual integrity.

This is a hallmark of our tradition – the primacy of integrity, undividedness within ourselves, even when it means we have to let go of the ideas, behaviors, and perspectives of generations when experience, when new knowledge, or when our hearts demand it in order for us to be whole and not split within ourselves.

So, like our institutional 8th or 9th great grandparents, we have two kinds of covenants that members here make with each other toward integrity.

UUCM’s Mission

The first kind covenant is an agreement with and a promise to work toward the reasons UUCM gathers as community in the first place. It’s captured in the mission statement that members articulated and voted on two years ago, a mission that is subject to change if integrity demands it.

I invite us to say it together. Like all covenants, it is aspirational, members commit to keep working toward its fulfillment. Now, as you know, the experience of reading words out loud together varies in terms of the quality of the experience. So, to prepare us, I invite you to engage a technique I use with choirs:

I invite you to speak the first phrase as if you don’t really care, as if you are uninterested and uninteresting: “With courageous love and a sense of wonder”
I invite you to speak the second phrase as if you and the person you are speaking to are both hard of hearing and someone’s using a leaf blower right next to you: “we cultivate our spiritual, emotional and intellectual strength”
I invite you to speak the final portion as if you’ve had way too much caffeine, or are super, super, super excited! Ready? Go! “to create a world more compassionate, sustainable and just.”

Now, I invite you read this congregation’s mission as if it matters, as if you believe, deeply, that living it would make a difference in your life and the life of the community.

I invite you first to breathe a few times to cleanse your palate and to get ready…and to speak the mission with meaning and heart, as if it matters to you.

With courageous love and a sense of wonder
we cultivate our spiritual, emotional and intellectual strength
to create a world more compassionate, sustainable, and just.

Members and joiners of this congregation say, “Yes, I commit to doing that with you.”

Again, if that ever feels like a mission that no longer has integrity, members can vote to change it.

What’s With a Behavioral Covenant?

The other kind of covenant is captured in a congregation’s behavioral covenant. It is another set of aspirational promises, this time about how the members will be with each other, treat each other, journey together, live in integrity with each other.

The current UUCM Covenant of Right Relations was created in 2009, meaning it is due for review, a process just getting underway.

The current behavioral covenant reads:

Recognizing that conflict is normal in human relations and wishing to relate to others as harmoniously as possible, I sincerely intend to:

Treat others with kindness, empathy and respect.
Communicate with patience, flexibility, and a willingness to negotiate in the spirit of meeting as many needs as possible.
Be aware of my own thoughts, feelings, and needs, and share them directly and honestly with others, without judgment or blame.
Invite and listen to all points of view, respecting others’ feelings and needs and encouraging minority opinions.
Take responsibility for my own mental, emotional, and spiritual balance, asking for support when I need it.
Be mindful of the needs of the group as a whole, mourning together when individual needs cannot be met.

I’ve heard people say, “We don’t need a covenant like that, we’re all adults here.” It’s not that we are not all adults, it’s that we are all human.

The Importance of the Quality of our Relationships

Mary Sellon and Dan Smith, who studied religious communities in the 1990s, noticed that:

“…some otherwise excellent programs [had very little] impact, [while] seemingly insignificant or poorly planned events touch[ed] people in significant ways. People dropped out of churches that were vital and exciting. Other people stayed tenaciously loyal to churches that appeared to be ho-hum in [terms of] the programs and facilities they offered. [They] noticed that some pastors flourished wherever they went. [While] others with superior theological and practical training continually failed. ‘What was it that made the difference?’ they asked themselves (xi-xii).”

“Authentic, loving relationships repeatedly surfaced as the … key … element that made the difference (xii).”

Not only did “participants’ sense of fulfillment and commitment [vary] according to the quality of their relationships with each other, . . . “the effectiveness and impact of a congregation’s work. . . [also] varied according to the quality of their relationships with each other (xii).”

Sellon and Smith pointed out that though all of us are committed to the ideal of loving our neighbor, we are often “at a loss for how to [do that] in a contentious [committee] meeting (xi).”

Lisa Ward wrote that “a covenant is not a definition of a relationship; it is the framework for our relating.”

The behavorial covenant is meant to call us to behaviors that support the health and integrity of our relationships with each other, to remind us that it matters. It puts up some helpful bumpers on the bowling lane of congregational interactions not only because it’s good and healthy for our relating with each other, but also because the effectiveness of everything we do – our justice work, for example – is affected by the quality of our relationships with each other. Ideally, our relationships embody qualities like “caring, playfulness, collaboration, authenticity, and deep trust (xii).” These are always works in progress, right?

The integrity of this community requires the integrity of our relationships. This is foundational to the life and effectiveness of this congregation. And this is central for me, a personal and vocational goal to which I am committed.

One of our great Universalist grandfathers, Hosea Ballou, speaking from a tradition that prioritized love above all else, put it this way:

If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury,
but if we do not, [agree in love] no other agreement can do us any good.

A wonderful thing here is that UUCM’s mission names this when it names right up front that members aspire and commit to do all that they do “with courageous love” – and in part to that end, members also commit, in that same mission statement, to cultivate emotional strength.

Mary Sellon and Dan Smith teach that the deep, healthy, and meaningful relationships that best anchor a community like this one require a lot of work and commitment to keep building our skills. We are, after all, human. We have to work at it continually.

Why?

In every congregation I’ve participated in or served, including this one, I have witnessed some of the most beautiful, generous, supportive, kind, loving, brave and nurturing behavior.

And in every congregation I’ve participated in or served, including this one, I have witnessed harmful, small, biting, destructive, rude, unaware, and hurtful behavior. Sometimes my own, of course.

Did I mention that we are human? Did I mention that covenants are aspirational?

It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being committed to work toward health and wholeness. As Victoria Safford points out, covenants aren’t about enforcement, they are about reinforcement – the covenant and we ourselves are “reinforced by forgiveness and by grace, when we stumble, when we forget, when we mess up (“Bound in Covenant “ in the UU World, Summer 2013).”

That’s why we make such promises – to help us stay with it. That’s why this congregation will review its behavioral covenant and also review what UUCM has in place to help us reconnect when we don’t get it right.

Embodied Connection

The final piece I want to bring to this today is to offer a little bit more about how our body is involved in all of this, outside the control or awareness of our conscious thought. It’s one of the reasons we need covenants to assist us, and why religious community matters.

The basis for this is what we are coming to know about the two sets of vagal nerves that run from our brain stem – evolutionarily, the oldest part of our brain – to our internal organs. The back and forth information sharing from organs to brain and back takes place without our conscious thought, thank goodness, it’s what kept our reptilian and mammalian ancestors alive, and what keeps us alive too.

The vagal system is continually monitoring and discerning whether or not it is safe to be with the other beings we are with.

When our vagal system decides for us that we are not safe with another being, our bodies gear up to fight, or to run, or, if all else fails, to shut down. It does not consult the rest of our brain, especially if the danger threat is high. It’s not something we think about. When our vagal system decides for us that we are not safe, when we are geared up to protect ourselves, it also shuts down our ability to be open, to be creative, to connect to other beings, AND it shuts down our ability to communicate to other beings that we are safe to be with.

It’s only when our vagal system decides that we are safe, when our vagal system is calm, that we can convey cues of safety to others. Our bodies our exquisitely tuned to pick up and to give this kind of information. It is transmitted through our eyes, through the sound of our voice, through our body language, and in particular through the expressions and micro-expressions of our faces. And the communication is continually going both ways. We are continually co-regulating each other’s vagal systems. Is it safe? Is it not safe?

Imagine a parent with a crying baby…

What does the parent do? The parent speaks in a soothing, sing-song, voice. “It’s okay, everything’s okay.” Faces close, soft animated facial expressions, lots of eye contact… And that usually helps. The baby calms down. But not only that. When the baby calms, the baby’s calming calms the parent! Who then has more calmness to offer the baby, which calms the baby even more. It creates a spiraling feedback loop that gradually calms both of their vagal systems. They co-regulate each other!

To make this clear, imagine the same scenario with a twist. The baby is crying. The parent speaks in a soothing, sing-song, voice. “It’s okay, everything’s okay.” Faces close, soft animated facial expressions, lots of eye contact… But… the baby keeps crying, maybe getting even more agitated! What happens to the parent? The parent does not calm down. “Nothing’s working! The baby is still crying!” The parent gets frustrated, agitated, maybe worried, which not only doesn’t help the baby, but ramps up the baby’s vagal system even more, which frustrates the parent even more. A different spiraling loop of co-regulation.

You know this plays out with adults too, right? I can see the looks some of you are giving to people you care about.

By the age of 3 or 4 months we are continually co-regulating with others, and not only with humans, but with other animals as well, mammals that have a vagal system that can respond. This is why pets are so important to so many people.

We are built this way for the sake of our survival. As Stephen Porges, the originator and key researcher of polyvagal theory, puts it, we have “a biological imperative” for connectedness.  Not a creed, not a covenant, not a nice-thing-for-a-community-if-you-can-get-it, but rather a biological, hardwired, largely unconscious drive for life-sustaining connectedness, whether we realize it or not.

And we can only reach that sense of connectedness, can only develop the deep and trusting relationships that calm our vagal system, when somebody in the mix has a calm enough vagal system, is feeling safe enough, to give us the cues that calm our own bodies, and help us know that we are safe.

That sense of safety is critical to our ability to optimize our personal and our collective potentials in many directions, says Porges. It is critical to living our mission with courageous love and the kind of wonder that opens us to seeing new ways forward. If we do not agree enough in our vagal sense of safety and trust, no other kind of agreement can do us any good.

Our personal integrity and our collective integrity are very much intertwined. And it’s not all in our heads. It is, very literally, in our hearts, our guts, and hands, our voices and our faces, in not only what we say, but how we say it, and whether and how we look when we say it.

This community is the living laboratory and the nursery for our wellbeing. It is the launching pad for our ability together to move the world toward compassion, sustainability and justice. It starts very close in. Between us.

Our UU ancestors taught that this journey is about learning to walk in the ways of love, as we know them now and as we come to know them in each generation. They realized that a covenant, not a creed, offered the best chance to find our integrity. They understood a covenant as  “declarations of interdependence” (in Victoria Safford’s words) Little did they know. Or maybe, they very much did know [hand on heart].

We human beings are the “promise­making, promise­keeping, promise­breaking, promise­renewing” creature, said Martin Buber.

For the sake of all of us, so may we 21st century covenantal Unitarian Universalists in northern California know ourselves to be.

 

Sources Cited or Consulted

Safford, Victoria. “Bound in Covenant.” UU World, Summer 2013. https://www.uuworld.org/articles/bound-in-covenant

Porges, Stephen W. The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe. 2017.

Sellon, Mary K, and Daniel P. Smith. Practicing Right Relationship: Skills for Deepening Purpose, Finding Fulfillment, and Increasing Effectiveness in Your Congregation. Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2005.

Wesley, Alice B. Our Covenant: The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church : the Spirit and the Promise of Our Covenant. Chicago: Meadville Lombard Theological School Press, 2002.

 

 

 

 

A message delivered December 15, 2019
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

Reading:  “The Moment of Magic” by Rev. Victoria Safford  READ IT HERE

Message: Feel the Presence of a Hope by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Gail Johnson Vaughan spoke last Sunday of the ineffable nature of transcendent experience – that words are only ever symbols for or approximations of experiences or senses that powerfully transcend our ordinary awareness and knowing. “God,” she pointed out, is one of the words, one of the symbols people use for all that we sense beyond what words can capture.

The celebrations and stories of Yule, Hanukkah and Christmas – both the sacred and the secular versions of Christmas – are also symbols for what words cannot adequately capture. They are stories and holy days and accumulations of rituals that help us know, or find, or remember somehow, who we are and our place in this world, in our communities, and in the larger story of life.

For me, they are all valuable metaphors.

Billy Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry” comes readily to mind: READ IT HERE

Our winter holy days and holidays arrive each year very purposefully when light is in shortest supply in our part of the world. A good number of people have shared with me recently that the time change and the long nights grease a slope down which they slide, with helplessness and hopelessness, toward depression.

These winter holy days and their symbols and stories serve as poems of hope, at heart, each a reminder that buried somewhere within every “now” is “a moment of magic,” a reminder that the light can yet hold, though it appears we have no fuel left, a reminder that it is possible at any time to realize, “Here’s a blessing.”

One of the great powers and staying powers of the Christian story is its message that the transformation of the world and of our our selves can arrive in the most impossible package – in this case a tiny, helpless, currently homeless baby, born to a very young, unwed mother and a working class adoptive father, in the most unexpected and yet common and accessible of places, a stable, the place of very ordinary animals and ordinary people.

The choir is about to sing, in Latin, “O Magnum Mysterium” – “O great and wonderous, improbable mystery, that animals should see the newborn hope for the world lying in a feeding trough.”

Whether or not you believe it is historically true, and no matter where various traditions in Christianity have taken it, it is a story and a metaphor that conveys – beneath the level of words – an accessible, compelling and important truth, a message of hope in troubled and troubling times: that an answer may arrive, when, where, and in whom we least expect it.

Music O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen   LISTEN HERE

I have sometimes been a person who “tie[s] a poem to a chair with a rope and [who tries to] torture a confession out of it.” My own relationship to these winter holidays and holy days weaves in and out from year to year, between the awe of “O Magnum Mysterium” or awe in the extraordinary universe into which we have been born (stuff of stars that we are) and, on the other end of the spectrum, “Bah Humbug!”

In the spirit of this month’s theme of awe, I believe that it is most helpful, if we can bring ourselves to do it, to hold these holidays and their stories “up to the light like a color slide,”

“to press an ear against [their] hive.”

‘to walk inside [each holiday’s] room and feel the walls for a light switch.’

‘to waterski across their surface[s] waving at their [ancient, anonymous] author[s] on [a far] shore].

Interrogating these holidays and traditions does have an important place in each person’s spiritual and intellectual journeys, and only you can know if this is a year you really do need to tie any of them to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of them.

If this is not one of those developmental moments in your journey, I expect that you may find more blessing and more hope by gently dropping your imagination in and allowing [it] to probe its way out.

One of my favorite poetic approaches to the Christian story of Christmas comes from Universalist minister Carl Seaburg. Though he was an outspoken proponent of disciplined theological scholarship, his own theology was once described as “a lyrical Universalism.” In fact, he wrote the text to a dozen of our hymns. “Is it not our business to be artists of the spirit?” he once asked.

The many and anonymous authors of religious traditions are all artists of the spirit. Here is Carl Seaburg’s “artist of the spirit” take on the Christian story of Christmas, his invitation to drop our imaginations into its metaphors, into its tangible images of sky, humanity, sorrow, searching, longing, and love, without telling us exactly what it means.

In the gentle of the moon, in the garnet of a star, feel the presence of a hope where the crowding shepherds are.

Soon the apple tree will bud, and the crimson fruit will fall, but within the stable shed, there’s no thought of that at all.

Touch the treasure of a faith that the mythic Easterns hear. See the measure of a love come candescent down the air.

Music  In the Gentle of the Moon by Carl Seaburg, arr. K. Tarsa 

May you feel the presence of a hope this season,

in the circle of family, friends or community with whom you gently crowd around what matters,

in the gentle of the moon and the sky and reassuring annual rhythms of the solstice,

in the treasure of the faith that you hold, after a lifetime of searching,

in the measures of love you are present enough to notice coming candescent, glowing, down the air when and where and in whom you least expect.

So may it be.  Blessed be. Amen.

 

What’s Wrong with God?

In my opening words I told you about bringing my dad to a UUCM service, and his amazement that we never mentioned God.

During that service I had a deeply moving journey into the sacred.  He’d had a different experience. He did not make dispersions, he simply spoke his observation – somehow we had been able to offer a Worship Service without mentioning God. What exactly were we worshiping, and how can you worship without speaking the name?

On the flip side when I serve as your Worship Associate, I find myself feeling some trepidation if I choose a reading or hymn that includes the word God – like the verses we sang this morning in Morning Has Broken — “sprung in completeness where God’s feet pass.”

We can sing “Spirit of Life come unto me”. We can muse on messages or guidance from the Universe. We can tiptoe into uttering the word “divine” – but seem to get increasingly uncomfortable if we expand it into the word “divinity.

So, what’s wrong with “God”?

Mind you, for me this has nothing to do with the questions of whether or not God exists, and I’m not interested in the misbehavior of a perceived deity that some call “God”.

I’m interested in what some here see as a  a taboo or at least a hesitancy against speaking this specific little three-lettered word in our services –  g-o-d hmmm

The words  Holly Near’s song, I ain’t afraid jump into my head.

I ain’t afraid of your Yahweh
I ain’t afraid of your Allah
I ain’t afraid of your Jesus
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God

……………………

So much war, so much horror, so much justification of oppression, racism, homophobia, poverty has been done in the name of one god or another – happening today as well as  throughout history…

The Hebrew Bible is full of them: Joshua fit the battle of Jerico for example. Holy wars were fought to rid the “Holy Land” of Muslim infidels. Wars were and are fought to suppress paganism, they are fought to resolve conflict between denominational rivals, think of Ireland or the Shiites vs the Sunnis.

I ain’t afraid of your churches
I ain’t afraid of your temples
I ain’t afraid of your praying
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God

The early religions of our most ancient ancestors were born of their wonderings, which in turn gave birth to creation stories to to make sense of how all this came to be.  They conjured up gods and goddesses – and ascribed to them the powers to create, to reward, to punish.

Priests and priestess stepped forward as intermediaries between mortals and these powerful and often vengeful deities. They raised up grand temples and sacrificed the innocent to gain favor and appease the gods.

Could it be we avoid the word “God” because we are rebelling against the way in which “God’s will” has been used to justify vast accumulation of wealth by “his” churches, and “his” chosen ones? – to justify lynchings, burning of crosses? To justify systemic intolerance – consider how state and federal legislators and the President – use their “knowledge of “God’s will” to create laws and policies limiting human rights  or prioritizing “religious freedom” over the right to access needed health care when the life styles of those in need conflict with the religious beliefs of the health care providers.

Could it be that we shutter at using the word ‘God’ because we are worried we will be mistaken for people that use religious freedom as a discriminatory sword?

In 2005 the Sacramento Business Journal chose to honor my work for children in foster care at their annual Women Who Mean Business luncheon. The five honorees were to share the secrets of our success in response to questions from a moderator. Just before our lunch was served the moderator came to the table of each us and let us know the first question she would ask– “please describe yourself in one sentence.”

So much for my appetite! I looked around my table at the people I had invited to support me.  In a mild panic I pleaded “help!”    My dear friend, and mentor, an attorney, looked at me kindly and confidently. “you are a woman who is divinely blessed.”  So simple, so absolutely true, for he and I often shared how my ability to do what so many thought impossible for children waiting in foster care, was because of my ability to download from some source beyond my comprehension, resources that opened the doors to power, that changed beliefs, that toppled barriers for the children I care so much about.

“Yes,” I told my tablemates, “I am a woman who is divinely blessed with gifts and talents to make a difference in the lives of children.”  Sitting next to me was someone I am close to. He looked horrified.  “What if they think you are….”  What? A right wing extremest,  or a new age weirdo, or “heaven knows what?

“What if they do,” I responded, “The way they understand “that which is more than we can comprehend” doesn’t matter to me…. Call it The Big Guy, call it the universe, call it God, we are all drawing on the same source.”

Maybe we shy away from the word and/or concept of God because of the way the holy books, (written of course, by mere mortals ) have been turned into inviolable rules – laws, with threats of eternal damnation for those who break them.

What a powerful way to control the masses … an all-seeing and vengeful god from which no sinful act or thought can be hidden. All the more convenient when the sinner could increase

the wealth of the church by purchasing indulgences to buy off years in purgatory.

Once again Holly Near sings

I ain’t afraid of your Bible
I ain’t afraid of your Torah
I ain’t afraid of your Koran
Watch out for the threats of purgatory

…………………

But then again, more I think about it, the more I wonder how much what seems like an aversion to the word God, comes from the wounds so many of us carry, including myself, from growing up in a theology that told us we were born sinners, unworthy of God’s (or anyone else’s) love and unless we repented our sins and accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior. By no other route could we escape the inevitability of burning for eternity in the fires of hell.

In churches everywhere in our nation the messengers of that vengeful god are raining down trauma with those repeated messages: we were defective before we were born, that our very thoughts prove how unworthy we are by nature.

This may well be the strongest reason some of us recoil from the use of the word God. How many of us have a personal Pandora’s Box where we unconsciously tuck away traumatic experiences too toxic to hold in the light,  and the negative stories of who we are and what has happened to us  a result.  These stories can be really destructive. They trap us.  No wonder we want to lock them away.

Certainly our Pandora’s Boxes, and all our defenses, are important. They help protect us. They wall us off from the recurring, controlling, scolding, messages that have been used against us.

They also wall us off from other people, from nature, and, when they have been hurled at us in the name of God, they can wall us off from a level of consciousness that many experience as “larger than what is contained by your skin”, to quote Michael Pollan.

Perhaps the word ‘God’ has an uncanny way of finding those hidden triggers inside us that open that Pandora’s Box of shame and anger – and we’d so much rather keep that box tightly closed.

 

Reflection Part 2

……………………………………….

Eckhart Tolle, in “The Power of Now” shares his belief, that in essence, there is and always has been, only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms.  “and some”, he says “such as ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost hidden.”  He explains that his source of wisdom is not external, but from “the one true Source within – a place within us that we already know, and “where truth is recognized when it is heard”.  Take a moment to consider where your source of wisdom dwells.

What I really want to do today is enlist your help to explore ways we can communicate with each other about how we each experience the deeper meaning and transformative power of whatever you want to call that which is beyond our capacity to understand.

– the ability to feel awe, not just “oh isn’t that pretty”, but “breath-taking, beyond words, that full – beyond physical experience of awe that takes us into an unexplainable oneness.

– the sense of wonder so strong that we refer to it in our mission statement.

– the many ways we live through experiences that feel transcendent .

Philosopher William James was not afraid to call the question: He said the mystical experience is ineffable,” yet as  Michael Pollan says, “we try very hard to eff it.”

Some cultures, and subcultures see access to the sacred as the natural state of the human person – a state that is clouded by the incessant chatter of our minds. We are offered many paths to enter this sense of oneness – a richness of meditation techniques – yoga, transcendental meditation, Buddhist meditations, mindfulness meditation, music, chanting, our own monthly singing meditation.

Nature, the river, the night sky,

Ingestion of psychedelic herbs shown to provide a direct, personal, and vivid transcendental entry into an experience of the oneness of all there is.

I find it interesting that the exploding field of neuroscience gives us physical evidence, detected by brain images, that there is a neurobiological home for spirituality.

Rather than  merely grounding the basis of spirituality in culture, neuro psychology shows us a universal, cognitive basis for spirituality. There is even growing neurological evidence that early religious practices and expanded consciousness helped shape the very structure of our brains.

Whether the thing that makes an individual feel connected to something greater, involves church, the river, or a stadium full of sports fans, a certain part of the brain activates.

This sense of wonder, of access to the infinite is now beginning to be understood as a normal, though not always realized, human neuro-psychological ability.

Wow!

And just to keep things balanced, Tony Jack, director of the Brain, Mind, Consciousness lab at Case Western Reserve University explains that analytical thinking , and spiritual, empathic thinking, rely on different neural pathways and processes. Analytical thinking and spiritual empathic thinking… He says that although they can’t happen at the same time in the brain, both modes are necessary, like breathing in and breathing out. “You can’t do both at the same time, but you need both to stay healthy and well,” he says.  That stops me in my tracks.

So clearly, there are many, many pathways to having a deeply human spiritual experience, where we can, and often do, enter something that might provide insight or even  answers to the BIG questions we, and our ancestors, struggle to comprehend.

Whether we identify as UU humanists, UU theists, UU mystics, UU Pagans, or UU Warrior fans, most of us have had those experiences or seek to have them.

Speaking for myself when I am in such an experience, and also after I’ve left it, I long to communicate it to someone else, — and there are so many of those “someone elses” in this room – to have another, perhaps you, look me in the eye and grok what I have seen.

Am I the only one?  But do I have to edit the words come easily to me?

Tolle says ” don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It’s an abstraction.”  But don’t, he advises, let your aversion to the word cut yourself off from the infinite reality that the word stands for.

As Michael Pollan, in his book How to Change Your Mind, talks about his direct research into the use of psychedelics, he describes the consciousness that beheld his mystical experiences as “not my normal consciousness. It was completely unperturbed. It was dispassionate. It was content as I watched myself dissolve over the landscape. And what I brought back from that experience was that I’m not identical to my ego, that there is another ground on which to plant our feet and that our ego is kind of this character that, you know, is chattering neurotically in our minds.“  But Pollan laments that he sounds “loopy” when he tries to communicate the trancendece of his experience.

Have we allowed the religious purists to usurp the language of the sacred? How do we remove the stranglehold on our spiritual vocabulary? Can we reclaim  the words of the ancient wisdoms?  Allow the word ‘god’ to be used as comfortably as the word ‘goddess”?

Words are only words. And taking an experience of the infinite and condensing it down into any word can, at best, be an abbreviation or acronym. How can you crunch the sacred into a tiny set of letters, be they W-O-W (wow!) or G-O-D (God), or anything else?

‘God’ isn’t the only word on our list of seemingly verbal taboos.  We have members here, perhaps you are one of them, who fear a modern day / UUCM “off with their heads” response if they use the words ‘prayer’, ‘church’ ‘divinity; ‘holy’, others that I’m sure you could add.

Perhaps its time for me to examine the contents of my own Pandora’s Box.  What triggers am I worried about unleashing and how do I use that fear to limit my ability to live from my essence?

Is it my fear of those triggers that gives me a reason to resist any word used to communicate a spiritual understanding? And does that resistance limit my ability to access what the essence of the word represents?

If I had a ribbon hanging from my nametag it would say UU Mystic.  What would yours say? Since we, at UUCM are inclusive, and hungry for diversity, just think of the juicy dialogues those ribbons could engender.

So… what’s wrong with God? Is it the word or the concept of something greater than ourselves?

Even atheist Albert Einstein,  says “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”

That’s my point.  I don’t care what words are used here for that which is beyond the ability of our “frail and feeble minds” to perceive. I am hungry for my experience of community to unapologetically include dialogue into the the sacred – Call it God, or call it the illimitable superior spirit, or call it a touchdown pass in the last 20 seconds, just don’t let what each calls it stop us from exploring the experience with each other.

The next time you hear the word God in this room, I invite you to consider it an acronym for something that is beyond our human capacity to understand, something infinite, universal, and un-nameable.

And when we sing our closing hymn… notice how you feel this time when you sing “sprung in completeness where God’s feet pass.”

Mindfulness

A sermon delivered November 24, 2019
by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, California

 

Mindfulness Aspirations

I begin with a poem by John Travis, founder of Mountain Stream Meditation Center in Nevada City, long time teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He very recently published some of his teachings in a book titled Taking the One Seat.

Chapter 1, “Calming the Muddy Water” begins with this:

Like a great blazing fire,
body came to rest on the cushions,
fired up to stay awake and present,
only to find bitter-sweet drifting off,
old stories holding court,
while body cried out, “Pay attention to me, I’m the most important.”
Everybody, everybody, demanding attention.
Nobody getting first place today.
Maybe enlightenment can wait.
Where are my car keys?

Ring familiar to anyone? Like anyone who has ever sought to meditate?

It rings familiar to me.

I am not an expert meditator, nor a Buddhism scholar, nor particularly skilled in formal mindfulness practice…however… I do continue to aspire to mindfulness, rather than the busy fullness of mind which is so often the reality for me.

I desire and aspire to bring full and loving attention to the present moment.

I desire and aspire “to hold painful experiences in awareness without overidentifying with them or desperately trying to fix them.”

I desire and aspire to seeing “reality exactly as it is, on purpose, and without judgement.”

I aspire to mindfulness, how about you?

Mindfulness Everywhere

A number of mindfulness teachers point out that not too long ago the concept of mindfulness was primarily the province of Buddhist practitioners, but that now mindfulness is touted everywhere!

As of yesterday Amazon had over 60,000 entries listed under “mindfulness meditation.” When Gil Fronsdal, from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City went looking about seven years ago, he found books on Mindfulness and Poker and Mindfulness and Angry Birds. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is now a mainstay in the corporate world.

There are tremendous resources out there now for all kinds of people of all ages and personalities and lifestyles, and yet, the experience of mindfulness remains elusive and aspirational, as perhaps it always must remain.

The predictable irony for me this week, is that as I was preparing for this service focused on mindfulness, I felt more distracted and agitated then I’ve felt in a very long time. I found it especially difficult to meditate and to focus my attention at all.

I’m not sure why that would be…except for all the reasons that any of us have to be slightly off kilter or on edge these days – predicted power shutoffs and risks of fire, impeachment hearings and mindboggling political stances, losses near and far…and the jingle of the approaching holidays.

A UU Thing to Do

I think the pursuit of mindfulness and meditation are particularly helpful spiritual practices in our Unitarian Universalist tradition, given the open path and the wide range of religious beliefs of our members. They are practices that can serve theists and non-thiests and in-betweenists and nothingists alike.

And the possibility of seeing reality as it is, without running from it or getting caught up and lost in our reactiveness to that reality, serves our Unitarian Universalist values that ask us to attend to well-being, sustainability, compassion and justice in this life and this world, not the next world or some other world.

I like Jon Kabat Zinn’s definition of mindfulness as a starting place: “Mindfulness is [the experience of) awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally…in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”

So, in these times, and at this time of year, just before Thanksgiving launches us into holiday energies, I thought it might be of use to invite a simple experience of awareness this morning – the beginning mindfulness practice of bringing our attention to our breath, a practice we might draw on in the weeks ahead.

Those of us who are seasoned meditators will be ready. Those of us who have tried meditation will have some sense of what we’re getting into. And for those who think the whole idea is rather woo-woo, or who are preparing to pull some hair out at the mere thought of mindfulness meditation and attention on our breathing, I want to throw your curious and rational mind a rope to hold on to.

Polyvagal Theory

Amy Renee and Allison Rivers Samson each turned me on to Polyvagal Theory, which I’m starting to read about and study because I think it has very critical things to say to us as we seek to create community that matters now and in the future, community that connects and affects us, and community that serves the cause of good in the world.

This morning I’ll offer just a tiny piece: inspired by the fact that more than two thousand years ago Gautama Buddha was teaching the value of paying attention to one’s breath, and the fact that now, scientific inquiry is shedding light on why that works.

Dr. Stephen Porges, is the originator of Polyvagal Theory, and it’s from his (The) Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory that I am drawing my information this morning.

(To quote (approximately) my colleague, Theresa I. Soto, “Now don’t you fall asleep just because I said something sciencey.”)

The vagal nerve in our bodies runs directly from our brain stem to our internal abdominal organs. It is an ancient development in our evolution, a nerve shared by our long-extinct reptilian ancestors. One set of fibers, the older set, runs from our brain stem, the oldest part of our brains, to the organs below our diaphragm – our guts. A slightly newer set of fibers runs from the brain stem to the organs above the diaphragm, or heart and lungs.

I just said that these sets of fibers run from the brain to the organs, but it’s actually the other way around. Only 20% of the information traveling along the vagus nerve goes from the brain to those organs. 80% of the information – the vast majority of it – goes from the organs to the brain, telling IT what to do. Gut instinct determines a whole bunch of our behavior, without our conscious mind, without our prefrontal cortex, ever getting involved or even knowing about it.

It was UU minister and meditation teacher Doug Kraft, long-time minister in Sacramento, who pointed out that the Pali term that gets translated into English as “mindfulness,” the word “sati,” doesn’t distinguish between mind and heart the way the English word “mindfulness” does, losing half its meaning. As Doug notes, “sati” could better be translated as mindfulness-heartfulness. And no wonder, the heart has a hotline directly to the brainstem.

These ancient parts of our neurology are all about figuring out whether we are safe or not – whether we can stay calm, or whether there is danger and we should ramp up enough energy to flee or to fight. Or, if it looks like neither of those options has a very good chance of succeeding, whether we should simply shut down as a last resort, and appear dead in some way. Physically or otherwise.

Ancient responses that we still use, unconsciously.

By Breath

I will note that the anxiousness of our time keeps us continually ramped up to fight or to flee (you’ve been telling me this for three years), or if we are overwhelmed, to shut down (you’ve been telling me this for three years).

By attending to our breathing, we can help calm those ancient survival mechanisms, and in so doing, improve not only how we feel, but also increase our capacity to heal, to be open, to be creative and to connect to one another, to know each other as “safe.”

By taking deep breaths (if we can), particularly by taking long, slow out breaths, we send a signal from our heart and lungs to the brains tem with the message that all is well, because it’s only when there is no danger that we would feel safe enough to take a long slow out breath.

If there were danger, we would need to be breathing faster to be ready to take off or to fight. Breathing fully and slowly calms our system. In fact, Wally Holtan told me that it’s in really extending that out breath, so that abdomen pulls inward, that we most affect that vagal nerve.

We don’t control that vagal system directly, it operates on its own, but we can influence it by our conscious choices, as the Buddha knew so long ago.

There’s so much more to know about the vagal system, but for today, let’s breathe….

Just Breathe

I invite you to find a comfortable, upright position, (stretch first) with an easy sense of height, feet resting calmly, hands resting in your lap, or on your thighs, shoulders released, eyes closed if you are comfortable doing so. wave of relaxation.

I invite you to follow a wave of relaxation flowing from the crown of your head, down through your body – forehead, behind eyes, cheeks, jaw, neck, collarbone, shoulders, arms, fingers, torso, chest and abdomen, pelvis, legs, thighs, knees, shins, ankles, feet toes…..letting a pool of relaxation gather around your feet.

Bring your attention to your breath, and rather than fill up first, which is a very American thing to do, let’s empty first – send a message to that vagal nerve right away that all is well. Long slow full breath OUT. Then simply relax and receive a breath inward, full and downward. OUT-IN. Once more, OUT-IN.

Then simply relax and breathe easily – in your own most comfortable way, at your own pace.

Keep your attention on your breath. It may help you to keep your attention focused on the movement of air in and out of your nostrils – warmer on the way out, cooler on the way in…

If your mind is moving to other things, as it is wont to do, just notice that, maybe acknowledging to yourself “hm, thinking”, and bring your attention back to your breath.

You may find it helpful to use a practice shared by Pema Chödrön – to focus only on the out breath, not worrying  about the in breath, just the out breath.  Or the other way around…

It may help to give your mind something to do in order to keep your attention on your breath, perhaps count your breaths, up to ten, in any way that you choose –Use what works for you to keep your attention on your breathing.

[…….quiet attention to the breath for a time……]

[Piano begins, to bring people gently out of the silence and focus – Meditation on Breathing chords. Continues under the remainder of sermon.]

How are you?

and there’s more…

Allow me to intrigue you with this thought:

The vagas nerve links, at our brain stem, to the nerves that operate our facial muscles, our larynx and our pharynx that operate our voices, and the muscles of our middle ear that allow us to tune our hearing to the wavelengths of human voices.

So, when we sing together, which naturally extends our out breath, uses our facial muscles, and our voices, and our ears tuning to hear each other, we are activating and marshalling all kinds of internal resources to calm our vagal system, helping communicate to our brain that all is well, that we are safe, that we can be “peaceful and at ease” – all of which allows us to connect to each other.

And that’s only part of what’s going on in the vagal system when we sing together.

Look for chances to breathe this week, with intention and attention.

Look for chances to…

[SING Meditation on Breathing]

“Breathe In. Breathe out…”
humming
just breathing.

So may we be.

Works Cited/Consulted

Chödron, Pema. Awakening Loving-Kindness. Shambhala Publications, Incorporated, 2017. Print.

Gunaratana, Henepola. Mindfulness in Plain English. Wisdom Publications, (2002) 2015. Print.

Kabat-Zinn, Jon. (Mindfulness definition at Mindful.org)

Kraft, Doug. Buddha’s Map: His Original Teachings on Awakening, Ease, and Insight in the Heart of Meditation. Blue Dolphin Publishing. 2013. Print.

Heller, Rick. Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy: a Guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard. New World Library, 2015. Print.

Porges, Stephen W. The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe. W. W. Norton, 2017. Print.

Travis, John M. Taking the One Seat. Koho Pono, LLC, 2019. Print.

Expectation: I Am That I Am

Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

A sermon delivered September 8, 2019

 

Of Beer and Balsamic

This morning I’d like to talk to you about…[hold up bottle]…beer.

 [open, take swig]

Well, beer and…[hold up bottle]…balsamic vinegar.

I don’t actually care for the taste of beer, it’s too bitter for me after a couple swallows, so this is root beer.

I don’t care for the taste of beer, but then I’ve never had it with balsamic vinegar in it.

Someone discovered that adding balsamic vinegar to beer improves the flavor of the beer for most people.

If you give a beer drinker two unidentified bottles, one plain beer, the other the exact same beer with balsamic vinegar added, and ask the person which tastes better, the vast majority of people prefer the beer with the vinegar in it.

Unless… you tell them ahead of time that the one bottle has vinegar in it. When you do that, most people prefer the plain beer and dislike the taste of the beer with the vinegar.

I learned this in a TEDx talk that was listed in our Soul Matters packet for this month’s theme of expectation, a talk by Dan Ariely of Duke University and his Center for Advanced Hindsight. In the wake of the beer experiments, Ariely wanted to know what was going on – why people clearly preferred the taste of the beer with vinegar when they didn’t know it was in there, but didn’t like the taste when they did know the vinegar was in there.

Was it simply a clash of incoming information? he asked – the brain hearing vinegar and thinking “YUCK!,” the mouth tasting vinegar and feeling “YUM!,”  with the conflicting results simply cancelling each other out? Or was there more going on?

To find out, he played with when the researchers told people about the vinegar.

As before, they told some people about the vinegar up front, then had them taste both beers, and then make their decision about which beer tasted better. This time however, they had some people taste the two beers first, and then they told them about the vinegar before the people made their decision about which tasted better.

If the issue was having two conflicting inputs – the brain saying “Yuck!” to vinegar, and the mouth saying “Yum!” – it shouldn’t matter whether you tell people about the vinegar before or after they taste it, the brain will still say “yuck” when it hears vinegar, and the Yum and the Yuck will cancel each other out.

But the people who tasted the vinegar beer first and were then told about the vinegar before they put in their vote, liked the vinegar beer just as much as people who were never told about the vinegar at all.

This implied that the people’s expectations about vinegar changed the way their taste perception worked, made tasting a different neuro-chemical experience, a different physical experience than if they hadn’t known about the vinegar.

Of Gray Water

In a related story:

This past week held the dates of my mom’s and my dad’s birthdays, as well as their wedding anniversary. One year, about this time, when I was quite young, my brothers and sisters and I decided we would make my parents a celebratory meal all by ourselves. And we decided that what would make that meal especially fun and festive (I think this was my idea) was to add food coloring to every dish of the meal.

I remember vividly the sickly green color of the cake we served for dessert, but my strongest memory of that meal is of the glasses of drinking water. Probably thinking fun rainbow colors, we added several different food coloring colors to the water, and as you might expect, in mixing several colors together we turned the water a dingy, opaque, gray/black.

I could not even get that glass to my lips without closing my eyes. As long as I couldn’t see it, it tasted fine, but still, after an initial sip, I could not drink that water without gagging.

So what?

So as we begin exploring this month’s theme of expectation, where is the spiritual message in the story of beer and balsamic vinegar and dingy dark gray drinking water?

For me, for today, the message is that the reality we experience is colored or flavored by our expectations. We know this already, but more than that, what is affected by our expectations is not merely our thoughts and feelings about an experience, but the very experience we experience. What we are able to experience in the first place, is affected by our expectations.

It’s not as simple as, “Does vinegared beer taste good to us or not?”

It’s “Will our expectations allow us to taste the goodness of vinegared beer?”

…or the goodness of the person next to us,

…or the goodness of our lives and the world,

…or the goodness of our selves?

Our expectations shape what we are able to experience. So, what does knowing that ask of us?

Now what?

Alice Walker suggests that we “Expect nothing. [And] Live frugally on surprise.”

I love the way she puts that: “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.”

Which is sort of where I’m going to end up in a moment, but let me get there with the help of Gil Fronsdal. I’ve been listening to Gil’s dharma talks online. He teaches at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, which makes transcripts and recordings of almost all their talks available at audiodharma.org. (I commend it to you.)

Gil teaches that it’s not realistic to have no expectations. It’s not really possible. Expectations help us predict and plan and survive.

But at the same time, because expectations are rooted in our past experience, not the now, they always risk causing us to miss or misperceive what is true and real in this moment.

So, if someone was rude to us yesterday, and we expect that to be true the next time as well, we limit our ability to see them and may not be able to taste the kindness that they are offering today. Or if someone treated us well yesterday, and we expect the same for the future, but today they have a headache and are a little short with us, our expectation will make that shortness a much bigger deal than it otherwise might have been, causing us grief and suffering.

Gil points out that when we are “living through the lens of expectation . . . it’s like having blinders on.” It limits our ability to see what is true. Everything gets measured through the narrow window of what we think is going to happen or think is supposed to be happening.

We then miss all kinds of beautiful and wonderful – and dangerous things, too – unfolding around us, because we limited by looking for what we expect to see.

Being Present to What Is

The goal of mindfulness practices like meditation is to help us be fully aware of and present to what is – not to what was or will be or might be or what we want it to be….but to what is. And that includes, very importantly, being fully present to ourselves as we are – not as we will be or might be or want to be or think we should be – but as we already are right now.

Coming to terms with who we really are  – our authentic, true, unarmored and unadorned self – is key to our ability to see and respond to other people’s authentic, true selves, key to our ability to taste their inherent goodness, vinegar and all.

“…Be very careful with expectations and your attachment to them,” advises Gil Fronsdal, “because sometimes expectations can really derail us.” An understatement, right?

For me personally, it’s my expectations about myself that are the biggest de-railers, expectations that come from a lifetime of internalizing other people’s expectations, sure  – expectations for boys, for Catholics, for gay people, for Americans, for musicians, for white people, for ministers, for eldest sons, for people with gray hair – but I have learned to generate plenty of unrealistic self-expectations of my own. I’m really good at it! No, I am great at it!!

Much of my spiritual work these days involves learning to notice my unhelpful self-expectations and my attachment to them so that I can learn to open myself up to seeing what is real and true in me rather than getting stuck in what I think ought to be true.

Whether your de-railing expectations are primarily about yourself, or about people in your life, or about your journey, or about the state of the world  – Gil Fronsdal suggests that the path is not to live without expectations, but to become aware of your expectations, to notice them and how they are operating, to recognize whether and how you are attached to them,

…and then, not to live without expectations, but to expect anything.

I like it, it’s the glass half full approach.

Expect Anything

“Have expectations” Gil teaches, “but expect anything. Expect the unexpected to happen.”

As Gretchen Haley put it in our opening words:

         Make space in your heart 
to be surprised
Make room in your soul
For a new story to take shape
Let astonishment be possible

“Have expectations, but expect anything.”

Gil Fronsdal invites us to have a simple response always at the ready. I invite you to try it this week and see if it makes a difference for you. The ready response is: “Of course!”

So, if on your way home you have a flat tire or you stub your toe, “Of course!”

If this afternoon a neighbor stops by with a wonderful and completely unexpected gift, say to yourself, “Of course!”

If you get a sore throat tomorrow, think to yourself, “Of course!” (Oh, the unpleasant one’s are more difficult, aren’t they?

If you win the lotto this week, whisper, “Of course!”

If the politics in our nation all of a sudden sort themselves out next Saturday afternoon, and everyone decides to live by your ideals and values from now on, shout, “Of course!”

Now, it’s important to say that responding “Of course!” does not mean ignoring and accepting harmful behavior or dangerous circumstances. It means seeing them clearly for what they are by not getting caught up in our expectations around them. Then we can respond most honestly and skillfully.

Expect anything, Gil says, and though you won’t get everything you want, you’ll travel through the world more safely.

It’s an echo of the William Blake poem from which I often quote in the Joys and Sorrows ritual, words of one of our UU hymns which speak of joy and woe being woven together through our lives – always:

“It is right we should be so, we were made for joy and woe, and when this we rightly know, safely through the world we go.”

Of course!

[grab beer bottle]      And perhaps more tastily through the world we’ll go, too.

[take a swig]

May it be so.

Sources/Resources Cited

Ariely, Dan. When Expectations Override our Senses. TedxTunali.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTBruF21Fk

 

Fronsdal, Gil. Dharmette: Expectations.

Transcribed and edited from a short talk on July 6, 2016.

Audio:   https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/6836.html

Transcript: http://media.audiodharma.org/documents/20160706_Gil_Fronsdal_IMC_Dharmette_Expectations.pdf

 

Haley, Gretchen. Let Them Go.

 

Walker, Alice. Expect Nothing.  https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/expect-nothing/