Past Services

Thanksgiving Memories

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

A sermon delivered November 25, 2018

 

“All life is a gift, which we are called to use to build the common good, and in so doing, make our own days glad.”

What has the Thanksgiving holiday meant to you over the course of your life?

When Jeff Stone and I first met to talk about the theme of memory and this service, we found ourselves reflecting on our changing understandings and expectations of Thanksgiving over time…

What does your memory surface most readily from when you were young?

(People are invited to offer responses)

What about over the course of your life since then – what do you associate with Thanksgiving?

(People are invited to offer responses)

In our family of 10, I knew the classic story of the Pilgrims, and I lived, pretty much, the Norman Rockwell painting of Thanksgiving, with its warmth, family, table full of food …and its whiteness….

Video  Everything You Know About Thanksgiving Is Wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFfREh7G3ck

Franchesca Ramsey has created a number of YouTube videos meant to help people understand white supremacy, white privilege and racism, which she does always with humor and pointed insight. Here, she extends her effort to speak to one of our foundational stories about America and another group of people, Native Americans.

One presumably indigenous person responded to this video with gratitude, to say thank you, AND to offer that it was not helpful to say things like “we…killed off all of the Native Americans.”

For me it’s a great example of someone doing what they can to help increase awareness, to make the invisible visible among us, AND doing it imperfectly. It is work that we cannot help but do imperfectly.

On Cole’s Hill, across the street from Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts (Plymouth Rock is very underwhelming, by the way. don’t bother), a monument commemorates the National Day of Mourning held on Thanksgiving Day each year since 1970.

A plaque there notes that:

“Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.”

This year’s National Day of Mourning was dedicated to today’s migrants.

I looked at many resources recently titled something like “The True Story of the First Thanksgiving.” The pieces run the entire gamut, from “it’s all about the evil English and Europeans celebrating the massacres of indigenous people,” to “it was all warm and loving and everyone got along just fine, and you are evil, stupid and unpatriotic for questioning it in the first place, what are you, communist?”

Among the many tellings, I am sure that you can find the “truth” that will support what you already believe.

What do Native Americans have to say?

In an episode of One Word Cut, several Native Americans were asked to do word association with the term Thanksgiving:

Video Thanksgiving: One Word Cut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGc34FeFqH0

Even among Native Americans, a range of responses, of course. There is no singular Native American identity or perspective. The faces themselves of a number of those speakers in the video visually challenge the stereotype of what it means to be “Native American.”

There has been a saying in circles of young Unitarian Universalists when they are creating their covenants, their list of promises, in our tradition, about how members will behave with one another. The saying is, “Don’t yuck my yum.” It’s a variation on. “Don’t rain on my parade.” Don’t dis the thing that I’m happy about. “Don’t yuck my yum.” I learned one of the latest versions just this weekend: “Don’t shade my shine.”

After [earlier in the service] naming the stress we’ve been carrying and the importance of treating ourselves and each other extra kindly, pointing out the injustices and the sorrows in the U.S. story of Thanksgiving – something you likely already know to some extent – risks “shading” your Thanksgiving “shine,” I know. Can’t we just celebrate thanksgiving with joy?

I thought, briefly, about focusing solely on gratitude this morning, all warmth and light, but I believe that these times call us to be proactively honest about the water we swim in, honest about who we are, and honest about what we see and think and say and do.

The truth is that this “life will break your heart,” AND “beckon with beauty and startle with delight.” [a reference to the Gretchen Haley reading offered earlier in the service]  In the end, the heartbreak need not shade the beauty so much as help us to see more clearly, and so to feel the delight and gratitude more deeply.

So, a little bit of “yuck” today, en route to our “yum.”

Whatever happened in the 1600s, it is important to recognize, as Jim Loewen points out in Lies My Teacher Told Me, that the U.S. Thanksgiving story is one of our nation’s “creation myths,” one of our origin myths.  It’s a founding story, developed along the way, that serves to explain and bless the origins of American society, and to justify why and how Europeans are here: as people seeking religious freedom, getting along nicely with the people who were already here, sharing generously and happily and gratefully and innocently.

Once again, how we choose to tell the story tells us most about ourselves.

It doesn’t serve the “America First” story-line to remember:

and hold up as our founding colony the earlier colony of Jamestown, whose remaining members had to resort to cannibalism to survive, and those Virginians who were more violent toward indigenous people than the Pilgrims.
that the very first non-native settlers in this land were the enslaved Africans left behind when the Spanish abandoned a settlement attempt in the 1500s in what is now South Carolina.
That the pilgrims already had religious freedom in Holland, before they came, that the Pilgrims left worried about the influence of Dutch materialist culture on their children; that pilgrims were only a portion of the boat load and that economic interests were paramount for many of the travelers.
That “one of the very first things the Pilgrims did when they arrived on Cape Cod — before they even made it to Plymouth — was to rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Wampanoag’s winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry.” (http://www.uaine.org)
That three years before the Pilgrims arrived, English fisherman had unwittingly introduced diseases against which the indigenous population had no immunity. That by the time the Pilgrims arrived three years later, those diseases had killed 90-95 percent of the indigenous coastal population.
That the native village at Plymouth was empty when the Pilgrims arrived and Squanto returned to his home…its inhabitants all dead or fled.
That the Pilgrims arrived to a ready-made village, already-cleared fields and a clean source of water.
That “King James and the early pilgrim leaders gave thanks for the plagues that afflicted the indigenous people, which [were proof to] to the English that God was on their side (Loewen 93).”
That estimates for how many indigenous people lived in the Western hemisphere in the 1400s range from 75 to 145 million people. 95 percent of them died after contact with and violence by Europeans, making the low estimate 75 million people who died, enough, some researchers say, to result in re-forestation in this hemisphere, and a drop in CO2 levels.
That a third of this country has been Spanish longer than it’s been “American.”
That the Native people thought the English smelled bad, and tried, unsuccessfully it seems, to convince them to bathe more often.

These are just a very few of the history notes that almost never make it into history books or challenge the glossy Thanksgiving story as it is passed on to us.

As James Loewen notes, this is not to deny the courage of the Pilgrims, their genuine ignorance at the causes of disease, that relations with the native nations started off reasonably positively, that Plymouth, unlike other colonies, usually paid for land it took, or that Europeans were sometimes invited into native villages as protection against neighboring tribes or other Europeans.

As Loewen puts it, “the antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history (97).”

“To glorify the Pilgrims,” without including the inconvenient truths, “is dangerous,” Loewen says.

In these times, our times, it is becoming increasingly imperative – for the sake of saving democracy – to learn about and challenge – often and visibly – the parts of our national narratives that are dangerous, the stories that sustain and reinforce the harmful aspects of the nation’s image of itself and of the status quo. It’s an important part of the work ahead for all of us.

So, not to “shade your shine,” but …

I encourage you to watch for the nuances of how the Thanksgiving story functions, to this day, as a “creation myth” that shapes America’s view of itself as innocent, benevolent, superior, white, noble, exceptional, chosen, the savior, born without sin of a mostly virgin wilderness and all of a sudden in 1620. And I encourage all of us to challenge those notions when we can, even at the family Thanksgiving table, even when it’s inconvenient, in order to build the common good, and make our own days glad.

To link us back to gratitude and giving thanks, to point toward an honest “yum,” and for a different story to guide us, let’s turn to the words, wisdom and invitation of Robin Wall Kimmerer: mother, scientist, writer, professor, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is

to create programs that draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared concerns for Mother Earth.

 

The Earth Calls Us to Gratitude    Robin Wall Kimmerer 

(excerpted from “Returning the Gift” – read at   https://www.humansandnature.org/returning-the-gift

Closing

“Gratitude is most powerful as a response to the Earth because it provides an opening to reciprocity, to the act of giving back, to living in a way that the Earth will be grateful for us.” 

To live in such a way “that the Earth will be grateful for us.” Wow. If we do that, so much else will benefit.

May we be so grateful.

Amen.

Sources Cited and Consulted

Hogue, Michael S. American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World., 2018. Print.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press, 2008. Print.

United American Indians of New England website:  http://www.uaine.org

 

 

 

Wake, Now, My Conscience: Rebellion, Revolution

and the Vulnerability of Democracy 

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

A sermon delivered September 23, 2018

 

What Do We Want?

[holding up a blank protest sign]

What do we want?!!

…well, we didn’t talk about or agree upon a focus for that chant. But whatever it is…

When do we want it?!!  [Now!

At a demonstration not long ago, Carol Kuczora explained that years ago she found a big, blank, white vinyl banner here at UUCM. She would cut out paper letters for an event and rubber cement the letters to the banner – keeping it at the ready. Carol knew that there would always be more events and rallies and marches, and that the issues would keep changing. What a great idea. I love the pragmatism of it.

[turn sign around to see printed on the other side, “Your Issue Here!”]

Let’s try this. Let’s start with the social justice issue that you yourself are caring about most strongly these days. The cause that matters most to you.

Take a moment…….. Got yours in mind? What is it that you want? Ready?

 [3x, stronger each time]

What do YOU want?!

When do YOU want it?!

 

We’ll come back to that in a few minutes.

Clearly, you believe in a better way.

Last fall and winter this congregation worked to articulate its mission. This year, as I see it, vision is not only the theme of this month, vision is the theme of the entire year – throughout the year, this congregation imagining the most compelling vision of itself living its mission and imagining how to get there from here.

Today my goal is to speak to the relationships between compassion (last week’s focus), and social justice, which so many of you name as important to you. As with all the services this month, this too is a service of seed planting, simply a start, offering what I hope will be useful concepts or frameworks for our continuing, shared exploration.

Compassion to Justice

So to trace the thread from compassion to justice…

I shared last Sunday my belief that cultivating compassion is the central task of religious community, the source from which all else flows, and that while compassion begins with loving kindness, compassion moves beyond loving-kindness to notice and to care about the well-being and the suffering of others until that care becomes a desire to help free others from their suffering.

Dr Joan Halifax teaches, from her engaged Buddhist perspective, that there are two sides to the river of compassion: Service and Social Transformation.

Service is about those direct efforts to relieve the suffering of a certain person or persons –  assisting an undocumented immigrant, volunteering at a domestic violence shelter, serving meals at Hospitality House, comforting a friend, for example.

Social Transformation is about changing the systemic and social realities that cause people to suffer unnecessarily in the first place, and about the systemic and social realities that enable and amplify that suffering – changing laws or defying laws, policies, influencing the behaviors of public officials and the climate of public rhetoric, for example.

Halifax teaches that on both sides of the river – the Service side and the Social Transformation side – there are four dimensions of compassion that must be cultivated:

Our capacity to attend to the experience of others – to be deeply present to others, laser focused while remaining non-judgmental and unperturbed, like a deep, still pond…fully present, completely focused, and internally calm and non-judgmental, so that we can really see and hear and take in the experience of others.
Our capacity to feel concern for others, to care – healthy empathy that allows us to resonate with someone else’s suffering without getting lost or trapped in that suffering ourselves.
Our Capacity to sense what will truly serve others – Not starting with what I would want done unto me, but rather sensing what will genuinely serve those for whom I am feeling empathy.
Drawing on all of that, finally, our capacity to Be of Service – to do what we believe will be helpful, remembering that sometimes we can be of greatest service by doing nothing.

Building capacity and skillfulness in all four of these dimensions of compassion is our ongoing study.

(Name upcoming Adult RE offerings and the dimensions of compassion that each addresses).

Cultivating Compassion via these four  dimensions is about waking our conscience. Applying it at social, public, institutional, systemic levels is the work of justice making. Justice is about attending to the experience of others, feeling concern for them, sensing what will really serve to reduce or relieve their suffering, and then being of genuine service, in public arenas.

“Justice is what love looks like in public.” – Cornell West.

Or as we might say, justice is what true, healthy, courageous compassion looks like in public.

What Moves You?

I want to come back to your causes…the ones you thought about and called out earlier.

I was going to ask members of the Social Justice team to name the causes about which they are particularly passionate right now, but the job of the Social Justice Team is not to do social justice work on behalf of the congregation. The job of the Social Justice Team is to help the members and friends of this congregation to do the work of justice in the community: to encourage, support, connect people to opportunities to do the work of justice.

So, let’s begin with you.

Drawing on your own compassion, who do you notice is suffering? From where are you hearing the cries of the world in ways that you feel, that move you so strongly that you desire to do something to relieve that suffering? (It may be what you called out earlier…or not.)

[Walk down rows as people call out the suffering that tugs at them.]

 

The Social Justice Team has been asking itself – How can we not only support all these individual calls toward compassion and justice, how can we gather our energies together into some critical mass and focus that energy where it might have a chance of effecting a real change, making a meaningful difference, really relieving suffering? Not all suffering, but someone’s suffering – and not only through service, but through social transformation as well.

At the end of the sermon, Stu will share with you a tool that the Social Justice Team hopes will help more of you to do together the justice work that matters to you.

As the year goes on, as we continue to envision, we’ll be looking at how to keep collecting and focusing the separate “I” energies more and more toward a powerful congregation-wide “WE” energy, focusing our collective compassion and desire for justice toward relieving real suffering in our town, in our area.

 

Rebellion and Resistance

Again, hoping to plant some seeds that we can water and tend, I want to offer a few more insights from Michael Hogue in his book, American Immanence.

As we think about how to go about the work of justice making in social arenas, the insight of Grace Lee Boggs may be helpful. Boggs was a Chinese American philosopher and activist who wrote of the difference between rebellion and revolution.

Boggs writes that rebellion “represents the massive uprisings and protests of the oppressed” [that] “[throw] into question the legitimacy and supposed permanence of existing institutions.”

Hogue picks up the thread, writing that “Rebellion is a …cathartic, …catalytic collective decision to resist the way things are.  [Rebellion decisively interrupts] the status quo and [so instigates] a crisis [cracks open a gap, creating] the opportunity for [something new to happen], a space for systemic change.

As such, rebellion is critical.

“However,” he points out, “a rebellion is not a revolution.”

As Boggs put it, “a revolution requires that people go beyond struggling against oppressive institutions. A revolution involves making an evolutionary/revolutionary leap toward becoming more socially responsible [more compassionate!] and more self-critical human beings. In order to transform the world we must transform ourselves. …Unlike rebellions which are here today and gone tomorrow [to which/as so many of our placards and t-shirts attest], revolutions require a patient and [extended] process that transforms and empowers us as individuals as we struggle to change the world around us.”

Rebellion is about resistance, says Hogue. Revolution is about resilience.

Rebellion and resistance are critically important, but not enough by themselves. By disrupting, they can open a window, but revolution must move in through that window to carry us forward.

Grace Lee Boggs points the way. She wrote that “when it comes to revolution, [when we go through that window] ‘We have to shift what unifies [us] from rejection to projection, from just denunciation to annunciation.’ [from what we are against, to what we’re for.]

Again, Michael Hogue frames it for us:

“While rebellion entails [merely] a critique of the way things are, revolution seeks to turn things around. Where rebellion is about resisting what is and [what] has been, revolution is about realizing what could and should be. And realizing the world that could and should be requires that it be deeply and vividly imagined.”

And so, imagining deeply and vividly the world that could and should be is our visioning work, even while we run to the front lines, as needed, to resist and rebel to stem the worst dangers and to create spaces for a foothold.

The thing is, the work to envision what we are for, not just what we are against, is exactly what is needed on a broad scale, Hogue says, to protect and strengthen our democracy, which is, at this moment, in peril, and, as it always is, vulnerable. Democracy can be injured, can take ill, can be killed, he says. Democracy, Hogue says, relies on creating the most diverse solidarity of people possible, united across many kinds of difference by a powerful common purpose….a shared vision.

“If the rebellious energy of the [many arising] movements [around the nation and the globe] can coalesce around something beyond critique, if they can announce, amplify, and unite around a revolutionary common purpose, then a transformative restructuring of larger economic, social, and ecological systems may become possible.”

And, Boggs says, such “revolutions must begin from wherever we are. . . . Organic systemic change emerges from the bottom up and the middle out…” not from the top. It’s about living our values where we are, first of all.

Our Unitarian Universalist principles name that we are committed to affirming and promoting the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. This is not simply a statement about how we make decisions, it is a theological statement about the nature of existence, about what matters, and about what it means to be human. Power, it says, is not located in any single location. Power, ideally, is disbursed broadly and equitably, shared by all.

Hogue says that justice is not a moral principle or a political ideal. It is not an abstract concept. Justice only exists as it is lived in our relationships and our communities, when “the power to act and decide, to be and to do and to know is shared rather than concentrated.”

And the capacity to share power that equitably can only exist, when the participants have a commitment to the common good, and willingness, in Mike’s words, to “empathically cross over to the experience of others.”

…which brings us back to cultivating compassion. The capacity to be present, to care, to discern what is needed, to be of service to relieve suffering.

All these are threads to pick up again, later.

What do you want?!

“We return today to remember that we become the vision we embrace.”

“May our time together,” not just today but every time two or more of us gather, “help us choose wisely and with courage.”

So may we be.

Sources/Resources

Halifax, Joan. TED Talk: “Compassion and the True Meaning of Empathy.” 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQijrruP9c4

Halifax, Joan, and Rebecca Solnit. Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet. New York: Flatiron Books, 2018.

Hogue, Michael S. American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

 

 

 

Wake, Now, Compassion

Rev. Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

A sermon delivered September 16, 2018

 “. . .to see, with open eyes, is a spiritual practice and thus a risk, for it can open you to ways of knowing the world and loving it that will lead to inevitable consequences. . . . some sorrow clearly, bravely seen is taken in, absorbed and felt, and reemerges, bent now into compassion.”  . . . It will make you very vulnerable. It is persistent, holy, world-transforming work.”

                                                     – Victoria Safford, from “Open Eye”

 

Here’s the point I want to make this morning. I’ll just name it up front, in case you are feeling sleepy later or I start to wander. 

I believe that cultivating compassion is our primary task as a religious community – the work from which all else in this congregation’s mission flows.

…cultivating compassion, in ourselves and in this congregation first of all, so that we will be able to cultivate compassion in the wider community that is our home.

All the rest is commentary.

 

The Metta Meditation

Let’s take a little time right now to warm up by cultivating our loving-kindness, our friendliness, through the Metta meditation that we just sang and that many of you know so well.

This morning I offer the form used by the Humanist Mindfulness Group at the Humanist Community at Harvard. It’s described by Rick Heller in his book, Secular Meditation, and it is rooted in Sharon Salzburg’s work from the 90’s, with a couple twists that I find helpful.

The traditional Metta meditation begins with I – “May I be filled with loving kindness,” or in this case, “May I be safe.” Rick Heller notes that for many in American culture it is easier to feel compassion for others first, especially someone we feel good about. Once we’ve surfaced the feeling of compassion and released oxytocin in our system, we remain in that mode for about 20 minutes, so while we are still in the glow of that compassion for someone else, we can more successfully turn compassion toward ourselves. So this meditation begins with focus on another person and then turns to ourselves.

And second, the wording is changed to claim more personal and human responsibility. Rather than “May you be safe,” which can convey a sense that it’s all up to somebody else somehow, the wording is, “I’d like you to be safe. I’d like you to be healthy. I’d like you to be happy. I’d like you to be at ease in the world.”

There are benefits and hazards to this language, but I invite you to try it on this morning.

 

Metta meditation from Secular Meditation

I invite you to make yourself as comfortable as you can,

to sit comfortably upright and tall.

You might close your eyes, or lower your eyelids and hold a soft gaze, eyes open but not really focusing.

Receive a few deep breaths.

Let ease or relax whatever in your body needs to ease or elax.

{Chime}

 

I’d like (you) to be safe.

I’d like (you) to be healthy.

I’d like (you) to be happy.

I’d like (you) to be at ease in the world

Applied to:

A Benefactor – a living person who has done something wonderfully good for you, and about whom you feel warmth and appreciation.
Yourself – your authentic, real, self, with all your gifts and quirks, just as you are
A Neutral Person – someone who you see but who you do not know.
A Difficult Person – not the most difficult person in your life, perhaps not a political figure, rather someone who bugs you a little, who rubs you the wrong way a little.

Finally:

“Imagine a circle of concern,

a circle of kindness

expanding outward from yourself,

To those near you,

To those further away,

Wider and wider

Until the circle dissolves

And your intention of being kind

Embraces all beings and all things.  (Heller 19)

{Chime}

 

Compassion

Loving-kindness, cultivated by practice. Not by wishful thinking, but by practices that change how we see one another, and how we feel, so that we are more likely to behave in kind and loving ways. Practices that teach us to be ready, in the moment it is needed, to feel some variation of “I’d like you to be safe, healthy, happy, at ease in the world.” And to act accordingly.

Compassion begins with loving kindness, but moves beyond loving-kindness to notice and to care about the suffering of others, until it becomes a desire to help free people from their suffering.

The hymn we sang says it well:

“Wake, now, compassion, give heed to the cry,

voices of suffering fill the wide sky.

Take as your neighbor both stranger and friend,

praying and striving their hardship to end.”

The message is that we first have to heed the cry – hear, see, notice with our own vulnerable openness that someone is suffering. Not only people far away and in dire circumstances, but the familiar person next to us, across the table, living next door, the person whose behavior irks us at the meeting. And then, having heard the cry, however disguised or silent, we let our wisest, most open-hearted empathy move us to want to relieve that suffering.

I heard once that compassion is the natural result of paying attention.

“…some sorrow clearly, bravely seen is taken in, absorbed and felt, and reemerges, bent now into compassion.” 

The message is that compassion calls us to more than thoughts, prayers, meditations and feelings. Compassion calls us to act to relieve suffering.

 

Avalokitesvara – Bodhisattva of Compassion

I’ve shown this photo of Avalokitesvara before.

Avalokitesvara is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, known as “The Regarder of the Cries of the World,” or “The Hearer of the Cries of the World.”

Avalokitesvara has a number of names and takes a number of gender-fluid forms. Here Avalokitesvara  is portrayed with one thousand arms, an eye of wisdom in the palm of each hand ready to see with honesty and clarity the reality of the world, including the suffering. And in each hand a different tool for relieving suffering.

Avalokitesvara is beloved as a divine resource (we all want our cries of suffering to be heard), and also held as an exemplar, an ideal for us.

 

Compassion as the path to true happiness

Modern studies are affirming what Buddhism has understood for thousands of years, that being compassionate benefits us, is in fact the central path to happiness.

Our empathy and skillful desire to lessen the suffering we find enhances neural integration, strengthens our immune system, increases longevity, decreases stress, and reduces the markers of inflammation.

Compassion accomplishes what religion is meant to accomplish: it ties our well-being to the well-being of others and helps us work toward both at the same time.

And so, I say, compassion is not merely one of the goals this congregation has named in its mission – a world more compassionate – compassion is the very definition of the spiritual and emotional strength named in the mission

Compassion is the reason and the way to use our intellectual strength.

Compassion is our grounding for seeking sustainability and justice in the world, natural outcomes of well-developed and healthy compassion.

 

Cultivating Compassion Here

I’ve been struggling with where best to place my energies and where to encourage your energy and attention in the life of this community. There’s social justice, and pastoral care, and education for young people and adults and outreach to the community, and Sunday services and the building and grounds and….

What’s become clear to me is that the more successfully we can cultivate compassion in ourselves and in this congregation first of all (and then in our community), the more successfully we will be able to live the mission you’ve set for yourselves. All of it. So for me, compassion is the foundation. The place to start. And without compassion as a foundation, the rest is ungrounded. For me, personally, unless compassion is the foundation, the rest becomes enervating/draining.

I’m finally becoming more clear about this after 55 years in the world, 44 years working in religious communities, and 2 years of ministry with you.

For me the initial questions are: “Are we here treating one another with loving-kindness, respect, compassion, and are we helping each other to do so.  Are we able to really see one another, clearly, as gifted and flawed human beings, recognizing each other’s suffering, even when it’s disguised, and moved to lessen that suffering.

“It is persistent, holy, world-transforming work”.

This is not to claim that I am an expert in or a guru of compassion.  This is a sermon to myself at least as much as it may be to anyone else. I am, rather, a fledgling devotee, aspiring to compassionate living and leadership, a student of those here who already offer such compassion.

I expect that some people in the room may be worried that compassion is too soft an anchor, in general and in these particular times, worried that compassion is too passive.

I offer you Joan Halifax’s reminder of the Buddhist insight that compassion requires both a strong back and a soft front…a thread we’ll pick up next week.

The first Sunday of this month we focused on seeing our personal vocations and ministries by looking at our lives honestly and clearly.

Last Sunday we framed this congregation’s journey in the larger unfolding epic of evolution and invited some of your visions for this congregation as it lives its mission into the future. Joanne and Ken Harris transcribed all those sticky notes from last Sunday, (thank you) watch for the results in this week’s e-Chalice. Many of you named love and justice, or in one way or another named compassion as a goal. Plus you named a bigger, younger, more diverse congregation … in a larger building.

All good.

 

Today I’ve suggested that compassion be the anchor for this congregation, our relationships with one another and the mission,

and next Sunday we’ll envision extending compassion outward to a focus on justice.

The many other things that need to be said and understood and experienced and teased out about genuine and healthy compassion will be part of our ongoing work.

To close today, I offer the insight and invitation of one of the teachers of compassion that I have been studying, who said that one helpful aid in the practice of compassion – is to have reminders everywhere of the importance of love and compassion.

Let’s together place reminders of the centrality of love and compassion everywhere in our life together – on our walls, in our newsletters, in our gatherings, covenants, and emails, in our one-on-one conversations, and most of all in our own hearts.

Through what we do and what we say, may we ourselves be reminders to one another of the primacy of love and compassion in our life together.

So may we be.

 

Sources/Resources

Bodhipaksa. TEDxTimberlaneSchools: “The Surprising Secret of Unlocking Compassion.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqGkkCXiqO0

 

Halifax, Joan. TED Talk: “Compassion and the True Meaning of Empathy.” 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQijrruP9c4

 

Heller, Rick. Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy., 2015.

 

Ladner, Lorne. The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychology. New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

 

Leighton, Taigen D. Faces of Compassion: Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and Their Modern Expression-an Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2012.

 

Letting Your Life Speak Sermon UUCM 9-2-18 Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Letting Your Life Speak
Rev.  Kevin Tarsa
Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
A sermon delivered September 2, 2018

A reading from the Letter of St. Palmer to the Roamers:

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent . . . at the heart of your own identity. …not the standards by which [you] must live, but the standards [you] cannot help but live if [you] are living [your] own life (Palmer 2-5).”

[CHIME]

A Psalm… of St. (May) Sarton:

Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces….

                                               (Palmer 9).

[CHIME]

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Brown Bridge Pond:

Brown Bridge Pond was begotten in the land of Michigan in 1921 with the installation of a large earthen berm and a small Hydro-electric dam. The dam created power for a growing community and it formed a beautiful 191-acre lake that became popular for kayaking, canoeing, fishing, and, around its edges, hiking and cross-country skiing.

I lived a short walk down the road and I hiked its edges several times a week, most weeks, for 11 years. Not long after I moved from there to a new home, a new part of my life, and a new vocation, the dam was removed.

A couple years later I made it a point to visit this once familiar and memory-filled place. I wondered what I would feel. I expected a bit of melancholy for the loss of the pond and parts of my life which it had accompanied.

When I returned, a river was snaking through where the pond had been.

I walked down to where the dam used to be.

 

 

A spot that now looked like this.

 

 

I cast off my shoes, found a stone at the edge, sat and let the clear, now cold water flow over my feet for a good long while.

What I felt, to my surprise, and with tears in my eyes, was a very powerful joy. There was a rightness, a trueness to this new-to-me, but original form of the river. As I had known it, the river had been buried beneath the pond all those years, still there, but slowed and masked for several miles by the dammed water.

This, now, was the river as it was meant to be, as it had been, once. The river freed to be itself.

[CHIME]

 

Being Ourselves

Karyn Packard has offered us several teachings this past year rooted in the Myers-Briggs and Keirsey typologies. Early in each workshop session she has named for us that the point of these tools is not to define us from the outside using someone else’s terms, but rather to help each of us to recognize, honor and live from our “true self.”

Not the adaptive/developed selves we have learned to be for the sake of survival and acceptance, and not the contextual selves that shift with the surroundings and the needs of the moment, but the true self at the center of who we are.

This takes some work, for most of us, takes “many years and places” as May Sarton put it, to become ourselves, especially if we’ve lived a while. We’ve done a lot of adapting and adjusting in our lives, most of us, in order to navigate our worlds. We’ve worn other people’s faces, many of us.

There is a well-known teaching story from the Hassidic tradition in Judaism:

Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’”
[Or Solomon? Or David? Or as we might put it, “Why were you not Mother Theresa? Or Martin Luther King, Jr.?”]
No, said Rabbi Zusya, “they will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”       (Palmer 11).”

The mystical edge of every truly religious tradition points us toward our most true self –  invites us, nudges us, inspires us, pushes us, tricks us, sometimes, toward realizing our essential self.

But Wait, There’s “More”

The thing is, the surface of religiosity seems to do just the opposite: to ask us to become something different than we are, something more than, someone better than we are.

I confess, am drawn to this ideal of self-improvement, like a moth to a flame, actually, drawn by my personality and by early family and religious training. I am easily seduced by the call to be ever more and better. To be something else, other than who and what I am now.

I have often thought of and described this pull to both accept ourselves as we are and improve ourselves as not only a paradox, in religion and life, but also a polarity, a necessary both/and high wire act requiring constant balancing. A blending of our Universalist heritage which teaches that you are infinitely precious, already loved and saved, and our Unitarian heritage which teaches that you are saved by developing your character. And it is a both/and polarity, but only at the surface, only to the extent we need it to be, and only as a means to an end.

At their best and in the end, all the religious shoulds and oughts, thou shalts and shalt nots, principles and purposes, and spiritual disciplines and practices designed to shape and guide our behavior are like bumpers on a bowling lane – meant to guide our spinning, fishtailing selves toward the center of who we are, without hurting others and without getting sidetracked or lost in the gutters.

The Treasure at Our Feet

There are a number of teaching stories that tell of someone’s grand quest to locate a marvelous treasure. Someone travels the world for years in a failed search, only to return home, eventually, and discover that the treasure they had been seeking was all along buried right where they had started. There seems to be no getting around making the journey.

Alan Watts refers to this as “a journey to where you already are.” He speaks of it in terms of a person’s realization that they are the Universal Self rather than a separate individual. He said,

“…you will visit many other places than the place where you are, and perhaps when you find through some long experience that all the places you go to are not the place you wanted to find, it may occur to you that you were already there in the beginning.”

He goes on: “And that is the Dharma, or “method,” as I prefer to translate the word. That’s the method that all gurus and spiritual teachers fundamentally use (Watts, in Parabola 42:1, pg. 31).”

Gurus have us traveling all over the place until we finally realize that we are already home.

Vocation and Ministry

This Labor Day weekend, I am inviting us to explore the idea of personal vocation and personal ministry through this lens. Lest you who are retirees think that the work is finished, know that David Whyte teaches that this is “a lifelong pilgrimage of identity.” Sometimes, he says, it’s not until retirement that a person is able, at last, to remove the dam – or when it is removed for you – and you are called back to the original essence of who you are.

I am inviting this exploration and your reflection, here at the beginning of the congregation year, because you will be invited into any number of ways to get involved and volunteer and offer who you are in service of this congregation and its mission to create, with courageous love, a world more compassionate, sustainable and just.

And I hope you will be involved fully and healthily. You and your personal gifts are what make this community. Which is why it is so important to give of yourself in ways that are sustainable over time.

Giving from who you most authentically are – from your essential, most true self – will be the giving that sustains and strengthens you at the same time it sustains and strengthens this community. It is the way to serve and grow at the same time. Ideally, this congregation and this tradition will help you to do both.

Parker Palmer says that “The deepest vocational question” – and I would say, in this context, your deepest question of ministry or how you want to serve, “is not ‘What ought I to do […] with my life,’” …my time, my energy, my talent, my money. It’s not about “shoulding” ourselves. The vocational and ministry question is, Palmer says, “the more elemental and demanding, ‘Who am I? What is my nature (Palmer 15)?’”

As you know, this can be difficult to sort out for those of us accustomed/used to offering our adaptive and contextual selves, to wearing other people’s faces, for which we’ve long been rewarded by people.

Let Your Life Speak

To find the clues to your true self beneath the masks and the accumulated layers, Palmer suggests, “Let your life speak.”

Early in his life Palmer took this Quaker phrase to be a call to live up to your “highest values” and their “demanding standards in everything you do.” To listen to the voices from the outside about who you ought to be. It was only 30 years later that he came to hear it as an invitation instead to “let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” Let your life tell you who you are most truly.

Thinking of one’s vocation as “an act of will,” he writes, “a grim determination that one’s life will go this way or that whether it wants to or not . . . is an act of violence toward ourselves,” however lofty the motivation (4).

In his words: “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity (4-5).”

In the Beginning…and beyond

As a starting place, says Palmer, look to early in your life, when you were closer to your birthright gifts, before you were rewarded or harmed into too much adapting.

Kathryn and Taylor have been sharing stories of their newborn grandchild – [PHOTO] here, at two weeks – already full of a particular easygoing personality. I think of Ixchel Matthews too, [PHOTO] entering the world with a particular set of gifts and a way of being. You who spend time with newborns know this. We arrive with a whole lot of “who” to us when we are born.

Palmer advises, look for hints of your essential self by remembering who you were in the beginning. Maybe not at two weeks old, but early on. Probably the earlier the better.

“We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then – if we are awake and aware and able to admit our loss – we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed (12).”

You can look for clues, he says, by remembering what you wanted to be when you grew up. This may not be super literal. The clues may need some decoding, in fact may be buried in paradox. (See Palmer’s book, Let Your Life Speak, for more here.)

A Lutheran guide for volunteers for discovering your gifts asks people to complete the sentence:  “A gift of which I’ve been aware since my childhood is…”

How would you complete that sentence?

Or you may find clues in someone who has mirrored you back to yourself, though this is tricky because they might have been using a mirror distorted by their own lenses, subtly teaching you to adapt. But there are people who selflessly enough mirror our truth back to us accurately. The second sentence for completion in that Lutheran guide is, “Others tell me I have the gift of…,” or I might put it, “Others tell me I have a gift for… “

How would you complete either of those sentences?

Possible clues to your truest self.

Another approach would be to look for the negative spaces, for when have you burned out in your life. This too can provide clues. David Whyte shares the wisdom he received from a Brother David Steindl-Rast that the antidote to exhaustion and burnout is not necessarily rest, but rather wholeheartedness.

Palmer says that true burnout is a sign not just that we are too busy doing too much, but, more important, that we are not doing the right thing, that we are “violating our own nature,” giving gifts that we can conjure up if necessary, but that we do not inherently possess (49). Ultimately, he says, this is harmful to ourselves and to others.

This is a challenging claim for those of us who are taught that it is a virtue to be what we are not for the sake of others. It is a risky claim in a community that so relies on volunteers.

For all the needs and demands that community life presents, religious community is meant to help us find and give our true selves healthily and well.

The Journey Home

You would think that the journey to where you already are would be simpler. And easier. But as May Sarton reminds us, this spiritual/emotional/intellectual journey can get mess, involve being “dissolved and shaken.” It sometimes takes bottoming out, with no other options, to get us there. If you are bottoming out these days, that may be a silver lining, waiting –  painfully opening a window to a truer self.

As the drawdown of the Brown Bridge Pond unfolded, a whole lot of mud was the reality for a time. Mud and stumps. Tree stumps were still there in the pond bed after almost 100 years. Pieces of the original identity remained, not only of the river, but also of what had surrounded it.

There are rewards for being a pond created by the damming of our river. People know that pond, appreciate it, affirm it, love it. Perhaps we do to. At the very least, we become accustomed to it, and moving toward a more true self involves our own losses and grief when we let it go.

At Brown Bridge, green life reclaimed that muddy ground surprisingly quickly, with a little help.

The land along the river where the pond had been was already becoming beautiful and abundant feeling when I saw it several years ago, not long after the dam was removed and the river took on its true form. I look forward to seeing what it looks like now.

I invite you to know, and to participate here at UUCM from the most essential self you can find. I invite you to offer your sacred “no” when a suggested task does not authentically match who you are. Your doing that will help the rest of us to do the same and to hear other people’s “no’s.” I also invite you to ask yourself, “What are your birthright gifts and where might you offer them here?” so that you can offer your sacred “yes” or create an opportunity for that “yes”, and listen for other people’s sacred “yes’s” – voiced and unvoiced – and create opportunities for them.

In the coming weeks we’ll offer additional invitations to reflect on this. And throughout the year we will be offering explicit opportunities to discover more of your true self – in classes and workshops and Soul Matters Circles and committee meetings and Sunday services.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to spend time reflecting on your life so far – on the friends you’ve had, the work you’ve done, the songs you’ve sung, the love you’ve shared – and your earliest visions for your life – listening for what your life tells you about who you are beneath the waters that may have covered your true self.

There’s a river flowing in your soul, in your heart, in your mind, and it’s telling you of the somebody that you are.

[Sing] There’s a river flowin’ in my soul…

Blessed be.

_____________________________

Sources

Palmer, Parker J. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Watts, Alan. “How To Reach Where You Already Are.” Parabola Spring 2017: 31. Print.

Whyte, David. Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work As a Pilgrimage of Identity. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.

 

Wrestling with “God”

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

A sermon delivered August 26, 2018

Reading    “Couples Counseling” from Love Like Thunder by Jess Reynolds

Reading    From Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott(see http://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbnonfiction/2012/11/excerpt-from-help-thanks-wow-by-anne-lamott/)

 

Wrestling with “God” 

by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Jacob’s Story – Genesis 32:22-31

In the first book of the Hebrew Bible there is a story of Jacob who is trying to return, at long last, to his childhood home and the brother from whom he has long been estranged. On the way home, after taking his family across, Jacob finds himself alone at the edge of a river, wrestling all night long with a mysterious figure.

As dawn breaks, the unknown figure wrenches Jacob’s hip at the socket, wounding him permanently, such that forever after Jacob walks with a limp.

Jacob doesn’t give up the struggle, however, and keeps wrestling, looking for a hold.

“Let me go!,” the figure demands, but Jacob replies “I won’t let you go, unless you bless me.”

And the mysterious figure asks “What is your name?”

When Jacob answers, “Jacob,” the figure says, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, meaning “One who struggles with God.” Jacob asks, “Pray tell me your name.” And the figure says, “You must not ask my name,” and leaves.

Jacob named that place Peniel, meaning, “I have seen God Face to Face.”

Who’s here?

I have asked this before, and will again, but to get our bearings in this moment with each other:

Who here has at some time in your life held a meaningful, helpful, important sense of God, whatever that meant to you?
Who here has wrestled with that God, either in person or in concept?
Who here currently holds a meaningful, helpful, important sense of god, whatever that means to you?
Who here is currently wrestling with god or their concept of god?
Who here has not ever in your life held a meaningful, helpful, important sense of god, whatever that meant to you?
And who here rejects the concept of god entirely, finding it unnecessary, irksome and maybe a bit worrisome to have a focus on God here on a Sunday?

So, here we are!

Together.

Covering that entire range.

In the same tradition.

In the same Congregation.

Or at least in the same service in the same room this morning, acknowledging a diversity among us that we can ignore or that we can explore, that we can wrestle with together for the sake of our relationships, our spiritual depth, and the strength of our community. I’m inviting us to wrestle with this diversity throughout this year, to hear from many voices over time so that we may “cultivate our spiritual, emotional and intellectual strength.”

Last Sunday offered some of that wrestling in a wonderful service led by members of our Humanist group, who offered human centered approaches to life’s large questions and the mysteries of “life, the universe, and everything.”

Wrestling with notions of God has been central to our Unitarian and Universalist histories, Universalists rejecting the idea of an angry God who metes out eternal punishment, and the Unitarians rejecting the trinitarian notion of a god divided into three aspects or beings, questioning, eventually, the divine nature of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus, wrestlings that do not occupy the attention of many of our UU members these days.

Yet, many Unitarian Universalists continue to wrestle with the concept of god in some way, or with other people’s concept of god, at least, and with the usefulness of wrestling with any of it in the first place in this day and age.

Abner Kneeland’s Story

 The last person to be jailed for blasphemy in the U.S. was a Universalist minister, Abner Kneeland.

Massachusetts, 1838.

By then Abner Kneeland had been disowned and disfellowshipped by the Universalists, for his religious and his political views. He had called for equal rights for women and equality of races. He had suggested that women keep their own name and bank accounts. He had spoken out in favor of birth control, divorce, and interracial marriage. He was attracting 2000 people on Sunday mornings and on Wednesday evenings as lecturer for the First Society of Free Inquirers in Boston.

In 1833 he had printed a letter in which he stated: “Universalists believe in a god which I do not…”  From this he was accused of being an atheist, and in his five trials on charges of blasphemy he argued grammar and punctuation in his defense.

Since there was no comma after “god”, he said, he wasn’t saying that he didn’t believe in god, just that he wasn’t believing in the same god in which the universalists believed. He also argued that he was not really an atheist, that he was a pantheist who believed that everything is god, that nature is god.

The courts didn’t buy either argument and Kneeland lost his case, serving 60 days in jail, likely more for his “dangerous” political views than anything. Though a person was convicted of blasphemy in the United States as late as 1928, and though some states still have blasphemy laws on the books, no one since Abner Kneeland has served time, officially, for blasphemy.

The absence of the comma and the question of grammar in Kneeland’s statement points in a helpful direction, for to enter any real conversation about god requires shared definitions.

What do we mean by “God?”

What do you, or I or anyone mean by “God?”

 

Traditional and tired wrestling matches about God begin with some variation on the dated definition of God that is shared by fundamentalist theists and fundamentalist atheists alike:

Rabbi Rami Shapiro says that arguing about whether this god exists – or any of its modern variations – is like arguing about unicorns. People agree on the definition of a unicorn. They simply disagree on whether unicorns exist or ever existed.

Reframing “God”

But liberal religionists in all traditions, and many of our Christian and Jewish neighbors, have long re-imagined god in much more metaphorical, often more mystical terms, explaining that we’ve kept the idea of God trapped in much too small a container.

Though the ago-old definition of God may yet be the god of some people, this is “not the god of serious, open minded thinkers,” says Jeanne H. Nieuwejaar. This is not the god we are likely to be wrestling with here among us.

The physicist, Murray Gellmann, once told Rabbi Irwin Kula, “Rabbi, I’m a scientist. I must tell you up front I don’t believe in God.” To which the rabbi replied, “That’s okay. I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.” (Nieuwejaar 84)

With our ever-changing knowledge and awareness, people have long invested in re-conceptualized god, rescuing god from older notions that no longer serve, that chafe, or that contradict knowledge and experience, continuing to wrestle with god, determined to extract a blessing before they are willing to let go.

Many atheists and other non-theists ask, “Why? Why bother? Why not just let go? Why go through all that effort to try to get “God” to fit?

There are cultural reasons for such persistence: in the U.S. we and our neighbors and our families are steeped in God culture and language. And there is a natural human search for security, comfort and certainty in an intrinsically uncertain world, or as Mike Hogue puts it, in a “finally mysterious and morally ambiguous” universe (Hogue 120). There is also an evolutionary, psychological propensity to infer intent and order in the world, rather than randomness and chaos. It is our human nature.

Rooted in Experience

But in our setting, the holy ground for our conversations and empathy and compassion, if not always our understanding or agreement, is to be found, I think, in the priority our UU tradition places on personal experience as the primary source and filter for religious knowledge and truth.

At a certain level, experience equals truth for us.

We are asked to hold our views not because someone else holds them, or wrote them down, or told us to hold them, but because our personal experience in life leads us to hold them. Our truths must match our personal experience for us to have integrity.

The risk, of course, is that our experience can lead us to incorrect conclusions. Rabi Rami gives the simple, familiar examples of seeing a mirage of water on hot pavement or sand,

or a pencil that appears broken when seen in glass of water, or that primal experience of being startled by a piece of rope or a branch that we mistake for a snake. Our perception does not always have a complete basis in reality, but it is where we start. And then in our interactions with others we test and vet our perceptions.

The root experiences that keep a sense of god present and alive long after God was declared dead are the powerful transcendent experiences people have, like Jacob’s, alone at edge of the river. As our UUA sources name it, it is,

“Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

In college, I was home on break one winter, snowshoeing in a cornfield behind my family’s home. In the depth of the blue in the sky, the chill of the air on my skin and in my nostrils, what was going on in my life, and the physical rhythm of walking on the snow, every cell in my body felt alive and pulsing. Charismatically Catholic at the time, I had a tremendous sense of God and Gods’ love permeating me and everything. It was expansive and exhilarating. Unexpected. Seemingly out of nowhere.

It’s the experience of mystery and awe Ursula Goodenough named in the reading last Sunday, of looking at the starry night sky, or looking through a microscope, when our perspective on our self and our place in the universe shifts.

Some of my favorite and strongest transcendent experiences involve human connectedness – music making, drumming, dancing together, laughing, crying, chanting, marching, singing… even holding silence together.

I’ve named before that when evangelical Christians talk about the presence of the holy spirit entering a room and group of people, I know exactly the experience they are talking about, even though I would now explain it in human, natural terms.

It is a physical experience for me. It is the powerful experience of sensing viscerally for a moment that we are connected to and part of something much larger, whether the universe, or time, or God. It’s an experience of feeling completely empty in Buddhist meditation, of everything dropping away leaving nothing, which is another form of unity and oneness.

Ice, Water, and Transcendence

Rabbi Shapiro offers the image of an ice cube in water.

Most of the time we see ourselves as the ice, different, distinct and separate from the water, but in powerful moments of transcendence, our sense of personal identity melts and we realize/feel/sense in that moment that we are entirely water, as is everything around us, and that we always have been water.

And then, because we can only sustain that so long, we go back to feeling separate, ice.

Most of the time human consciousness helps us make our way through the world this way, by making distinctions and delineating edges: What’s me/what’s not me? What’s this/what’s that? Our consciousness separates and categorizes, helps us locate all the edges. We need that to navigate the world.

But there are times when, for whatever reasons, our consciousness stops defining things for a moment, and when suddenly, without those boundaries delineated, all the distinctions fall away, leaving a potent experience of total connection, or total emptiness, or complete oneness.

…until at some point, the usual awareness returns and we become… ice again.

For me these are the foundational experiences of what we label “spiritual” or “religious.” Each of us will understand and interpret such experiences through our current lenses, lenses handed to us by our culture and those around us, as well lenses fashioned by our unique experiences and personality.

We’ll interpret our experience of transcendence as a feeling of oneness with the universe, as unconditional love and acceptance, as a higher state of human consciousness, as in interesting neurological experience, or as being held in the hand or the heart of God, for example.

Wordless

But because in the transcendent moment all distinctions and boundaries fall away, the experience itself is inherently wordless. Words define and delineate and so are unavailable in the midst of transcendence, and words are always inadequate to capturing or explaining it later, even to ourselves.

When Jacob asks, “Pray, tell me your name.” The mysterious figure answers, “You must not ask my name.”

There is no adequate answer.

Since words cannot truly capture the transcendent experience or the something larger of which we sense ourselves to be a part, we can only ever speak about them and point to them in symbol and metaphor that make sense to each of us, and even then, only incompletely.

“The Tao (the way) that can be named is not the Eternal Tao.  (Tao Te Ching 1:1)

Thus, Ursula Goodenough’s covenant with mystery, letting the mystery be, without needing to filling in the blank spaces.

As Forrest Church put it, “God is our name for that which cannot be named or known.” (Nieuwejaar 93)

We who are atheists tend to think that god is an illusion, a mirage maintained by undisciplined minds, but, in our tradition, god is not an illusion, god is an allusion. “God” alludes to that which cannot be separated and named, even in a fully natural world.

As Anne Lamott suggests, “God is (simply) the name we might agree to use for convenience.”

And yet, I know, I know …the name “God” comes with a whole lot of baggage.

I myself am drawn to other symbols and words. But in this regard, we are diverse enough, in this very room, to benefit from wrestling with “god,” if we can.

Let’s Wrestle

I invite us to wrestle here with “God” not by starting with our beliefs, or our arguments of logic, or our pet peeves, which are usually dead ends for the beginning of such a conversation, but by sharing the stories of our transcendent experiences and what we make of them.

What are those boundary transcending experiences you have had, whether you label them wonderful mysteries, or God, or “unimaginably big and not us.”

Let’s be ready to listen to others with curiosity, rather than loaded for bear with our own convictions.

Start there, I say.

With our felt experiences.

Start there.

Without a comma.

 

I’m fond of a quote from Alice Walker in The Color Purple:

“…have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”

A couple years ago, in the Davis UU congregation, the children played hide and seek with God on a Sunday morning much like this one.

They looked for God in nature.

They looked for God in human caring.

They looked for God in a mirror.

And finally, they looked for god in each other’s eyes, seeing God face-to-face.

Let’s start there.

 

So may we be.

 

Sources

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998..

Hogue, Michael S. American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Lamott, Anne. Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. New York: Riverhead Books/The Penguin Group, 2015.

Nieuwejaar, Jeanne Harrison. Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2012.

Shapiro, Richard R. God: A Rabbi Rami Guide. Cork: BookBaby, 2013.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1982

 

 

Download a PDF version of the sermon.

“Oxygen, Soda Water, Gunpowder, and You”

by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

July 29, 2018

 

Time for All Ages        “Joseph Priestley”

from the Tapestry of Faith “Miracles” curriculum by Adrianne Ross, Chris Jablonski, Miriam Smith, & Susan Lawrence.

https://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/multigenerational/miracles/session-4/joseph-priestley

 

Sermon      “Oxygen, Soda Water, Gunpowder, and You”   by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

 

Joseph Priestley, O2 and Soda Water

Joseph Priestley not only isolated oxygen and identified it as a component of the air we breathe, he identified 10 gaseous compounds, including Nitrous oxide (laughing gas), hydrogen chloride, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide.  He also wrote an important text on his study of electricity and his electricity producing inventions.

Along the way, he invented …soda water.

Yes, we have a Unitarian minister to thank for carbonated beverages!

Joseph Priestley created soda water by pouring water back and forth between two glasses while holding them over the fermentation vats at the brewery near where he was living. Why he thought to do this, I have no idea. He was a creative and open experimenter.

He discovered that if he poured water back and forth over the fermenting mixture for two minutes, the water would pick up some of the mephitic air being released from the vats, what we know as carbon dioxide, making the water pleasantly bubbly.

He called his carbonated water Pyrmont water, while others called it “windy water,” and when Priestley speculated that his invention might prevent scurvy, the British Navy sent Caption Cook out on the high seas with ships equipped with soda-water machines.

Informed of this by a spy, the French government figured it must be some great military secret, and so they set out to make their own windy water.

If you are wanting to learn more, there is a very engaging telling of Priestley’s story in a book titled, The Invention of Air, and Priestley features prominently in the first episode of a PBS series titled The Mystery of Matter.

Although he is not well known now beyond science history textbooks, in his time, he was spoken of by fellow progressive scientists with the kind of respect reserved for people like Sir Isaac Newton. Steven Johnson, the author of The Invention of Air, notes that “in their legendary fourteen-year final correspondence” …Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote 165 letters to each other. In those 165 letters, they mention Benjamin Franklin five times, George Washington three times, Alexander Hamilton two times, and Joseph Priestley 52 times!

Born in 1733 in England, Priestley was one of the first English ministers to claim the name Unitarian. A good friend of Benjamin Franklin and a key influence on Thomas Jefferson’s religious ideas, Priestley spent the last 10 or so years of his life and ministry in Pennsylvania, not long after a raging mob in Birmingham, England burned his church, his home, and his laboratory on the evening of July 14, 1791, and then threatened to come after him and his family.

The date of the attack was no mere coincidence; July 14, 1791 was the 2-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, France. Priestley and a number of his friends and colleagues had been voicing support for the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and had been hinting that revolution might not be such bad thing for England.

Religion

But even before that, Priestley’s religious views had him in hot water with the public. In 1782 he had published his “History of the Corruptions of Christianity,” in which he wrote that he didn’t believe in the biblical miracles, the trinity, or the divinity of Jesus. He believed Jesus was entirely, if powerfully, human. After an angry backlash from the religious leaders and the public, he wrote a sermon in response, titled “The Importance and Extent of Free Enquiry.” In it he reassured his flock:

“Let us not, …, be discouraged, though for the present we should see no great number of churches professedly Unitarian. It is sufficiently evident that Unitarian principles are gaining ground every day (Johnson 177).”

Did I mention that he was optimistic? Thomas Jefferson echoed Priestley’s sentiment in his own conviction that our entire country would one day become Unitarian.

Joseph Priestley was living, thinking, experimenting and writing at significant thresholds  – at a time of paradigm shifts – in science, in industry, in religion, and in politics, entering new territory in all those arenas at the same time, all connected, as they always are.

Free Inquiry

Priestley believed that in order to move forward in each of these realms of science, religion and politics, what was most important was making room for free inquiry, for unencumbered questioning. As he put it, for:

“promot[ing] the most perfect freedom of thinking and acting…in order that every point of difference [might] have an opportunity of being fully canvassed, not doubting but that…Truth [would] prevail, and that then a rational, firm, and truly valuable [agreement would] take place (147).”

If ideas of all kinds have a chance to be raised and fully and freely examined and vetted then we will, in the end, reach truths, he believed.

New forms of communication – the brand new postal services of the day, and a new coffeehouse culture in England that kept progressive thinkers in lively conversation with one another – were allowing information to be shared much more quickly and widely – precursors to the internet and Facebook and Twitter.

At a time when scientific discoveries were transforming people’s sense of the world, where it came from and how it works, Priestley said that the Bible ought to be re-translated continually, updated based on our new knowledge.

He believed that truth, in the end, was absolute, but that our human understanding of truth would keep unfolding forever, in a gradual and collective process. We would never reach Truth completely, but we would always be moving upward, toward it.

He brought this spirit of free inquiry and the canvassing of truth to everything he did. In his scientific explorations he would just try things, keeping exhaustively detailed notes on his experiments, and then he would share that information freely.

Some of his friends encouraged him hold his hard won discoveries closer to his chest, but he believed in maximum openness and the generous circulation of ideas, and ao he put his soda water formula in letters and pamphlets and told it to anyone who would listen. He believed that scientific advancements came not from individual great thinkers, but from the many small discoveries of truths available to all people.

About 12 years after his Piermont water creation, one Johann Schweppe patented a method of carbonating water …and, I expect, made a lot more money than Priestley ever did.

Our 4th Principle

In earlier sermons based on Joseph Priestley, I’ve been drawn to tie our fourth Principle – our Unitarian Universalist commitment to “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning”  – to Priestley’s ideas. It is indeed THE central principle in Unitarian Universalism, freedom of inquiry that allows us to reach all the other principles, demanding that we discern and interrogate truths together, and that we hold even our most cherished convictions with a loose enough grip that we will be able let go of them when new experiences and knowledge lead us to new truths.

In religious language, we say that for Unitarian Universalists, revelation is never sealed once and for all – that our understanding of truth will continue to evolve, and, fair warning!, that our new experiences and discoveries might at any moment shake up everything we think we know.

The Gunpowder Sermon

I mentioned earlier Priestley’s sermon, “The Importance And Extent Of Free Enquiry.”

In that sermon he offered his Unitarian congregation metaphors for thinking about and facing their challenging times, metaphors for the significant, confusing, and seemingly sudden transformations taking place all at once in industry, in religion, in science and in politics.

He began by offering his people gentle images of farming: of a seed that lies quietly underground, in the dark, invisible all winter, but that bursts forth with green life in the spring, seemingly out of nowhere.

Then he moved on to more dramatic metaphors: earthquakes and volcanoes that lie dormant for ages, and then suddenly erupt, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in violent outbursts, quickly re-shaping the landscape for a new age.

And then, to encourage his congregants, Priestley said:

“We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.”

Priestley delivered this incendiary sermon on Guy Fawke’s Day, the day commemorating the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a conspiracy by a group of English Catholics to assassinate the Protestant King of England and replace him with a Catholic. The conspirators placed kegs of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords, intending to blow it up while the body was in session, but the plot was discovered and the conspirators executed.

Priestley’s sermon became known as The Gunpowder Sermon, and his antagonists referred to him as “Gunpowder Joe.”

What about U(U)s? Today?

This year, reflecting on Priestley’s life and work, I’m taken with the parallels to our current age, wherein the established anchors and norms in science, economics, religion and politics are all shifting – seemingly suddenly, but not really….and wherein our ability to share information has become enormous and instantaneous.

I’ve wondered how we might best prepare ourselves for and midwife goodness in the midst of the paradigm shifts underway, how we might even help midwife those paradigm shifts themselves – knowing that our path forward is going to be through them, not around them.

I wondered what edifices of error and superstition we might be called to blow up, with our courageous love and our grains of carefully laid explosive pow(d)er.

It’s easy and tempting to think that we progressive UUs are all about the work of laying explosive powders grain by grain – or keg by keg sometimes – underneath other people’s errors and superstitions. And while there is important work to do there, it’s important to name that we have our own errors and superstitions that need toppling.

As an institution and as individual UUs, those of us who are white are being called to face our racism, our white supremacy and our white fragility, for example. My sermon on Joseph Priestley and my own presence notwithstanding, we are being called to center the voices of people of color and other people marginalized by the status quo, to commit to de-center whiteness, maleness, ablebodiedness, heterosexuality – not because everything else is better than those things, but because everything else has been excluded for so long, keeping us not only unjust but dangerously out of balance, missing the perspectives and the people that we must include if we are to reach truths fully.

But this is about more than the privileged luxury of reaching for truths. The stakes are higher and more visceral now, in an era in which human behaviors are re-shaping not only culture and biology, but re-shaping the very geology of the earth.

Unnecessary Bifurcations

Michael Hogue, whose ideas and book American Immanence I drew upon at the beginning of the month, says that a whole set of false and oppositional separations needs toppling, a set of long-time and increasingly dangerous bifurcations: either/or’s that are not only untrue, but unnecessarily framed as if they are in opposition to one another.

These false and oppositional bifurcations that need toppling include, he says, the artificial separation in our minds and hearts between human and animal, culture and nature, mental and physical, God and world, religious and secular, us and them…

Now, if it is difficult to imagine re-uniting some of those pairs, to imagine, for example, that religious and secular, or mental and physical, or human and animal could be false and dangerous separations, I invite you to remember that many enlightened people in Europe once thought that trees polluted the air and ought to be chopped down near a home, not knowing our symbiotic relationship, that trees breathe in our carbon dioxide to their benefit and breathe out, to our benefit, life-sustaining oxygen. We have our own edifices, “the erection of which has been the work of ages.”

All of these problematic bifurcations, Hogue says, are anchored in and enabled by one foundational edifice of error that needs dismantling if not destruction. It has driven the interconnected theological, political, and scientific assumptions that are leading us to crises.

It is the erroneous separation we have made between humanity and the earth, between humanity and nature….as if we came from somewhere outside of nature and are separate from it, as if we are really from and belong in a different realm, as if we are exceptional to all else that exists, when in truth, no matter how multifaceted and complex we may be, we are fully of the earth.

As Kichwa, an indigenous culture of the Andes, teaches, “We are Earth walking.”

Or as some of the most ancient stories in the Hebrew Bible remind us, we are made “of the dust of the ground.” (Genesis 2:7).

And?

As to exactly how our separating of humanity and earth/nature leads to our theological, scientific and political hazards, that will need to be a focus for another time.

I would point out this morning an irony and source of hope and encouragement from Michael Hogue: that the current crises arising out of this foundational error separating humanity and nature are finally getting us to a place to where we can see our error and must face our error.

Because we humans can now change not only culture and biology but also the geology and climate of the earth itself in ways that affect human wellbeing, increasingly we can no longer consider ourselves as separate from the earth. Hogue says that our crises are unsettling the false separation that has led to them, opening up space now for new possibilities. The error is beginning to topple itself.

Everything, everything, is connected, even if we don’t now know or will ever know all the ways that this is true. Revelation will never be sealed.

Our work ahead, according to Hogue, and I’m agreeing, is courageously and actively to point out and critique the artificial separations we’ve held, to lament them and unsettle and disrupt them, maybe blow them up, including separations we may be holding onto ourselves, and then constructively and creatively to reimagine the symbols, meanings, and practices that underlie our cultural systems.

In other words, our work is to point out the errors and superstitions of our edifices with all the courageous love we can muster, to lay our individual grains of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual gunpowder underneath them, and to find the spark to set them alight, even under some of our own most cherished notions that keep things separated.

And then, to realize together new ways forward built on our awareness of our complete inter-relatedness, our thorough inter-connectedness, our oneness of being in this world and of this earth – to build on this awareness new structures that are “radically relational, politically enlivened” and “engaged, spiritually vital, environmentally and socially just…” and, underneath it all, “ecologically attuned,” and so perhaps, just perhaps, sustainable.

Our work is cut out for us.

And I realize that I am speaking in broad generalities.

The path ahead will be to discern and act upon the specifics…to identify and address those bifurcations deeply, one by one. That is work we will need to do together…if you are willing.

My hope is that it will be so.

Blessed be.

Amen.

Sources

Hogue, Michael S. American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, 2008.

FREE THE PRODIGAL SELF

By Bev Lyon

Part I – The Hostage Self

 

 

I love stories of all kinds, and one of my favorites is the story of the prodigal son. You may know it.  A man has two sons, one who leads a disreputable life in the city and one who stays home to help his father on the farm.

When the wastrel finally returns home, broken and broke, his father throws a banquet and welcomes him with open arms. I respond to the forgiveness and redemption in the story. I always hope someone will give me the opportunity to start over, to try again, and again.

Think for a moment about celebrations of life or memorial services you have attended, those of relatives, friends, and others. It seems that when you put together all the stories that are told, the deceased was courageous, generous, selfless, funny, creative, energetic………, and kind.

Now, that is not to say that the person was a paragon of virtue. In fact, the less of a paragon of virtue they were, the better the memorial often is. A joyful celebration of life includes shared laughter about the foibles of the deceased. In the end we don’t demand perfection of one another. In fact, we most appreciate people when we can accept their humanness.

With that in mind, I have begun to view the prodigal son story from a different perspective. What if instead of waiting for someone else to forgive us, maybe in a memorial service, what if we forgave ourselves and welcomed our own prodigal selves with warm embrace? Could that change our outlook and perhaps even our behavior?

In 2010 my wife Lynn and I were in Dublin during a Fringe Festival, and we saw a comedy duo called The Pajama Men. Two barefoot men came on stage dressed in pajamas and sat down on side-by-side chairs. From there scenes tumbled out like improv gone wild.

At one point one of them plays a man on a train and the other is a little bird that rides on his shoulder. The bird has a refrain, “I am so small,” “I am so small.” This became a catchphrase for us. Whenever something felt too difficult, we said, “I’m so small.”

This phrase resonated with me I think, because one of my judgments of myself is that I lack physical strength and I’m afraid of heights, crowds, and high rates of speed. I am also acutely aware of my hesitation to take overt political action.

I attended UC Berkeley during the sixties where I saw people signing up to go to the South to help register African-Americans to vote. I watched Free Speech rallies and sit-ins on my way to my political science classes.  I caught whiffs of tear gas from anti-war protests during my law school exams.

Now, I agreed with all the protests, but I kept going to class or at most stood at the periphery of the rally. Curious, intellectually engaged, but fearful.

However, in my rush to judge myself I forget that there are many times when I have been, if not fearless, at least persistent in the face of fear.

I began to think about this better aspect of myself when I delivered a short eulogy at my ex-husband’s memorial service last year. I had been in poor health during most of our marriage, but, buoyed by the gift of denial, he took me hiking, camping and fishing. I learned to ski. On sheets of ice. Going fast down steep hills.

The fear was palpable, but the experience and the vision were pure reward.

There was sitting tucked behind the pilot in a vintage, two-seater, canvas-sided, face-in-the wind, piper cub seaplane. Once, flying flap-to-flap, with a Canada goose as we shared the air above the river.

There was the truly faith-inspiring sight of seeing storm clouds part unexpectedly to reveal Mt. Denali from base to the 20,310 – foot peak.  Breath….catching.

We went on multiple back packing trips. My husband carried the tent, water, stove, food, fishing gear, tent poles, camera, spare shoes etc.

My very large pack was often filled to the top with two down sleeping bags.

One weekend we hiked from Wright’s Lake on Highway 50 into Desolation Wilderness. One long stretch of the trail is so steep, that tall steps have been cut into the granite, a clamber for me on the way up, and a painful jumping process on the way down. Trudging back out the next day my feet and ankles were so swollen, I could barely walk.

By moonlight and flashlight, we made it back to the trail head well past midnight. I remember bursting into tears at the sight of the car. Sometimes courage is simply left foot, right foot.

Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben tells the story of the training of baby elephants by tying them to a small peg in the ground with a rope or chain around their leg. Time and again the baby elephants struggle to get free, but they cannot.  At some point they stop struggling.

Even though the elephants grow to the size of huts, even though they can uproot towering trees, they fail to recognize that they could easily dislodge the tiny peg in the ground. Merely the sight of the restraint keeps them in check.

As Rabbi Reuben puts it, “If only they knew how powerful they really are.”

Do you know how powerful you really are? Can you envision that?

In the 1970s a condition was recognized that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their kidnappers as a survival strategy. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome. Or we could call it the Battered Spouse Syndrome or the Abused Child Syndrome. When the victim perceives that he or she has no power, they may stop struggling.

Rabbi Reuben goes on to say, “One of my frustrations almost daily as a rabbi is to see so many who still live like our ancestors imprisoned in Egypt. They are fearful to have a vision of their lives that exalts them and could set them free.”

Sometimes we have limitations that we have outgrown, but we don’t realize it. Like the elephants. Sometimes outside forces are so overwhelming that we cannot sort out what our strengths really are.

Here at UUCM we are called upon to the bless the world, to take action, to have courageous love.  It sounds so straight forward coming from the pulpit or from General Assembly.  I have endless admiration for those who can. But some of us are overwhelmed and don’t know how to begin.

James Baldwin wrote, “It’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

Repetitive negative vision is a learned behavior. I believe a positive vision can be a learned behavior as well.  We live into the labels we give ourselves.

Personally, I have decided to discard the, “I’m so small” refrain.

What is your, “I can’t” belief?    Your, “I’m not” belief?

“I can’t speak in public?” “I can’t walk that far?” “I’m not brave?” “I’m not a good enough?” “I can’t, I’m not, I can’t.”

What negatives do you habitually tell yourself?

What negatives hold you hostage?

 

Part II – Free the Prodigal Self

 

When we left the original story of the prodigal son, a big celebration was about to break out. Servants were gathering fresh vegetables from the garden and picking the ripest fruit from the trees.  Clean clothes were laid out for the prodigal son while he took a long-needed bath.

But what about the other son? Remember him? The one who stayed home and worked day in and day out to help his father on the farm?

Can’t you just hear him?

“I cannot believe you’re giving my no-good brother a banquet.  With the calf that I spent all spring fattening up. Where’s my reward? The father explained that the young man had been lost and now he was found. It was an occasion for joy.

Don’t let the older brother spoil the party. For all we know the younger son wasn’t so much lost as seeking and finding.  Yes, it took a long time, but maybe he came back with experiences that taught him compassion and a wisdom he could not have discerned in any other way. And he did return in due course.

We shouldn’t berate ourselves for not catching on sooner, I tell myself. Our habits and fears come from long forgotten events and stories. They may have been protective for a time in your life. But could you let them go? Can you let them go?

The kind of change I’m talking about is not like making a New Year’s resolution. This is about shifting your vision of yourself.  We need to develop a vision somewhere in our core that we are strong or compassionate or wise or capable – whatever it is we think we aren’t or whatever it is we think we can’t do.

This country and this world need us in all our glory. It is not enough anymore simply to be curious and intellectually engaged.  We need to stand up for justice, stand up for love, stand up for freedom. We must be persistent in the face of fear.

I find it useful to have an image in mind, a symbol, a talisman, to remind me of my new vision.

Quite by accident I discovered something that made me see myself differently.  I started wearing a hat. {put on hat}. The alchemy of the hat is that when I wear it I see myself as taller. I feel stronger, and by some magic others treat me as if I were stronger.

Clerks, who have been known to look right over the top of my head to speak to the person standing behind me, frequently comment on my hat.  They see me. Or at least they see the first tentative steps of a new me.

Now, maybe hats are not your thing.  I also carry my dad’s pill box. {shake into mic} No one knows I have it in my pocket, but it conveys love and strength to me.

Think of something that you could carry.  Not so large or ostentatious to take you out of your comfort zone; just enough to ease you out of your complacent zone.

Maybe a Black Lives Matter bracelet or a rainbow bracelet. Prayer beads.

Or, maybe you could stick an affirmation to your mirror and repeat it to yourself each morning. How powerful could you become?

Psychology tells us to band with others to enlist their support for change.

Even one person can lighten the load. If the task seems too challenging, gather more people and dress for the occasion.

How powerful could we become? Look around here at everyone.  What… if .…10% of us or 25% or 50% of us each adopted an image of a new powerful self.  Whoa! I feel an earthquake coming on.

What if we had a secret handshake? Perhaps a hug.   What if we had gang colors? {show Standing on the Side of Love shirt} What if we wore bracelets that said, “UUCM – With Courageous Love.”

Some of you may remember Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Song. It was a shaggy dog story of a song that was one of the funniest and most popular anti-draft, anti-war songs of the Vietnam Era.  Arlo sang in a voice that made Bob Dylan sound melodic, which is the only reason I dare continue.

Let me quote his words from the song about protesting at the draft board,

“And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out.  They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out.  And friend they may think it’s a movement.”

And that’s what it is, “The UUCM Courageous Love Movement” and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time our chorus come’s round.

 

THE COURAGEOUS LOVE MOVEMENT

 

You can do anything you want if you’ve got courageous love.

You can be anyone you want if you’ve got courageous love.

Walk right in with your sense of wonder, cultivate your strength and yell like THUNDER.

You can do anything you want if you’ve got courageous love.

REPEAT

 

Bev Lyon

July 22, 2018

A More Perfect Union

a sermon by the Rev. Kevin Tarsa

delivered July 1, 2018

to the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

 

(Preceded by an excerpted reading of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again.”)

 

 “The happiness of governments like ours, wherein the people are truly the mainspring, is that they are never to be despaired of. When an evil becomes so glaring as to strike them generally, they arouse themselves, and it is redressed.”

 – Thomas Jefferson (in reply to English Unitarian minister Richard Price’s 1785 retrospective on the American Revolution)

In the late 1980s I sang in a community college choir that performed at the annual college fundraiser, a buffalo barbeque. One year our program included a selection of patriotic songs. This was during Ronald Reagan’s second term. The Iran-Contra Scandal was flaring, as were protests against the School of the Americas, dubbed the “School of Assassins,” the United States institution that trained Latin American leaders in military combat, many of its graduates becoming brutal sources of destabilization, bloodshed and suffering in their home countries.

I was angry with our national leaders and I could not bring myself to sing the patriotic songs in that concert. They felt false, xenophobic, arrogant, hypocritical and blind to America’s faults. I could not sing “God Bless America,” or “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” America über alles! So I stood with my fellow tenors, mouth closed, head still, and above my clenched teeth, while everyone else sang, I breathed in and out my hope for a better America in the future.

I had warned the choir director about this ahead of time…He didn’t quite know what to say.

I did open my mouth to sing “America the Beautiful,” however. Almost 100 years earlier Katharine Lee Bates, after a visit to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a train trip across the plains to Colorado, had written into her otherwise appreciative poem several calls for America to be better than it was. Her message wasn’t only amber waves, purple mountains and Rah, rah, America!

Make brotherhood the crowning achievement of this nation, she said. Let success be measured in nobleness rather than in wealth or power.

Confirm the soul of America not in military might, but “in self-control.”

Confirm liberty not just in empty promises, but “in law!” This, written when women and Native Americans did not yet have the right to vote. This, written during the Jim Crow era that strengthened and institutionalized racial segregation and denied the civil rights and liberties of African American persons.

“God mend thine every flaw,” she prayed.

I could sing those words. In those words, coupled with her images of America’s awesome beauty, Katharine Lee Bates expressed both a love of this nation and recognition that America falls short of its ideals. It’s the kind of both/and that people who find a home in our religious tradition tend to be able to tolerate and to wrestle with.

From its beginnings through today, America never has been America to many of its people. We who are white and well-to-do enough have more and more chances now to learn and understand that.

Our real America, unrealized yet in terms of its ideals of liberty, equality and justice for all;     our real America, born in bloodshed, cruelty and a sense of superiority and ownership;            our real America that began by clearing the land of indigenous people and granting the great bulk of property to those men who already had the most power, this is the America we have inherited – with all its peril AND all its promise.

Like many of you, I have struggled this past year and a half to find ways to creatively and hopefully and constructively understand and address the political dangers of our times, while evidence of the perils is thrust before us in every morning’s news cycle.

I have been reluctant to pick up and wave the banner of “resistance,” aware that focusing our attention, our energy, and our language on what we are resisting keeps us oriented toward that which we are resisting, potentially empowering what we resist. I have wanted to find not merely a “No!” to what’s happening, but also a “Yes!” to what might be possible.

That’s what motivates me most strongly.

I am a person who often needs to get my head around something before I know what action to take. The constant barrage of Trump’s unbelievable actions is continually dizzying and disorienting, and not accidentally so.

Tapping with precision into our very own values, he has us racing to catch the next falling victims before they hit the ground, even before we’ve finished caring for the previous casualties. And I have no doubt in my own mind that the dangerous and wild circus at the surface of our national politics is masking much else that is out of our direct sight.  It is a consistently masterful and effective use of chaos and of misdirection. Trump is extraordinary in this regard.

And yet… it has been clear to me from the beginning, that Trump is primarily a result, rather than a cause.  I have not sensed Trump himself to be the underlying problem. Though frighteningly effective, and though he adds his own particularly disturbing “gleeful cruelty,” as Jon Stewart put it, Trump and our current politics are symptoms, evidence of a deeper dynamic at work in the United States.  But understanding that dynamic well and usefully has been a challenge.

 

Last week, at General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists from across the nation, I found some help in the form of a book, or rather the ideas therein, by one of my seminary professors, a young theologian named Michael Hogue. Mike grew up in Traverse City, Michigan where both Rev. Leisa Huyck and I have served the local UU congregation at different times.

Mike’s theology is anchored in his experience of the beautiful environment of that area. He is open-hearted, wicked smart, and passionately attentive to how our human ways affect the earth.

Out of his own internal wrestling, and with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Hogue has written a new book titled American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World. Reading it this week has been thrilling …and challenging. It is opening up for me encouraging glimpses of a way forward. It is also a very dense theological/political text. Digesting it will be the work of my summer (at least) and drawing upon its insight to serve this congregation and the future will be my work in the new church year, I expect.

I’m still finishing my reading of it, and it is too fresh for me to convey Mike’s rich insights well, but encouraged by his vision of a new “resilient democracy” and a political theology that is “deeply democratic, ecologically attuned, and spiritually vital,” – and especially after yesterday’s very large demonstration at the corners of Brunswick and Sutton Way for Families Belong Together, a demonstration with a great showing of members of this congregation – I am drawn to at least lift up and affirm for you this morning, with more available hope than I’ve had for a while, the possibility that, yes, the current cluster of maddening, sometimes terrifying, crises we are facing may indeed be the necessary nursery for the next theo-political revolution in the United States and beyond.

I once shared here Rev. David Usher’s mountain metaphor for such a notion. I find it helpful. He spoke of climbing to reach a mountain summit. Of climbing and climbing and climbing and at last cresting the peak – only to discover that that current peak is not the summit after all. That the real summit is still over there. And not only that, but to get from this peak to the true summit, one has to go way down into a deep valley and then climb again!

Before the 2016 elections, David said, those of us who identify as progressive felt like we were finally approaching the summit: We had a person of color as our president, we had marriage equality, and it looked like we would have our first woman president. And then we discovered that we had not reached the summit after all, and that the path to the true summit, where we are wanting to go, runs through the deep and wide valley ahead of us. We realized that we will have to find our way through that valley and then climb again.

It is important to note that this realization was less of a surprise to many people of color and other marginalized people. They know the valleys.

 

Mike Hogue suggests that the crises of our time, including and enfolded within the climate crisis that threatens to alter the planet, may finally be dire and unsettling enough to take us down into the fertile, natal valley, and there provoke and liberate new moral, political, and theological possibilities. A revolution!

And right on cue.

Mike quotes American sociologist Robert Bellah, who observed that:

 “Once in each of the last three centuries America has faced a time of trial, a time of testing so severe that not only the form but even the existence of our nation have been called into question.”

Mike picks up the thread:

“[First, the American Revolution in the 1700s,] grounded in a deep moral contradiction: freedom for the colonists . . . while the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans continued unabated.”

“[Which led to] the second trial, the Civil War of the 1800s, which asked,] “How far are we willing to extend freedom?”  Though Union victory emancipated [enslaved people], America continued to [exploit, marginalize, and oppress them.]”

Requiring a third trial, the civil rights movement of the 1900s, to realize more of that promised freedom, a struggle for rights for marginalized and oppressed groups that has been unfolding ever since, right up to this day. . . .

Hogue writes,

 “The United States is currently in the throes of a virulent uprising of anti-black racism, white ethno-nationalism, and Islamophobia. . . . the election of Donald J. Trump is  . . . a vivid sign that we are living amid a fourth major trial [of this American experiment in democracy]”

Again, testing not only the form but the existence of our nation.

 

“Trump,” he writes, “is a symptom of the problem of democracy in [a very] uncertain world.”

As disheartening as this might feel to some of us, as much risk and courage as it will entail, as much laboring in the valley, as much climbing as there will be to do again, this is not, ultimately, backward motion, but movement forward, down into the valley and toward the summit we seek.

With Mike’s help, through the insight of Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American philosopher and activist, I am starting to better understand now how this journey will be a journey of both rebellion and revolution. Of both powerful “No!” and powerful “Yes!” A journey made up of many discrete moments of necessary resistance and critique of the way things are, (protests and rampart storming) that can, with our committed effort and courage, heart and creativity, become linked together in a movement of resilience, a revolution that seeks to – that must – turn things around, not back to some America that never truly was for anyone, but to an America that yet must be…if we are to survive.

Mike claims, and I agree, that this is now moral-theological-political work – all woven together – exactly what our Unitarian Universalist tradition primes us for and calls us to do, as it has in each of democracy’s previous trials in this nation.

As I quoted Sue Phillips the Sunday after the 2016 Presidential election,

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

Mike says that the revolution needed now must take America toward an ability to live with the inherent uncertainties of life, which is what true democracy is designed to do. Religiously, politically and economically, America was born in and has clung to a fearful need for certainty. That fearful clinging and certainty are being terribly taxed now, and so it’s becoming more and more desperate, breaking out in white supremacy marches, attempts to seal the borders, calls for Muslim travel bans, spiraling economic disparity, deportations, flipped fingers from some people driving by yesterday, and the election of a gleefully cruel president.

In my hopeful moments, I see these as the death throes of a way of seeing and of being that has brought the world to the brink of its own destruction and that cannot, must not, continue.

By nature, and of necessity, we Unitarian Universalists practice living with uncertainty and ambiguity every single week. People who need certainty are rarely satisfied in our congregations and do not often stay very long.

My friends, we were made for this work! We are now more than ever called to this work.

As our UUA president, Susan Frederick-Gray told us in last Sunday’s in Kansas City, “This is no time for a casual faith.”

Imagine the America – the world – you want to see… and what you are willing to do to get there.  (silent hand motion: down into the valley and up to the next summit)

That is our work ahead.

“O, yes, 
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be! “
The video earlier did not include the ending of Langston Hughes’ poem:

“Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, 
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states– 

And make America again!”

(from Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again”)

Not “again,” as in make America something we tell ourselves it was in some glorious, imagined past, but rather “go at it again,” make America…yet again! For at least the 4th time.

“We were made for this work.

And now we actually have to do it.”

 

May it be so.

May we be so.

Amen.

Primary Sources

Church, Forrest. The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America’s Founders. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2004.

Hogue, Michael S. American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Hughes, Langston. “Let America Be America Again.” From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper [An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers], 2017.

 

 

 

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

Earth Day, April 22, 2018

Sights and Sounds for Entering this Time 

– slideshow of nature photography with nature sounds

 

Songs for Gathering    

#21 For the Beauty of the Earth 

#1066 O Brother Sun

 

Welcome      Gail Johnson Vaughan

 

Prelude     Ancient Mother   UUCM Family Choir and Congregation

 

Invocation/Lighting of the Chalice  – Greetings and Thanks to the Natural World 

(A daily Thanksgiving inspired by the Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee)

 

Time for All Ages   Different Questions, Different Answers      Susan Sanford

(The different kinds of answers one receives asking “What’s that?” vs. asking “Who are you?” when getting to know something.)

 

Singing the Children on Their Way

 

Pebbles of Joy & Sorrow (with nature elements placed in water and/or sand)

 

Song    Mother Moon   

 

Reading       from Nature Needs a New Pronoun by Robin Kimmerer        Susan Sanford

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/together-with-earth/alternative-grammar-a-new-language-of-kinship

 

Meditation   (nature slides from UUCM members and friends, with nature sounds)

 

Reflection      Earth Too: The Rights of Nature       Rev. Kevin Tarsa

 

In 1960, when the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association were sorting out the practical details of merging and consolidating the two denominations, they drafted a statement of six purposes. Those of you who are familiar with Unitarian Universalism will know that we now have seven Principles that UU congregations promise to affirm and promote.  The changes came in 1984-85, after women led the effort for a number of years to find more inclusive language than the original references to “the dignity of man” and “ideals of Brotherhood” and “men of good will.”

 

While those male-centered references were broadened, the general concepts from the original principles remained the same in the new set of principles except for an addition, a 7th principle and commitment that broadened our Principles in another way, naming our “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”.

 

The UUA’s Seven Principles begin by naming the inherent worth and dignity of every individual and end by naming our utter interdependence. In fact, the various principles move gradually from a focus on the individual, toward a recognition of our complete interconnectedness. UU ministers Barbara Wells and and Jaco ten Hove suggested that the two bookends of our principles, the 1st and the 7th principles, are the foundational pillars upon which all the other principles rest.

 

When sociologist Robert Bellah spoke to us Unitarian Universalists at our General Assembly in 1998, he suggested to us that we were wearing our principles backwards. Bellah is the sociologist who wrote Bowling Alone and who studied what he saw as an increasingly problematic individualism in the United States.

 

As a deep core value in America, he said, “the sacredness of the conscience of every single individual” has “enormous power for good. But . . . it [also] opens the door to the worst in our culture. It easily leads to the idea that humans are nothing but self-interest maximizers. . . . I don’t think we can challenge that . . . until we come to see that the sacredness of the individual depends ultimately on our solidarity with all being…”

 

Then he challenged us Unitarian Universalists to reverse our focus, to make respect for the interdependent web of all existence “the first of [our] Principles, and not the last.”

 

(http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_7.htm)

 

On this 48th annual celebration of Earth Day, his challenge to us remains: to make it not all about “me,” but first about “we, ” to make respect for the interdependent web of all existence, the first of our Principles, not the last.

The beautiful photographs this morning, and the sounds to go with, celebrate the extraordinary beauty, awesomeness, and grandeur of our world, and the beauty also of the eyes, ears and other senses that behold it. How can we not be inspired with a tremendous sense of wonder and amazement and gratitude –even love.  As Robin Wall Kimmerer put it:   “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate.”  (Braiding Sweetgrass 124)

 

The photos shown before the service and the meditation photos we just saw all came from UUCM members and friends, assembled and prepared by Gail. Thank you! Clearly, here are people who love the earth. The sounds during the meditation slide show came from Lincoln Meadow at Yuba pass, a recording shared by Susan Sanford, made on a spring morning in 1988 by Bernie Krauss. Again, clearly people who love the earth.

 

I am assuming that I do not need to tell you about or convince you that our human treatment of our environment and the life within it is often dangerously shortsighted and damaging, and that human behaviors and activity put the well-being of the earth and its inhabitants in increasing jeopardy, so I will not take time for that this morning. Besides, I’m reluctant to use fear as a primary motivator, though I realize it can be expedient and effective.

 

Environmental advocates have learned to appeal to human self-interest, helping people see how their own wellbeing – and perhaps their financial bottom line – is impoverished or jeopardized when our treatment of the earth is not respectful.  As someone said to me…”compassion doesn’t change policy, it’s self interest.”

 

Remaining pragmatic and human-centric, environmental advocates have also been promoting the idea that all humans have a legal right to a healthy environment. Spain, France, Portugal and Finland have already recognized such human rights to a healthy environment.

But some environmental advocates are arguing that this isn’t enough, that in order to make real change, we need to recognize the inherent rights of nature herself – or maybe it’s nature ki-self – to see nature ki-self as a rights-bearing entity. If corporations can be guaranteed rights, like a person, why not nature?

 

Last October, “the Colorado River filed a . . . lawsuit against the state of Colorado, . . . demanding [the river’s] right to evolve, flourish and be restored in the wake of human interference be recognized in the court of law. Well, sort of,” wrote Mike Ludwig, who was reporting on it. “[It was a human] lawyer [who] filed the legal complaint at a federal district court in Denver, naming the river as a plaintiff and calling on the court to recognize its ecosystems as a ‘person’ under the law.”

 

(“Nature Has Rights” Activists Call for a Legal Transformation” published in Truthout: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42565-nature-has-rights-activists-call-for-a-legal-transformation)

 

Just this month, Colombia’s Supreme Court [ruled that] the entire Amazon region is now subject to rights…as a citizen would be,…and that the Presidency and regional entities must act urgently to protect it from deforestation.

 

And back in 2008 Ecuador actually enshrined rights for nature in its constitution:

Article. 71. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. . . .

 

I name the “rights of nature” effort this morning because it is such a profound and provocative turn toward perceiving the earth and nature as a who rather than a what or an it, as an entity with whom we are in mutual relationship rather than an object whose utility we are continually measuring and discerning.

 

As early as 1867 John Muir proposed respect for “the rights of all the rest of creation,” (Yesterday was Muir’s 180th birthday) but to make the claim in court that nature has inherent legal rights is new territory in contemporary western cultures.

 

Heck, it wasn’t that long ago that people without property, black persons, women and indigenous people were finally granted the right to vote in the U.S! The Equal Rights Amendment that would, in our federal constitution, guarantee rights regardless of sex, still hasn’t been ratified. The federal Animal Welfare Act stretches some people’s sense of the use of law.

 

Recognizing the inherent rights of plants, rivers, regions, nature? That is way out there.

 

Plus, understanding nature as a rights-bearing entity entails not just a legal shift, but a significant emotional and spiritual shift away from seeing humanity as the center of the universe, and human well-being as the measure for all decision making. At root it de-centers humanity, no less than Galileo’s insistence that the Earth moved around the Sun and not vice-versa.  It’s the expanded version of putting the 7th Principle first – “respect for the interdependent web” rather than the 1st Principle.

 

This is a challenging move, even for those of us who think of ourselves as evolved and environmentally aware and committed. Easy to imagine when far away and as a way to curb corporate pollution and harm, but probably more difficult to face if our backyard were to sue us, or the tree outside the sanctuary to file a complaint, or the land on which this building or our home rests were suddenly to demand freedom.

 

I know, up close it is difficult to imagine it as more than a mental exercise, but the mental/spiritual/emotional exercise has value, I think.  Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the teachings of her elders who say that “the purpose of ceremony is to remember to remember (Braiding Sweetgrass).” Here too, I would say, the purpose of the exercise is to remember to remember.

 

We are asked to consider our right relationship with nature, other animals, plants, trees, mountains, all living beings, and Mother Earth not as relationships of I and it, but of I and you. To de-center ourselves and relate as I and ki, I and kin.

 

Ecologist John Seed wrote that

“when [we] human beings [can] see through [our] layers of [human-focused) self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. [You are] no longer an outsider apart. Your humanness is then recognized as merely the most recent stage of your existence, and . . . you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest.

 

As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them.  . . . ‘I am protecting the rainforest’ develops to “I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking”

 

What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature.”

 

(from Beyond Anthropocentrism by John Seed

www.morning-earth.org/DE6103/Read%20DE/Beyond%20anthropo.seed.pdf

 

“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate.  But when you feel that the earth loves in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”     – Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

So to celebrate this Earth Day, this Earth year, yes, by all means please reduce your use of plastics, and recycle, and plant a tree, and pick up litter along the roadside, and conserve water and demonstrate on behalf of the Bear River, but first consider taking time – no matter how silly it might feel to you – to ask a cedar tree, or a gosling, or a blackberry bramble or a boulder or the Yuba river, “Who are you?”

 

And then be open to their answer,

which just might change your sense of who you are.

 

So may we be.

 

Offering 

Closing Hymn    #1064 Blue Boat Home 

Closing Words   

Community Benediction / Extinguishing of the Chalice