Past Services

“God?” – Sermon by Jeff Stone
August 25, 2019

I have an acquaintance who, a couple of years ago, wrote and published a book about coming to terms with the end of life. She told me that when she has presented this book at public readings, it is not uncommon for one or two people to get up in the middle and leave feeling quite upset. In one case a medical doctor, a specialist, stood up and yelled out something about not planning to have to face the end of life. I’m not sure what he meant, but I was surprised at how difficult it is for some people, even, in this case a medical doctor, to acknowledge what is fairly obvious, that we all die. Why do some people come to terms with the idea of death more easily than others?

When my son was around seven years old, I found him walking around the house chanting, “we’re all going to die, we’re all going to die” over and over. After initial puzzlement and even a little alarm, I realized that he was trying to come to terms with this momentous fact in his own way. I wonder if some folks never really got to assimilate this information as a child. Perhaps adults get in the way by, with good intentions, urging their kids to not worry about something so far off or trying to make it alright by telling the child that the deceased is in a better place now, like heaven, and that you will see her again, and so forth, which may help to soothe the feelings of the child, but will also shield the child from having to come to terms with the absence of a loved one.

I had a very close friend, Jerry, who thought life was a big mistake. He resented his parents for bringing him into the world and would not speak to them. Paradoxically, the worst part of life for him was that it ended. I remember how for awhile he volunteered to lovingly hold Aids babies, babies who at the time were doomed from the moment they were born. He found it fulfilling work, though he ultimately quit in disgust because of politics in the volunteer organization. Jerry’s personal bible was a book titled “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker, an interesting and influential thinker who believed the fear of death and the denial of that fear was the hidden motivator behind most of our beliefs and much of our behavior. I got into many arguments with Jerry about whether life is worth living. I learned how hopeless it is to try to talk someone out of suicide that way. He ultimately settled the question by taking his own life, a very great personal loss for me and other folks who appreciated and loved Jerry more than he did himself.

For myself, I am not eager to die, but I don’t feel particularly cross at the universe about the reality of death. Perhaps it is my disposition, but I also think that it has to do with my sense of gratefulness for being alive and faith that there is something good in myself and life in general which makes it all worthwhile.

My son used to ask me if I believe in God. I said, in effect, I’ll get back to you on that. I never gave him a definitive answer. Rationally I couldn’t believe in God, but I wasn’t willing to commit to that view because it was evident to me that I would be giving up too much.

So I have this faith in something that can be called God, or a higher power, or something divine that I feel in myself. The name “God” is so loaded that it isn’t always helpful and doesn’t suit everybody. But for me, partly because of it’s ambiguity, and therefore it’s spaciousness, I like to use it. So if I say I believe in God, it doesn’t necessarily mean to me what it may mean to someone else, and it doesn’t necessarily even mean the same thing to me at all times. But it feels right and it feels natural. It is that naturalness that makes me wonder if believing in God isn’t somehow in my genes.

I find that it helps me to believe in God, and so I do, most of the time. It is not a matter of ultimate truth, or something that requires proof. It’s a useful act, to choose to believe. I’m not talking about philosophy or science. I’m not talking about making something up as a game. I am deliberately choosing to believe in something that may or may not actually exist in an objective sense, but by taking that leap, I am setting up a dialogue between me and something greater than me that seems real, that embodies wisdom and compassion.

Now wait, you may say. How can you choose to believe something? Isn’t a belief just there? You either believe or you don’t. Well, if people can’t choose their beliefs, then why do some churches work so hard at impressing upon their members what they should believe. I’d say most of the time we choose our beliefs, but we choose them unconsciously. If you can do it unconsciously, why not do it consciously?

I have a voice, not just the one coming out of my mouth, but the one I hear as it jabbers to me in my head. I have other voices in my head. Mostly they come from places in me that have agendas of one sort or another, like the voice that worries about my health, or the one that gets angry at me for being too quiet when I’m feeling shy. But there is a voice I’ve come to recognize as being different, being wiser than my everyday thoughts. It’s not necessarily a voice that comes to me unbidden. Usually I need to seek it out when I wish to hear it. I think of it as the voice of God. It is there for me when I need it, whether for re-assurance, or to impart some needed wisdom. Sometimes I dialogue with that voice on paper. Sometimes I pray to it. Sometimes it answers me.

I have faith in that voice I call God. It’s a voice that I instinctively learned to trust before I gave it a name. You may have something similar, but you may not think of it as a voice. It sometimes just seems to be a feeling or a notion or a sense of something. Maybe it tells you whether you are in danger, like whether you can trust someone you meet on the street. Perhaps you have that something in you which seems to be wise and on which you can rely in a pinch. Perhaps you put faith in this secret sense that you have because it has been there for you before and because it is so personal. I call this voice God, but other people might have different names for such a voice, like higher self, soul, or maybe just street smarts.

Of course, you do have to be careful with voices in your head. This is a matter of discernment, learning to discern one voice from another. If you have a voice you call God, you need to be wary of imposters. They happen. It takes practice to learn the quality of a voice, the mood of the voice, the kind of things you’d expect that voice to say.

I don’t need God to explain the world, nor do I think that life without God is uninteresting. There is plenty of wonder in beauty, art, science. I don’t need God in order to feel awe of the universe as I look up at the stars, or contemplate the amazing mechanisms at work in genetics and evolution. I don’t need God to explain how life could exist or how complex it is. But I love the feeling of devotion and prayer, the thrill of feeling energy through my body that seems to come from a divine source. For me it does come from that source and I’m OK with the possibility of being wrong. In fact I am probably wrong no matter my point of view. Existence and everything in it may be beyond my ability to explain it all. It is fun to try to explain, at least for some of us, and useful too. So I don’t disparage any of that. But the point, for me, is that it isn’t about getting it right. It’s about embracing the process. For me, it’s about being human. And this process can live alongside other ways of seeing the world without interference, such as through the lens of science, which, obviously, has tremendous utility and teaches us so much about the world, and really is about getting it right.

I like the term “higher self” to refer to that wise and mysterious voice I sometimes call God. But then, what is my lower or small self? I think of that as what I usually refer to when I say “I”. It is my everyday self that handles the mundane stuff in my life. This lower self is sometimes referred to by the Freudian term “ego”. One might also call it our personality. I think this is the part of us that fears death. I don’t detect fear in my higher self, especially about my own death. But my ego, or personality, lives in fear of all kinds. It is insecure, unsure of itself. It is competitive, it is concerned about how it looks. This is the part of me that is afraid of dying, but it doesn’t feel real, rather like a construct made up of traits and memories. I think when I am afraid of death I am strongly identified with my personality.

I propose that spirituality, in any form that is palatable to you, can be an antidote to the fear of death. That doesn’t mean you have to believe in God. That is personal to you. When I say spirituality I’m referring to a way of getting beyond the ego, beyond the personality. It is acknowledging that perhaps our brain doesn’t only work through rational thought, but also through intuition, through unconscious processes. The more we trust in these processes, the more they can enrich our lives. And here may be one key to accepting death. Fear or anxiety around death is not an intellectual position, it is more of an irrational emotion, that seems to come from the ego. When we get beyond the ego we can find that what we are may be more than what is contained in our skin. That what we love or can love is not just ourselves but is also all around us. Like an ocean wave we eventually just sink back into the ocean. Do we really need to know with certainty what happens after that?

I took an acting class once, and one exercise we did in this class was to close our eyes and let ourselves fall back, where behind us was another student waiting to catch us. It was an exercise in trust. If we can trust enough in our inner resources, as well as the resources in our loving community, we can let go. Let go of the fierce grip on trying to understand and control the world around us. Let go and fall back into the arms of whatever it is we have faith in, whether it is God, or love, or whomever or whatever we’ve learned to trust. If we have that trust, if we’ve found a way to foster that trust, we are ready for whatever does or does not await.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

A sermon delivered May 26, 2019

May theme: curiosity

 

 “Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought: that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Oversoul”

 

Where do we come from?

I share, in new member classes, that the evolution of religion over many thousands of years traces the gradual movement from external authority to internal authority.

In early human religiosity, the ultimate sources of power and influence were outside of humanity, in the sun, moon, stars, oceans, mountains, weather, earthquakes, volcanoes… Ultimate power and control were ascribed to the most powerful realities that people experienced, personified sometimes as goddesses, gods, and deities of many kinds.

The next ring inward, included powerful animals and trees and plants, sacred objects and images that represented the larger powers that controlled the world and peoples’ lives.

When humans began to live in larger, more layered and more organized groups, power and authority became located in human structures and institutions, seen as gateways to the ultimate powers: temples, religious traditions, rituals, sacred texts and human intermediaries – the designated priestesses, priests and shamans who interpreted the traditions, and sacred signs and writings for everyone else, who communed directly with deities and served as bridges between the human realm and the sacred realms.

With the development of the printing press and more efficient forms of transportation, knowledge and awareness spread – not only geographically, but through more of the layers of given societies. More and more people no longer needed to rely solely on the designated, educated, religious leaders for information, people could read and interpret sacred texts like the Bible for themselves, and so the source of religious authority moved from the institutions, toward the individual. This is when many new varieties of Christianity sprang up in Europe, because people were interpreting the writings for themselves and coming to all kinds of different conclusions. Imagine!

But no sooner did certain people break from a tradition, than they set up their own tradition as the one true religion, proclaiming that they themselves, and their particular interpretations, were THE new and final source for all religious authority.

As Helen Keller put it, “The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”
It is out of one of those chapters of someone’s new and rigid version of Christianity in the 1500s that Unitarianism and Universalism arose and branched off from Calvinism, a very specific and narrow interpretation of Christian scripture. Our ancestors, from many different streams, were heretics in their times, a word that means, we know from its Greek roots, “people who choose.”

By the early 1800s, Unitarians had shifted to an understanding of Jesus as a fully, albeit exceptional, human being, not uniquely divine;  to an understanding of the Hebrew and Christian bibles as human works that needed to be studied as we would study any historic human document, based on what we know about the times and the people; and to a belief that humans are morally and spiritually obligated to apply reason and current knowledge to all religious exploration and understanding.

It was a way of thinking that had been foreshadowed earlier in that diagram of a solar system painted on the ceiling panel of a Unitarian church in Transylvania, no matter what the Catholic church had insisted upon for centuries. The primary source of religious authority was moving then, in our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors, from ancient texts, traditions and institutions, to human knowledge and awareness. It was reached, as William Ellery Channing preached, by each person’s God-given capacity to reason.

What are we?

And then, hot on the tails of that shift in the United States, came the Transcendentalists, who pulled the ultimate source of religious authority completely inside the individual – sort of.

“The soul,” Emerson wrote, “is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.”

Almost all of the New England Transcendentalists were Unitarian or strongly associated with Unitarianism. Many were, like Emerson, Unitarians ministers. Still, they were in some ways a varied lot: Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father), Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker, George and Sophia Ripley, among others. They were called “the club of the like-minded” by outsiders, a description that they more-or-less accepted, saying that they truly were “like-minded” …in that “no two [of them] were of the same opinion.”

What they did hold in common, was an “emphasis on the primacy of self-consciousness” (Gura),  the idea that one’s own consciousness is THE legitimate access point to knowledge and truth, and that everyone has direct, intuitive and immediate access to all things divine…if we would but open ourselves to it and not let anything get in the way.

Emerson again:

“There is a deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us.”

He referred to this deep power and ultimate unity as the “oversoul.”

Emerson preached that there is no need for a church, for a priest, for a preacher, for a sacred text, for rituals, traditions, or anyone else’s ideas. Every person, of every social and education level, at every age in one’s life, can access ultimate reality through their innermost awareness.

“It comes to the lowly and the simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity; it comes as grandeur. . . Within us is the soul of the whole.”        ~ Emerson

It is a mystical approach, inspired by Vedic texts and European philosophies, and beamed through this America-crafted lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

For the Transcendentalists, the final authority for knowing what is true is one’s personal experience and direct, intuitive perception and knowledge.

“We know truth when we see it.”

Theologically, this is pretty much where we still are in our tradition and our nation 150 years later. Although they were both revered and ridiculed in their time, Emerson and the Transcendentalists shaped American thinking significantly, and pointed U.S. culture toward prioritizing individuality and toward the primacy of personal consciousness as the source of authority.

This is evident, I think, everywhere in our national politics now, wherein people come to their own felt conclusions regardless of outside information or evidence that challenges those conclusions.

The thing is, if we follow our tradition, the use of our reason and the application of our accumulating knowledge ought to lead us to the realization that we individuals are not the center of the universe after all, heretical as that message may be in our circles.  The world and truth do not revolve around us individuals and our own consciousness.

Ongoing human research keeps pointing out to us that what we are able to see, perceive and understand is shaped and bounded by our genetic blueprint, our life experience, our physiology, our psychology, our neurochemistry, our diets …and the sound of our names.

Okay, to explain that segue…

A relative of mine, Nicholas, just announced his engagement to his fiancée, Nicole. How much more similar could those names be? I think of my friends, Paula and Paul, and Jeanine and George. My first love’s name, early in my young adult life, was Colin. Colin and Kevin. Of the five sounds in our two, brief names, three are exactly the same.

It’s referred to in the research as “the Name Letter Effect” – people disproportionately choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. We think we are making these intimate and vital life decisions based on our careful evaluation and awareness, when something as simple as the spelling or sound of our names is actually pulling some of the strings.

These kinds of things fascinate me because of what they reveal about human nature in general.  I am intrigued by the way that what I eat influences how and what I think and feel. That sitting in a hard chair (as opposed to a soft chair) makes people more uncompromising when they are negotiating.

That having the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma Gondii, which infects almost ¼ (about 22.5%) of Americans older than the age of 12, makes people more extroverted and less conscientious than people without the parasite. All these amazing subtle influences that shape our feelings, our thinking and our behavior without our knowing it, when all the while we think we are choosing freely and with complete conscious control.

Again and again, the message is that we are not as conscious as we think we are of our own biases, of the limits of our perception and awareness, of the invisible influences on our choices and our actions.

Religions In the Hands of an Angry God

The NPR show and podcast “The Hidden Brain,” looks at just these kinds of invisible influences upon us. A recent episode asked, “Where does religion come from?” In it, the host, Shankar Vedantam, highlights the work of Azim Shariff, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, who studies religion from a psychological perspective.

Shariff begins with the assumption that religion arose, evolved and continues because it offers some sort of survival advantage in terms of natural selection, allowing people who are religious to survive and pass on their genetic material to their offspring.

Shariff points out that for most of human history we lived in small groups in which everyone knew everyone and in which everyone knew everyone’s behavior. It is difficult, in small groups, to get away with cheating, or stealing, or killing, or not contributing to the work needed. But when human groups became larger than 150 or so, to 500, to 1000, to 10,000 people, those natural small group controls on behavior were no longer sustainable. People could cheat, and steal, and kill and free-load and get away with it, which is not helpful to the health and sustainability and genetic survival of the group.

Shariff and others say that religion arose as a cultural innovation to allow us to succeed in these larger groups by enhancing trust and cooperation. This is not a new concept. But not just any religion, Shariff says. What worked best to corral human behavior was the idea of “a supernatural punisher” – a large, all-seeing, all-knowing, punitive God. The perfect opposite of what our Universalist tradition teaches. It turns out that believing that you are a “sinner in the hands of an angry god” confers an evolutionary advantage on you and your people.

Oh, crap.

In one study of college students, Shariff discovered that the more a person believed god to be on the punitive side of the spectrum, the less likely the person was to cheat on a test, whereas the more a person believed their god to be loving, the more likely they were to cheat on a test.

Again. Oh, crap. Not a great selling point for Universalism and liberal religion.

Shariff says that “the societies that have been able to grow [the] largest with the religions that they believe in, have had this idea of supernatural punishment at their core because it is an effective deterrent” and an effective connector to people you’ve never even met.

Shariff points out that “All the world’s major religions today arose at times when human societies were struggling with the challenges of size, complexity or scarcity,” and therefore struggling with trust and cooperation.

Believing in a big, bad God helped large societies, in many cases.

The good news/bad news in these complex times, when trust and cooperation are a challenge,  is that there is a chicken and egg reality here: Which kinds of religions reign in a given time and place is context dependent and can change. For example, small groups and societies tend to have small gods who are not particularly powerful or punitive. And “local conditions, like individual ecosystems, can create conditions where certain beliefs flourish and where other beliefs fade away,” says Shariff.

Now, what is considered sacred isn’t necessarily something religious – we sacralize things like freedom, patriotism and our nation, for example – so there are ramifications for our country.

Shariff says that the countries in which religion is least important are the countries with the highest faith in the rule of law and trust in institutions.

On the flip side, as Shankar Vedantam explains:

“Azim thinks that if regulations and good governance provide the trust and cooperation that religious bonds once provided, new kinds of faith might flourish – religions that don’t have an angry god who threatens to punish you if you step out of line, religions that don’t talk a lot about hell and damnation but instead spend more time on building community.”

Where are we going?

So where does that leave us, and what does all of this have to do with curiosity?

I say that we turn to Catholicism.

For a moment.

There is, in Catholicism, a little known and not actively publicized escape clause.

For all its clear dogma and firm listing of what is okay and what is not okay, Catholic tradition notes, in the fine print, that in the end, each Catholic may appeal to the primacy of their own conscience. No matter what the church tradition teaches, one’s personal conscience is the final arbiter when navigating difficult moral questions.

(Pope Francis caught flack and was publicly accused of heresy when he reaffirming the primacy of conscience two years ago, in November 2017. He said that priests are supposed to inform Catholic consciences, “not replace them.”)

I say that what we are called to now is not so much a primacy of isolated personal consciousness as our Transcendentalist forebears taught, but rather to a primacy of conscience that is informed not only by our incomplete consciousness, but also informed by a sense of humility that recognizes that we don’t know everything, even and especially about ourselves….that understands that we must draw on sources of authority both inside and outside of ourselves in order to know what we need to know and need to do…that recognizes that we, as individuals, are not the center of the universe around which all else revolves…that we are not isolated beings.

I’m not suggesting that we let go of our inner authority completely, but that we add to it, couple it with an openness to outer sources of knowledge and authority. It’s part of our maturation as a religious tradition. UUism is rather young, in religion terms, and much like adolescents who need to define themselves – often angrily and with a great deal of drama – as separate from their parents in order to grow into who they are and will become, UUism has defined itself by what it is not, and by a powerfully self-centered theology. Maturing as a faith will require that we remain true to our own consciousness while keeping our hearts and our heads open to answers beyond our own.

A Primacy of Conscience requires that we stay genuinely and endlessly curious.

For the last two and a half years I have been repeating to myself the mantra, “Get curious, not furious. Get curious, not furious,”not always certain that getting furious wasn’t the better way.

But in these times, staying curious is essential.

Emerson valued curiosity as a path to overcoming the fear of not conforming, curiosity as a path to being an individual. Curiosity, especially considering what we are learning about human nature, is also a path to overcoming the fear of being more than an individual, of being thoroughly and intimately interconnected and interdependent.

Emerson saw curiosity as an avenue to staying ever receptive to the ultimate oneness of nature that is named God by many. As many of us might put it, curiosity is about staying ever open to the spirit of love, as we know it now and as it will continue to be revealed.

Deeply curious may we ever be.

 

Sources

Emerson, Ralph W, and Edward L. Ericson. Emerson on Transcendentalism. New York: Ungar, 1986. Print.

Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. , 2007. Print.

Vedantam, Shankar, host. “Where Does Religion Come From? One Researcher Points To ‘Cultural’ Evolution.” Hidden Brain, NPR, 6 May. 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/05/06/720656274/where-does-religion-come-from-one-researcher-points-to-cultural-evolution

Winfield, Nicole. “Pope Francis reaffirms primacy of conscience amid criticism of ‘Amoris Laetitia.’” America: The Jesuit Review. November 11, 2017. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/11/11/pope-francis-reaffirms-primacy-conscience-amid-criticism-amoris-laetitia

And several online articles regarding unexpected influences on human behavior.

 

 

“At the Edge of Hope” –  sermon by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
UU Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, CA
January 13, 2019

INTRO

You’ve been telling me, many of you, that hope is in short supply these days, a rare and precious commodity, what with the climate crisis and scientists’ dire warnings of immanent danger, the current manufactured political emergency rooted in values antithetical to so many of our own values, increasingly intractable division in the nation, the dismantling of so many protections, and, on top of it all, the day to day challenges in our lives, close to home and close to heart.

So I’ve been thinking about hope – yours, mine and ours – in the context of these times.

In my office I have a deck of cards with meaningful quotes on them, a gift from a friend. Periodically I pull out a new card, and the CARD that came up this very week offered the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, who claimed that “A leader is a dealer in hope.”

A leader is a dealer in hope.

Psst. Wanna buy some hope? Top quality hope? I know you do!

I don’t actually have hope to sell you, I’m afraid, but I may try to sell you on hope.

FAITH IN POSSIBILITY

Years ago, a congregant stopped me in the middle of the aisle after a service one Sunday, to ask, “Where do you find hope?” She knew that I was navigating the painful sadness of an unexpected divorce, leaving behind the house and so much else that we had shared, and that my family had spent the previous year and a half caring for my mother through her journey with cancer and death. When that congregation member stopped me to ask about hope, I stopped for a moment too, listened internally, and responded uncharacteristically quickly. “I have faith in possibility,” I said, listening for truth in the words even as they were coming out of my mouth. “The future is not yet determined, and my life experience leads me to believe that many things, if not exactly all things, are possible.”

It was an intuitive response rather than carefully formulated response. Enough events in my life that I was certain would be fabulous, had fallen flat or outright bombed, and enough of the occasions I was sure would crash in disaster had succeeded wildly, that at some level I had become prepared to be surprised. Life had taught me that you just never know, no matter how certain something seems.

I’ve named here many times that this is a foundational perspective for Unitarian Universalists: You just never know, and so we remind each other to hold open a space for uncertainty. It’s Allan Watts’ “wisdom of insecurity” of which I spoke in December.

This is, to be sure, a double-edged uncertainty: It allows that what we think of as “good” is always possible, no matter how things look. And it allows that what we think of as undesirable or “bad” is also always possible, no matter how things look.

That flip side is a particular downer if we have anchored ourselves in optimism rather than hope.

OPTIMISM vs HOPE

Many wise persons make a distinction between optimism and hope, and do so in a variety of ways. Lately I’m contemplating Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s take on it.

In his conversations with the Dalai Lama, captured in The Book of Joy, Archbishop Tutu said that optimism “depends on feelings more than the actual reality. We feel optimistic, or we feel pessimistic.” Optimism is not a very solid foundation, he suggests. It is too subject to the mercurial nature of our feelings and our changing circumstances.

In an online article in Medium, Sharon Ackman relays the story of Jim Collins’ interview with Commander James Stockdale (in Good to Great):

“…during the Vietnam War several thousand American servicemen were captured by the North Vietnamese, and taken as prisoners of war. They were held in tiny cells where they were tortured, beaten and starved. Some were kept for years in solitary confinement. At the end of the war, only 591 returned home.”

. . . Medal of Honor recipient Commander Stockdale was later asked who had not made it out of the camps. “That’s easy,” he said. “It was the optimists.”

He continued, “…they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again.”

“It sent those POWs on a wild rollercoaster of false hope and delusion, only to come crashing down,” writes Ackman. “It shattered their endurance and ultimately their will to live. As Stockdale [recalled], ‘they died of a broken heart.’”

Ackman concludes that it was pessimism that had helped the survivors to survive. I would suggest that it was realism and hope that allowed them to survive, rather than pessimism. Either way, optimism did not serve them well.

HOPE

Now, hope,” Archbishop Tutu says, “is different in that it is based not on the ephemerality of feelings, but on the firm ground of conviction.” Commander Stockdale, of his own surviving said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life.”

One can feel happy, one can feel optimistic, but one doesn’t feel hope, so much as have hope. “I believe with steadfast faith that there can never be a situation that is utterly, totally hopeless,” said Tutu.

I.e. there is always a possibility for good, for benefit. You just never know.

“Hope is deeper [than optimism,]: Tutu said, “and very, very close to unshakeable. It’s in the pit of your tummy. It’s not in your head. It’s all here,” [(pointing to abdomen). At the gut level] – a “dogged, inextinguishable hope.”

NOT THE EASY PATH

These days, when people tell me they are looking for hope, when I’m wanting to find hope, I’m aware that what we are saying, most of the time, is that we want to feel better. We don’t want to feel the discomfort or pain of despair.

Many of us have been telling each other stories about how we’ve been numbing ourselves in response to national and world events – binge watching television, overeating, drinking, over-working, over-functioning, staying in bed, distracting ourselves in any number of ways …

Archbishop Tutu offers a helpful insight. He points out that despair and cynicism and resignation are, in essence, self-soothing postures in their own right. They form an easy, self-serving, soothing path, as much as we might complain about them. They don’t merely lead to numbing, they are themselves forms of numbing.

We complain about them, but feelings of despair, resignation and cynicism ease (things) by letting us off the hook, in that they do not require what Tutu calls “the raw vulnerability and tragic risk of hope.” We draw on despair to protect ourselves from the real vulnerability and risk of hope.

Tutu says that, “To choose hope is to step firmly forward into the howling wind, baring one’s [skin] to the elements, knowing that, in time, the storm will pass.”

The good news (well, it’s all good news, I just wanted something easier for once), the good news, the saving news, is that we are not alone.

ANNE LAMOTT STORY Part 1

In her recent book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, Anne Lamott writes of her lifelong obsession with the thought of jumping when she is in high places from which jumping might be possible. She does not see this as suicidal, but the thought has energy.  Anne made an agreement with her psychiatrist that whenever she had the thought of jumping, she would tell whoever she was with

“As you might expect,” writes Lamott, “this admission tended to throw off my companions, who saw it as a buzzkill”

When she dutifully tells [the people she is with,] they “usually want to have little talks about the preciousness of life, [and] permanent solutions to temporary problems.”

“Blah blah.”, she writes.

“Only three words spoken to [her] at these times have ever helped.”

ANNE LAMOTT STORY Part 2

Anne was invited to offer a lecture and a sermon in Cairo, Egypt. Her host in Cairo, a Coptic minister drove her up Mokattam Mountain to spot overlooking the area where tens of thousands of garbage collectors sort the city’s garbage

Anne and the minister walked to within a few yards of the cliff’s edge. She thought about jumping, of course. “How could I not?” she writes.

So she cleared her throat and said shyly to the minister: “I have to tell you something sort of embarrassing. I promised my psychiatrist I would tell whomever I was with when I was in any high place that since childhood, whenever I’m very, very high up, I think about jumping.”

“He didn’t miss a beat,” she writes. With a wave of his hand he said, “Oh, who doesn’t?”

And the energy of the thought of jumping lifted.

THE LIMITS OF HOPE

There are all kinds of ways to learn that we are not alone, one of the ways we anchor hope here (gut), rather than here (head). Sometimes it’s as simple as that Coptic minister’s variation on “me too,” awareness that other people feel or think in similar ways, or when someone really sees us or listens to us.

In the most challenging times in our lives, it’s a deeper need and realization – to know that no matter how tragic and painful and hopeless our circumstance seems, someone else, somewhere has experienced the same thing, or much, much worse, …and has survived in body and/or in spirit, and been able to find meaning, connection, and even joy beyond that experience.

In that light, I do want to acknowledge the limits of hope, in a way that points us forward.

OF DEEP LOSS

Between the date I interviewed for an internship in Massachusetts, and the date the position began, a beloved young woman, a member of the congregation I would be serving, was murdered by her boyfriend. It was a tragedy for that entire community, that congregation, and, of course, the family.

At the congregation’s annual auction fundraiser, the mother of that young woman purchased the opportunity to name a sermon to be preached by the minister. “Got hope?” she titled it.

As he often did, the minister sought ideas and wisdom for the sermon from colleagues as well as from staff. I usually need time to consider answers to such queries, but I responded with uncharacteristic speed.” It was not my wisdom, this time, but wisdom I had learned from John Schneider, who mentored me in the ways of grief.

“Sometimes, some rare times, a person simply cannot have hope. Some experiences are so painful, that for a time, holding hope is not possible. In fact, the expectation that a person should have hope only adds to the burden, compounding the pain.” I shared the companion piece of John’s insight. “What is possible in such times, is that others can hold that person’s hope for them, until such time as they can hold it again themself.”

Of all the wisdom and insight that the minister shared with the grieving couple, this is the insight they found most helpful.

Knowing two Unitarian Universalist ministers whose daughters had been murdered, I offered to connect the couple to one of them, so these parents would know that they were not alone. Of course, they knew here (head) that they were not alone, but so they would also know here (heart) and here (gut) that they are not alone. 

GETTING PERSPECTIVE & HAVING FAITH

The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have each been through tremendously tragic, painful experiences, and both are tremendously hope-filled. They both teach that part of what we need in order to cultivate hope is to keep things in proportion and to find a wider perspective. Understanding that you are not alone in your experience – is one powerful path to gaining perspective.

Archbishop Tutu says we must also have faith ….in something, in, if nothing else, “the very persistence of life to find a way.”  I’ll share again Alan Watts definition of “faith as “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.” In other words, faith in possibility. You just never know.

INTO THE ARMS OF OTHERS

But it’s another observation from Archbishop Tutu’s that I want to leave you with today. “Hope,” he said, is also nurtured by relationship, by community.”

“Despair turns us inward. Hope sends us into the arms of others.”

My experience is that not only does hope send us into the arms of others, being in the “arms” of others – in the hearts, compassion, witness, kindness and care of others – feeds our own sense of hope. Once again, it’s about not perceiving ourselves to be alone. Relationship is both a source of hope and the result of having hope…

In relationship, our capacity for vulnerability and risk, become key, and important for us to cultivate together. (This will be the focus of one of our services in March.)

To choose hope is to choose to reach out to others with whatever hope we do have. And to choose hope is to reach out to others in order to find the hope we are seeking. As Archbishop Tutu points out, “Hope is not generated in solitude.”

THE WHY OF IT…

I’m sorry, I can’t sell you some ready-made hope. But I will do my best to sell you on hope and to point you toward each other, so that you may find and strengthen hope in each other, and so that we will all be ready to hold hope for one another in the really tough times, when one of us cannot hold hope ourselves.

Anne Lamott says that “Love is why we have hope.”

It’s also true, I say, that hope is why we have love.

My hope is that this congregation, this community, becomes ever more a place where people can figure that out and cultivate both love and hope deeply and for the long haul.

You just never know.

May we be so.

SOURCES REFERENCED OR CITED

Ackman, Sharon. “Soldiers with this trait are survivors in life and war.” Medium. August 3, 2018. Online. https://medium.com/@sharonackman/soldiers-with-this-trait-are-survivors-in-war-and-life-2b7c6ad34afb

Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas C. Abrams. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. 2016. Print.

Collins, James C. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t. New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2001. Print.

Lamott, Anne. Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. 2018. Print.

Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Print.

Religious Naturalism: Let the Mystery Be
a sermon by Rev. Kevin Tarsa
UU Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, CA
December 9, 2018

Opening Words by Chet Raymo

“I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery. Let this then, be the ground of my faith: All that we know, now and forever, all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or ever will have, is as an island in the sea [of mystery]. And still the mystery surrounds us.” 

Time for All Ages   Snow Music by Lynne Rae Perkins

Music Holy Now by Peter Mayer. (see/listen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiypaURysz4)

 

Sermon: Religious Naturalism: Let the Mystery Be   by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

 

LET THE RIVER RUN

[1-minute video of the Yuba River in the spring]

I know that many of you feel a profound sense of connection to the Yuba River and its tributaries, its forks and its surroundings. Several people offered photos of the river to represent what is holy to them. That video was taken at the end of the Buttermilk Bend Trail at Bridgeport, in the spot where a friend and I once watched a river otter work its way upstream just a few feet from us, along the edge of the rushing water.

Even though I am new to this area, I too feel a powerful connection to the river and to my experience of it, and often, after I am there, I wish I could bring the river home with me.

This usually brings to mind an image from Alan Watts, something I read over 30 years ago: He wrote,

“…you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To ‘have’ running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life…” he adds (Watts 24).

The book’s curiosity-piquing title is The Wisdom of Insecurity. It has shaped my thinking and awareness ever since I read it right after college, and simply remembering the title is enough to get me contemplating anew.

I’ve mentioned this title and concept here before to a number of heads nodding in recognition. In these times, in which so much seems less secure than it did a couple years ago, in this month inviting us to focus on the idea and the experience of “mystery” in our lives, an invitation to come to terms with the inherent uncertainty of our existence feels important, an invitation to consider (despite any of our natural human resistance) the wisdom of insecurity.

It’s tempting to think that we are experiencing an especially uncertain age. Allan Watts said the same thing that about his times when he published The Wisdom of Insecurity…in 1951. In truth, he wrote then and says to us now, “our age is no more insecure than any other (15),” though our perceptions of security do wax and wane, I would note.

I have titled and framed today’s focus within religious naturalism. Lest this feel like a bait and switch, I’ll assure you that the wisdom of insecurity is not only a very Buddhist kind of perspective, it is also a naturalist perspective, and I’ll focus on that aspect of religious naturalism today.

Years ago I told someone I was preparing to speak in a service about religious naturalism and they got a strange look on their face. The person thought I was going to be speaking of “naturism” – i.e. social nudism. Now religious nudism would be a fascinating topic, I am sure, but in case you are about to be disappointed, I’ll let you know that naturalism is something else.

Although………. there is a kind of spiritual, psychological and intellectual nakedness and vulnerability that comes with naturalism.

 

WHAT IS NATURALISM?

Sometimes when I name religious naturalism a person will reply, “Oh, I love nature too.” Naturalism includes a valuing and even love of nature, but is more than that. The defining aspect of naturalism is the stance that nature is all there is.  That there is nothing else, nothing that is not natural. It is to say that there is no super-natural realm outside of the natural world, “no supernatural agents, no supernatural means of knowing, no supernatural [seals of approval], and no supernatural [entities] (Hogue).”

Which is not to deny all that is incredible about this world, and the marvelous, mysterious and unexplainable aspects of this universe! It is, rather, to say that all such awesomeness, mystery, extraordinariness, divinity wonder and sacredness is part of this one natural world in which we live….and which we will never fully know or understand. It is to see everything in the world as holy.

From a naturalist perspective, this includes us human beings, meaning that we too are completely from, thoroughly part of, and entirely held within this natural world. There is no part of us that isn’t.

As Donald Crosby summed it up, for a naturalist:  “Nature in some shape or form is all there is now, ever has been, and ever shall be (Hogue 204).” Amen.

 

ALL IS FLUX

I’m drawing on Michaels Hogue’s insight again….as well as Allan Watts’ today, starting with Michael noting that this kind of naturalist perspective has not been the norm in much of the dominant white, western European thinking and history.

The sacred was separated from the profane, Heaven above and Hell below were placed in realms separate from earth, God above a different substance and reality from humanity, humanity located in a different realm from animals and nature, mind and soul existing separate from the body and belonging to a different, more true home somewhere else…Hogue and Watts claim that all those separations and creation of unchanging categories are ways of trying to create a sense of sureness and security in a world and life that is inherently risk-filled and precarious.

There have long been naturalist currents within every religious tradition, but it was the scientific discoveries of the 1800’s that started to challenge all that separateness in a broad way in white western societies.

The theory of evolution, among other new ideas and discoveries, challenged the notion that human beings are totally separate from nature, and suggested, instead, that not only did humans arise out of nature and out of other animals, but also that humans too, are still evolving. …Sort of.

The problem is that we appear to be evolving like this:

But I’m getting ahead of things.

The bottom line, from a naturalist perspective, is that neither we humans nor the world were created once and for all, as is. Instead everything that exists is continually changing, unfolding, becoming….which means that certainty is never more than momentary.

 

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

One of ironies is that the white intellectual history of the west –  including both the religious search for unchanging truths and an unchanging God, as well as the scientific search for verifiable knowledge and unchanging natural laws – was driven by that quest for certainty, a quest to allay our human fears for our safety in a precarious world. But, instead, it led and continues to lead to an awareness that nothing is static, that everything is thoroughly interwoven and changing continually, and that knowledge and understanding are therefore endlessly slippery. It turns out the world is even less certain than we thought (Watts 93).

Though this is initially exhilaratingly liberating, when the truth of it settles in emotionally, it is not a happy discovery for survival-driven, finite creatures like ourselves. It tends to trigger our anxiousness, which drives us to an even more desperate search for some sort of certainty, and leading to yet more anxiousness….

Michael Hogue claims that this is what has gotten humanity and now the earth into trouble. That drive for certainty. It underlies the artificial splits our western white culture made between heaven and earth, sacred and profane, human and animal, mind and body, humanity and nature – and that these splits have led to the political and social challenges of our times, including climate change.

The anxiety of our times is both a source and a result of our reach for certainty.

When we don’t see ourselves as thoroughly part of and at one with nature, we treat the earth and all else within it as “other.” When we see a god as absolutely powerful in contrast to mere human beings, that sets us up to imagine some people as more worthy of power than other people. Splitting things into deeply separate categories keeps us from realizing that all is of one substance and thoroughly interconnected.

Seeing the world and ourselves as entirely natural, not separate and exceptional or uniquely protected, leaves us out there, naked, exposed in a sea of relativity and mystery. Seeing the world as not fixed, but ever in motion, leaves us vulnerable – spiritually and emotionally.

These also leave us knowing that we are interconnected with everything, able ourselves to change, and positioned to move through the world as it really is, to move through life more naturally.

There is hope to be found in all of this.

 

WHY “RELIGIOUS?”

To get there, it may help to ask, “What is religious, then, about religious naturalism?”

Hogue gives a pragmatic reply: “Religion is a human response to living in a changing environment.”

From a progressive standpoint, religion does not require  – or rule out – belief in God.  Religion is, instead, defined by its purpose – religion helps orient us in the world, to know which direction is which, helps us locate meaning and discern value, and so helps us find our way “through the blessings and the burdens of life’s vulnerabilities (Hogue 138).” Religion, whatever it looks like in a given tradition, helps us find our way through this beautiful and precarious “world of uncertainty, creativity, [and] risk (Hogue 135).”

That is what participation in this community and this faith tradition is meant to offer, in many different ways – invitation, encouragement, inspiration, education, opportunity, practice and experience that help us get our bearings in the world, as it is, and to find our way in it – each and together.

Religious naturalism and our Unitarian Universalist tradition do this knowing that we must hold all of our orienting knowledge and understanding provisionally, open to change when our experiences lead us to new conclusions. I repeat this here often, because it is so foundational to our faith, this “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

Religious naturalist Ursula Goodenough says that religion’s function is to help people answer two questions…. “How things are and which things matter.” …and then to integrate those two answers. The thing is, the answer to the first question determines the answer to the second. Our understanding of “how things are” determines “which things matter.”

If we believe that the physical world and our earthly lives take second place to a more authentic existence elsewhere and elsehow, and if we think the universe and life are ruled by a set of unchanging absolutes, then we’ll get a certain set of answers to the question about what matters ultimately, and we’ll behave accordingly. What matters then is tolerating this time and place and preparing for another. What matters then is honoring, enforcing and shoring up the hard lines of all the absolutes.

If we believe that the world is entirely natural, including we humans with it, and that nature is all there is, and if we believe that everything we think we know could change at any moment, we’ll get a different set of answers to the question about what matters ultimately, and we’ll behave accordingly. What matters then is anything that supports or endangers the web of existence that connects everything. What matters then is remaining open, seeing all things as relative and related…and impermanent.

 

HAVE FAITH!

I define my own religious perspective as religious naturalist, so you get doses of it most Sundays. It’s what leads me to so many both/and notions. There are other religious perspectives in the room, I know. Whatever your religious understandings, I invite you to have faith!

Now if that word pushes your buttons uncomfortably, Allan Watts may be of help.

For Watts, “belief … is the insistence that truth is what one would wish it to be. The believer,” he writes, “will open [their] mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with [their] preconceived ideas and wishes (24).” We can only believe in what we’ve already known or imagined, Watts claims.

“Faith,” on the other hand, says Watts, “is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.”

“Belief clings,” he says, whereas “faith lets go.”

“Faith, [in this sense of openness,] is the essential virtue of both science and any religion that is not self-deception.”

Watts claimed, back in 1951, that “Most of us believe in order to feel [spiritually and psychologically] secure, in order to make our individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. Whether one believes in God or believes in atheism,” Watts says, “belief has become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp it and to keep it for one’s own. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it.  You cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. To have running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.”he adds (24).

 

AND?

“It must be obvious, from the start, wrote Watts, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a Universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the conflict lies deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. To want security, [i.e. to want to be protected from the natural flux of life, is to want to be separate from life. [And] It is that very sense of separateness that makes one feel insecure (77).”

“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing (77-78). . . To hold your breath is to lose your breath.”

So, let go, he invites, have faith, and let the mystery be.

Or as Michael Hogue invites, “embrace a spirit of resistance to certainty (91).”

This is not the easy path, as you know, and it is long-term work, in whichever traditions we may travel it. But I’m coming to understand, with the help of Watts and Hogue, that not only is this the spiritually wise approach, it is an important part of the theological and political work ahead to midwife whatever is best to be born out of the current birth pangs in the nation and across the globe. It is the grasp for certainty that has gotten us into trouble. Resisting certainty is an important part of the answer.

Hope, in this regard, comes through knowing that the collapse of old realities and perspectives, though painful and frightening often, is always a potential blessing,

An opportunity opens up in the gap, a creative space for something new to be born.

This is where we are, my friends, traveling together through this amazing and uncertain world. The religious work is to get our bearings, and navigate it as best we can.

Let us have faith …wherever it may lead.

May it be so.

Works Cited

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. 1998. Print.

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

Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Print.

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.