Past Services

“Oxygen, Soda Water, Gunpowder, and You”

by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

July 29, 2018

 

Time for All Ages        “Joseph Priestley”

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

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

 

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

 

Joseph Priestley, O2 and Soda Water

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

Along the way, he invented …soda water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion

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

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

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

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

Free Inquiry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our 4th Principle

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

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

The Gunpowder Sermon

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

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

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

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

And then, to encourage his congregants, Priestley said:

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

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

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

What about U(U)s? Today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unnecessary Bifurcations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our work is cut out for us.

And I realize that I am speaking in broad generalities.

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

My hope is that it will be so.

Blessed be.

Amen.

Sources

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

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

FREE THE PRODIGAL SELF

By Bev Lyon

Part I – The Hostage Self

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What negatives do you habitually tell yourself?

What negatives hold you hostage?

 

Part II – Free the Prodigal Self

 

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

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

Can’t you just hear him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

THE COURAGEOUS LOVE MOVEMENT

 

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

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

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

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

REPEAT

 

Bev Lyon

July 22, 2018

A More Perfect Union

a sermon by the Rev. Kevin Tarsa

delivered July 1, 2018

to the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God mend thine every flaw,” she prayed.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what motivates me most strongly.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

And right on cue.

Mike quotes American sociologist Robert Bellah, who observed that:

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

Mike picks up the thread:

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

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

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

Hogue writes,

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is our work ahead.

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

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

And make America again!”

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

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

“We were made for this work.

And now we actually have to do it.”

 

May it be so.

May we be so.

Amen.

Primary Sources

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

Earth Day, April 22, 2018

Sights and Sounds for Entering this Time 

– slideshow of nature photography with nature sounds

 

Songs for Gathering    

#21 For the Beauty of the Earth 

#1066 O Brother Sun

 

Welcome      Gail Johnson Vaughan

 

Prelude     Ancient Mother   UUCM Family Choir and Congregation

 

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

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

 

Time for All Ages   Different Questions, Different Answers      Susan Sanford

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

 

Singing the Children on Their Way

 

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

 

Song    Mother Moon   

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ecologist John Seed wrote that

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

 

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

 

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

 

(from Beyond Anthropocentrism by John Seed

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

 

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

 

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

 

And then be open to their answer,

which just might change your sense of who you are.

 

So may we be.

 

Offering 

Closing Hymn    #1064 Blue Boat Home 

Closing Words   

Community Benediction / Extinguishing of the Chalice  

“The Promise and the Practice of our Faith for Black Lives
of Unitarian Universalism” 

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
Grass Valley, CA
February 25, 2018

Note: This service was offered in support of an association wide effort to support Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU). BLUU was formed in the wake of several conversations among Black UUs at the July 2015 Movement for Black Lives Convening in Cleveland, OH. The BLUU Organizing Collective works to provide support, information, and resources for Black Unitarian Universalists. They also work to expand the role and visibility of Black UUs within our faith. 

https://www.uua.org/giving/areas-support/funds/promise-and-practice

 

 Here, we offer not a “sermon” per se, but links to the pieces that we utilized in order to center the voices of Black Unitarian Universalists.

^ Songs for Gathering

#95 There’s a River Flowin‘ in My Soul by Faya Ora Rose Touré

#153 Oh, I Woke Up this Morning, an African American spiritual from the time of slavery.

Welcome    (From Promise and Practice materials)

Rev. Kevin Tarsa and Wendy Wernigg, worship associate

Good morning and welcome!

“Our worship service this morning is uniquely prophetic: it calls to us who identify as white to listen, humbly and perhaps with some discomfort, to the lived reality of black Unitarian Universalists in our midst. This discomfort is both a gesture of hospitality to voices that have not been heard enough, and a sign that we have a chance to grow.

“If you’re joining us today as a guest, know that you are witnessing this Unitarian Universalist congregation doing sacred work:

collectively, we will wrestle with what it means to be a majority-white faith whose anti-racist intentions have not always been borne out. We invite you to witness this moment of transparency and vision.”

“We who are Unitarian Universalists often choose to make ourselves uncomfortable in the service of our meaning-making. We recognize our discomfort as evidence that we’re growing. Today, if you feel discomfort arise within you – especially if you’re white – we invite you to practice being curious, and to allow your discomfort to lead you to new learning.”

The words and the music we offer this morning center the voices of black Unitarian Universalists. I am so glad you have chosen to be here with us today. I invite you enter our time together with an open heart and mind:

Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains.

Opening Words  by Viola Abbitt  https://www.uua.org/worship/words/invocation/promise-and-practice-call-worship

Lighting of the Chalice by Rebekah Savage   Wendy Wernigg https://www.uua.org/worship/words/chalice-lighting/promise-and-practice-chalice-lighting-1

Time for All Ages  The Golden Chain: An Ife Creation Story by Erica Shadowsong https://www.uua.org/worship/words/time-all-ages/promise-and-practice-story-all-ages

Singing the Children on Their Way (There’s a River Flowing in my Soul)

Pebbles of Joys & Sorrow 

Meditation/Prayer    Let Us Have the Wisdom by Viola Abbitt  https://www.uua.org/worship/words/prayer/promise-and-practice-pastoral-prayer-2

Song   #1040 Hush

Reading  Words Matter by Carol Thomas Cissel  https://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/promise-and-practice-words-matter-reading

Music  – I Been in the Storm So Long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIGPUlkLWlg

Reflections

Tired of Being Silent by Rayla D. Mattson https://www.uua.org/worship/words/homily/promise-and-practice-tired-being-silent-reflection

Song   Hush 

A Parable on Privilege by DeReau K. Farrar.  Read and/or watch: https://www.uua.org/worship/words/homily/promise-and-practice-parable-privilege-reflection

Song   Hush

Call to the Offering     Rev. Kevin and Wendy

Excerpted from https://uuacdn.s3.amazonaws.com/videos/bluu-funding-appeal.mp4, words of Lena K. Gardner, executive director of BLUU, and UUA President Susan Frederick-Gray

Every day in our world, people are feeling vulnerable, frightened, and heartbroken. For those who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color, the effects of racism and oppression are an everyday lived reality — and these feelings are not new.

For others, this can be a time of hard awakening to the realities that have existed for a long time, and to new and heightened racial violence and policies targeting the most vulnerable. For all of us, the call of this moment is real. And as Unitarian Universalists we are invited and challenged everyday to live more deeply into our faith.

And every day, our people, our congregations  — you — are responding to that invitation. We are learning to live with a vision of the Beloved Community in the face of white supremacy and fear. We are learning to confront these things in our own hearts, lives and congregations.

If we as UUs are going to be ready to meet the challenge, and accept our invitation to build a new way, we must do it together. We know that, as June Jordan said, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism is one of the most exciting ways our faith is answering this call.

As a national ministry for and by black-identified Unitarian Universalists, BLUU embodies a liberating community of all ages. A community that lifts up the lives, and stories and the leadership of those who have been marginalized and silenced. A community that brings hope, when hope is hard to find. And a community that calls us to wrestle with the gap between our theology and our practice in the world.

Today, we are asking you to join us in fulfilling this promise.

The Unitarian Universalist Association has set aside one million dollars from its endowment.

Two very generous Unitarian Universalists, Julie and Brad Bradburd, have offered an additional one million dollars to match congregational giving. All of your gifts are needed and appreciated. And, if this congregations reaches the threshold of $10 per member (or however we count the souls we serve), our gift will doubled!

If you believe that our faith must become radically inclusive, justice centered, multiracial and multigenerational, [here is a way] to advance that vision than through your support for BLUU.

The power and promise of Unitarian Universalism is waking up to meet fear and hate with radical imagination, transformative partnership, resilience, and joy.

We make it possible through our commitment and our generosity. Thank you for your support.

Offertory

^ Closing Hymn     #95 There is More Love, Somewhere (African American spiritual from the time of slavery)

Benediction   by Kimberly Quinn Johnson https://www.uua.org/worship/words/benediction/promise-and-practice-benediction-3

Love is the Water that Wears Down the Rock

Sermon delivered Sunday, February 11, 2018

to the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

 

Opening Words    attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”  

 

Lighting of the Chalice    UUCM’s new mission covenant statement

With courageous love and a sense of wonder, 

we cultivate our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual strength 

to create a world more compassionate, sustainable, and just. 

 

Sermon    Love is the Water that Wears Down the Rock 

                        by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

As I think about perseverance and what it means to be a people of perseverance, I’m aware that there is a muscular/head-strong kind of perseverance: we plow through, come what may, no one stopping us now, we persevere.

And there is a softer kind of perseverance: we keep at it, quietly, steadily, faithfully no matter what.

I have long been drawn to the metaphor of water slowly, gradually, steadily wearing down seemingly impenetrable and immutable rock.

“Be like water,” Kendra Ford invites, “eat boulders quietly.”

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip…

In the early 80s my sister and my feminist and lesbian friends came back from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival each year with recordings of songs that became touchstones for them and for me – including Meg Christian’s warm, rich voice singing Holly Near’s words:

[sing] “…Can we be like drops of water, falling on the stone, splashing, breaking, dispersing in air, weaker than the stone, by far, but be aware that as time goes by the rock will wear away…And the water comes again…”

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip…

In those days, as I was trying to find my “self” as a young gay man, I found in Meg’s voice and in Holly’s lyrics hope and encouragement to continue the difficult, important and seemingly endless work of seeking…not even equality and rights, at first, but seeking simply tolerance and maybe eventually acceptance of lesbian and gay persons. We were making a good faith effort to change awareness and attitudes, one conversation, one workshop, one church service at a time, with occasional stabs at city ordinances, but there was little sign that things would change much anytime soon.

I have reflected many times since on that encouraging, hopeful idea that water can wear away rock, slowly but steadily, though we likely won’t see it at the time, (Someday…) and even though again and again we ourselves splash and break and disperse in the air as we keep launching ourselves at the hard surfaces that seem to block the way.

My first week in Grass Valley, I went to Purdon Crossing and was taken with the boulders clearly shaped by the movement of water. [photo] I found scooped out bowls, [photo] and intriguing shapes. [photo]

“…the river wears near and near, flow outlasting the standing firm.” (Wendell Berry)

Little did I know that four months later the river would look like this: [Photo of Yuba River at it’s height, January 2017]

Okay, sometimes it’s not a slow drip that wears the rock. Sometimes it’s a torrent of water, and everything the water carries – in this case all the rock and sand from the hydraulic mining.  No wonder those boulders had scooped out hollows!

This afternoon, in one of our religious exploration sessions, Keith Johnson and I will introduce Rev. William Barber’s ideas around coalition building for the sake of those who most need support and protection in our country.

The Moral Monday movement Barber initiated has some of this feel, of many drops of water coming together to form larger and larger tributaries into something that might have adequate power to make a difference – non-violent but passionate power grounded in united moral dissent. For the sake of people of color, poor people, LGBTQ people, women …joining energies and focuses to garner collective strength. It is an example of shared perseverance, even though here, too, Barber says it’s not about force, but about perseverance and being willing to suffer.

No matter whether swiftly or slowly, dramatically or quietly accomplished, the ability of water to shape stone rings miraculous and awesome and inspiring and beautiful. [photos]

One of my favorite experiences of this phenomenon is not about water but about feet.  On an Island in Lake Chiemsee in southern Germany, there is a Benedictine convent founded in 782 and rebuilt most recently in 1836. The doorway to the chapel has a stone threshold, and that stone has a very deep dip in it right in the middle, worn over the years by all the footsteps of the nuns and other people moving in and out.

Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip…

This message of water, soft and flexible, wearing down rock, rigid and unyielding, is a message that appeals to oppressed people who are facing entrenched powers, or to any of us, I suppose, when we are feeling powerless. It made sense to me that the oppressed circles I knew best when I was young, women and LGBTQI persons, would be drawn to this metaphor – in Roman poet Ovid’s take:

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”

When you don’t have power and don’t have force to wield, then persistence/perseverance becomes your power, especially when united with the perseverance of others. It is, for some, the available slow route to change, to a world or life that is better, no matter how long it might take. It’s about outlasting the rigid obstacle. It’s an underdog’s message and metaphor of hope that justice and right and love will prevail, eventually, if we just keep at it. Someday….

(sing: There is more love, somewhere…I’m gonna keep on, til I find it…)

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip…

In the early 90s my progressive womyn friends introduced me to feminist thinkers and writers who challenged the model of slow, steady progress toward change and equality, and I read black writers’ critiques of slow progress toward justice and equity. They pointed out that messages like “it’s going to take time” and “you can’t move too fast” and “change must be gradual” arise as pushback from those with power whenever real social change starts to look possible.

So, while I am still very much fed by the call to steady, gentle perseverance and the metaphor of drops of water slowly wearing away the stone (it fits my personality) I approach it as one possibility among others, and, in Buddhist parlance, I want to learn to apply it skillfully, when it’s truly a healthy and helpful metaphor, and not when it’s merely a variation on Sisyphus’s plight. Sisyphus is the king in Greek mythology who is condemned to roll a huge stone up a hill, only to have it roll all the way back down as soon as he reaches the summit. It was a punishment for his outwitting death.

These days, when it comes to the world we inhabit, and what might make a useful difference toward justice and right, I find myself torn between faith in the muscular kind of perseverance or resistance, and faith in the watery kind of perseverance and resistance. Of course it’s not necessarily either/or.

I’m curious, have any of you, in your life, found hope and encouragement in that metaphor of water’s capacity to wear away stone over time?

If you are willing to share it, to what aspect of your life have you applied that metaphor? What rigid surface are/were you hoping to carve away or change through your steady perseverance?

At first glance, this notion appears to be about changing the rock, about achieving eventual success, as a person, or perhaps as generations of persons who get in line and keep splashing and who eventually alter the rock.

“…the rock will wear away…”

But the definition of perseverance is not necessarily about success. To persevere is to be more than steadfast in the face of difficulty or delay, it is, in particular, to be steadfast when there is little chance of success.

A year ago January, the day after the women’s marches around the country, I named my observation that marches and rally’s like that rarely change the world outside the march. They don’t often change laws or legislators or the public’s mind. Marches do, however, at their best, change the marchers, providing support, affirmation, inspiration, and strengthened commitment.

Wendell Berry helps dig a little deeper. He wrote:

Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvements and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protestors who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal… Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

– Wendell Berry, “On Difficult Hope”

Perhaps the perseverance metaphor we’ve been talking about is not primarily or at least not always about changing the stone, but rather about preserving the qualities in our own heart and spirit that would be destroyed if we weren’t persevering, if we weren’t assembling and marching, reminding and supporting, outward success likely or no. Maybe perseverance is primarily about keeping hope alive in us, keeping our inner spiritual/emotional selves intact, rather than changing something outside of us.

Maybe the helpful metaphor is, at times, the drip, drip, drip in a self-administered IV line.

To the extent that is so, what does it mean for this congregation to be a people of perseverance?

Oh, now my thoughts go many different directions.

But this morning, for a start, I suggest that, it will mean living out your newly articulated mission with perseverance  – living it first with each other.

To do everything – and I mean everything – with courageous love, from expressing your feeling honestly, to imagining what this community could do if it pooled and channeled its energies. To love courageously, again and again, because of what it will mean for you as well as us. To love courageously here, anchored in the strength that comes with vulnerability as Brené Brown defines it: “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, with no guarantees.”

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

It will mean keeping your sense of wonder open at all times, especially when you are doggone sure that you have the right and final answer, and especially when the person across the table is driving you to the edge of your patience…

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

It will mean cultivating your spiritual, emotional and intellectual strength, … through your persistent willingness to face and find your way through uncertainty and risk with honesty and courage, your persevering willingness to risk emotional exposure, and your commitment to keep your intellectual strength in conversation with your spiritual and emotional strength.

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

It will mean finding, feeling and living your own compassion for others, AND being vulnerable enough to receive others’ compassion for you, AND, to be honest, sometimes finding and facing the healthy limits of compassion.

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

It begins, all of it begins, with again and again loving courageously, whatever we together discover that to mean…

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

Drip, drip, drip, drip…

So may we be.

 

^ Closing Hymn  Love is the Water That Wears Down the Rock by Pat Wictor

 

^ Closing Words (at the pace of a water drip) “love, love, love, love….”

Kendra Ford

I Am Learning by Carmen Riley 

I am learning the endless joys of sobriety

The multiple ways in which to calm my fears and mend my broken spirit

The multiple ways to call back my power.

I learn trust

Take refuge against the spiraling vortex of my past

I am learning…

Learning to spread my wings

Embrace my many passions

Take control.

Engage the marvels of life

Embrace the inner sanctum of my spiritual being

I am learning…

Learning the dauntless job of taking care of me…

…And that too

–whatever ‘that’ may come to be

I am learning.

Resurrecting the Spirit

Carmen Riley

10/22/2017

          Long ago, the Elders of Indigenous Nations warned the people of the coming of ‘light skins.’  The light skins will bring with them ‘Four Mind Changers,’ the Elders said, all of which the people should avoid.  One of the Mind Changers was a bottle of liquid; once consumed, the effects so powerful, the Elders referred to it as a ‘spirit within the liquid.’  This Liquid was called many things.  Some called it alcohol.  The Elders called it, “Spirits.”

My history with alcohol begins decades back.  Not as a teen, but as a social drinker in college.  Back then, my habit consisted of an occasional cocktail with friends, rarely followed by a second; often times, going month’s in-between without.

Over the years, the consistency and amount that I drank began to increase.  I don’t remember exactly at what point I began watching the clock in anticipation of Happy Hour, or sat with friends, joking that it was 5:00 o’clock somewhere, as we kicked back in the early afternoon to enjoy a drink or two.

Eventually, another celebration would present itself.  A birthday or Saturday afternoon gathering.  Back then, I was still at a point, where making the decision to dry out for a while wasn’t a problem.

Years passed–never giving it a thought that somewhere along the way, I’d transitioned from a Social Drinker to a Functioning Alcoholic–always capable of taking care of business, and never missing a day of work.

There came a time when I began to experience blackouts, and a time where nothing else in life took precedence over the anticipation of that first drink of the day.

Spiritually, I flat-lined–emotionally incapable of connecting to anything aside from booze.  There’s a reason the Indigenous Elders call alcohol, “Spirits.”

So many times, I looked towards the front doors of UUCM while passing.  And just as many times, promised myself to return on Sunday.  But alas—Sunday morning arrived, and instead of getting dressed for church, I stood at my kitchen counter in sweats, spiking my coffee with Rum.

Eventually, I found my way into Chapa de, and connected with a doctor who thought it wise for me to give my liver a little rest.  She persisted, without seeming to nag, until I finally agreed to make an appointment with the Chapa de addictions nurse–Katie.

I was beginning to wear down by the time I cautiously followed her through her office door.  Even though my liver felt like a balled-up knot each time I took a drink, the prospect of withdrawals scared me more than death.  Rehab and AA weren’t options for me, and I knew enough, to know that quitting cold-turkey was far too dangerous for an alcoholic to attempt alone.

With the aid of medication, and the promise of support under Katie’s watchful eye—over a period of months, I found myself safely transitioning from Addiction to Sobriety.  No seizures.  Nausea.  No hallucinations or pain.  Most importantly—no desire to drink.

At last, no longer did I wake up in the morning, focused on how to pass the next eight hours, until I could begin my evening by mixing my first drink.

Eventually, creative interests from the past began to re-surface.  I discovered new interests, and found myself entering the front door of UUCM, with no idea what to expect.  Afraid of judgement–instead I found acceptance and support.  Instead of religious dogma—freedom to follow my heart, and explore my spirituality, wherever it might lead.

I will never be totally free from addiction.  Not in this lifetime!  That’s not the way addiction works!  Already—one year, two months and two weeks into Sobriety, I’ve been tested numerous times.

Do I pour a glass of wine, or go for the ice tea?  Do I savor the essence of a fermented piece of fruit? — even as I knowingly reach for another?—fully aware that I’m genetically hardwired to easily fall victim to the faintest temptation of alcohol.

Only those who have suffered addiction, can truly understand the inner joy of spitting out the forbidden fruit.

To this congregation—and to all my close friends who have come from it.  To Reverend Kevin.  My doctor.  Most importantly, Katie Bell.

Namaste

 

Resurrecting the Spirit – Reflections on Addiction by Gail Johnson Vaughan (10-22-17)

With deep appreciation to Dr. Pam Peeke for her lucid description of the neurobiology of addiction[i]

Reading from Dr Pam Peeke’s book The Hunger Fix:

We all have one

At least one.

A darling. A best friend. A helper, a life raft.

An entrenched habit that’s so comfortable, it feels like a hug or an island of calm.

A fix.

A fix starts simply enough. You think about doing something that you like to do – drink a mojito or check your cell phone, or get it on with your sweetie, and that thought lights up an entire dopamine-driven reward pathway in your brain.

You feel a rush of pleasure.  You start thinking about when and how you are going to do that thing:

Is it happy hour yet?

Can I sneak a peek at my email during this meeting?

Will he or she be around tonight? When are we going to connect?

Your brain becomes consumed by the drive to satisfy that urge. You try, but you just can’t get it out of our head. You give in.

And then, as soon as you satisfy the raging hunger, bingo: you feel another rush. Your brain says, “Yeah! This is amazing. Bring it on. I want more.”

You need your fix.

I’ve been up here before you many times before, sometimes doing reflections on personal challenges and how I’ve overcome them.  It’s not been uncommon for some of you to comment on how much courage that must have taken.  Truth be known, it really didn’t take much courage at all because they were all issues that I’d resolved and grown from.

Today is different.  I will be inviting you into to something in me that is raw and current. My inner addict is freaking out knowing that sharing openly with you will empower me toward breaking the hunger fix cycle.  Did you notice me having to go up and light the votive candle so Carmen could light the chalice? And did you notice me having to run out while the choir was singing to get water for our joys and sorrows… yep, I need your understanding and support as I share this morning.

You would have loved my mother Bea Durley, warm, intelligent, dry-witted, the go-to person for her church and KVIE TV where she was a fulltime volunteer, so respected for her civic involvement that when she died at age 76 the Sacramento Bee announced her death as news, not a paid obituary.

It was her addictions that killed her. Her genetics passed the susceptibility to addiction on to me, and I passed them on to my daughter.  My mom’s addictions?  Nicotine and food.

If this were an OA meeting – that’s Overeater’s Anonymous – I’d have started this reflection with “My name is Gail and I’m a food addict”.   I’ve told some of you that already; it may surprise others of you. Perhaps you think I’m using a loose definition of addict.

Here’s how neuroscience defines addiction: “behaviors that a person consistently engages in despite significant negative consequences”. [ii]

The negative consequences for my mother was undiagnosed heart disease and an untimely death.  We’d all been together that night in 1993.  I’d done an event on the Capitol Steps in Sacramento to draw attention to the thousands of foster children growing up without families.  Many of my extended family were there.   I remember seeing her walk up the sidewalk as I spoke from the podium with two large TV cameras a foot from my face.  She engaged happily at the legislative reception and family dinner that followed.  That was the last time I saw her alive. She went back to her house, taped the news, went to bed, and never woke up.  The autopsy said long-term arterial sclerosis and hypertension.  She had been significantly overweight for years, a closeted compulsive eater, and was a lifelong smoker.

I’m not overweight, mostly because I’m too vain to let my addiction show so publicly, and I’ve never smoked, but I’ve struggled with food addiction since I was a pudgy little girl. As Dr. Pam Peeke describes, “the mere mention of food … will trigger [me] to obsess about it, or crave it.” [iii] If I see certain foods in my fruit bowl or in grocery stores I have to tie myself to the mast to keep from eating large quantities of them.  Usually, but not always, they are sweet things.  It’s been years since I’ve allowed cookies and cakes and ice cream in my house…. Or if my husband wants them I’ve asked him to keep them somewhere I can’t find them. That’s a little tricky with ice cream so we came to an agreement that he will eat whatever he brings home before he goes to bed or wash the remainder down the sink.

There are some “healthy” sweets that I no longer bring into the house.  Raisins is one. I mean, a handful is fine, and maybe two handfuls, but a bowl, half a bag, a whole bag? The next will be bananas… but I haven’t built the resolve to do that and still “abuse” bananas and other fruit – especially when I’m under stress.  Stress is an ongoing characteristic of my job, especially right now.  On Friday coming home from a stressful meeting in Sacramento I stopped at Trader Joe’s to get food for my family. I bought 4 bananas thinking that would be a manageable amount – I could discipline myself to do one a day.  Instead I ate all four as I drove home.  If I’d had ten I probably would have eaten them too.  Managing my addiction is hard work and it wears down my spirit.

Food addiction is real. Science has finally proved that it is every bit as powerful and painful as one to cocaine, heroin, alcohol, or nicotine.  And every bit as hard to break as a compulsive gambling problem, compulsive video gaming, or a compulsive need for sex. [iv]

It helped me a lot to understand the biology of addiction. All of these substances and experiences trigger a release of dopamine, a brain chemical that makes us feel a burst of pleasure and satisfaction.  While one may have enjoyed these experiences guilt-free at one point, [for many] your body and brain hunger for them… to help them cope, … and to try to “fix” their unpleasant feelings.  Even when you know consciously that this fleeting “high” of pleasure and satisfaction can’t fix the root of the problem – you can’t resist the temptation of scoring just one more “hit” before you resolve to buckle down.  Repeat this pattern enough times, and any of these “False Fixes” becomes the problem in itself.[v]

So that beckoning lure keeps popping up in my mind… does the clock tell me it’s been enough time since my last food that I can eat again even though I’m not hungry?  And when I do go down to the house to get lunch, can I convince myself to stop eating once I start?

Please indulge me with a quick over-simplified neurobiology of addiction, explained so well in Dr. Peeke’s book. Science tells us that “repeated exposure to all of these substances and experiences has the power to physically alter the neural structure and chemistry of our brains. “[vi]

The addiction develops like this Think of a river during a flood. The water charges over the banks, taking down trees and housed along the way. Continued dopamine flooding in the brain works the same way. The pathway between the ventral tegmental and the nucleus accumbens areas of the brain flood with dopamine again and again. The brain thinks it has “too much” dopamine – so the brain attempts to compensate for this overabundance by battening down the hatches, decreasing the total number of dopamine receptors to less the amount of dopamine your brain absorbs.  This “down regulation” decimates the receptors in a variety of brain regions, particularly your limbic system, the site of motivation and emotions.

After this down regulation, my brain demands I eat greater and greater amounts of the same foods to elicit the same dopamine “rush”.  You have an insatiable false hunger for more and more. But the sad irony is, the more you feed the craving with False Fixes, the less satisfaction you feel – because each time you flood the brain, additional receptors are wiped out.  And the relentless false hunger persists.[vii]

Here’s the really nasty part.

“As these receptors disappear, the abilities of other parts of your brain to communicate with each other also take a hit….  The prefrontal cortex – the grown-up responsible part of your brain that gets you to work on time and brushes your teeth and pulls your hand back from the dessert tray – gets [suppressed].  Double whammy: not only do you have to eat more food to experience normal pleasure, but you also have a tougher time stopping once you do eat.  Your “inner addict” shouts [“it’s just a banana.”] [viii]

Your prefrontal cortex saying “yes, but you just had one” gets shouted and smacked down and “the communication channel with the prefrontal cortex gets weaker and weaker.”[ix]

Addicts, food addicts and all others may spend much of our time thinking about food and “withdrawing from other people in embarrassment to ‘do’ their food in private.”[x]  I sometimes go through an entire day strategizing about my next food fix.  To make it worse, I feel ashamed of these thoughts and feelings.

Recovery from food addiction can be complicated.  Hard-core drug addicts actually have it easier than people who struggle on their own with food addiction.  Why? because drugs, alcohol, and nicotine are not needed for survival. Once you are clean, you never touch the substance again. You are abstinent for the rest of your life…

The harsh reality with food addiction is that abstinence from all food is not an option. I have to walk among my “drug” everyday of my life.[xi]

They line the grocery store aisles when I go to buy healthy food for my family, they are fed to me at lunch meetings, family and friends bring them to my house. I cannot escape them, even at UUCM, which is why you usually don’t see me sharing snacks after the service. .  It’s hard work and it wears down my spirit.

I want you to know that about me so you can support the resurrection of my spirit and my recovery by understanding if I say “no thank you” when you offer me something delicious, it’s not about you, it’s about me.  Trust me to know my triggers.  And by all means, accept my invitation to give me “the look” if you see me reaching for that beckoning baked thing at our social hour.   Thank you.

[i]     Peeke, P. (2012), The Hunger Fix; The Three-Stage Detox and Recovery Plan For Overeating and Food Addiction. New York, NY: Rodale Inc.

[ii]    Polk, T.A. (2015), Lecture 12: Junk Food, Porn, Video Games – Addictions?; The Addictive Brain. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company

[iii]   Peeke, (2012), pg xii.

[iv]   Peeke, (2012), pg xiii.

[v]    Peeke, (2012), pg xiii.

[vi]   Peeke, (2012), pg xiv.

[vii]  Peeke, (2012), pg 8.

[viii] Peeke, (2012), pg 9.

[ix]  Peeke, (2012), pg 9.

[x]   Peeke, (2012), pg 10.

[xi]  Peeke, (2012), pg xvii.

 

Resurrecting the Spirit

   Rev. Kevin Tarsa  

I am wondering:

For how many people in this room has someone’s deep addiction been a powerful and painful reality in your life? Whether in the past or now?

(I invite us to hold each other in that awareness.)

And of those people you are holding in your mind’s eye and in your heart, the people suffering under an addiction, how many of them found a way, eventually, beyond the suffering of addiction?

(I invite us to hold each other in that awareness, too.)

I appreciate Carmen’s and Gail’s courage and willingness, and the courage that I know others of you have offered here over the years in sharing your stories and your hard-won insight and wisdom regarding addiction.

Though I have known and lost acquaintances and congregants to alcohol and drug addictions, watched families orient their lives around a person’s unquenchable need, and named in several memorial services the deceased person’s struggle with addiction, deep addiction has largely remained at a distance from my immediate, personal life.

I am not an expert in the ways of addiction, but for my own more socially acceptable turns to sugar, or binge TV watching, for which the physical dangers of use or withdrawal do not possess the intensity of alcohol or heroine or opioid use.

I would lift up, from what Carmen and Gail have said, that there appears to be an important spiritual component to addiction and to recovery, as well as an important physical component to addiction and to recovery, that the two are connected and that environment and support of a community like this one matter.

JUNG

When Carmen courageously told me of her journey to sobriety, she shared in both her words and the sound of her voice, her desire to offer a message of hope to others, and I hope that you hear in her experience a message of hope for you or for someone you love.

When Carmen shared her experience of finding her spirit and her spirituality again in the midst of finding release from the hold of a powerful addiction, I remembered a story I’d read about one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous and psychologist, Carl Jung. I found one telling of that story in a 2000 sermon by Mark Worth entitled “Thirsting for Wholeness.”

In the story, as it is told, a man struggling with alcoholism had been seeing Jung for a time but making no progress,

“Jung said to him, “You’re wasting your time with me. I don’t know how to help you. I can’t help you.” And the man asked, “Is there no hope for me then? Is there nothing you can suggest?”

And Jung said, “The only thing I can suggest is that you might seek a religious conversion. I’ve heard reports of a few people who underwent religious conversions and stopped drinking. It makes a kind of sense to me.”

[So the man sought a religious conversion, which he found about 6 years later, and he stopped drinking. The man then introduced the idea to an alcoholic friend who also had a religious conversion, and who stopped drinking. And that friend told his alcoholic friend, Bill W.]

And Bill W, …along with his friend, Dr. Bob S., decided that the way to fight alcoholism was through a religious conversion and in the company of other alcoholics, who shared “their experience, strength and hope” with one another so that they could stay sober and save each other’s lives. Together Bill W. and Dr. Bob S. founded Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio in 1935.

[Years, later Bill W. wrote to Jung of what had come of that first patient. JUNG is said to have replied that it was] perhaps no accident that we have traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as spirits. Perhaps, [he suggested,] alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and perhaps alcoholism was … a spiritual condition.”

Indeed addiction does appear to be a spiritual condition at the consequence end, if not necessarily the cause end, deadening the spirit, as Carmen shared. And a spiritual conversion need not mean conversion to a particular belief in God. Spiritual conversions of many sorts arrive when someone finally reaches an end, rock bottom, when a person surrenders somehow to the need for help, whether that help will come from other people, from a new treatment, from God or the divine or something beyond oneself, however named…..

We know, as we’ve been reminded today by both Carmen and Gail, that addiction is a powerfully physical condition. A neuro-chemical reality. And an addictive substance isn’t the only influence on that neuro-chemical reality.

Some of us will remember the Drug-Free America public service announcements on Television in the 70s. One of those commercials was based on studies in which a lone rat in a cage is offered two sources of water. In one source the water is pure. The other water has had heroin or cocaine added. Almost all the rats choose the drug-laced water and drink until it kills them.  The voice-over in the add explains:

“Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

It’s the style of ad reappearing in areas plagued by the current opioid epidemic in our nation, the epidemic in which people are using, and using and using until… (see on PBS – “America Addicted”)

From a colleague, Amanda Aikman, I was reminded of that ad and learned of the work of Bruce Alexander. As Rev. Aikman tells it:

“But a Psychology professor named Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently?

So Professor Alexander built what he called Rat Park – a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats tried both water bottles, …but…

the rats [living in the rich environment of] Rat Park … mostly shunned the [drugged water], consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of [the Rat Park rats] died.

While all the rats who were [alone in a stark cage] … became heavy users, none of the rats who had a [sustaining] environment did.

[Alexander had read that] 20 percent of soldiers in Vietnam had developed addictions to heroin overseas, but 95 percent of them were able to [stop] when they came home.

Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use the drug for fifty-seven days … Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park.

He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked forever, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few [symptoms] of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and [returned to more typical behavior.]

The … cage with interesting activities, a variety of food, and plenty of social interaction — saved them.

Professor Alexander argued that this is a challenge to both the view that addiction is a moral failing, and …the view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. [He argues that addiction is [in part] an adaptation…[to our environment, to our cage.]”

(From “The Real Cause of Addiction” a Sermon by Rev. Amanda L. Aikman, South Fraser Unitarian Congregation, February 28, 2016)

The country Portugal proved him right after about 16-17 years ago, when 1 percent of the country’s population was addicted to heroin. Instead of arresting and jailing addicts, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and invested in establishing housing, jobs and clinics for addicts. Addicts connected with fellow victims and were gradually re-introduced to society with a new reason to live.

The result was a 50 percent decrease in the use of intravenous drugs in the country.

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/18/524380027/in-portugal-drug-use-is-treated-as-a-medical-issue-not-a-crime

What I want to suggest today, as the non-expert regarding addiction, as we consider both the spiritual and physical natures of addiction and of finding a path beyond addiction, is that physical and social environments matter when it comes to addiction. Not as simple cause and effect, or as the only factor, or the sole solution, but as one potentially important factor in a complex set of layers.

What I want to suggest today, is that we, as a community, find ways to support religious conversion – UU style – i.e. to help each other find our deep grounding in whatever sources are powerful enough to sustain our spirits and find our bearings when we find it difficult to do so on our own.

What I want to suggest today is that we create here the kind of rich and supportive social and spiritual environment that might allow us to BE the difference for one another and for the new people who enter this community.

The thing is, religious conversion and social environment are connected. Although religious conversions have a reputation of being intensely personal and internal, they are never completely personal. Our sense of our place in the scheme of things is shaped constantly by our interactions, engagement and relationships with the people and ideas around us. Religious stories not-with-standing, religious conversions don’t really come out of nowhere.

This is why AA works for so many people, I expect, and why spending time in the program, with others, matters.

This is the nature of religious community too, to link these two things, our sense of ourselves in the order of things and in our community. Here too, time in the community, with others, digging into what matters, makes a difference.

I’m not suggesting that this is all that someone who is addicted or in recovery needs. Professional and peer support will be important. If you are looking for direct mutual support in facing an addiction, I bring your attention to the Speed Bumps group that Carmen as begun. It is not a 12-step group, but a place to share and find support.

AND let us know, all of us, that the sum total of this religious community’s environment, patterns, people, behaviors, beliefs and reigning ideas matter as well – whether or not we are facing an addiction.

Here may we learn how to share deeply our “experience, strength and hope” with one another” and so perhaps “save each other’s lives.”

So may we be.

 COURAGE

October 8, 2017

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the romantic illusion that my ancestors had been driven from Ireland by famine. But when Lynn and I traveled there in 2010 I discovered that the dates were vague. Rather than starving refugees in the bottoms of leaky boats, it appears my forebearers came before the Great Hunger, during times of opportunity with skills to make a modest living.

On my mother’s side my great-grandfather was a steam pipe fitter from what is now Northern Ireland, and my immigrant great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was a tailor from what is now The Republic of Ireland. I can’t imagine the courage it took to leave family and hearth and step onto their first seagoing vessel. I visualize old maps that fade into stormy seas with the notation, “There be dragons here.”

But what I most came away with from that trip was a profound love for the Irish who did not emigrate. Particularly, in the Blasket Islands, shards of land off the west coast of Ireland, I realized how difficult life had been in “the old country.” In family after family the eldest son would travel to America, and once he was established, he would send for a sister or a brother, and so it would go down the line of siblings. Until one day the patriarch of the family would die, and the youngest child, the one who hadn’t made it away yet, stayed to care for mother.  This continued until 1953 when the British government removed the last residents from the islands, 22 single, elderly women and men.  The children who never made it away. They were the ones with quiet courage.

Later this week, on October 11, will be Coming Out Day.  Now some people may take that as their opportunity to “come out,” but in my experience, it doesn’t usually happen that way.  Some people come out when confronted by well-meaning friends or family.  Others when confronted by more hostile interrogators.  Many come out after years of grappling with self-doubt or even self-hatred.  For others, it is a startling self-revelation.

That’s how it was for me some thirty years ago when I was in my early forties.  It was an earthquake I didn’t understand. Easily 8.5 on my personal Richter scale.  The aftershocks never stopped coming.  Gradually I realized that it’s not simply come out and be done with it.  It’s like the movie “Groundhog Day.”  Morning after morning you wake up to the shock of remembering, “Oh, yeah, I’m gay.”

Repeatedly you calibrate who knows and who doesn’t.  With each person, each location, each group, you have to come out again, or not, because for those of us who easily pass as straight, that has to be an actual decision.  Is this location, group or person safe for me?  It took a long time before I realized that sometimes the important question was not “Is it safe?” but “Is it authentic?”  That doesn’t mean I don’t always still first ask myself, “Is it safe?”

When I first came out there were no happy gay or lesbian characters on T.V. or in the movies.  This was long before “Will and Grace,” and fifteen years before Ellen came out on T.V. The most famous lesbian novel I’d ever heard of was titled, “The Well of Loneliness.”  It did not have a happy ending.

Lynn and I are fortunate. We live in a place and time that is relatively safe, but we know to be more circumspect in Nevada County than in the Bay Area. Mostly we barely merit a glance, but as getting-up-in-years, middle class, white women we are safer than LBGT persons of color. Just two years ago, vandals attempted to destroy a mural in the Mission District in San Francisco. First, they spray-painted over the image — a tribute to queer Latinos and Chicanos; two men on one side, two women on the other and a trans man between them all — and then they set it on fire. In San Francisco!

My first fears of coming out were the realized consequence of divorce, the risk of loss of family, fortunately not realized, or friends, realized, and the fear of financial insecurity. My law office was less than a mile from Solano Avenue in Berkeley where I would regularly have lunch at a particularly inexpensive Chinese place.

The owner, and sometimes her young children, would rush to service all the tables during the lunch hour.  You hated to ask for even a glass of water for fear she would literally run to get it. For $2.95 I could get a pot of tea, a plate of mango chicken (my favorite), rice, a fortune cookie, and a slice of orange. I would eat half the meal in the restaurant and take the other half home for dinner.

One evening, having calculated that I could afford an entire meal for dinner, I stopped on my way home. The place was empty. The owner asked if she could sit at my table.  “Of course,” I said. She was tired and wanted to tell me that this would be her last weekend.  “I have worked every day for eighteen months,” she told me, “and I have lost eighteen thousand dollars.”  I still get tears in my eyes when I think of her.  I could have afforded $3.25 or maybe even $3.50 if I had known. She had such courage, endurance, and a hopeful dream, but sometimes you need more. You need community.

By coming out as lesbian I found a new community.  Actually, I found community for the first time.  I had never felt that I fit in; I just didn’t know why.  Looking back I now see that all the groups I belonged to, the books I read, and all the movies I saw were imbued with a heterosexual perspective.  It’s funny how you never see that until you step out of the frame.

A gay man explained this to me as follows saying, “As a gay man my feelings about this chair are etc…” Silly example perhaps, but suddenly I got it. Everything, down to the chairs comes with assumptions about who will like them, who will buy them, who will sit in them.

Whether you are straight or LBGT, black or white or Latino or Asian, everything comes with the assumed norms of white and straight and probably male, unless someone musters the courage to question them.

Coming out is a lesson in courage that LBGT persons live over and over again. For me, each time gets a little easier and brings a little more community. On the other hand, I note last week’s announcements from the Department of Justice that transgender persons are not protected from workplace discrimination, and it’s now okay again to turn same-sex couples away from a business because our mere existence offends the religious beliefs of the owner.

I am a big fan of newspaper comic strips, and I saw one recently that tickled me. A man is reading the paper and nearby a parrot is sitting on a perch, without a cage.  The parrot says, “You’d better hope PETA doesn’t find out you’ve got me working up here without a net.” Maybe all of us feel that way from time to time. But in this congregation that underlying assumption is not true! We are all each other’s net.

Mutual support gives us the courage to speak and sing out loud. My courage builds your courage. Your courage builds mine. As a community our individual courage gathers us together in love, in faith and in support. It gives us each the courage to be authentic and to walk, talk and sing our way toward justice.

COURAGE

Rev. Karyn Packard

October 8th, 2017

Courage… What conditions demand it?  Where does it come from?  What is courage…really?

When I think about courage, what immediately comes to mind are those stories of soldiers throwing themselves over the bodies of their comrades to save them from being shot… valor in combat.  I think of Doctors Without Borders, saving lives in far corners of the world after natural disasters:  hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, ebola…setting aside their own lives, their safety and comfort for someone else’s.   As I look at my life, I know that I don’t qualify for those kinds of examples of courage.

When I reflect on my life experience as a hospital chaplain, I think of the patients enduring difficult treatments so as not to die…not to leave their families and their friends.  I think of those families, putting themselves last as they cared for their loved ones, sometimes for years.  I think of the mothers in the pediatric cancer ward who took turns taking care of each other’s children so those moms could shower, eat, rest.  The courage it took for them to be at the bedside of their sick child day after day…night after night, and the profound courage to be at the bedside when their child was no longer able to maintain life.  Crisis came into their lives and they stepped up! What conditions demanded it?   Where did that courage come from?  It came from deep love and commitment.  It  was also a reaction to fear…the fear of loss.  Sometimes, their strength came from information.  They learned everything they could, to do the best jobs for their family member.   Information became power over the unknown days ahead.  They did things they never believed they could do.  For some, courage came from faith, the beliefs that had propped up their lives in the past, were now being called upon in their present need.  Sometimes that worked for them and sometimes it didn’t.  But they maintained.  Courage shows  itself as a response to a personal crisis in the lives of  your families or friends.

Sometimes courage is a question of morals… Doing “right” rather than “wrong”.  I reflect on a hospital administrator who when participating in a restructure process for the hospital to insure financial stability.  She eliminated her own job.  That was where she could save the most money for the institution.  I held her in the bathroom after her budget presentation was accepted. She was in tears.  She had a new baby and didn’t know what the future would bring.   Years later, SHE became the CEO.  The best CEO that I think, that Memorial Health Care ever had.  Courage is taking the chance that your biggest fears will be actualized and doing it anyway,  because it is the right thing to do.  When a triple shooting of employees at the hospital eventually led her to a breakdown, she had the courage to resign and get the help that she needed.  Moral courage… Courage to do what is right.

Courage is also telling the truth to someone you love when you are afraid to lose the relationship.  It is saying “no” when the expectation is“yes”.  It is having the courage to speak up to injustice, even if it puts you in danger.  I reflect on my pastor in Newport Beach having marched in Selma and having been put in jail and all those in Charlottesville who put themselves in harm’s way to protest the white supremacists.  Think about those wheel chair bound Medicare recipients who found ways to be ready and present at 5am to protest at the recent healthcare hearings in Washington DC.  Think what it must have taken to get them up and ready…delivered to that hallway outside the chambers of government so that their voices could be heard.  Incredible tasks for each of them and for the people who care for them.  Their bodies must have been stressed in their already challenged conditions, as they were dragged from the room.  These kinds of courage come from having a strong moral compass.  Perhaps it is a response to excellent parenting or education.  However, It might be the result of the opposite, having lived injustice and disappointment and being committed to overcoming it.  Courage to do what is right…to love self and others.

But the kind of courage that I, personally, can relate to involves tenacity… the commitment to keep going no matter what.  When I was caring for my deceased husband with brain cancer, a minister told me “Life is a cinch by the inch and hard by the yard”.  I took it an inch at a time, as I am sure have many of you.  I think that is the way many of us “do” courage.  We may be afraid, we may falter, we may make mistakes… but we do not give up.  To me, that takes courage.  It takes courage in relationship; it takes courage in the ups and downs of daily life.  I observe my youngest son (38) in the slow process of recovery from a major stroke get acquainted with a new normal each and every day.  A cinc by the inch and hard by the yard.

I’m imaging, like Bob and I, many of you have been watching Ken Burns’ series on The Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it, The American War.  Having gone to Vietnam last fall with returning Vietnam vets and their spouses, we were especially intrigued.  There was much to learn and re-experience and we had trouble sleeping after those episodes.  Our sleep was delayed as we discussed Bob’s experiences there.  But what moved me the most, was a poem read at the end and taken from Tim Obrien’s book, “The Things They Carried”.  To me it spoke about the various kinds of courage in our soldiers during that war…a war for which they were never thanked.  I’d like to share it with you now.

They shared the weight of memory

They took up what others could no longer bear

Often they carried each other

The wounded or weak

They carried infections

They carried chess sets

Basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries

Insignias of rank, bronze stars, and purple hearts

Plastic cards imprinted with the code of conduct

They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery

They carried lice and ringworm and leaches

Paddy algae and various rots and molds

They carried the land itself

Vietnam…the pots, the soil, the dust

Powdery orange and red dust

That coated their boots, fatigues and faces

They carried the sky – the whole atmosphere

They carried the humidity – the monsoons

The stink of fungus and decay – all of it

They carried gravity

They moved like mules

By daylight they took sniper fire

At night, they were mortared

They crawled into tunnels

 

IT WAS JUST THE ENDLESS MARCH

VILLAGE TO VILLAGE

THEY MARCHED FOR THE SAKE OF THE MARCH

THEY PLODDED ALONG SLOWLY, DUMBLY

LEANING AGAINST THE HEAT

UNTHINKING, ALL BLOOD AND BONE

SIMPLE GRUNTS SOLDIERING WITH THEIR LEGS

TOILING UP THE HILLS AND DOWN INTO THE PADDIES

AND ACROSS THE RIVER

AND UP AGAIN AND DOWN…JUST HUMPING

ONE STEP AND THEN THE NEXT AND THEN ANOTHER

THEY MADE THEIR LEGS MOVE

THEY ENDURED.

 

Courage, comradeship, perseverance, understanding,

 

Together we lean into the heat of life…

Courage!

a homily by The Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Reflections by Kristin Famula, Acting DRE

delivered October 1, 2017

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

Grass Valley, CA

With this service, we enter our month-long exploration of the theme of courage. We’ve begun our work to identify our mission, we transition today from our Acting Director of Religious Education to our new Religious Education Coordinator, and the events around us call us to courageous love and action most every day.

Today we’ll enter our theme, but we will continue to explore it each week – through personal stories of courage next week, through a chance to move deeper into our examination of white supremacy on the 15th, through a courageous look at behaviors that get in the way of our wholeness on the 22nd, and finally at the end of the month through a brave consideration of death itself and an honoring of our loved ones who have died.

I saw a short documentary titled Ten Meter Tower at a film festival this summer. I was very taken with it as a visceral example of facing the unknown and facing one’s fear. The scenario is simple: two Swiss filmmakers paid 67 people who had never done it before $30 each to jump off a 10-meter diving tower into a pool. That’s 33 feet above the water.

Ten Meter Tower (excerpt) – a film by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson

I can feel it in my body as I watch and listen to those people struggling with the decision to jump off the tower. Struggling inside themselves, mostly, but also struggling out loud, sometimes as well.

I love this example of facing a primal fear for physical safety and survival, especially since there is a choice involved. No one is forcing them to jump.

You can feel each person want to do it, trying so hard to get past their fear, one man even getting right up to the edge and almost going over, and then last minute using all of his energy to stop his forward momentum and then regain his balance. So close! Could you feel that in your own body, your empathy and your mirror neurons firing away?

And then there is a couple, with a man who wants to jump and who is not alone, who receives support, encouragement and companionship from his partner who talks him through it. They share the commitment to dive over the edge, and they share the experience, knowing that they aren’t doing it alone.

In the rest of the film, people of many different ages and types gather up enough courage to make it over their fear and over the edge into the water. And other people, also of many different ages and types try, and try, but finally decide they cannot do it and walk all the way back down the long series of ladders to ground level. These little stories of fear and courage were very compelling to me.

At the very end of the film, a professional diver stands at the edge, falls backward ….and does a beautiful, smooth, slow motion dive into the water.  While that dive is beautiful and inspiring in its own way, it does not hold the power of the people facing that dive for the first time.

For the professional diver, that dive is about making small adjustments to perfect her technique. And while I am sure that there is always some risk in dropping 33 feet into a pool of water, I don’t think of the professional diver’s effort as particularly courageous compared to the other folks.

It is tempting to think that courage is about reducing or getting rid of our fear so we can act bravely, jump off, do the right thing, but without fear it’s not courage. Courage is not about getting rid of fear, courage is about being afraid and doing something anyway.

The Rev. Galen Guengerich, the minister at All Souls Church in New York City, pointed this out in a series of lectures he offered at General Assembly in 2010: “The Necessity of Virtue.” One entire lecture was on Courage. He points out that the reason we would do something scary anyway is not because we are not afraid, but because there is something more important than our fear, something that we want so badly, that we are willing find a way through our fear.

[Invite people to name their own stories of acting with courage for something beyond the fear.]

Rev. Guengerich said that courage requires that we know what is worthy, what is worth facing our fear. He named two kinds of possibilities for what makes it worth it. He said, “courage is the ability 1) to see good afar off and take a step toward it, despite obvious risk.  And 2) the ability to see evil close at hand and to take steps to confront it, despite the present danger.”

Cite shared EXAMPLES, including Imani’s experience.

(A young African American man who this week was followed for three blocks in downtown Grass Valley by 3 young white men in a car who called him names. No one on the sidewalks or streets did anything to help. http://www.theunion.com/news/local-news/love-walk-in-response-to-racist-incident-to-be-held-friday/

Read about the Love Walk held in response: http://www.theunion.com/news/local-news/love-walk-packs-downtown-grass-valley/

Guengerich reminds us that “to know courage is to know a calling that is greater than fear. [Courage] sees a path through the fear to the calling that lies beyond. The key to courage,” he says, “is not the fear, but the calling.” Being courageous is about saying “yes” to what matters.

Senator John McCain defined courage as

“that rare moment of unity between conscience, fear, and action, when something deep within us strikes the flint of love, of honor, of duty, to make the spark that fires our resolve.” (“Courage as Skill” by Kathleen Reardon in the Harvard Business Review, January 2007).

Kathleen Reardon points out that “this definition conjures up an image of the lone hero who—instinctively, spontaneously, and against all odds—suddenly takes charge and stands up for virtue”

And while that happens sometimes, most of the time it is much more ordinary and much less solitary, says Reardon. Michael Durall: says the courage that calls us through our fear to our highest values is “more likely to occur among people in a faith community than individuals acting on their own.” Galen Gingrich agrees. He says that the goal of being a solitary courageous person is the wrong goal. It’s not about going it alone, it’s about being connected, he says.

This is one of the important benefits of being in religious community, at our best. It is one of the fundamental reasons for religious community, to call us to our own courage.

For us, the connection in community is not only about en-couraging one another – giving each other courage, talking us through it, offering to be with another as they or we leap – it is also about together sharpening our vision, so we can see what’s worthy of our courage on the far side of fear.  What’s worth the risks? We can’t get rid of the risks. We can however help figure out what is worth taking the risks.

Michael Durall says that “this is what spiritual maturity looks like – the courage to act on our principles, to say yes to our callings. . . in spite of the fear.”

This is what religious education for all ages is about, developing our awareness of our values and what matters, and calling us to our courage to act on them.

This is why naming and claiming UUCM’s Mission is so important: to call us beyond our easy comfort and beyond our fear. The newly articulated mission of this congregation will have to be strong enough to call us into some scary situations, I believe, or it won’t be a strong enough mission.

What does it mean to be a community of courage?

Let’s commit to keep finding out, meeting by meeting, Sunday by Sunday, phone call by phone call, community march by community march, conversation by conversation.

So may we be.

 

Works Cited

Ten Meter Tower, a film by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000004882589/ten-meter-tower.html

“The Necessity of Virtue,” a workshop series by The Rev. Galen Guengerich at UUA General Assembly 2010. DVD published by the UUA.

“Courage as Skill” by Kathleen Reardon in the Harvard Business Review. January 2007.

The Almost Church Revitalized: Envisioning the Future of Unitarian Universalism by Michael Durall. Boulder, CO: CommonWealth Consulting Group, 2009.