Past Services

“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.

Seeing Beyond Hate

a sermon by The Rev. Kevin Tarsa

delivered September 24, 2017

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

Grass Valley, CA

In reaction to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, with its violence and its participants’ Nazi and anti-Jewish chants of “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” our national and private conversations in response have been focused on hate – hate groups, hate speech, hate crimes, hate violence, and fear of the same.

A bipartisan congressional resolution against hate, signed by the President, recognizes “the growing prevalence of … hate groups in the United States” and urges the president “to improve the reporting of hate crimes.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has long monitored and fought against groups listed in their Hate Watch and noted on their Hate Map  (917 groups currently, two near here) Their Ten Ways to Fight Hate document is available online for free download – all good and important work by the SPLC. (www.splcenter.org)

And though I appreciate and commend the ten kinds of action they recommend to make a difference, holding up HATE as the focus never sits well with me, even to rail against it.

[PHOTO of “I hate hate” T-shirt]

In the march and rally in Sacramento to Stand in Solidarity with Charlottesville, the anti-hate chants and slogans did not ring true to me, though I knew they were coming from well meaning persons.

My discomfort comes, in part, from a belief and my experience that often what we resist persists, or as our mission renewal workshop facilitator, Linda Laskowski, put it yesterday when she was speaking of Appreciative Inquiry, “We become what we focus on.” We energize and shore up those things we focus on, even to oppose them. (Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. –  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

My discomfort with focusing on hate comes also from my long-time study of George Lakoff’s ideas about framing – the notion that the language and metaphors we use shape what and how we think, shape what we believe needs to be done, and shape what we can imagine as possible.

If we define hate as “the problem,” then our questions and our solutions will orbit around a particular set of ideas and expectations deeply associated with hate. And this is a misplaced focus, a distracting focus that prevents us from seeing what we really need to see and address.

Drawing on the work of Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski in their book, Considering Hate, I want to take issue with the popular focus on hate, for the sake of our political, our emotional and our spiritual health and well-being, and I want to invite us to invest, long term, in more productive and helpful focal points and framings that are anchored in our UU faith tradition.

[photo of Elizabeth Eckford being screamed at and spat upon by white segregationists]

When I first saw photos like this years ago, of someone radiating rage at another human being for no reason that I could see, I struggled to understand it. Such rage, such hatred, was not something I had experienced at that point.

Have you ever felt that kind of hate, that intense hostility within you?

Have you ever felt that kind of hate directed at you?

One day, I received a small inkling of the experience of hatred from the inside. It’s a garden story, which may surprise some of you, but won’t surprise gardeners.

I lived in the woods and the deer ate pretty much everything we planted in the yard. I came to terms with this. The deer were there first.  This is their land. I’ll try to find plants they won’t eat. But there was one little garden area between the walkway and the house where the deer didn’t venture, and I channeled all of my landscaping and gardening energy into that space. Very carefully designed and planted, with years of future plantings in my design and imagination.

That was great for a couple years. And then one year, moles moved in under the steps. Every day, tunneled through all of my beautiful landscaping were the moles, They ate and tore out the tulips. They shredded the lily bulbs. They dug under plants exposing the roots to the air and the plants died. I’d replant and the moles would come along, making their raised tunnels and tossing the new plants to the side. The seeds I planted would all get dug up.

One day I come home and the garden is once again riddled with these mounded mole tunnels. I press. My. Foot. Down. Pressing. The. Soil. Back. Down. One. Foot width. At. A. Time. Swearing the whole time. And I look back and see the soil coming back up, inching along. Foop. Foop. Foop. Foop. Foop…

I did not think. There was not a moment in between. I took my heel and STOMPED as hard as I could where the mole was. Now you have to know, this is not like me. I’m a person who goes around lifting worms off drying sidewalks and roads. I spent summers diving in the lakes to tear the zebra mussels off of clams before the mussels prevented the clams from closing. I catch flies and spiders and wasps in the house and let them outside. (Most of the time.) Not like me. And yet…

The next time I was on the receiving end of someone’s verbal rage, at a gay pride event, the next time a saw a contorted face of hatred, I recognized something in the energy of that face and that voice, and I remembered my violent stomp on that poor mole:

That mole in my garden was just living it’s ordinary life, doing what moles do, something I could usually accept, knowing we needed to share the woods and knowing that the moles were there long before I was. But that year, that day, that mole was messing up my world, destroying my carefully crafted and beautiful world in which I had invested so much time, energy, money and imagination.

When I next saw hatred manifest in someone else, hatred directed at me, in that case, I recognized that my sheer existence, as a gay person, was messing up someone’s world. Their carefully constructed and tended world did not have room in it for people and ways of being outside the boundaries they had set, or that had been set for them.

Accepting my presence would call into question and so genuinely jeopardize their entire way of seeing and understanding the world. As one person explained it to me, making an exception like, even for a person they thought was a nice person,  that would risk making a crack in the foundation of their beliefs, and they feared that their entire belief system might come crashing down eventually if they started to question any part of it. They could not risk that possibility.

Especially after serving in the South, when I see something like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I see that group of angry, yelling faces through that lens. I see people whose internal sense of the world is indeed in jeopardy, challenged by all the changes in our nation and our culture.

After the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, a commentator on American Public Radio noted that a number of her friends were lamenting to her that the white nationalist rally and its violence were so un-American, they couldn’t understand how it could happen.

She explained to them that what happened in Charlottesville was, on the contrary, thoroughly American, rooted in a history of violence from the very beginning, “a violent history of erasure,” as Mishuana Goeman puts it (Whitlock and Bronski 141) that has been “accepted, even celebrated,” violence based on the promoted superiority of one group over another, violence that ensures the power of one group over another, violence against anyone whose behavior or full presence might mess up or jeopardize that world of superiority and domination it has been constructed in our nation.

Here’s the point:

Hate is a servant of the current power order. Hate speech and hate violence serve to keep things the way they are by keeping people in line, by keeping people in their places. But hate is a consequence of that order, not the cause of it. Hate is not THE problem. Hate is evidence of the problem. As Whitlock & Bronski write, “Hate violence is a visible eruption of longstanding injustice (17).”

It is no accident, I think, that white nationalist groups and a president whose chastisement of them comes with a wink are manifesting visibly now, as the order of things is challenged by the changing demographics of the nation and eventually, perhaps, by the growing inequality in wealth.

Thinking that hate is the issue, obscures the realities we need to see beneath or behind hate.

[NASA photo of the recent solar eclipse at totality.]

In the midst of all the excitement and publicity around the recent eclipse, I learned that the solar eclipse is an occultation  “an event that occurs when one object is hidden by another object that passes between it and the observer . . . when an object in the foreground blocks from view (occults) an object in the background.”

I would name this morning three of the ways that a focus on hate comes between us and what we need to see.

First – Whitlock & Bronski point out that in the U.S. we tend to think of hate as an attribute of individuals – a “personal prejudice held and perpetrated by individual extremists, loners, and misfits (11-13).” Even when people are in groups, as in Charlottesville, we are likely to think of them as collection of individually hate-possessed people in need of individual reform.

This is especially true when white people are categorizing white people. When Timothy McVeigh bombs the Federal building in Oklahoma, or when a young white man shoots people in a school or theater or church, the public conversation is mostly about the troubled young man and why HE is troubled, The conversation is typically not about why Christians are bombing buildings or why white people or young people are going on shooting rampages.

But if we treat hate as the malady of an individual, we won’t see the systemic nature of the violence behind that hate, the language, the stories, the movies and images, the laws and policies and sanctioned behaviors that reinforce status quo relationships of superiority in ways that generate hate violence as an enforcement mechanism.

You may know the song from the musical South Pacific, “You’ve got to be carefully taught…to hate and fear”. This may be true, and people may learn, one at a time, to hate, but the unequal power relationships that are kept in place by violence in our nation, ensure that hate will be taught, even if we reform individual teachers. The teachers aren’t the issue. The entire culture will continue to create teachers of hate until we address the status quo that requires them.

Second – We tend to believe that hate is something that resides in other people – not us. Especially we progressive folks, say Whitlock and Bronski, like to believe that hate is an attribute exclusive to ignorant bigots (119).

This is a brilliant tactic on the part of the system for disguising hate.

Though as human beings we may have to be taught to hate in particular ways, we all have the capacity for hate, for intense animosity, for stomping when our world is in jeopardy.

Our Unitarian heritage can get in the way here. Our ancestors worked so hard to move away from the Calvinist notion that human beings are inherently depraved and to promote the idea that human beings are inherently good, that we are slow to acknowledge the gaps in our goodness.

As long as we believe that we don’t personally have the capacity to hate, we are vulnerable to wielding hate unawares. We won’t see the subtle ways in which our behaviors perpetrate racism, or violence against women or immigrant others. We will not see our micro-aggressions and how they keep relationships of superiority in place.

Whitlock and Bronski claim that we “legitimize violence and hate by ascribing them to ‘monsters (107),’” out of the ordinary “thems”, but “ordinary people can commit demonic acts,” they remind us (109). Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux Klan were filled with ordinary people.

If we can acknowledge our own capacity to hate, we will be less vulnerable to its wiles and we will see more of what we need to see behind the veil in our society.

Whitlock and Bronski note that most of us experience ourselves “not as haters, but as the hated. When we do express hate,” they say, “it is inevitably in response to being hated (2).”  Feeling hated triggers and justifies in us our own hatred.

And Third –  We tend to believe that “hate violence is considered unacceptable to respectable society [in America] (13).” Though that notion is being challenged these days.

People express shock at the white nationalist rallies, but Whitlock and Bronski ask, “what if hate violence is not an aberration, what if hate violence represents community norms (37)?” As long as we believe that this couldn’t possibly be true, much hate violence will remain invisible to us. Members of Black Lives Matter have been trying to communicate this, that violence against black persons is the accepted norm in the U.S., not an unaccepted aberration, which is why so many white people don’t recognize it.

Whitlock and Bronski tell the story of Matthew Shepherd, the young gay man murdered in Wyoming in 1998 by two young men his age, young men addicted to methamphetamine and from a lower socio-economic class than Shepherd. It was immediately labeled a hate crime, though there was no direct evidence that Shepherd was killed because we was gay (perhaps targeted because he was gay) and though the state of Wyoming had no official “hate crime” category.

And they tell of the events that took place in Stubenville, OH in 2012, when “two high school football players were accused and later convicted of sexually assaulting a highly intoxicated 16-year-old female from a neighboring high school at a large, out of control party. Other students witnessed the assault, disseminated photos on social media and openly discussed it. The media coverage was filled with outrage but the words hate and hate crime were never used (3-4).”

Why not?

Violence against women is so common, such a community norm, that the term hate crime doesn’t get applied to it. The way we erroneously think about hate as rare and socially unacceptable in America again hides much violence that keeps in place the status quo hierarchy of domination.

Because of the subconscious ways hate is understood in America, whenever we define and focus on hate as the issue we automatically call into play an entire set of conceptions and misconceptions that get in the way of our seeing what we need to see and address.

If we know that, we can try to find our way through those occultations, but Whitlock and Bronski suggest that we stop and pause before jumping to a label of hate (82), to notice what’s behind it, where it comes from beyond the individual person, beyond the other/the monster that’s not us, beyond what we expect are acceptable societal norms, to see what we really need to see: a several hundred year culture of superiority and domination, held in place by systemic, implicitly sanctioned violence.

Framing the issue as hate obscures that.

Then, if not hate, what are we to call upon as our focus instead?

I’m afraid that that’s at least two more sermons’ worth, and I will commit to offering them eventually, but I can’t just leave you here! So to close, I will draw on Whitlock and Bronski again to try to point in the direction of hope and to connect all of this to our monthly theme of “welcome.”

Whitlock and Bronski urge us to “change our language of justice from [a language] of HATE to [a language] of public goodness (99).”

They write:

[We have] been unable to create a new societal ethic and language for encouraging empathy and goodness as options in everyday life. . . . Our society suffers from what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called maladies of the spirit . . . spiritual disorders that prevent society from thinking coherently about justice and goodness in ways that dismantle beliefs and structures rooted in an ethic of domination.

One malady upon which many other disorders rest is a lack of trust. The roots of fear and hatred are located in the absence of trust: trust in others, trust in our communities, trust in ourselves, and trust in ability to do good. And why should we trust, given our nation’s history?

A beginning might be in radically breaking from society’s preoccupation with evil and enemies.

 It would be necessary to replace this language [of enemies, evil and hate] with an expanded civic vocabulary of goodness . . .[and] to think about justice as a means of expressing compassion (97-99).

The core challenge is [to transform our] imagination.

Rather than focusing on hate, evil and enemies, lift up new ways of understanding and living Goodness and Justice, Whitlock and Bronski suggest. And they suggest a practical place to start.

“Because American society focuses on fear and exclusion,” they write, “not on the positive creation of caring and just communities,” one way to be transformatively disruptive would be to undertake “a radical and compassionate embrace of the Neighbor (137).”

“The politics of fear portrays the Neighbor as harassing and intruding,” and the idea of Neighbor has almost disappeared from “civic conscience [and] public imagination (123).”

“An ethic of public goodness demands that [we] make new efforts to increase our moral awareness of what’s happening to our Neighbor, to ask more questions, and to act in light of new awareness (138),” to move toward, rather than away from, the pain and suffering of others, especially strangers, [bringing] us closer to a real experience of shared humanity.”

This is what is asked of us in the best of each religion, this radical and compassionate embrace of the neighbor.

As we conclude this month’s theme of welcome, as we prepare to work toward new ways of understanding and living public goodness and justice, I invite us all to start nearby – with the Neighbors we encounter – neighbors and strangers who may look and act, think, behave and believe very differently than we do, with the equivalent of toes all over their face and eyeballs in their feet, maybe. (note: a reference to a “monster” in a song sung earlier in the service.)

Let’s see if we can radically and compassionately embrace the Neighbor, one neighbor, one stranger at a time, and so strengthen the foundation for shifting our collective focus toward shared responsibility and new public conceptions of goodness and justice.

That is the work before us.

May it be ours.

 

Sources Cited and Referenced

Southern Poverty Law Center: www.splcenter.org

Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. (most recent edition 2016)

Whitlock, Kay, and Michael Bronski. Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics. Beacon Press MA, 2016.

Brave Space and the Buddy Bench ©

preached* for the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains
in Grass Valley, CA

by the Rev. Kathryn A. Bert

September 17, 2017

 

I wish I could say all the things I could say… my favorite line from our hymnal I think.  Perhaps because it’s my job to be saying things Sunday after Sunday.   No matter how many times I’ve spoken in public, I always feel inadequate to the task.  Words are just words, after all.  They mean what we agree they mean, and no more.  And they are also our biggest tool for communication, for building relationship, for being together.

It is great to be with you this morning.  What an honor it was to give the charge to your minister yesterday at his installation and to be with you here this morning.  As Kevin told you, I’ve recently returned to the Pacific Northwest, to Vancouver (Washington, not BC).I’d been in the Midwest for nearly 20 years, serving a congregation in Michigan for the last 15 where we were so fortunate to have Kevin on staff one of those years.  Though the Pacific Northwest is the land of my birth and my heart, I have to admit to a tear falling down my cheek when Kevin poured water from Lake Michigan into the common vessel at the installation yesterday.  Like Kevin, I have been adjusting to a new place, a new people and this new climate.

It seems we are all adjusting to a new climate these days.  When I was in Vancouver for candidating week, they all told me how unusual their winter had been – how very long and cloudy and rainy it was.  How they got feet of snow when they never get snow.  When I arrived in late June, there were these glorious sunny days I remembered from long ago summer trips to the coast when I could have been persuaded that it was always sunny and beautiful in the Pacific Northwest.

But more recently, the mountains have disappeared with the white haze of wildfire smoke.  A week ago Tuesday, if it hadn’t been so hot, I would have believed it was snowing with the ash blowing around Vancouver.   Western wildfires, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma all give us painful, concrete images of how global climate change may be affecting us from here on out.  As astrophysics professor Adam Frank says,

“It’s never been about politics or ideology…“What it’s always been about are the truly awesome powers inherent to planets and the real human consequences of altering the balance of those powers.”

The balance of powers has been altered in many ways since last year’s presidential election.  The climate has become less welcoming – to immigrants, people of color, Muslims, those who are transgender, or disabled or gay, well, the list, as you know, goes on and on and on.  Though I cannot blame the current administration for the changes in our planet’s weather patterns, (though they are not helping)  I can and do fault the current president for his hateful and hurtful rhetoric and actions which further divide the country, encouraging the most racist elements of our society to spew their vitriol and kill the innocent.  Words, as I said as I began, are just words, but they do have consequences.  As our best tool for communication, they should be used to help and not harm.

Rev. Jennifer Bailey is an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).  She wrote an op ed piece for Krista Tippet’s show On Being.  The article is called the Power of Welcome in an Age of Loneliness.

She begins with these words:

“We’re living in what’s been termed “the age of loneliness”: we’re more connected than ever before, and simultaneously, more isolated. We rely on social media in place of face-to-face contact. We bemoan the deterioration of conversation as we spend more time looking down at our screens than up at the people we’re talking to. But, really, the problem is that we do not give ourselves permission to talk about the things that truly matter.”

In order to give people space and permission to talk about the things that truly matter, Jennifer Bailey and a couple of friends began the 100 days 100 dinners movement.  Did you know about these?  For the first 100 nights of the new administration, they launched this project where people all over the country were invited to host or attend dinners with people they knew – to encourage belonging and healing – or with people they didn’t know – to try to bridge political, ideological and identity differences. Though each conversation took a different turn, they all began with the same set of questions.  The questions were each designed to elicit stories from guests about times they felt unwelcome and times they felt at ease.  They began each evening with the recitation of the following poem written by her friend and colleague Mickey ScottBey Jones:

“Together we will create brave space
Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work on it side by side.”

http://www.mickyscottbeyjones.com/invitation-to-brave-space/

I love this idea of “brave space.”  Creating brave space is something we can all participate in together, by talking with one another about things which really matter, by risking the awkward moment by raising a question that may not seem “polite,” or talking about taboo subjects like race or gender.

Safe space, on the other hand, seems to be something we try to create for others – we try to create safe space in the classroom, in a worship service, in a soul matters circle.  But the truth is – there is no guarantee.  As long as you’ve included some human beings in your group, we can’t guarantee that confidences will be kept or your feeling won’t be hurt by the words of another.  We must try, but we must also expect – that in the real world – we will be disappointed from time to time.

And so I like changing the focus from promising safe space to creating brave space.  If I am brave enough to share my truth, I might encourage others to do the same. I take responsibility for my own feelings, rather than expecting others to not hurt them.

Rev. Bailey goes on to say that: “One of our biggest sources of resilience in combating loneliness is what psychologists call “common humanity”: the degree to which you see your struggles as part of the human experience. “To feel less lonely in your stress, two things help,” writes Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal. “The first is to increase your awareness of other people’s suffering. The second is to be more open about yours.”

We exist in the real world.  We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.  Welcoming the awareness of our own vulnerability, our own suffering and the suffering of others.  Welcoming the knowledge that we have all caused wounds and we all carry scars.  These can be hard to welcome, hard to acknowledge.

Sometimes children, who have accumulated fewer wounds over fewer years, can be better at this than more experienced – more wounded – adults.

Enter Christian Bucks and the Buddy Bench that Chuck told us about this morning.

That buddy bench where you can go sit on if you don’t have anyone to play with.  You have to display vulnerability and courage, in a school playground, to volunteer to sit on a bench that declares to the world that you have nobody to play with!  I would call it a brave space.  And yet, that’s what kids can do, and it can work.

I don’t know if your local schools have Buddy Benches, but I do know that the trend has spread in this country thanks to this first-grader, who has since turned 11.

To be a people of Welcome, requires both the receiving and giving of welcome.  My first thought of welcome is about giving it – providing hospitality.  Being welcoming.  Scooting over in worship so that latecomers can find a seat, or sharing your hymnal with a stranger.  Wearing your nametag… going over to the buddy bench to see if someone would like to join your game.

But perhaps it is the other side of welcome that needs some practice – the gracious reception of welcome, the ability to ask for help and be vulnerable, to sit on the buddy bench and expose your loneliness.

It may be that what we need to work on is based on how much power we have in the world.  Many people who identify as Unitarian Universalist are used to having some measure of power in the world, and often struggle when they become ill or as they age, or find themselves in the less familiar territory of dependency.  Perhaps it’s not tied to power based on social location, but I have noticed the difficulty people in UU congregations have accepting help.  We can be great at giving it, but accepting it seems to be a bit harder.

Two springs ago, the congregation in Lansing, MI that I served, held worship services in the gymnasium of the local Islamic Center.  We had bought a school that we were remodeling into our new church building, but had already moved out of the old one.   The reconstruction, you won’t be surprised to learn, took longer than expected, so the congregation was temporarily homeless.  The Islamic Center offered us space for a month, no charge, and really wanted to host us.  Only we in the congregation weren’t so good at accepting the hospitality of others.  We were used to being the hosts, not the guests.  Culturally, we came up against each other a bit.  For hospitality is quite important in Islam.  They wanted to be good hosts, and to do that, meant they needed to be allowed to do everything for us.  They set up the chairs, and did not want our help taking them down.  They brought coffee and donuts and did not want us bringing in any food.  My people struggled mightily.

I got emails from congregants who told me that we weren’t being gracious because we weren’t helping them take down the chairs after worship.  I tried to explain, but people have a hard time getting out of our own cultural and class frameworks.  Just being recipients of welcome was surprisingly hard.  In fact, I’d say that was the biggest learning for me from that time sharing space with our Muslim neighbors.

I’ve been thinking about my Muslim neighbors in Lansing, MI lately, so many are immigrants from other lands.  And my new neighborhood in Vancouver, WA where the UU church is located, is also home many people from other parts of the world.  When the Trump administration announced its decision recently to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, I couldn’t help but think of my old friends in Lansing and the new ones I’m making here, and the Mexican farmworker families of children I taught in Central Washington state – apple picking country – before I went into the ministry.  800,000 undocumented immigrants in this country could be affected.

And maybe congress will do something, but given inaction from the past, and the track record of this administration, it’s hard to hold out much hope.  Even though I know this country was taken from Native peoples and many people of color were enslaved and indentured to build this country, nevertheless, with Langston Hughes, I believed we could let America be America again – let it be the dream it used to be.  “America never was America to me,” he wrote, but “let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.”  I have believed in the words of Langston Hughes and the words on the statue of liberty, the mother of exiles, by poet Emma Lazarus– “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and in the absence of that welcome, that mission, I am not sure what America is to be.

And yet, we are America, too – and if we in this small world of Unitarian Universalism can figure out how to be welcoming and how to receive welcome, if we can learn to be vulnerable, learn to go sit on the buddy bench and create brave space together… it is my conviction that we can help America be the dream the dreamers dreamed…

You have an incredible opportunity coming up this next Saturday to create some brave space together with your Mission Covenant Renewal Workshop.  As Kevin recently wrote in your newsletter, “Stated most simply, a mission is a statement of reason for being.  At its best, a mission statement is a brief, compelling and inspiring articulation of the primary reason the organization exists.  What is its fundamental purpose?  What is it organized to accomplish?”

Or, as the Rev. Roger Jones, Senior Minister of the UU Society of Sacramento asked you yesterday in his charge to the congregation, “

“What are those few things this congregation does well, those few things you might aspire to pursue next? What are those few strengths of yours, without which this region would be deprived of sustenance? Your spiritual community may be the only source for those few life-changing things, so it need not do everything, just those few things.”

Don’t dismiss this Mission Covenant Renewal work as mundane, rote, or boring – it is not.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.  For, to uncover your fundamental purpose requires the courage of brave space.  I don’t know if this is true for you, but it is my experience that many UU congregations try to do everything – lest we disappoint someone who really wants to lead this project or that project among us.  We avoid conflict by pretending we’re committed to everything any single member wants to do, rather than saying “no” to some things, allowing us to say “yes” well, to others.  This work requires brave space because you will be talking about things that really matter.  And as much as we like to consider ourselves of like minds, we may discover that different things matter to us.  And that is a good thing.  I have been rewarded in the past when I have been able to set aside my own agenda and trust the wisdom of the group – I always learn something new and am constantly surprised.

If we in this small world of Unitarian Universalism can figure out how to be vulnerable, learn to go sit on the buddy bench and create brave space together… If we can learn how to be a people of welcome, by offering and receiving welcome, I believe we can help America be the dream the dreamers dreamed…

As the poets say, “We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been –a place half-remembered and half-envisioned….some place where we can be free.” And it begins when  “we sit together and I tell you things, silent, unborn, naked things that only my God has heard me say and you do not cluck your tongue at me or split my heart into a thousand thousand pieces….I breathe you in and I breathe you out in one luxurious and contented sigh.  In sweet company, I am home at last.”

Thank you for your sweet company, for welcoming me into your home, and welcoming my friend, ‘Rev. Kev.’ into your ministry.  Thank you for being a people of welcome.

* Sermons are meant to be spoken and not written.  I have not edited this sermon to written form.

Welcoming our Full Selves

A Full Community Service

September 10, 2017

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains, Grass Valley, CA

 

Opening Words – The Rev. Kevin Tarsa

When I first visited a Unitarian Universalist congregation 30 years ago I wasn’t sure what to expect and I wasn’t sure that the people would accept me or welcome me. At that time I did not know of any religious groups or churches that welcomed gay people like me.

It’s not the kind of thing I would have told people right away, usually I’d want people to get to know other parts of me first, but a UU Fellowship invited me to come speak about being a gay person. “Putting a Face on Homosexuality” was the title in the newspaper, so right away they knew about this part of me, and I knew that they were a very different kind of religious group than I had ever met before. They welcomed me. Completely. They were warm and kind and interested and interesting.

That was the very first, and for a long time the only, non-gay group of people in which I felt comfortable being out as a gay person, in which I could really be me fully and comfortably.

Gail Geisenhainer, tells the story of the first time she visited a UU congregation. She didn’t really want to go.

“I was thirty-eight years old, living in Maine, driving a snowplow for a living and feeling very sorry for myself when a friend invited me to his church. He said it was different. I rudely refused. I cursed his church. “All blank-ing churches are the same,” I informed him. “They say they’re open—but they don’t want queer folk. To heck with church!” 

My friend persisted. He knew his church was different. He told me his church cared about people, em­braced diverse families, and worked to make a better world. He assured me I could come and not have to hide any aspects of myself.       So I went.

And I dressed sooooo . . . carefully for my first Sunday visit. I spiked my short hair straight up into the air. I dug out my heaviest, oldest work boots, the ones with the chainsaw cut that exposed the steel toe. I got my torn blue jeans and my leather jacket. There would not be a shred of ambiguity this Sunday morning. (meaning that they would know exactly what kind of person she was) They would embrace me in my full Amazon glory, or they could fry ice. 

I carefully arranged my outfit so it would highlight the rock-hard chip I carried on my shoulder, I bundled up every shred of pain and hurt and betrayal I had harbored from every other religious experience in my life, and I lumbered into that tiny meeting house on the coast of Maine. [She was just daring them to welcome her.]

I expected the gray-haired ladies in the foyer to step back in fear. That would have been familiar. Instead, they stepped forward, offered me a bulletin, and a newsletter, and invited me to stay for coffee. It was so . . . odd! They never even flinched!

They called me “dear.” “Stay for coffee, dear.”

I stayed for coffee. I stayed for Unitarian Universalism. 

Over time, the good folks of that church loved up the scattered parts of me and guided me from shattered to whole; from outcast to beloved among many. And those folks listened to me.”

From “A Different Church” by Gail R Geisenhainer in UU World, Fall 2012.

http://www.uuworld.org/articles/different-church

Starhawk writes that “we are all longing to go home, to some place we’ve never been.” A place where people listen to us, see us as we are, welcome us as we are. A place where people “[love] up the scattered parts of [us] and [guide us] from shattered to whole; from outcast to beloved among many.” A place where, maybe for the first time, we can be… free.

May you and I, all of us together, be such a home for one another and for those at our door who are still dreaming of such a place –  a home where the light of love, the light of peace, the light of hope, the light of welcome shines on every face.

 

Entering the Story  Kristin Famula, Acting Director of Religious Education 

Today, and this month, we are exploring together this theme of “welcome”.
Especially the kinds of welcome that sometimes are a little uncomfortable, or require courage.

We’re going to be thinking about how we…
welcome a gay man when it’s not common to do so;

Or how we welcome a person with spiked hair and torn jeans.
We’re going to be thinking about all of us at UUCM – and how we make our space a welcoming place for all the people who might show up here.

We’re also going to consider the parts of ourselves – the pieces of our identity – that we choose to show – or hide away when we’re not sure how other people will receive them.

Sometimes it’s little things – like sometimes, when I’m meeting people for the first time, I’ll wear long sleeves to cover my tattoos – so that people don’t create the wrong impression of me.

(Do some of you have things about you that you can hide if you decide to?)

AND, sometimes, I make sure my tattoos are showing proudly when I meet certain groups of people – because I do want them to understand that side of me.

There are other things I can hide if I want to…
Sometimes when I’m meeting people for the first time, I don’t say that I work for a UU church, or I don’t talk about my peacebuilding work.

(Are there parts of you that you don’t talk about?)

AND, sometimes, I make sure those pieces of my identity are shared proudly.

Sometimes, there are parts of me, that no one knows about for a loooong time – or ever.
(Is it the same for you?)

And sometimes there are things that you can’t cover up.  When you can’t just wear long sleeves to cover up pieces of you – and so you just don’t go to certain places because you’re not sure (or you ARE sure) about how you’ll be welcomed.

(Are there pieces of who you are – that you aren’t comfortable with – or you don’t know how people will react – so you don’t share them?)

I wonder what pieces of you you bring to UUCM – and what pieces you leave behind?
What parts of you don’t come to church on Sunday?  What parts do you want to bring in order to be your full self?  Sometimes we dare people to welcome us – all of us – and sometimes we don’t bring all of us.

We’re going to read a story this morning about someone who risked bringing their full self to the world …  let’s see what happens.

 

Story  Brontorina by James Howe and Randy Cecil

Brontorina is a dinosaur who dreams of dancing, but Brontorina is too large to fit in Madame Lucille’s dance studio and doesn’t have the right shoes. The mother of a student makes a special pair of shoes and Madame Lucille realizes that the problem is not that Brontorina is too large, it’s that her studio is too small.

 

Reflection: The Rev. Kevin Tarsa

“One of the things I appreciate about this story is the way that the dance teacher and the dance students find a way to think outside their box. At first, the question they are asking is “Does Brontorina fit in our room?” That’s the usual question. “She’s bumping up against our ceiling! She’s making a mess! Does she really fit in our room?”

But eventually, as they learn to see Brontorina as the true ballerina she is – especially after someone notices and is kind enough to make her a special pair of shoes just her size, which helps other people to see her as a ballerina too – then the teacher and the students change their question from “Does Brontorina fit in our room?” to “How can we make room for Brontorina?” “How can we find room for Brontorina to be who she is with us?”

In other words, they made room for Brontorina in their hearts first. like the gray-haired ladies who invited Gail to “stay for coffee, dear.”

Never underestimate the power of a sincere invitation to stay for connection or to come back. In my case it was Ruth Gamble who said, “I look forward to seeing you next week.” She didn’t even ask whether I’d be coming back. I did come back. I came back for Unitarian Universalism.

We can hear the Brontorina story from Brontorina’s point of view, or from the Dance Academy’s point of view.

Is there a part of you – your head, your heart, or your spirit, maybe – that feels like it’s bumping up against a ceiling that is a little too low in your life, or pressing against a wall that feels a little too close, or do you feel like you keep knocking over other people’s…stuff…when what you really need is room to dance who you are and what matters to you?

If you are wanting to be more fully and truly who you are at your core, frightening as that possibility may be, what part of you do you really hope other people will see and welcome in you? Is there a way you might make that known?

And from the other side of the story:

Are you noticing people whose heads, hearts or spirits seem to be bumping up against our current ceilings, people who might need more room, might need to be welcomed especially thoughtfully, gently, tenderly, courageously, when they walk through our doors looking…..different…..with spiky personalities, and torn hearts and leathered layers of emotional protection and carefully arranged chips on their shoulders.

How willing are we to think outside our own “boxes,” outside our usual rooms – outside the way we always do things in order to welcome the person who doesn’t look like most of us, or act like most of us, or believe like we think most of us believe?

From either perspective, inside or outside, welcoming – making room – happens first in our hearts, and then has to be lived in what we say and do. It is a spiritual practice to offer welcome. It means revealing something of who we are, risky, yes, and it means taking the initiative and responsibility, as members and friends, to be the welcoming team at UUCM – all of us, always, so that the light in your eyes helps people know that this just might be a spiritual home for them.

I invite you into such a spiritual practice this year.

The thing is, when we make more space for others, in our hearts and in our congregation, we create more space for ourselves too, even the parts of ourselves that we don’t always let people know or see.

And the more we can do that here together, with each other…the more we can do that in this city, in this county, in this country, in this world.

 

Reflection: Kristin Famula

We feel really strongly about this at UUCM.
We want you – each of you and ALL of each of you – to be welcomed in and loved for your full self.  And we want to make space for all of the other dinosaurs out there, who want to dance at UUCM, to be welcome and loved as well.

We feel so strongly about this – that we’re going to create a piece of art that will remind us of this every time we come to UUCM.

In front of our church home, you may have noticed a patch of garden space that currently just has some woodchips and sparse plants. In this space, we are going to place a beautiful rock garden in the shape of a running stream.   The stream will be made up of individual, painted rocks – each in different colors and shapes and sizes – that will represent each of our unique selves – in all of their full authenticity.
After the service today, we invite you to paint a rock, which will represent you.
For those who aren’t with us today, we will provide other opportunities for painting their own individual rock – before we create our flowing, collective stream in front of UUCM.
When we create our group art-piece, we will leave open space at the end, to represent all of the other Brontorina’s who may wish to find in UUCM a home.

Some of our children and youth have already had an opportunity to create their rocks.  (youth come forward – each holding a rock)

May each of these rocks encourage our creativity in designing a rock that represents each of us; and the courage to bring that full authenticity with us when we come to UUCM, and when we show up in life; and may UUCM be open and ready to welcome in ALL of anyone who is looking for a community here.

Offering

25% of your donation to the offering will be given to the Sierra Forever Families. If you wish 100% to be given to the Sierra Forever Families, then please write “100% SFF” in the memo line. If you are also making a payment toward your annual pledge, please make this a separate check, and write “Pledge” in the memo line.

Offertory

^ Closing Words

(Thanks first – participants, summer worship, new entry art, B-days) – Kevin

When Gail Geisenhainer talks about being welcomed by that UU congregation she says: “Please don’t think the transition was smooth or swift. These were not imaginary super-heroes, they were human beings. …We walked together and we helped each other grow…

That is our commitment to one another in a UU congregation like this one – to walk together and to help each other grow.

 “One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn’t as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.” ― Jean Vanier, Community And Growth

Help and Hope

Anticipation vs. Expectation

July 16th, 2017

Rev. Karyn Packard

Let me tell you about a little friend of mind.  Douglas was six when he came to Kapiolani Women’s and Children’s hospital in Honolulu for his first brain surgery.  His parents lived on a pig farm on the Big Island of Hawaii.  They were very poor.  They did not have a TV and they had no religious background.  The Alani’s had 6 other children.  They could not afford to fly back and forth to Honolulu to be with their little boy.  They asked if I would help.  I made a commitment to spending some time with him every day.  It was my joy.  In fact, the one time they all came to see Douglas, they also attended my Ordination to The Ministry.  All eight of them sat in the front row.

On Christmas Eve, I had been bringing the Children’s Cancer Choir through the hospital medical units in their red wagons to sing for patients and staff.  My children came along as well.  It was a Christmas Eve tradition for us.  When we finished, I went to see Douglas, to wish him Merry Christmas before we all went home.  Douglas was excited.  He asked, “Tutu Karyn, there is a man and boys and girls at the end of my bed and they want me to come with them”, “Should I go?”  Douglas died that night –  full of anticipation for what was to come.  No fear, no church doctrine, no TV evangelists, no parent opinions, no chaplain intervention.

Anticipation in life and Anticipation even in Death.

July’s Soul Matter topic is “Anticipation”.  I have to tell you that this has been one of my favorites.  The material asks us – and I ask each of you today.  What does it mean to live a life of…anticipation, with openness to possibilities?  Many of you know that I was not ordained Unitarian Universalist.  So I found myself doing a little research on UU theology.  I see that we have much in common.  We prepare ourselves for support through listening and openness as Melissa did today in her guided meditation.  We commit ourselves to both Hope and Help…we know we can count on them.  We believe that we can anticipate having help, and we can anticipate a hopeful future.

Catch what I said and also what I didn’t say.  I said that we could anticipate them.  What I didn’t say was that we could expect them.  What is the difference between anticipation and expectation.   It is a fine line.  To me, expectation is believing that something will happen, in a specific way.  On the other hand, anticipation is about excitement and eagerness.  It is about believing in the potential for something good to happen, but not being attached to a certain outcome in the process.

I grew up with many expectations.  Some came from outside and some I laid on myself.  They had to do with manners, grades, completed chores, character, responsibility, excellence…maybe some of those expectations were part of your growing up too.  The hard thing was, it was up to me to meet those expectations, and I was always anxious that I wouldn’t measure up. I expected, at most, to be a secretary, if I worked hard, and still I would worry.  Bob says to me, “do you believe it, I am 72 years old, I still worry what my deceased Dad would say about what I am doing.”   Do you worry?  Are you anxious or fearful?  Are you spending lots of time trying to figure out how to control your life or guide the lives of your family members? Whether they want you to or not!  Are you stuck in expectation?  Do you expect your life to play out per a predetermined script?   Gerald May, a favorite theologian of mine, reminds us that “Grace (unexpected gifts) fills an empty cup rather than a full one.”  His premise is that when our hands and minds are fixated on worry, anxiety, addiction and a need to control outcomes, our cup is full…too full of ourselves to receive the surprising gifts that are being offered to us by others or from the mystery of the universe. Our lives are meant to be filled with possibilities, with surprises.  When we are too full of ourselves to see what is offered, it is time for spiritual receptivity.  With an empty cup, created with listening and openness, fresh understandings take root and insights emerge that are clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.

Anticipation is different from expectation.  It is open ended.   As Unitarian Universalists, we are called to Listen and to be Open.  Our assumption is, if we live in excitement and eagerness we prepare ourselves for something good to happen.  I hear your questions now.  Hey Karyn, something good does not always happen!  You are right.   Yes, anticipation is freeing, but no, life does not always have a positive outcome?  Of course it doesn’t. Old Testament Scholar Walter Brueggeman tells us, “life does not consist in pleasant growth to well-being, but it consists in painful wrenchings and surprising gifts.  And over none of them do we preside”.   Trusting in unexpected gifts ask us to live differently.  We are reminded to live in Hope and to rely on Help.

Let me tell you another story, a story that taught me about anticipation.

For about 18 years, I led a Thursday night grief support group.  It was an open group, no interview required and people could stay as long as they wanted or needed.  In that environment, there were lots of challenges as you might imagine.  However, I had the blessing of witnessing many of the “surprising gifts” that Brueggeman talked about working with these grieving people.  I’d like to share one of them with you.

As you might imagine, there were more women than men in these groups.  The men usually didn’t stay too long.  They didn’t want to just keep talking about their loved one or their long illness process.  They wanted to learn how to cope…how to “move along”.  For some, death had come too soon.  For others, after long and meaningful lives together.  That is true for both of the people I will tell you about today.  Let me introduce Willard and Hazel.  Willard, a Scottish gentleman, didn’t follow quite the same track as most of the men who attended.  He decided to stay.  In the weeks that followed, Willard (89) seemed to be shifting his interest in grief support to an interest in Hazel.  Hazel was also Scottish, and also an octogenarian. She too had been blessed with a long marriage and came to the group very weary after years of caretaking.   Now to see the two of them…well you would never have been able to imagine a romance.  They were each quite plain and also a bit bent with bad knees and hips. But they do say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I watched with interest through the months as they began to sit progressively nearer each other.  Then they began to arrive together and when Hazel began to look at her watch to remind Willard when to take his pills.  Mmm…possibilities!

Well, I was in my office on January 2nd, when a call came in from Hazel’s son in Denver.  You see it was customary, every New Year’s Day, for him and his Mom to have a phone conversation.  But this year…no phone call.  He was worried.  He had called his mom’s home several times, and you guessed it, no answer.  In fact, he had just notified the police.  Did I have any idea where she might be?  Well, I didn’t tell him just yet, but indeed I did!  I told him I would call him right back and quickly called Willard’s home.  I knew they had gone to the party in the city park on New Year’s Eve.  Willard answered the phone. I asked if Hazel was there…pause…yes she was.  Hazel came to the phone.  I told her that her son was looking for her.  In fact, he had called the police.  “Oh my, she said, “I totally forgot”. There was a pause and a chuckle and then Hazel explained.  Well, after the party, we had to soak the black eyed peas overnight for New Year’s Day.  Then we had to put them on to cook first thing in the morning (they take a long time), and then later in the day, they took them door to door to share with his neighbors for good luck.  There was another long pause…and Hazel said, (I could hear the grin in her voice), “You know Karyn, there may by snow on the mountain, but there is still fire in the furnace”.  My last word of pastoral advice to Hazel, “call your son quickly”.

Hazel and Willard didn’t return to the grief group.  But I did see them I both again in the hospital when they got their knees repaired before their upcoming trip to Scotland. They were planning on dancing the Highland Fling.  The anticipation of discovering new possibilities, even so late in life, became their greatest joy.  It got them through their grief, their physical therapy and eventually through both of their deaths in their 90’s.

Keep your ears and eyes open for “Surprising Gifts”

Anticipation in life…Anticipation in death

May it be so…for all of you.