Past Services

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.

Opening Words

Faith of the larger liberty –
Faith for the people everywhere, whatever their oppression –

This majestic old hymn tune, #287 in our hymnal, has had many lyrics set to it over the years, and these words were written by Vincent Silliman, a UU minister, in 1944.

One way to think of the larger liberty is to look at the foundations of our own country. Our constitution begins: “We the people.” Our bill of rights states that we, the people, have freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press, and freedom to assemble and to ask for redress of grievances.

Faith of the free! Whate’er our plight,
thy law, thy liberty, thy light
Shall be our blest possession

In so many ways, our country was founded on the principle of the people speaking out. This song, “The Great Correction” speaks about the foundering of some of America’s cherished dreams.

The Great Correction by Eliza Gilkyson

Whole lotta people tryin’ to turn it around
Gonna shout ‘til the walls come tumblin’ down
And the great correction comes

Our UU tradition calls us to promote justice, to search for truth and meaning, and to use our conscience and the democratic process.

In this month of focusing together on Prophecy, we’ve heard the questions: Which truths are you willing to speak? Which truths are you willing to hear? But as many of us have experienced, truth is often unpopular.

Pete Santucci says, “The Prophetic role is such a tough one…It’s annoying and unsettling. It points out hypocrisy and the intentional self-deception we engage in. Who wants that?”

Cornel West puts it more bluntly. “A leader is somebody who has to jump in the middle of the fray and be prudential, we hope, rather than opportunistic. But a prophetic person tells the truth, exposes lies, bears witness and then, usually, is pushed to the margins or shot dead.”

Societal sanctions, and peer pressure, have taught many of us to keep our mouths shut rather than voice the truths of our conscience.

Last week, Rev Kevin invited us to build our truth telling and truth hearing capacity by first speaking truth about ourselves, then listening to truths we don’t see, when they are told to us.

Today, in this Tapestry of Faith service, three of our members share their stories of listening to their own truth, and the truths of others, and then speaking out to those who were willing to receive.

Gail Johnson Vaughan will talk first about finding and speaking her truth as an advocate. Then Frank Lawrence will talk about confronting management about wages. Finally, Karyn Packard will talk about speaking up to administration about budget cuts.

Gail Johnson Vaughan

I have a clear memory, now 47 years old, of telling my cousin that I believed that if anyone, anywhere, whether I knew them or not, did not like me, I would cease to exist and diffuse into the universe.

20 years later I found myself showing up, and speaking up, on behalf of children languishing in foster care. Lots of people, right in front of me, did not like me because of what I believed and said. I threatened the status quo, what I suggested seemed impossible to them; it couldn’t be possible, because if it were they would have already been doing it.

12-year old Libby had a lot to do with this change in me. Libby was in my son’s 6th grade class where I volunteered each week. When she found out I worked in adoption she cornered me at recess, told me she’d been in foster care for six years, been in four families, and left behind when her two brothers and sister were adopted by a family that did not take her. She wanted a family, she told me – would I help her?

I explained that most people thought that kids her age were too old to find adoptive families, but I would try. She told me the name of her county and of her worker and left with a wisp of hope on her face.

It took me three weeks to get through to her worker. “I met Libby,” I told her. “If I found her a family could she be placed for adoption?”  The answer came quickly, “No, she’s unadoptable.” I sucked in my breath of disbelief and tried again. “I mean, if I found a family that wanted her and had the skills to meet her special needs, is there any reason why she couldn’t be adopted?”  “You don’t understand,” she replied, “she’s unadoptable.”

It took me no time to identify the right family for Libby, but it took me five months to get permission from the county to place her. When the big day arrived, she and her new family stopped by my office. Libby brought me flowers and a balloon that said “Thank You.”  She said, “If it hadn’t been for you this wouldn’t have happened.”

“If it hadn’t been for me…” That struck a deep chord in me, and my career as an advocate began. As I pushed forward with as much grace as I could muster, many of the county’s child welfare staff pushed back. When ultimately we had to play hardball and go to the board of supervisors, the adoptions unit showed me who had the power – they boycotted our agency. For three years we got not one referral.

I could go on and on about how that formerly skittish, needing-to-be-liked young woman worked for decades confronting the powers that be, and amazingly influencing sweeping policy and practice changes that have resulted in permanent families for thousands of children in California and beyond, but the power of bureaucracy, and the political system are wimpy compared to the Goliath that still shows up in my life today. That Goliath lives inside of me, masquerades as me, threatens to annihilate me if I question its authority.

Goliath – or actually, a long time ago I named her Maud – served as the internal guardian of my little girl survival strategies. She’s the one that taught me that I’d better hide my true self so everyone would like me, especially mommy and daddy, or the kids in the new schools when we moved every 2 years, or the teachers, or anyone, anywhere.

I got pretty good at following Maud’s advice, guessing who people in my life wanted me to be and being it. But the mask got heavy and it didn’t work so well as a young woman moving into marriage. I did a great job convincing the 1st husband, and the 2nd, that I was exactly the woman they wanted… but after a couple of years the real me got tired of hiding behind Maud, contorting myself to fit into the required disguise.

It took a lot of work, a lot of tears, a lot of courage to begin to speak my truth louder than Maud. I was often terrified. I remember having my first truly genuine conversation with my 2nd husband. The only way I could do it was to sit back-to-back 4 feet apart, so I could say what I really thought without seeing the reaction on his face. It was a long journey, but over time I could stand up to Maud and tell her that she had no power. I thanked her for helping me when I was little, but I didn’t need her anymore.

When I met John, my real husband, he was recently widowed, and perhaps even worse, had survived the death of his 19-year old daughter, killed in an accident involving a drunk driver. I was drawn to him, but knew I couldn’t do the old unconscious bait and switch – being who I knew he wanted and then revealing, later, the true and unacceptable me. I had to be kind to his heart. I took the risk and showed him who I really was. He loved me, not Maud. And if he hadn’t, that would have been okay because at last, I loved me too.

Pema Chodron says: the point is not to change ourselves, the point is to make friends with who we already are. I recommend it.

Frank Lawrence

When Annie and Gail asked me to speak today, I first thought about a college experience. I was an Editor at City on a Hill, the U.C. Santa Cruz newspaper. A Women’s Studies professor was up for tenure.  She was an outspoken progressive and an out lesbian. Both the internal and external review committees unanimously recommended tenure. The Chancellor denied tenure. The campus erupted, and we wrote a series of scathing articles and editorials. One night at the paper’s office, I got a call – “Frank, the Chancellor’s wife is on the phone for you!” Every phone extension in the office was muted and lifted, and I picked up. She cussed me out at full volume. I managed to stay calm enough to ask if we were on the record…  We were not…  The newspaper staff dinner at the Chancellor’s house was pretty interesting later that year.

Reflecting on that incident, it seems to me that I was not really speaking truth to power. She did not have power in that situation. We ran the newspaper with no financial support from the University. More to the point, she had done nothing substantively unjust – it was her husband who had denied tenure.

Then I remembered a time when I worked as a reporter for the People’s World, the Communist Party’s weekly newspaper. Conn Hallinan, of the famous SF progressive Hallinan family, hired me. The staff included Pele De Lappe, an artist and writer who had befriended Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera during their time in the Bay Area. Billy Allen had spent half a century reporting on the labor movement. In 1936 he covered the Flint, Michigan sit-down strike from the inside, sneaking past GM’s armed goons in the middle of the night, manual typewriter under his arm – the same typewriter he was still using in 1985 – again and again. He’d walk to a pay phone, read his story to his editor, then turn around and do it all over again for the duration of the month-and-a-half occupation of Fisher Body Plant #1. So the People’s World was staffed with wonderful folks whom I respected greatly.

I covered major strikes by the California Nurses Association and SEIU. Billy took me to interview Harry Bridges, the key organizer of the Longshoremen’s’ Union in SF (as I mentioned last week, a Bridges’ speaking tour in the early 1940s brought my father into a Unitarian Church for the first time). The People’s World was a pretty good gig.

There was only one problem: they paid me about half of the minimum wage. The hypocrisy of the situation gnawed at me. I turned it over in my mind for a long time. I knew I was a 25-year-old, privileged, white, college graduate, with no family to support. I knew the paper didn’t have much money. I had a lot of respect for the staff and their many decades of struggle. More selfishly, I was afraid that if I raised the issue I’d be shown the door.

But I could not shake my disquiet. Finally I found the courage to speak up at a staff meeting: an organization that advocated so passionately for workers’ rights should pay its own workers minimum wage. A few folks let me know that if I truly believed in “the cause” I would gladly accept the hardship of low pay. But I also earned respect from others for speaking up. I was not fired. Of course, I did not get a raise.

That experience has stayed with me. I still feel good about having spoken up. It reminds me again and again that we need to treat others fairly and with respect, not regardless of the “cause” but because of it. It reminds me that I’m good at imagining bad consequences, and that they almost never come to pass. It reminds me that I have the strength to speak up even when I’m afraid. And it reminds me that, even if I can’t remedy an injustice, when I do speak up, I change myself a little, by gaining courage and confidence to do the right thing.

Karyn Packard

I was born in 1945 just as the second World War was over. When my father came home, ‘tis said that he ran a “tight ship;” he had definite rules and regs. These are ideas that I internalized: Girls were to be “seen and not heard.”  They were to “do as they were told.”  Orders were to be obeyed! Girls were never to speak back to authority. I learned “to please” and “to comply.” I learned not to speak unless spoken to. In many ways, it actually served me well. As we moved from place to place (15 schools before finishing high school), there was an ever-changing array of “authority figures.” I pleased, complied, kept my mouth shut and worked hard. To the degree a child can succeed, in the eyes of my parents and my other authority figures, I was not a problem. I was predictably acquiescent. I learned to avoid conflict at all costs, to always take the subservient position, to always be willing to compromise. Those behaviors didn’t threaten anyone or upset anyone; people could count on me! I really did not see myself becoming anything other than a secretary, or a store clerk, a job that matched my perceived skills of service.

In the 80’s I cared for my mother, father and husband through their long illnesses and eventual deaths. During that time, I had to take over all of the decision-making. It was heady stuff for me to be in that position. I learned about medicine and how to navigate the system for their care. I was forced to take personal responsibility. I had to be their advocates when they couldn’t speak for themselves. After they all died, I was encouraged by my minister to train to be a hospital chaplain…to be ordained to the ministry. It was rigorous training and I was a good student. In that training, I began to be confronted on my acquiescence. I remember in my ordination service being told that I was now called to be “a prophet.” I knew in my heart that it would be my biggest challenge.

In 1992, I was hired to be the Director of Pastoral Care at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Miller Children’s Hospital. Once again, I was new, and didn’t have directorial experience. I went back to my tried and true role. I learned to please, to comply, to care for others and put my own needs and ideas on the shelf. I carried three pagers, 24 hours a day. I didn’t want any needs to go unaddressed. You guessed it, I was very popular, albeit very tired. But I didn’t threaten anyone, didn’t upset anyone. I took care of others and they appreciated it. It was a meaningful work, and my job was secure. I was now a single mother and that was imperative for my son’s and my well-being.

But things began to change in the health care environment. Administration had supported my creating relaxation rooms for the staff, and we had taken them on retreats to teach them about self-care. They knew they were appreciated. However, I began to see things change. What had been a strong focus on patient care became more of a focus on the bottom line. Staffing was reduced to a place where I felt it was unsafe; I saw staff working through incredibly difficult situations with no time for self-care. I was having to scan every little box of tissues that I handed to family members at the bedside when we were discontinuing life support. It wasn’t right! We all knew it. What could I do to support them? I felt called to “speak up.” How would I do it? Where would I do it?

Speaking truth to power is not the same challenge for everyone. Each of us has to use our own unique gifts. What were mine? I looked inside to see just what came to me when I thought about these financial changes. It was the patient-care stories that had moved my heart. Perhaps they would move others. I used them in my sermons and in my pastoral care teaching. Maybe I could share them more broadly. Where was there a place that these stories could be shared with the fiscal decision-makers? Did I have the courage to ask for a voice at the table? The Chaplain’s role was carefully defined. But there was one place where our spheres overlapped…the monthly Operations Steering Committee. As a Director, I had a recently been given a place at the table. It was a dubious distinction. We met in a room for 1 hour a month to discuss “the budget.” I was at the table and heard the discussions. I seldom said anything, unless directly asked. I was not regularly presenting. Pastoral Care’s budget was hardly worth their attention.

I began to wonder if this executive grouping might possibly be the place for inspirational stories.  I believe that change comes when both hearts and minds can be impacted. Maybe I could bring out the “heart” in this “mind” environment. I knew we all were best when we integrated the two.

I had given invocations at various hospital occasions that were well received, so I asked if I might offer one at the beginning of the Operations Meeting. I knew most of them as we had interfaced after a recent shooting at the hospital. Everyone had been impacted in a different way to this incredible tragedy. I was given permission to try. I began gathering stories about our wonderful hospital staff and their work with patients and families, focusing on stories of unselfishness, kindness and commitment to the institution. I wanted these folks who were focused on finance to remember why we were all there. Everyone from the cooks to the CFO wanted to help people. From my perspective, this was about discovering shared values. It worked in patient rooms and so I hoped it would have an impact in this setting.

At the next Operations Meeting, I was hopeful when I noticed that no one arrived late for the meeting. They didn’t want to miss it. After the invocation, there were tears and a natural silence in the room. They told me that it reminded them of why they had gone into healthcare in the first place. They asked me to bring copies and they took them home and shared them with their families and friends. They never ran out of financial crisis, and I never ran out of stories. We were all in agreement that it was a wonderful hospital system with outstanding employees. We did good work. Yes, they still chiseled away at the budget. I can’t tell you that we saved a lot of money or a lot of minds. But I was heartened that they were consistently reminded that excellent care takes time, talent, and resources, and that real care is not always “cost effective.”

Note: Rather than a traditional sermon, this service offered a feast of pieces calling us to awareness and gratitude. Here are links to most of those pieces.

Gathering Song #21 For the Beauty of the Earth

Opening Words    What Song? by Victoria Safford

http://archive.uuworld.org/2003/03/calltoworship.html

Opening Hymn    #1010 Oh, We Give Thanks

Story     Thankful Dogs by Naomi King

http://www.uua.org/worship/words/story/151529.shtml

A Thanksgiving Feast (An Introduction by Rev. Kevin Tarsa)

Rather than a sermon, this morning we’ll continue to set a table of readings, music, reflection, images, movement, and sharing, and invite you to partake of this meal family style, which is to say take and taste what you will, what you need, what will nourish you, and simply pass on the rest.

I will name for us all that we already know that gratitude is good for us, and that expressing gratitude is good for us and for the recipients of that gratitude. Gratitude strengthens our spiritual health, our emotional health, and our physical health. It is a virtue prized in our tradition.

In fact, Rev. Galen Gingrich claims that gratitude ought to be our defining religious discipline, as Unitarian Universalists, rooted in a transcendent experience of awe and an awareness of “how utterly dependent we are on the people and world around us for everything that matters. From this flows an ethic of gratitude, …an obligation to nurture the world that nurtures us in return.”

It’s difficult to force a feeling of genuine gratitude, however we can cultivate a sense of gratitude. We can take on spiritual practices that bring our attention to what we have in life, and we can cultivate practices that help us move from feeling to acting, so that gratitude becomes a life-giving virtue, not simply an internal state.

Robert Emmons, who studies gratitude right nearby in Davis, CA, echoes Guengrich, saying there are two key aspects to cultivating and experiencing gratitude. One: Recognizing all that we have, even when we don’t have everything we want. And two: recognizing all the things that benefit us that come from outside of ourselves, all that arrives by what some call grace.

So let’s begin with grace, cultivate our gratitude, partake of the feast, and so find ways to feed not only ourselves, but others and the well-being of the world in the process.

Reading    Meditation (#479) by Denise Levertov

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3222273-an-awe-so-quiet-i-don-t-know-when-it-began

Music      Thanksgiving Song by Mary Chapin Carpenter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mEHOWsTaas

Reading     Let Us Give Thanks by Max Coots

http://emilierichards.com/2013/11/sunday-inspiration-let-us-give-thanks-for-a-bounty-of-people/

Reading      There Once Was a Woman…

There once was a woman who woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and noticed she had only three hairs on her head.

‘Well’, she said, ‘I think I’ll braid my hair today?’

So she did and she had a wonderful day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and saw that she had only two hairs on her head.

‘H-M-M,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll part my hair down the middle today?’

So she did and she had a grand day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that she had only one hair on her head.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘today I’m going to wear my hair in a pony tail.’

So she did and she had a fun, fun day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that there wasn’t a single hair on her head.

‘YEA!’ she exclaimed, ‘I don’t have to fix my hair today!’

Universal Body Prayer by Rev. Beth Johnson, within a sermon by Rev. Denis Paul

http://uufkc.org/2013/03/exercising-gratitude-rev-denis-paul/

Reading    Gratitude by Max Kapp

http://www.uua.org/worship/words/meditation/58050.shtml

Meditation     Gratitude by Brother David Steindl-Rast with photography by Louie Schwartzberg (video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2egMSliB8DE

Gratitude Sharing (conversation with one another)

Gratitude Journals (copies are still available in the entryway at UUCM)

Offering

Offertory   Thanksgiving Eve by Bob Franke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dADZFqO62A

Closing Words  by W. E. B. DuBois

Give us thankful hearts . . . in [this] season of Thanksgiving.

May we be thankful for health and strength, for sun and rain and peace. Let us seize the day and the opportunity and strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities, and let us ever remember that true gratitude and appreciation shows itself neither in independence nor satisfaction but passes the gift joyfully on in larger and better form.

Closing Hymn #1064 Blue Boat Home

Community Benediction

Let us…carry the flame of peace and love until we meet again.

Music for Going Forth

“What’s Y/Our Story” by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Delivered November 6, 2016

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

Grass Valley, CA

Message

That hymn (#297 The Star of Truth) is one of my favorites. I appreciate its celebration of uncertainty, of a story continually being written. I appreciate also its naming that each of us sees only a partial glimmer of truth. No one of us sees it all, and so we benefit when we share with one another the pieces of light that we do see. And though at times it seems utterly unfathomable, people in political parties other than our own hold pieces of truth that we need.

I’ll come back to that.

In a seminary class once, a teacher asked us to introduce ourselves with the usual name and where we were from, but then the teacher added “…and tell us one story that’s told about you in your family.”

With that kind of question, I try go with the first thing that pops into to my mind, in this case, a story my mom loved to tell:

I was a junior in high school, helping my sister drive home from college in our family’s tiny electric blue Datsun B210. On the way home, we remembered that our parents had warned us to check the oil frequently. So, my sister and I pulled over at a gas station, popped the hood, used the oil dipstick to check, and sure, enough the oil was low. But we were prepared. We got the oil from the back of the car, returned to the front, looked under the hood………and we could not tell where to put the oil.

Now, in our defense, there were plenty of caps with that international symbol indicating “fluid goes in here,” but not one was labeled “oil” in English.

We knew enough to know that we should not put oil where it didn’t belong. So I, very cleverly, I thought, figured…“Well, we know that the dipstick reaches the oil, so if we pour the oil down the dipstick tube, at least we’ll know the oil is going where rest of the oil is.” And so we tried to pour the oil into this very, very skinny dipstick tube. It was a messy business and took forever, but eventually we got enough oil in to continue on our way.

Now, mind you, we had stopped at a gas station.

We had been too embarrassed to ask for help.

My mom loved to tell that story, and she’d laugh and laugh…until I told her how embarrassed I felt and I asked her please not to tell it anymore.

The message of my mom’s story was that Kevin had many wonderful gifts, but that mechanical ability was not one of them. For years, I let that story – as it was repeated and as it replayed in me – discourage me from working on cars. I had mechanically inclined uncles and brothers and cousins, but that was their story, not mine, I thought.

So for a time, I lived the story of the un-mechanical me pouring oil down the dipstick tube, until later, of financial necessity and with instruction from a woman I worked with at the Food Coop, I worked on my old cars quite a bit. I changed water pumps and starter motors, gaskets, brakes even, and … several times a year changed the oil, knowing by then exactly where to put it, and how to drain it and to change the filter.

In all that doing, all that working on cars with the help of a friend, the story that had been told in my family, the story I had internalized, gradually changed in me, and over time so did I.

That’s a simple story, but that pattern played out for me around much more profound identities –  regarding what it means to be a man, for example, or what it means to be a gay person, or a religious person, or an atheist.  There were many stories about myself or people like me, some of which I internalized, stories that shaped my life unless and until my life and experience started to reshape those stories, until I learned that I could remake those stories.

Three Early Memories

As part of a career assessment for seminary, I met with a psychologist who said, “Please tell me three of your earliest memories.”

Again, I tried not to censor, and took the first three memories that came to mind, all from when I was 2 or 3 years old –

The first was a memory of being out in the yard, a leather harness strapped around my torso, attached to 6 or 8 feet of clothesline behind me, tied to a cement block.

I remember reaching my arms forward, crying and screaming as I watched our babysitter hold the front door open to let my older sister into the house.

(I joke with friends that that memory probably explains everything you need to know about me.)

I named two other memories – in one I was reprimanded by my grandmother for licking my finger, sticking it in the sugar bowl, and licking the sugar off my finger, over and over. The same babysitter who had tied me to the cement block …came to my defense.

In the third memory, at my request someone lifted me up so that I could see into the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet in an abandoned house where I was sure there must be something wonderful.

When I had finished my three stories, the psychologist asked, “Do your three memories have anything in common? Do you see any themes in your three stories?”

I thought for a moment:

in each case, I really wanted something;
in each case my quest was thwarted,
in each case, I needed someone else’s help to get what I wanted.

Memory and Stories

Both of those experiences of being asked to tell my stories brought to mind something I had read years ago in the book At the Edge of History by philosopher William Irwin Thompson. He pointed out that given the extraordinary number of events that have taken place in all of human history, what we choose to remember and pass on and label “history” tells us very little of what actually happened, but tells us a great deal about how we see and understand ourselves now.

I read once something very similar about personal memory: Out of all that’s happened to each of us in our lives, the memories that stay with us, are memories of those experiences that we believe help explain who we are, and why we are the way we are.

More recent research has suggested that our memories change in the very act of our remembering! They are not so much indelible truths, as evolving stories about ourselves that we re-create every time we tell them.

We shape our stories even as our stories are shaping us.

I invite you to notice this week and all month –  in the midst of the election and its aftermath, and in the midst of family Thanksgiving gatherings, which are so story laden, even when no words are spoken –  to take stock of some of the stories you’ve internalized, and to do so in ways that are helpful to you. Notice the stories you tell yourself about yourself and the stories you tell about others, and consider how those stories might be perpetuating, or creating, or recreating a reality and quietly shaping the way you move through the world.

Psychologist Dan McAdams claims that our minds are story processors, not logic processors, and that stories about ourselves – though not necessarily true – are among the most important stories we know (Haidt 281) because they shape so powerfully our behavior, our relationships, our lives…. (281-282).

A Christmas Carol

As part of a storytelling class, four of us were each asked to tell the story of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” …in five minutes. I expect you know the story: Ebinezer Scrooge, Bob Crachit, Bah humbug!, Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present Future, Tiny Tim… The first person in our group didn’t even get to the first ghost by the time the bell rang for “times up.” Surprised, she ended then suddenly, right in the middle of the story with, “God bless us, every one!” – Tiny Tim’s closing line. It became our running joke: no matter where we were in the story when the time ran out we ended with “God bless us, every one!”

After we’d each had a turn trying to tell the story in five minutes, the instructor asked us each to tell the story again – in three minutes. And then, to do one more round, to tell the story in one minute.

Now, squeezing Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” into 60 seconds requires that you distill the story to its absolutely essential elements: In some way to name Scrooge’s miserliness and greed, his chance to see both the roots and the consequences of his feelings and his actions, the opportunity to change the ending of his story – redemption.

I took the concept one step further and invited people from this congregation to tell the story of the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains in six words…. i.e. to distill the story of this congregation – or at least their experience of it – to its essential elements.

Many stories came in, so many that we’re reading half of them at each service. We’ll post them all with this week’s eChalice and with the sermon on the website.

Thank you to everyone who wrote and sent in one of these stories. I hope it helped you consider the essence of UUCM for you. The authors will remain anonymous. As you hear them, listen for the recurring themes, listen for what a story says about the congregation, and listen for what a story says about it’s author and it’s author’s experience, in life in general and in this community.

Notice also what your reaction to each story tells you about YOU.

My friends, we give you The story of the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains:

UUCM 6-word stories 9:45 Service – November 2016

It’s okay if I’m an atheist.

Critical thinking seekers building spiritual community.

Open-minded community learning about sharing love.

UUCM Celebrates diversity, love and justice.

Teaching my kids values in community.

Attended, listened, got involved, attended again.

UUCM invites me home to myself.

Moving forward with Concern, Laughter, Love

Connected with warm acceptance and growing.

Support is always there if needed.

We got trashed – now disgusted, wary.

Finding community of loving, accepting people.

UU accepts me as I am.

Group of dedicated people ever growing

After years adrift, I found home.

Helping my child find meaning, context.

My community of advocates for justice.

Community, where I can be me!

Energizing liberal folk in Nevada County.

Devastating loss…then wrapped in gentle embrace.

They paved the road we walk.

Stop! Look, listen, evaluate, negotiate.  Reflect.

UUCM crawled, walked, and now runs.

UUCM 6-word stories 11:30 Service – November 2016

Open minds. Warm Hearts. Fellowship hands.

Family – messy, loving, trying, forgiving, searching.

I value Unitarian social action principles.

Seekers, joining forces to find love.

From living room to living body.

Community, where I can be me!

They married us, no questions asked.

Unfocused hope and without a mission.

A community that shares my values

Spiritual support without fundamentalist guilt trips.

Island finds connection to the universe.

A community my child finds nurturing.

Safe place for my whole self.

Connection with Mind, body and Spirit.

I feel cared for at church.

An assembly of diversity and acceptance.

Helping me to be my best.

UUCM: In sickness and in health!

Returned to hometown to join UUCM.

A meaningful interconnection between loving people.

It offers a family-like atmosphere.

People sharing life, community, love, ideas.

It’s a loving community of friends.

Thank you.

What themes stood out to you?

Listen for what your stories and memories of this congregation are telling you about how you see and understand yourselves now. Listen for how your future is being shaped by the story you tell of this congregation’s past and present and future. Imagine the story you would like to be telling several years from now…

UUism….the Election

In this sermon on story I usually conclude by naming a couple stories told about UUism, I list a few of UUisms earliest memories, looking for common themes, and finally I try to distill UUism to its absolute essence – in six words or less.

But there is this presidential election looming, in which the story being told by many is that people on the other side of the political spectrum, whichever that may be, are misguided or cognitively impaired at best, and more likely morally corrupt or evil, even. An election in which the story is told that the process is rigged and you won’t be able to trust the outcome, and that people who support the other candidate are inherently deplorable.

No matter who “wins” next Tuesday it feels like we’ve all already lost a great deal of communal integrity and social connection in what was already a very polarized atmosphere before the campaigning began. In theory, next Wednesday morning we’ll at least have an answer to the immediate national question, powerful feelings of relief or terror, and either way, tremendous questions as to what will happen moving forward.

So there we will be.

How are you feeling about the election at this point?

[people are invited to name feelings]

 

My question to you is, what will your story be next Wednesday morning…or whenever the election results are finalized?

No matter who wins or what happens or which of the 837 state propositions passes or fails (I’m new to California), I invite you to pick up a thread from the recent service focused on forgiveness and to tie it to our Unitarian Universalist commitment to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, including yourself. Tie it to our commitment to compassion in human relations, acceptance of one another, the right of conscience and the goal of a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. 

If you are tempted to tell a story that demonizes, dismisses, minimizes or rails against “those” people, as if they are inherently flawed, unintelligent and unworthy…

if someone who bothers you, or whom you don’t like, or of whom you are afraid, is the main character in the stories you are telling and retelling next week, see if you can (after some cathartic venting, probably), change the character of your story.

Change the main character, so it becomes a story about you and your effort to live your UU and personal values in the midst of potent and highly charged polarization. Draw on all your centering, grounding, spiritual resources to calm your fight or flight or freeze response, [3 deep breaths is a great start ] and then tell a story about your heroic effort to find genuine compassion and openness in your heart, a story about your desire to find some way to understand and connect to people who seem so different from yourself.

Change the character, the tenor, of the story so it is a story about what it might take to move forward from that moment toward the world you long to see, the best world you can imagine. Attend to the story you tell.

I’ll finish by offering two very brief bits of insight that help me, a liberal humanistic naturalist, to keep my heart open and to get off my high horse when I want to demonize or dismiss people.

These are from moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt who came to some understandings about why good people can be divided by religion and politics.

He writes that researchers have found genetic differences between liberals and conservatives, differences in neurotransmitter functioning in particular; seratonin and glutamate in conservative people, who react more strongly, physiologically, than liberals to signs of danger. And dopamine in liberal people, who are physiologically more sensation-seeking and more open to new experiences. Change as threat or change as “Oh, goody!” No wonder we are polarized!

Remembering to consider the physical roots of our emotional states, perspectives and behaviors almost always helps me surface more of my compassion. When I don’t think that people are being willfully antagonistic to may ways of seeing and being.

And…

Haidt identifies 6 moral foundations to which humans have access, though we may understand and draw on them in very different ways. Liberals draw primarily on two or at most three of those six moral foundations – care, liberty in terms of human rights, and fairness. While Conservatives tend to draw on all six.

So when asked to describe how the other side thinks, conservatives are able to do a pretty good job of describing how liberals think. Liberals, however, typically do a very poor job of describing what and how conservatives think, because liberals attach so little importance to half of those moral foundations – foundations rooted in a valuing of authority, loyalty, sanctity. Lliberals have more a more difficult time communicating to and with conservatives, because they are not accessing, resonating with or even recognizing half of the moral foundations that are important to conservatives.

So if you identify as liberal, and find yourself flabbergasted at other people’s stances, not understanding how some people could possibly think and decide the way they do…there are reasons for that. Reasons we can learn from.

When I can remember that some people will define and seek the common good differently than I do, and that I may have something to learn from them, I am better able to keep my heart open. Which has not been easy this year.

As for distilling UU-ism to it’s essence…

At one time Unitarianism was summed up in just three words: Freedom. Reason. Tolerance.

Universalism also was summed up in three words:

God is Love. (or as I reframe it for myself, Love is God)

Not a bad 6-word story when combined. We are at our best when we understand that freedom, reason, and tolerance or openness are not final ends, but means to higher a higher end: living more loving lives for the sake of the well being of all.

That’s one way to tell the UU story, anyway.

My invitation to you is to pay attention. really pay attention to the stories you tell and re-tell about yourself, about others, about this congregation, about our religious tradition, about the election and about democracy. Those stories shape who you are and who you will become. Who we will become.

The good news is that, like Ebinezer Scrooge, it’s not too late, you have a chance to shape your stories, and thus your future, in the telling.

So may it be.

 

Oh,… and God bless us, everyone!”

“Forgive for Good” by Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Delivered October 23, 2016

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

Grass Valley, CA

Opening Words   Let Go, by Lois Van Leer

http://www.uua.org/worship/words/opening/let-go

Readings

“The Skeleton at the Feast” by Frederick Buechner

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/279489-of-the-seven-deadly-sins-anger-is-possibly-the-most

“You Might Not Get the Apology You Deserve” (excerpt) by Shannon L. Alder

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7571152-you-might-not-get-the-apology-you-deserve-you-might

Message         “Forgive for Good”          Rev. Kevin Tarsa

Ray Stedman claims that “Forgiveness… is the virtue we most enjoy, and least employ… . We all love to be forgiven — we expect it, and want it. But we find it a struggle to forgive; we resist it, and refuse oftentimes to do it.”[1]

I know that I have often struggled to forgive. Anyone else?

One Halloween, when I was about eight or nine years old I decided I would save my Halloween candy in a jar and eat only or two pieces each day, spreading out the enjoyment over a couple weeks. There were probably five of us kids at that time. The next day I got my jar out of hiding only to discover that almost all the candy was gone, eaten, presumably, by one or more of my siblings. I was furious. I’m still working on that one!

In the Catholic tradition in which I was raised, asking for and offering forgiveness were held up as central to our spiritual wellbeing. Catholicism keeps repentance front and center every week, inviting silent confession in the service itself, and in the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation beforehand. It was so important to this young Catholic and my fellow competitively Catholic school classmates, that it was tempting to make things up in the confessional, which would have the added benefit of giving something genuine to confess next time, but of course there was plenty about which to repent.

I remember my mother once insisting that I apologize to one of my brothers– I don’t remember for what – I only remember the feeling of my anger and my snapping back that I wouldn’t mean it.

And meaning it matters. I read recently of some legal scholars’ argument that “sincere penitence is superior to punishment as a way of resolving mutual grievances, and . . .[that] many legal disputes arise in the first place only because there had not been an apology.”[2] All kinds of disputes arise, or continue, because there has not been an apology. I bet you know some of those.

The High Holy Days

The Jewish tradition offers an annual invitation to reflect deeply on the relationships we’ve harmed or severed, and encourages people to seek reconciliation. Teshuva (repentance), is the focus, Teshuva, from a Hebrew root meaning “to return.” (“return to who we are, to what we are, to where we are born and reborn again”….to relationships that are renewed, if not ever quite the same as before.)

According to Jewish law a person is required to apologize sincerely three times, and if the apology is not accepted by then, it becomes the other person’s problem. If you happen to be the “other person” in a harmed relationship, “You might not get the apology you deserve …” let alone three apologies (for any number of reasons), but that doesn’t mean that you cannot forgive, that you cannot let go in ways that strengthen your wholeness and integrity, and maybe even, eventually, return you to a repaired and strong, if knotty, relationship.

The sincere penitence and apology parts of the reconciliation process are so important and worthy of a service and more.  I certainly want and need to work on those in myself. This morning, however, I will focus on the forgiveness side of the process, as we continue our month-long exploration of what it means to be a community of healing. Because if we require someone’s apology in order to forgive them, we are unnecessarily limiting our ability to forgive, and placing our capacity to forgive in other people’s hands, rather than in our own heart.

Forgiveness

A story from the Gospel of Matthew rings in my memory, perhaps in your memory too: The apostle Peter came to Jesus and asked: “If a member of this community sins against me, how many times should I forgive? As many as 7 times?” Jesus answers, “No, not 7 times, but …77 times or 70×7 times, depending upon the translation (Matthew 18: 21-22)

People who study such things say that both the number and the equation, represented infinity in that time and culture, meaning that the invitation was to forgive an infinite number of times. But those numbers can also be interpreted as “completeness.” That’s the way I think of it. We’re called to forgive others and ourselves enough to support our own wholeness, the integrity of our relationships, and the completeness of our community. “Return again…return to the home of your soul…”

To link back to a recent Sunday service and to be clear, this doesn’t mean that we allow people to keep hurting us or the community. We may need to say No! to someone’s behavior for the sake of our wholeness AND learn to forgive that person even as we set those integrity-sustaining boundaries.

The bottom line is that forgiving others is good for you.  We know this, but as

C.S. Lewis points out, “forgiveness is a lovely idea …until we have something to forgive.”

In the hope of offering insight that helps us move from “lovely idea” to effective forgiveness, I’ll share with you some of the teachings of Frederic Luskin.

Fred Luskin’s Work

For almost twenty years now Frederic Luskin has been the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects. He studies forgiveness, figures out what works, and teaches classes in how to forgive.

He points out that religions have been developing tools and urging people to forgiveness in passionate ways for thousands of years, and all he had to do was publish a paper showing that forgiving others lowers your blood pressure and he gets in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. If lower blood pressure is a compelling motivation, “great,” I say, especially when the end results offer so many other benefits.

According to Luskin’s research, when people learn to forgive, their cardiovascular, muscle and neural health improves, they have less stress, report fewer health problems, their relationships improve, AND learning to forgive, says Luskin, can also help limit the degree to which you get hurt in the future.

He’s particularly attentive to the emotional and physical stress that not forgiving causes people, and the toll that it takes on our bodies and our happiness.

Learn how to Forgive for Good, he advises, for the good of your health, for the good of your relationships, for the good of the world.

Forgive for Good

Luskin says that the problem begins when we form a grievance:

When something happens in our lives that we didn’t want to happen, or when something we really hoped would happen didn’t, if we deal with the hurt, pain and disappointment by thinking about it too much and too long, what he refers to as “renting too much space in our minds to it,” a grievance develops.  By carefully nurturing and feeding a grievance we can keep a hurt alive forever, feeling the anger long past when the anger might actually help us change the situation. But hanging on to a grievance after the event keeps us locked in the past, keeps us prisoner to the experience that hurt, and prisoner to the person that hurt us.

“[Though] to lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, . . . to savor to the last toothsome morsel in many ways . . . is a feast fit for a king [or a queen]…. [however] what you are wolfing down is yourself.   – Frederick Buechner

After a painful hurt, we tend to think: “What someone did was wrong! End of the story,” and we get stuck there, telling that story in a way that hurts us. Luskin says instead, “What someone did was wrong, and that was the beginning of the forgiveness story.”

Here is how Luskin defines “forgiveness:”

“Forgiveness: is the experience of peace and understanding that can be felt in the present moment, if we let go of the grievance.” It sounds Buddhist, to me. Luskin says that without forgiving, part of our energy to love others is tied up in feeling and holding onto the grievance, and then a portion of our love is unavailable to give to others.

He names that “forgiveness is not condoning unkindness. Forgiveness is not forgetting that something painful happened. Forgiveness is not excusing poor behavior. … Forgiveness is not denying or minimizing your hurt. Forgiveness does not mean reconciling with the offender. Forgiveness does not mean that you don’t press charges [or work for change]. Forgiveness does not mean you give up having feelings.”

Forgiveness is a way of giving you back to yourself, of experiencing peace in the present moment, of freeing up the energy that’s tied up in holding the grievance, so you can channel it toward positive changes in your life, and toward loving others.

Forgiveness doesn’t excuse their actions. Forgiveness stops their actions from destroying your heart.              – Karen Salmansohn

Luskin offers many helpful insights. If you are wanting to strengthen your capacity to fogive, I commend his work to you. Here are a few of his ideas that I find particularly helpful. Draw upon any of these that might serve you:

In Order To Forgive…

Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not okay. (These are more challenging that they might appear.)Then, tell a trusted couple of people about your experience.

Now, given that I’ve recently asked you to practice direct communication with one another and to avoid pass-through communication, let me clarify the details.

The reason you tell a couple trusted others is important. Tell in order to receive support, and guidance for what to do about it, not to reinforce or get cosponsors for your grievance story.

And tell a couple trusted others. If you tell more than a couple others, you are starting to stoke a grievance story.

If you tell your story more than twice to the same person, it’s a grievance story.

If you replay your story in your mind throughout the day, it’s a grievance story.

Don’t confuse an unforgivable offense with an unwillingness or inability to forgive. No matter what we’ve experienced, someone in the world has forgiven such a thing.

When the 10 young Amish women were killed in Lancaster Co. PA, a grandfather of one of the women expressed forgiveness for the shooter the same day. That same same afternoon neighbors visited and consoled the shooter’s family. That same week the families of the young women invited shooter’s family to their funerals. At the shooters funeral, there were more Amish than anyone else.

I think of the Tibettan Buddhist nuns captured and tortured. Their greatest fear, they said, was not the pain they would experience, but that they would come to hate their captors.

I think of the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina. Families members of some of the nine people who were killed expressed very public forgiveness for the shooter.

Recognize that both a grievance and forgiveness are experiences in the moment. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you last year or four or ten years ago. Suffering is coming from the feelings we have now around the hurt, not from the original active hurting behavior itself, unless that behavior is continuing.

Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better.

Start with the realization that forgiveness is for you. What you are after is to find peace, the “peace and understanding that come from blaming that which has hurt you less.” Otherwise we are giving what or who hurt us power over how we feel.

Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you. Luskin advises, “Don’t tune into the grievance channel.” The grievance channel runs 24/7 and is enticing, but there are other channels. Find other channels.

At the moment you feel upset practice a simple stress management technique to soothe your body’s flight or fight [or freeze] response. We can’t think clearly when we are in survival mode. Luskin suggests taking deep breaths and imagining a person you love or a beautiful place.

Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt, figure out what unmet need is underneath the hurt and seek out new ways to get what you want.

Notice who is the main character in the story you are telling. It the person who hurt you is the main character in the story, it’s a grievance story. Can you it a story about you, change your grievance story to remind you of your heroic choice to forgive?

We can’t control what happened, but can control how we tell the story about what happened.

In the context of this congregation, perhaps you are feeling hurt. Perhaps you need, for your own peace of heart and mind, to apologize to someone. That may go a long way toward reconciliation since so many disputes happen or continue because there was never an apology.

You may need, for your own peace of heart and mind to forgive, with or without apology or reconciliation. “You may [never] get the apology you deserve.”

Either way, choose to forgive.

A Ritual

I imagine that various personal stories have been surfacing in you throughout the service today. I invite you to reflect for a moment, and to surface a grievance or grudge that you wish had less of a hold on you than it does. Something that needs forgiving (or apologizing for) for your own wellbeing.

Write some word or symbol or shape on the special paper you received on the way into the service this morning.  I invite you, as you are ready and if you wish, to bring your piece of paper forward and to place it in the bowl of water

On your way back, I invite you to take a piece of knotted rope as a tangible reminder of a re-connection you desire, or a knot that needs untying within you, or between you and another person – some forgiveness that you seek in your life.

Song:  “There is a Healing” by K. Tarsa

There is a healing…in this room; …in these eyes; …in these hands; …in this heart; etc.

That was dissolving paper. The message is not that forgiveness happens easily or quickly, that it disappears like magic. Sometimes forgiveness is like that, but often not. It takes practice and courage, takes changing your story, without waiting for an apology.

May that embodied ritual Ritual and the small piece of knotted rope anchor your memory, remind you of the invitation to forgive.

Choose forgiveness.

Corrie Ten Boom, a Christian woman who survived a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust, said,

“Forgiveness is to set a prisoner free, and to realize the prisoner was you.”

May this be the beginning of your forgiveness story.

May we learn, over time, to set ourselves free, each and together……

So may it be.

[1] Forgive for Good by Fred Luskin, HarperOne, 2002.

[2] http://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Im_Sorry.html

Opening Words

We all belong to groups in our lives: a family or families, school classrooms, scouting or 4H groups, churches, sports teams, bands, choirs, and community organizations. And sometimes there’s an event or situation that affects the group, such as a disappointment, failure, tragedy, betrayal, injury, or internal disagreement.

Today, in this Tapestry of Faith service, three of our members will share their stories of what happened when their group went through a painful time together, and survived it, and healed or began a healing process.

Scottie Hart will talk first about a rift in her extended family. Then Walt O’Maley will talk about a toxic workplace situation that changed for the better. Finally, Lindsay Dunckel will talk about building collaboration between community agencies.

Scottie Hart – A Family Rift

In December 2015, a deep, painful rift occurred in my family that has yet to mend. I do not have words to express the anguish I felt then and now about the rupture.

How do we understand healing in a situation like this?

Sometimes healing is about a broken bone that heals stronger than it was before the break. So far, that’s not what’s happening here.

Sometimes healing is about working to create an atmosphere that welcomes dialog. Or maybe healing has occurred when I am no longer buried in sadness, or anger, or fear… Maybe healing means I am at peace with an unwelcome change in a relationship.

I really, really want things to be again the way they were last November, before the rift. My deep, deep preference would be to put that toothpaste back in that tube.

And I am willing to look at more probable possibilities. Given the current realities, what can I do to heal my heart? What strategies for healing do I already know about? In no particular order…

Acknowledge the reality of my pain. Recognize and make space for my tremendous grief. Be willing to do this again and again.
Ask for help. Talk to a neutral third party who’s balance I trust. Although my participation in essential, healing is rarely a do-it-yourself project. I have talked this situation over thoroughly with several wise and compassionate people, and will continue to do so.
Whenever possible, tell the deep truth. Not so much the truth that “That so-and-so is a jerk,” but the truth that I am in pain.
Look at my own contribution to the situation. In what ways did I help set this off? In what ways am I perpetuating my pain? Where have I been unskillful?
Get myself back into balance before I settle on a “plan.” When I am upset, my pre-frontal cortex is not very available; I am physiologically incapable of recognizing a good path toward solution. So it’s important to come to terms with my pain before making a pre-mature attempt to “solve” the situation.
Remember it’s never, ever personal. No one is doing this to me, they’re just doing it.
When I can, remember this is probably not about pointless pain. Chances are good that I will emerge from this furnace more the person I truly want to be than I was when it all started.
Connect in whatever way I can with the foundational reality that I am safe. No matter what it feels like in the moment, the deep truth is that I am safe and I am loved.

These strategies are a well-worn path that will lead me through to healing, to growth and to comfort. And I am deeply grateful for your company on the path.

Musical Interlude: “Rain, Rain,” by Tom Wernigg

Walt O’Maley – A Toxic Workplace

I’m a product manager down in Silicon Valley. Back in 2003 I was over a product for four years that had two different organizations

The first one was one of my worst jobs. The second one of my best. Both sentiments are because of the respective organizations.

First Organization

In first one, the company I was at acquired a small start up that sold software used by mobile carriers.

The general manager and about 25 developers and staff came over. I was their product manager and only one from the larger company.

It soon turned out to be a tough job. The general manager though smart had a large ego.  He is type of guy that it is his way or the highway. Also he was quite combative. If he was not happy with someone he would yell at them in meetings with often 20 coworkers in the room. He put people on the defensive and managed from fear.

The environment was quite toxic. Since he confronted people they would be defensive and often finger point to other coworkers as to why things weren’t completed. I believe a good measure of the state of an organization’s culture is how much joy is there. Is there laughter in meetings at all. In this group there certainly was not.

Given how harsh it was to work there the results were not surprising.

Many people left.  Something like 1/2 in two years
Given the turnover and lack of developers we missed significant customer commitments
Missing commitments resulted in lower sales
We had lost credibility with the sales force and most they did not want to try to sell the product anymore

After two years general manager was moved on, but the damage was done.

Second Organization

A new general manager took over who was more a coach than a tyrant. He deferred much of the leadership to myself and development manager.

I knew we needed to go a different way. The product was behind and we lost the sales force for main markets like US and Europe.

So lead engineers and myself brainstormed on possible new uses for the product. After couple days of brainstorm we came to a new vision.

We immediately evangelized the vision to the broader team. We wanted to say that we have a future and hopefully discourage further departures.

The team was jazzed. Plans were formed to start building this new vision.

Then the focus was on getting some customer wins. This was my main focus. It is complex product and requires in-depth technical sale. I acted as product consultant to help the field answer questions. I worked on large proposals and initial pilots. Often sales cycles would be 4 to 6 months.

After several months of work we won the largest carrier in Argentina.

That was a big win for the team. The team felt that not only are we working on a cool new thing, but we now have a real customer. I could talk to management that indeed we are starting to win.

Subsequently we won more deals and sales improved.

Looking at the work environment it was a lot more collaborative as people were not put on the defensive. There was also a lot more joy in the new organization.

Healing

After the general manager left the first organization, there was a lot of angst. Workers had bad feelings about him. They had bad feelings about some coworkers as it had been a finger pointing environment.

Though one might think having active discussions, possibly doing meditation might be a good course for healing, it was not taken. Corporations in my view really do not encourage such discussions even if they say they do.

Rather what I saw and experienced myself was “embracing the future”. Basically, people were assigned to work on the new product vision. They found it compelling and the work environment much more collaborative. So for the average engineer it was positive step. What I observed was no one told anybody “just get over the past”. Rather the negative energy people had about the first organization just “dissipated”. Basically it was not serving anyone anymore.

From this experience, though I do think people need to process things, that a heavy dose of embracing the future should be a good part of healing medicine.

Thanks for opportunity to share.

Musical Interlude: “Do It with Love,” by Tom Wernigg

Lindsay Dunckel – Agency Collaboration

I have a story for you about two groups of people who were working on behalf of children in this county, yet were oddly split from one another – and how we found our way forward, together.

Each county in California has a CAPC – a Child Abuse Prevention Council, charged with investing birth certificate revenues to help prevent child abuse. And each county in California has a First 5 Commission, charged with investing tobacco tax dollars from Prop 10 locally to enhance child development in the first 5 years. Many years ago, the CAPC oversaw some funds from the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, funds that went to mostly non-profit services in the county; agencies receiving these grants were required to attend a monthly meeting of the CAPC. The meetings involved checking in about any news among the agencies with one agency highlighted at each meeting. As is often the case with meetings that have required attendance, the meetings were dreaded affairs for most participants, and often terribly dull, with no buy-in of the importance of being there and the strong arm of the CAPC board keenly felt. Because the agencies competed each year for the funds available, there was no true collaboration going on nor really any potential for true collaboration.

The executive director of First 5 heard the community’s frustration with these meetings and was also aware of the potential importance and impact of a family service collaborative – and so she got her Commission to agree to fund one that, in her words, ‘worked’. A funding process was undertaken and then the Family Connections Collaborative was begun. Agencies came to the table of their own free will, the collaborative grew as people formed relationships with one another, found common ground and support from the other attendees, and were free to focus on issues of importance to the community and not their own bottom line.

Of course there were hard feelings on the part of the CAPC Board who rightly saw this as a duplication of what they were trying to do, and therefore a challenge to them and their authority. It was at this point that I started working for First 5; I had had a brief stint on the CAPC board when I first came to town, but had had to step down when the meetings conflicted with the classes I was teaching at Sierra College. I suddenly found I was persona non grata with my former colleagues since I now worked for First 5. It was troubling to me, but I saw the work of the Family Connections Collaborative as more vital so gravitated that way anyway.

Long story short, a third collaborative was formed focused on direct service and crossing the county to include colleagues in the Truckee region. That one was called FAST – Family Advocacy and Support Team. And suddenly many people were attending three meetings a month focused on the needs of and services for children and families in Nevada County. I became the Executive Director of First 5 shortly after FAST started up. One day early in my tenure, I attended a child development conference and ran into the new chair of the CAPC board in the hallway – I introduced myself. She noted that there was bad blood between First 5 and CAPC but that with the new leadership, hers and mine, we had a chance to start over. She was a straight-shooter and what she actually said to me was “I think it’s time we all put on our big girl panties and get past that.”

At the same time, those of us on the steering committee of Family Connections, most of whom were intimately involved with FAST as well, were putting together a symposium on inter-agency collaboration – so we reached out to the CAPC Board who agreed to partner with us on it. We put together a panel representing some other communities who were moving mountains with their family service collaborative efforts. It was an inspiring day and proved that we could rise above past hard feelings and work on something for the greater good. We wanted to keep the good work going, so representatives of the three local collaboratives met in my office to discuss how we might move forward. At that first meeting, we all agreed that we should explore how we might work more closely together. Jokingly, we dubbed the group Collab-Collab – the collaboration of collaboratives.

Believe it or not, the Collab Collab met for about a year; we identified that we wanted to create a single collaborative that could embrace the goals and mandates of each group. We trod delicately at first, mindful of egos and politics; but as we worked together monthly, we formed relationships with one another; we laughed often; we loosened up. We refocused on the larger picture: we were all working on behalf of the kids, and that was a touchstone for us – what do the children need? We spent many meetings coming up with a name and then a logo for the new group: the Community Support Network of Nevada County. Throughout this work, we each checked back in with our three collaboratives, tweaking the work in response to their various inputs.

Finally, we felt ready to merge the three collaboratives: we had worked through the mandate issues and realized there were no outside forces keeping us apart. We hired a neutral party to facilitate our merger talks – and I think that was crucial to our success. Susan Sanford, a member of UUCM, actually, handily lead us through a several-meeting process in which all the potential pitfalls and issues were laid on the table and worked through. With her help as an outside observer and expert facilitator, who beautifully modeled positive language and clear and open communication, we were able to create a governance structure that we all felt would work and would meet all the critical needs that the three collaboratives had been, or had been dreaming of, meeting. We were able to work out a structure that was free of top-down or even of majority-rules decision-making, built on consensus that we felt was a better fit for a true collaborative. We articulated a mission statement that made our hearts swell and called to members of all 3 original collaboratives. Here it is: The Community Support Network of Nevada County is an inclusive, voluntary association of agencies and individuals from the Nevada County community who share a common mission:  That all families in Nevada County have ready access to a well-integrated and coordinated support network that is easily available and well funded.

The CSN is still going strong; it has over 400 individuals on its mailing list now, over 60 member agencies. But best of all, CSN has realized the advocacy potential it has to work for a better system for families and children. Last year, the group finalized a Children’s Bill of Rights for Nevada County which was then endorsed by the Board of Supervisors. We proudly wear our bright green t-shirts that say “And how are the children?” And remind those around us that this should be the first question we ask as we are making any decision that affects the community. The question that drew us together, that served as our touchstone, as we navigated our way to working together despite our fractious past.

Tikkun Olam: All Lives Mattering in a Wounded World

            What does it mean to be a community of healing?

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

UU Community of the Mountains

Delivered October 9, 2016

(during the Jewish High Holy Days, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur)

 

Time for All Ages

In the Jewish tradition, there is a famous story of Tikkun Olam, which means “the repair of the world.” Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed wrote this story almost 500 years ago, and he told the story this way:

At the beginning of time, God’s holy presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring this world into being, to make room for creation God first drew in a breath, and in so doing, became smaller.  In that new space made by God getting smaller, darkness was created. And when God said, “Let there be light,” the light that came into being filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with that bright first light.

God sent those ten vessels out into the universe, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. If all those containers had arrived unbroken, the world would have been perfect. But the containers weren’t strong enough to hold such a powerful, holy light. They all exploded, and holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars. Those sparks fell everywhere! (But more fell on the Holy Land than anywhere else, said Rabbi Issac.)

Our job, he said, is to gather the sparks from all over the world, no matter where they are hidden, and to keep putting the light back together. When all the sparks are back together, the world will be repaired, and perfect.

Rachael Naomi Remen tells the story a little bit differently, based on how her father told her the story. She says:

… that the holy light came out of a holy darkness, the source of all life, and that when the containers broke, and sparks of light scattered everywhere, the sparks fell into all events and all people, where they remain hidden to this day.

Each one of us as some of the light in us, she says, and each one of us has the ability to find the hidden light in all things and in all people, even in the person right next to us. We can help those sparks shine and so restore the world. She says this will take all of us, every person who ever lived, every person who lives now, and every person who ever will live. We are ALL healers of the world.

Tikkun Olam is not about making a huge difference, Rachael Naomi Remen says, it’s about healing the world right around you, the world that touches you.

It’s up to you to figure out how.

A True Story       

[A congregation member told a story about a young male family member who is black, who while walking down Mill Street twenty years ago was picked up by police as a possible suspect in a crime in Grass Valley. The perpetrator had been described as a white man in his 50s. When the person who had given the original description pointed out that this person they had brought in was not a white man in his 50s, the officer said, “I just thought we should check.”]

Instrumental Music    

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child – African American Spiritual

Sermon

Tikkun Olam: All Lives Mattering in a Wounded World        

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

The Black Lives Matter banner that this congregation had hung on its outside wall has been vandalized and/or stolen three times now. This congregation is still deciding what step to take next. This service/sermon is meant to set a context for that decision making.

My goal today is not to make the case for getting behind the Black Lives Matter movement, though I would, and I may, another Sunday. Meanwhile, my column to the Union names some of the reasons why I believe that’s important.

The story we just heard about a young black man in Grass Valley speaks powerfully to its importance. What does it say and what consequences does it have that right here in Grass Valley, one is forever treated as suspect for no reason other than the color of one’s skin? Except for being male, this man did not match the given description at all. What he matched – and only because of his skin color – is our US culture’s description of a criminal, of a person to be feared.

Addressing that often unconscious reality will require deep and sustained emotional, spiritual and political work. So today my goal is not to name a singular answer, but to help prepare us for both individual growth, and for this congregation’s effective, courageous and compassionate engagement with the wider community, knowing that intelligent, thoughtful, kind people can hold views that are very different from mine or yours.

Let’s begin by taking as a given, that yes, of course, we believe that all lives matter. And then to get us out of some either/or expectations, I want to share with you the basics of something I’ve found helpful, the Intercultural Development Continuum adapted from Dr. Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. The question it addresses is, “what is [our] capability to accurately understand and adapt behavior to cultural difference and commonality.” What is our capability to accurately understand cultural difference and commonality, and what is our capability to adapt our own behavior to cultural difference and commonality?

As long as two or more are gathered we’ll have chances to work on those questions, for as one of my teachers, Mark Hicks, points out, every two-person conversation is at some level a multicultural conversation, especially if the two people are not from the same family. Couples know this. Its evidence can be as simple as differences in expectation regarding how one celebrates a holiday appropriately: Is the “right” way to open Christmas presents on Christmas Eve or on Christmas morning? Is 4:00 the correct time for a Thanksgiving meal, or is it noon? Is it okay to watch football that day? Is it okay to bring up touchy subjects, to raise your voice, to have a messy house when company arrives?

Bennet said that as we learn to understand and navigate cultural difference and commonality, we typically go through a set of developmental stages – “developmental” indicating that people tend to move through these stages in a predictable direction and order. Like any model, it’s a framework for our understanding, not a cage for who we are.

Developmental Stages In Our Intercultural Capabilities

Our early orientation, the model says, is DENIAL. After we are born, for a time all we know is our own culture, the world right around us. As time goes on we might notice obvious and observable cultural differences, like differences in food, clothing, language or religious rituals, but we might not notice deeper, less immediately visible cultural differences, like conflict resolution styles, notions of leadership or expectations around privacy or gift giving or spirituality.  In this stage, we are aware of the tip of the iceberg, but unaware of the significant cultural differences beneath the surface.

Two stories – The Eyes Have It

In college I was in Munich Germany, walking down a street, when I realized that I was looking primarily at the ground as I walked. This is not very friendly, I thought. I don’t want to appear to be a disengaged American, I should look people in the eye more often. And so I did. The very next people I encountered were a group of young men about my age. I held the gaze of the first person as we approached one another, radiating my gentle friendliness all the while. Except that when that person reached me, he started screaming at me and beating on me. A leader of a gang (a white gang, in case you pictured otherwise), he had taken my unfaltering gaze as a challenge to his authority. For him, lowering my eyes submissively would have been the appropriate stance.

More recently, a young African American man arrived at the congregation very distraught and seeking assistance. Not wanting to appear uninterested, wanting to convey, “I see you. I see your pain. I’m not treating you as invisible,” I pulled up a chair and looked him in the eye, a gaze he did not hold in return. I watched him as we spoke. After a while he communicated to me that this felt disrespectfully intrusive. As if I had the right to stare at him (from on high) in his pain.

In each case I acted from my own assumptions and expectations, wanting to do something kind and good, but in each case my behavior registered as hostile. I expect that you may have your own stories of differences in cultural expectations.

When we move forward from denial, we tend to move to an orientation of POLARIZATION, where we recognize cultural differences, and we judge them. We think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ One is right or better than the other.

Now the interesting thing is that this takes two forms:

In one form, our own cultural way is right, and others’ cultural ways are not: “If they would only get their act together and do it our way, things would be better.” “Why can’t they arrive at meetings on time?” OR “Why are they so uptight about starting a meeting at a certain time?” “Why do black people have to choose names like Shaniqua. Can’t they choose normal names (ie. names from white culture)?” “Why do the Italians need to talk so loudly and forcefully, can’t they be quieter and not get in people’s faces?”

In polarization, we critique other cultures’ practices and values, but not our own.

But for some people there comes a reversal of the us/them poles: to “Another culture has it right. Mine does not.” “Oh, Native Americans have it right, always so peaceful and spiritually enlightened and in tune with the earth. White culture is all screwed up.” Stereotyping, we put an entire culture on a pedestal and critique our own, wanting to distance ourselves and become ex-patriots from our own cultural landscape (culturally disengaged) and become a part of the culture that has it right. It’s still an us/them stance, but in favor of the “them.”

When we move forward from Polarization of either kind, we move toward MINIMIZATION, in which we focus intently on cultural commonality and universal values. “Really, we’re all the same. We all have the same needs underneath. We all bleed red. We’re color blind, we don’t see color.” It’s a very Universalist notion and moves helpfully toward great inclusion, but thinking that we’re all the same means thinking that we’re all the same like me! I universalize my perspective and believe it applies to everyone.

This is where most progressive people, where most Unitarian Universalists are, in minimization.

I want to celebrate that getting to minimization is wonderful progress, important and necessary movement forward from denial and polarization, from us/them, to it’s all us.  This is just what some people need to move toward. But those of us in minimization tend to think that we’ve arrived at the final answer. “What could be better for the world than focusing on what we have in common? We’re all one.” It sounds beautiful. “All lives matter. Isn’t saying that Black Lives Matter a racist message, I thought we were beyond race?” But minimization is not the end of the journey. We are not all the same, not even underneath.

Dancer Story

A few years ago I read a story that challenged my notion of human commonalities in a very simple but memorable way. A child somewhere in the vicinity of Papua New Guinea was recognized as a very talented young dancer and someone offered to pay the child’s way to a dance school somewhere else. The child had a very difficult time for the first year or so, unable at first to follow the teachers instructions. The teacher would say something like, “Please take two steps to the right.” But in the child’s culture, a person orients oneself to the cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – not to oneself.

In that culture one might say “Please take two steps to the east, or one step north.” To move right or left relative to oneself had no meaning. Even when they figured this out, the child had to learn to orient north, south, east, west in a new physical location. In that child’s culture, the self is not the center of the universe, not the point of reference. How different from our culture, and what a profoundly different way to see oneself in relation to the world.

You would think that we could safely assume that all humans share an understanding of moving right or left, by whatever name. But NO! Not even that can be assumed!

Next?

The next step in the journey, if one is in minimization, is to recognize and appreciate patterns of cultural difference AND commonality, to reach an ACCEPTANCE of both/and. We are alike in some ways, and not in others. Important others.

If we don’t see a person’s color, we are not really seeing the person. If those of us who are white we don’t understand that a black person will have a very different experience walking down Mill Street than we will, we are not seeing what we need to see.

In acceptance, we learn look at our own culture and how it is different from and similar to other cultures, without assuming that ours is the universal norm. In terms of race, it means that no, we are not color blind, and for those of us who are white, it means that we learn to see and better understand our own whiteness. The term “people of color” is used in our culture to refer to everyone who is not white, as if white is not a color. If those of us who are white don’t see our whiteness, if it is the invisible standard by which we gauge life, we are not seeing all that we need to see and accept.

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Though I’ve long loved the African American spiritual, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” for a time I did not sing or play it, though it had been a powerful song for me. In UU music circles, a now decades long conversation has been underway among musicians regarding cultural misappropriation, and in this case, whether it is okay for white (dominant culture) musicians to sing or play music from other cultures. Is it okay for a white choir to sing an African American spiritual, for example?

In the midst of that conversation (a conversation that has followed the developmental stages I’m outlining), not wanting to do something harmful, I stopped singing and playing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” …until I read the book, Learning to Be White by Thandeka. In it she looks at the ways we in America, all of us, of any skin color, learn to devalue everything and everyone associated with darkness of skin. We are taught in myriad and mostly unconscious ways to be white. She helps white people look at the costs of learning to be white, and the ways our culture betrays us through the people closest to us, parents and family and community who often unknowingly perpetuate the culture’s norms and so lead us away from our original authentic, true, loving and open selves. We have to deny aspects of our true self in order to learn to be white. Becoming aware of this is a powerfully painful experience, she says.

The moment I finished reading the book, having taken it deeply to heart, I had no words. All I could do was sit down and start improvising on the piano to try to express and process what I was feeling. In the hour of playing, what gradually surfaced was “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” For the first time I felt that I could sing that spiritual for myself from inside of the song. Not from the same place someone whose ancestors had been enslaved might sing it, but from a place that recognized our common source of harm.

As part of Minimization earlier, people are likely to say that there are many paths to the mountaintop. It’s a wonderful and important way to move from us/them to inclusion of difference. However, that still assumes that we’re all going to the same mountaintop. In Acceptance, we start to come to terms with the fact that there may be more than one mountaintop.

In the final but never ending stage of ADAPTATION we take what we have learned about our own and other cultures, and learn to become flexible, able to shift our cultural perspective and change our behavior in culturally appropriate and authentic ways. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, not in superficial imitation, but in ways that recognize, respect and honor the ways of Romans while remaining authentic to who we are. It’s a move from the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” to the Platinum Rule of “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

 “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

In Adaptation, we learn to adapt our eye contact behavior to match the people we are interacting with, to let a meeting’s start time or length be flexible if need be, to adjust the tone of our voice or our expectations about who and how someone should be in charge when there is a task to do. We adjust our language, and still stay true to who we are.

This is not a smooth road. Despite our best intentions we will commit faux pas, and put our foot in our mouths, and look in someone’s eyes in a way we think is kind but that feels disrespectful to them.

The path is to learn whatever we can, to expand our understanding and awareness, and then, in good faith, to interact in genuine, authentic ways with people who are different from us, with hearts open to learning what we need to learn.

Why am I telling you this, as we ask together, “What does it mean to be a community of healing in the wider world?” and when this congregation has on the table an unanswered question about what to do regarding it’s third Black Lives Matter Banner being stolen?

In part, I hope this is an invitation to some personal awareness and curiosity and growth.

In part I hope it is an invitation to understand that all our congregational conversations are intercultural conversations, even when everyone in the room is of white, European descent, and that knowing this will help members learn to navigate difference.

And I believe that this congregation’s ability to be an effective facilitator of healing and its ability to make wise decisions about what to do about the Banner, depend on members’ ability to understand that people inside and outside this congregation are in different places in this developmental journey. There are layers of right answers about what to do.

If we go into our congregational meetings or meetings which engage the wider community thinking we have THE answer and everyone else just has to get up to our speed, we will miss the mark.

The goal – if we want to build the world we so deeply desire – is to help as many people as possible to move forward from wherever they are. And what people need in order to move forward, depends on where they are in the journey:

If in Denial – what one needs in order to move forward is to be exposed to and to learn to notice cultural differences.

If in Polarization, recognizing differences but:

…demonizing other cultures – one needs to discover and focus on commonalities with “them” and to engage in cooperative activities that help make connections.

…idolizing other cultures – one needs to discover what’s valuable in one’s own culture and to notice when we are stereotyping.

If in Minimization – in order to move forward one needs to look more closely, and to learn and discern what really is the same between cultures, and what is not. At first, reading books about black experience by black authors, for example, or watching movies from and for other cultures, or listening to speakers name the cultural differences for you. Then, personal experience with people who are different is key.

If in Acceptance – deep learning and direct practice navigating difference is what’s needed. Experiences in communities not our own, finding pressure points and discomfort zones. Learning to navigate other cultures authentically and respectfully.

If in Adaptation – which never ends, because there is always more to learn and new differences to encounter, the need is to keep learning, and, having made the journey,  to become a guide for others, perhaps teaching others how to travel their road forward.

The people who work with this model say that it takes 40 hours of focused work/experience/learning to move one developmental stage forward. The good news is that moving forward is possible. The sobering news is that our work is cut out for us. It will take much more than a single meeting or speaker or book or event.

Our next congregational conversation about the BLM banner, to make recommendations about specific, concrete steps to take, will be held in two weeks, on Oct 23, after the second service. [noting the list of stages] To whom are you intending to speak when you decide what to do about the missing Black Lives Matter Banner, and to what end?

As you are preparing for that gathering, I invite you to think about where you might be in this developmental journey yourself. I’ll also note that very consistently people identify themselves as one stage farther in the journey than they actually are.  (Note for this written sermon edition: There are good reasons for this. Ask me.)

I remind you that Rachael Naomi Remen says to start tikkun olam, the repair/healing of the world, not with something huge, but by healing the world right around you, the world that touches you.

What’s the world that touches this congregation?

What are the (cultural) differences and commonalities here in Grass Valley and Nevada City and Nevada County that people are not seeing, or are denying, or polarizing, or minimizing, and what can this congregation do to help as many people as possible, including us, move forward in this developmental journey, toward ever greater understanding, acceptance, compassion, kindness, justice and love, as our faith tradition asks of us. 

My hope is that we can learn to practice tikkun olam, the repair/healing of the world, with courage, strength and conviction, yes… AND humility at the same time, in order that we can make a meaningful difference, and gather more pieces of the light.

I’m not expecting that we will ever reach a perfect world, but together we can take some powerful progress toward that ideal.

So may it be.

Resources:

The Intercultural Development Research Institute

http://www.idrinstitute.org/

Intercultural Development Inventory

https://idiinventory.com/products/the-intercultural-development-continuum-idc/

Bennett, M. J. (2013). Basic concepts of intercultural communication: Paradigms, principles, & practice: selected readings.