Past Services

When the Vow Breaks

            What does it mean to be a community of covenant?

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

UU Community of the Mountains

Delivered September 25, 2016

 

100 years ago this week in The Union, the local Grass Valley newspaper, there was a notice that Josiah Royce had died September 14. Philosopher/theologian Josiah Royce was born here in Grass Valley. Long time professor at Harvard, he developed the idea of the Beloved Community, an idea that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later adopted and adapted in light of the civil rights movement and a commitment to non-violence.

Royce wrote, “A crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic is not a community. It has a mind, but no institutions, no organizations, no coherent unity, no history, no traditions…”

In that spirit, last week I offered a little of our Unitarian Universalist history, our backstory. I spoke of our tradition’s rootedness in covenants – the mutual, voluntary promises members make to one another – rather than a creed that spells out what a person is required to believe.

I spoke primarily of a central covenant for a congregation, the covenant that names the largest and most compelling reasons for being a community in the first place, the deep goals members promise to pursue together, and that names the inspiring, demanding commitments such goals ought to ask of us. As I see it, everything else grows from that central covenant, which the congregation has to identify, articulate and sign on to. This congregation doesn’t have that kind of covenant (yet!) That’s work for the road ahead.

But there is another kind of covenant we make in our tradition, a set of promises that names how members will be with one another as they move toward those larger goals. These are behavioral covenants whose purpose is to protect and strengthen relationships, and this congregation does have a behavioral covenant, a Covenant of Right Relations.

Why have such a covenant?

For all the importance placed on relationship in religious communities of all kinds, we don’t always know how to do relationships well. People may commit to loving their neighbor, they’re just not always sure how to do it in the middle of a contentious committee meeting when people are upset and the emotional heat is high!

I learned this early in my life since my father was a teacher in a small Catholic school and since I was a church musician at a young age. I saw the inside of church life. I saw church life bring out the extraordinary best in people – amazingly generous and beautiful, loving behavior, AND I saw it bring out the worst in people – cruel, destructive behavior.

As someone put it:

To dwell above
with saints we love,
Oh, that will be the glory                               

But to dwell below
with saints we know,
Well, that’s another story.

Religious communities are human endeavors, and the stakes are high and personal since ideally we are working with values and ideas and feelings that really matter to us. So the quality of the relationships across the congregation is central to the community’s well-being and effectiveness.

20 years ago, Mary Sellon and Daniel Smith started studying why some communities that looked vital and dynamic from the outside failed or continually lost members, and why some communities that looked like duds from the outside, thrived or survived against all odds. They discovered that it wasn’t the building or budget or staff size or the programs or the years of academic training the minister had that mattered most, it was the quality of the relationships.

“Relationships embodying qualities like caring, playfulness, collaboration, authenticity and deep trust engendered commitment…and personal fulfillment. They … fostered creativity and drew others in. These groups’ paths were not always smooth; group members did not always agree. But, there was an energy, commitment, and audacity that other groups strove for, yet never attained (Practicing Right Relationship, xii).”

This is my experience too, in a lifetime working in religious communities, and as a long-term investment, I’m inclined to invest first in the health and quality of the ways people here relate to one another. That’s what behavioral covenants are meant to assist, to protect and strengthen the health of the relationships, so that the congregation can do what it’s here to accomplish.

As is often true, this congregation’s behavioral covenant – or Covenant of Right Relations – was birthed in response to a particular time of conflict. The people who helped craft it for the members to vote on, have said that they didn’t think it was perfect at the time, but they felt it was important to create a covenant then, to get one in place. We’ll read through it in a few moments, knowing that a there is already a group exploring ways for this congregation to look at it again, to review and revise and renew it for the future.

But first I want to address or at least acknowledge the concern some people have that behavioral covenants that set standards and expectations for members’ behavior are unnecessarily restrictive at best, and maybe even dangerous.

This is a relatively common attitude in our tradition, since for so much of our history we have been a haven for refugees from other religious traditions, people who left traditions that felt too restrictive and demanding to them. When they arrive in our communities, wounded, they arrive wary and cautious around any strong expectations, and I can understand why. I have been that refugee in my lifetime. I have had that same wariness. Maybe you have too.

However, while we do insist on absolute freedom of thought and belief in our tradition, we do not enshrine absolute freedom of behavior, freedom to do whatever one wants however one wants without regard for others. Instead our religious community calls us to our most courageously loving and compassionate behavior. It matters what we do, not just what we think.

What many wary members have said to me over this years is, “We are all adults here. We don’t need a set of rules.” And in response, I simply ask people, I’ll ask you, to think about some of the adults that YOU know – those adults who do not play well with others.

One of the challenges is that we have learned different patterns in our families.

A colleague told the story of a congregant who often yelled when he spoke to her. In response, my colleague would lower her voice and act more and more calm, at which the gentleman would get even louder. Until someone helped her understand that she might need to raise her voice, maybe even yell back at this man. Once she did, he was fine.  If the norm in a family is to yell at one another, than that’s how you “know” others are engaged with you. When someone gets more and more silent more and more quiet, it feels like they aren’t caring, aren’t engaged. Conversely, when your formative environment was one in which surface calm was the priority, a raised voice or any tension is perceived as a sign of danger.

In part because of the different ways we learn to relate, Sellon and Smith say that life giving healthy relationships don’t just happen automatically or magically. They are created by people who make the choice to be “open, authentic, caring and curious” with each other (11).

Creating and entering a behavioral covenant is part of naming and committing to that choice, to nurturing and preserving relationships through our behaviors. And we make this choice, voluntarily, not only because of the good it will do us, but also because there is a larger shared goal we want to reach together.

Let’s try UUCM’s covenant on for size:

UUCM Covenant of Right Relations

Recognizing that conflict is normal in human relations and wishing to relate to others as harmoniously as possible, I sincerely intend to:

Before we read the rest of the covenant, I want to not that I think in terms of conflict being natural rather than normal, not wanting to imply that conflict is the norm. You don’t HAVE to have conflict all the time. Really.

Also, I’ve noticed that UUCM has a tendency to use soft language when it comes to expectations and commitments, as if you don’t want to ask too much of people.

My first title for this sermon was “Great Expectations? or Anything Goes? Usually covenants are more like a wedding vow. “Do you promise…? I DO!  I will!” Rather than, “Do you promise to love and cherish…? I’ll Try. Or, I sincerely intend to.”

I can imagine that some people, taking a literal interpretation, might say, “I can’t in good faith promise that I won’t EVER speak unkindly, so the best I can do is sincerely intend to.

I served a family that took a trip to Canada, only to realize at the border that they had not brought birth certificates or passports for the children. At one point while they were detained, a border guard asked the young son, “Are you absolutely certain that these are your parents?” Responding perfectly logically, the boy said, “No.” As far as he knew, they were, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain.

Covenants are by nature aspirational. They imply “I sincerely intend to.” If these were commitments of which we could be absolutely certain, we wouldn’t need covenants around them. The value of the stronger language is the stronger hold it has on those of us who enter a covenant. “I will” is a different level of commitment than “I sincerely intend to.”

Okay, here is UUCM’s current Covenant of Right Relations what members have promised one another, or sincerely intended to one another.

Treat others with kindness, empathy and respect.
Communicate with patience, flexibility, and a willingness to negotiate in the spirit of meeting as many needs as possible.
Be aware of my own thoughts, feelings, and needs, and share them directly and honestly with others, without judgment or blame.
Invite and listen to all points of view, respecting others’ feelings and needs and encouraging minority opinions.
Take responsibility for my own mental, emotional, and spiritual balance, asking for support when I need it.
Be mindful of the needs of the group as a whole, mourning together when individual needs cannot be met.

Notice how those felt to you as commitments that might help build healthy, strong, dependable trust-filled relationships. You’ll have a chance sometime in the future to re-envision those commitments.

So what do you do when you or someone else doesn’t hold to the covenant, when these vows are broken? (Which they will be, since none of us is perfect.)

When we break our vows in a community the covenant is there to remind us of our own commitments, the choice we made to be part of a community, not just part of a crowd, even when we disagree, even when the vote doesn’t go our way, even when the sermons are “insufferable.”

“Covenant offers us an invitation to be curious and humble, to make room for mistakes by pre-promising that–when we fail–we are willing to forgive and try again.” – Rev. Renee Ruchotzke.

A covenant is not a set of laws used by other people to put us in some kind of prison or to punish us. It is there to help us call each other back to behavior that strengthens trust and well-being, rather than behavior that harms trust and well-being. Members have a responsibility – not just the capability – to call each other back to, and help each other to live the covenant, to live those more loving and life-giving behaviors, to help each other “come ‘round right,”  in the words of the song.

We can’t know what is in someone’s mind and heart for certain. It’s not about motivation, and it is not about whether someone is a good or bad person. It’s about observable behavior and the effects that behavior is having on the health and wellbeing of the community and its members.

A community like this often creates a team of people to help members find their way back into covenantal behavior when it’s difficult. It is sometimes called a right relations team.  That’s an option for this congregation to consider, though it’s important to remember that every member has a responsibility to help each other do this.

I would name today that the starting place is honesty, with ourselves, first of all and with others. I its important to name our hurt, and to learn to do it in ways that do not shame and that call people back to relationship-sustaining behavior. Ultimately the work then is to help people rebuild trust by helping them to be trustworthy – again and again, nurturing health and wellbeing, by living those covenanted behaviors.

The Rumi poem we sang at the beginning of the service includes the line, “Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times, come, yet, again, come.” Or as Jesus said, forgive seventy times seven times, or an infinite number of times. But I need to say, while we’re on this subject, that there are limits to the amount of harmful behavior a community can sustain and survive with integrity.

On those rare occasions when a member cannot, even with help, manage their own behavior and bring it round, when that person’s behavior is continually hurtful, and undermining and destroying trust and goodwill, I believe that at some point a community has to be willing to say to that person, “We have made promises to each other for the good of all. If you cannot behave differently here than you are now, you cannot be a part of this community.”

[shield self with raised arms]

BLASPHEMY! I know. How could you ever exclude anyone?! In our liberal, universalist tradition, this is the thing many people have the hardest time imagining. They cannot imagine saying no to someone in this way. But that reluctance comes at the expense of the health and strength of the community.

The good news is, that that is a rare last resort, though it needs to be a conceivable possibility. Happily, it’s usually much less dire than that, and we’ll have many chances to practice and learn together around more mundane, everyday experiences.

To that end, I close with an invitation – a request really.

I ask you to take on a simple relationship-strengthening practice rooted in the part of the congregation’s covenant about sharing thoughts, feelings and needs directly and honestly with others. Direct communication is one the strongest and fastest ways to nurture health in relationships, in your family, where you work and in the congregation.

Here’s the practice: Avoid pass-through communication, communication in which “to get a message to someone, you tell someone else.” (Healthy Disclosure, 188-190)

The beauty of this is that it shows up often and in very ordinary ways, and you’ll get many chances to practice. A common scenario is something like, “Bob, would you please tell Carol that I’ll be late for the meeting tomorrow?” The message is for Carol but we tell Bob instead. Indirect communication.

Here’s your chance to practice while the stakes are low. Catch yourself, and say, “Wait, better yet, I’ll tell Carol myself.” And if someone asks YOU to tell Carol that they’ll be late for the meeting, or to pass on any other message, I encourage you to refuse, kindly. If it helps you, feel free to say, “Rev. Kevin asked us to practice direct communication and I’m trying it out. I’ll ask you please to tell Carol directly.”

It would seem that having Bob give a message to Carol is simply expedient and practical, but if our behavior pattern and habit is to communicate with someone indirectly through someone else, then that’s the same pattern we’ll likely rely on when the issues are much more important and the stakes higher. Remember the game of “telephone,” in which you pass a whispered sentence around a circle of people? By the time it reaches the end it is often completely different from the starting message. The same thing can and often does happen when we pass messages through someone else.

So here’s a low-threat way to strengthen everyone’s healthy communication muscles. Help each other avoid pass through communication and you’ll be making a wise investment.

The life a religious community is about many things – our spiritual, emotional, intellectual and social selves.  The foundations for our ability to grow in all those areas in a community are 1) a powerful shared focus and 2) the quality of our relationships. That’s why it’s important to covenant around each. That’s why I’m spending time in these first couple services laying groundwork for the road ahead.

People sometimes fear that covenants will hem us in, but in truth, covenants are meant to liberate us for the greatest possible personal growth, the deepest possible mutual love, the strongest chance to make a difference for those in the world who are suffering.

I trust that you as a community can eventually find yourselves in the place just right, and then it will indeed be in the valley of love and delight. Along the way the road may be “muddy and rough,” but “we’ll get there. Heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will.”

So may it be.

 

Resources and Works Cited

Ruth, Kibbie S, and Karen A. McClintock. Healthy Disclosure: Solving Communication Quandaries in Congregations. Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2007. Print.

Sellon, Mary K, and Daniel P. Smith. Practicing Right Relationship: Skills for Deepening Purpose, Finding Fulfillment, and Increasing Effectiveness in Your Congregation. Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2005. Print.

Rev. Ruchotzke’s quote came from a UUA Growing Vital Leaders blog entry: http://vitalleaders.blogs.uua.org/leadership-skills/reflections-on-right-relationship/

The closing lines quote the songs “Tis a Gift to be Simple” and “Woyaya,” from the UUA hymnbooks Singing the Living Tradition and Singing the Journey.

WE WOULD BE ONE

What does it mean to be a community of covenant?

Rev. Kevin Tarsa

UU Community of the Mountains

Delivered September 18, 2016

 

After Jesus died… (which is not how I begin most sermons, by the way, or have ever begun a sermon, until now)  the people who had known and loved and followed him had a lot of questions.

The reason I’m starting there, in a room full of us atheists and agnostics and humanists, as well as Buddhists and Christians and others, is because though you might not know it from looking around this room or the rest of the building, Unitarian Universalism has roots in the Christian tradition, in Calvinism, to be more specific.

Our ancestors – both Unitarians and Universalists – rejected certain teachings of Calvinism,

which was one of the protestant traditions that had rejected aspects of Catholicism,

which was one form of Christianity,

that had evolved out of some of the small communities of the early Jesus followers,

who were, for the most part, Jewish.

We retain pieces of all of those traditions and I think its important to know where you come from as you figure out where we’re going, even though much has changed over the centuries. So I want to offer you a little bit of the backstory.

After Jesus died, there were two fundamental questions for his followers, questions that people argued about for centuries and still do:

1) What was Jesus’ purpose? I.e. Why was he here and for whom?

2) Who or what was Jesus, exactly – God? A god? Partly god? Divine but not as high on the ladder as God, a special prophet, a wise guru, en exemplary human being? What was his nature?

The Judaism that gave birth to Christianity prioritized ortho-praxy – correct action, over ortho-doxy – correct belief/opinion. Both were important, but when push came to shove, what mattered most, is what you do. What you believe about a ritual, for example, is less important than that you do the ritual, and do it correctly. Think the 10 Commandments….primarily about what you do.

The earliest Christian communities also prioritized action over belief (even as they argued about their beliefs about Jesus), perhaps because they were made up primarily of Jewish people. At their best, loving action was at the center of these communities and I find the ancient accounts of them powerfully inspiring. Following Jesus’ teaching, these people cared for the least and the ostracized, the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, the lepers at great personal expense and risk. And they cared for each other in a way that elicited remarks from the Romans, according to Tertullian, “See how they love one another,” they would say.

Justin Martyr, born around 100 CE, portrayed Christian love this way, as he tried to convince the Roman emperor to stop persecuting Christians:

“We who used to value the acquisition of wealth and possessions more than anything else now bring what we have into a common fund and share it with anyone who needs it. We used to hate and destroy one another and refused to associate with people of another race or country. Now, . . . we live together with such people and pray for our enemies.”

One of my favorite songs as young catholic, as guitar masses were coming in, was “They’ll know we are Christians by our Love (sung).” That’s how I wanted to be known…by the visible evidence of my love.

After 300 years or so, when Christianity had spread and included people from many different cultures and traditions, there were many different ideas about Jesus’ purpose and nature and Christianity was fragmented. In hopes of unifying Christians in the known world, Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea in 325, to decide once and for all, among other things, which ideas about Jesus’ nature were correct.

Their answers have important repercussions in our UU history, but today I want to name that what that Council of Nicea did, in our heritage, is shift the focus in Christianity from orthopraxy (correct action – doing the right thing) to orthodoxy (having the correct belief). It was a turn away from being the religion of Jesus, toward being a religion about Jesus. That’s oversimplifying it, but that turn was significant.

What thereafter defined a true Christian, was holding the approved/sanctioned beliefs – the beliefs spelled out in the Nicene Creed. For the next 1300 or 1400 years or so in much of Western Christianity, people were in or out, included or ostracized, burned at the stake or allowed to live, based on what they were willing to say they believed.

Fast forward to the 1600s and our direct religious forebears on this continent – the Pilgrims and the Puritans. They came for many reasons, among them the freedom to practice Christianity as they felt it ought to be practiced. The Pilgrims sought to build a community separate from the world. Puritans sought to build communities that would become a shining example to the world and the folks back home, and many expected to return to England at some point. You know how that goes. You plan to stay for a year and 20 years later you are still there.

They were here on their own all that time, without bishops or any hierarchy telling them what to do. And when Presbyterian ways of governing churches started to become a trend in England – where regional groups of elected elders had the power to make decisions for congregations – our ancestors here said wait a minute, we like making our own decisions.

They called a meeting at Harvard, the Cambridge Synod, and drafted and eventually adopted what we know as the Cambridge Platform, which is the basis for how we govern ourselves in UUism. It is the basis for our congregations making decisions for themselves, and the basis for our focus not on a creed or a specific set of beliefs, but on covenant.

The drafters of the Platform looked back to and referenced the early Jewish communities in the Hebrew Bible, and the early Christian communities in the Christian New Testament, and they said that THE reason to form religious communities, and the purpose of everything religious communities do is “mutual edification” – mutual teaching and learning –  that is based on the second of the Great Commandments, “Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself.”

As Alice Blaire Wesley put it, our ancestors said that we gather “for mutual learning and teaching concerning the (many and complex) ways of Love.”

Wesley points out that there are an infinite number of subtopics in this category of Love, and that our Forebears believed that people have to gather with others in order to figure out the details, or as they put it, to discern God’s will.

Communities like ours must figure out continually what, specifically, love demands of us now, so that “neighborly love” is not just a “fuzzy, sentimental abstraction” …but rather a challenging call to be more and more our best and most courageously loving selves within our gathered community, with our sister congregations, and in the wider world.

Our job, according to our forebears, is to help each other figure out what loving your neighbor (as yourself) means and looks like today, and then to help each other do that, while caring for each other along the way.

That is Christianity at its best, I say, and I know people who live that faith beautifully and powerfully. I expect that you do too. The thing is, that is also Unitarian Universalism at its best, no matter whether we think of ourselves as Christian or not. I would go one step further to say that that is religion at its best: helping each other discern and practice loving action in our community and in our world.

For this to happen well and in ways that can keep evolving with our evolving understandings, our forebears said it’s not a creed that we need, its a covenant – not a static statement of beliefs, but a mutual, aspirational, voluntary promise of how we’ll go about being a community trying to discover the demands of love and how to live that love. A “declaration of interdependence.”

Though we let go of many aspects of the Cambridge Platform over time, our UU congregations today are still rooted in covenants, mutual promises developed and chosen and committed to within each congregation as well as between and among congregations.

I want to acknowledge that some people feel uncomfortable with the word or the idea of “covenant.” For some it feels too churchy, religious, old fashioned, or too legalistic. Some fear that covenants are used as punitive instruments to pummel people back in line.

I would offer:

The root – “co-venir” – means to agree (to) – to be not merely of like mind, but of like heart and like commitment. It’s about shared commitment

The word and concept are indeed churchy, religious, old fashioned, and legalistic. The drafters of the Cambridge Platform drew the concept from the Hebrew Bible (the covenant between God and the Israelites), and the Christian New Testament (meaning new covenant), It is a concept rooted in political agreements of biblical times.

Covenants are entered voluntarily.

However, to be a member (of a UU congregation) requires entering a covenant with the other members, making a set of mutual promises. Members do not always realize this. Since the tradition is not defined not by creed but rather by covenant, simply agreeing with other UUs or even with the Seven Principles is not enough. One must be in a covenant with other members. That is our religious practice. That is our spiritual discipline

Covenants are created by the members, not handed from on high or elsewhere, and they are not etched in stone forever. Each congregation, group, or committee decides what it will covenant in order to best achieve its goals and care for each other in the process. Dave has already asked a small group of people to explore ways for this congregation to review, revise and renew its behavioral covenant.

Covenants are upheld mutually. The people who have entered a covenant with each other are responsible to help each other live into it and live up to it. A covenant does not say you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. It holds out mutual expectations.

Covenants are aspirational. They are not a tool used to slap someone’s hand, but a tool to help us hold out a hand to invite members to live into community-building and love-enhancing behavior. More about this next week.

“A contract is a matter of law. A covenant is a matter of love.” 

~ Rev. Preston Moore

“A contract protects interests, but a covenant protects relationships.”

~ David Brooks

The theme this month is “What does it mean to be a community of covenant?”

SLIDE of word cloud from last week’s service: Answers to, “Why are you here?”

The words used most often were: Community, Love, Others, Friendship, Connection

All relational.

A few final thoughts:

Covenant is a way to become ONE out of many.

With all these different theological beliefs, and in a culture that prizes individualism, the question is: How do you hold together/cohere as a community?

When I work with choirs I try to help them understand the difference between singing at the same time and singing together. Singing at the same time can sound beautiful, but when truly singing together, something else happens, something powerfully transcendent and even transformational. Covenant binds us and, ideally, helps us “sing” not just at the same time and in the same direction, but together.

We claim to prize diversity – which is important – but diversity does not connect people. To be a community of cohesiveness and meaningful depth, people have to connect in common around something so important that they can draw on their differences to reach toward a common goal, rather than to have those differences interfere with that reaching.

I therefore believe that our foundational covenants in congregations must speak to the largest, most compelling goals we hold, and that mission statements are best framed as covenants or in covenantal language. Name your deepest shared aspirational mutual commitment up front, and covenant toward reaching it, so that members new and old know that that’s what they are signing up for and signing on to…

Your congregational covenant cannot be shallow. It must lay claim on your heart, must inspire you enough to want to be subject to its demands. Not because anyone said you have to, but because you want to, because you know, as frightening as it might be, that it will call you toward who you most want to be in the world. It ought not be easy. It ought to give you pause before you sign on to it. It ought to be worthy of your commitment.

Our ancestors said that we best covenant in order to figure together what loving our neighbor (as yourself) means and looks like and asks of us now, and then to help each other do that, caring for each other along the way.

My personal dream is to be able to sing with total honesty and conviction, “They will know we are UUs by our love” (sung)… whatever that love might need to look like in Grass Valley these days.

What great end does or would keep your critical thinking skills humming AND grab your heart at the same with such power, that you would risk a great deal to be here, to be part of it.

Figuring that out together – so that you can be ONE and a powerful force for good in this community – that’s the work ahead. The marvelous, hard, and joyful work ahead.

Yonder, come day!

May day be a’breakin,

and may the sun be arising,

In your collective soul.

 

So may it be.

 

Works cited:

Wesley, Alice B. Our Covenant: The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church : the Spirit and the Promise of Our Covenant. Chicago: Meadville Lombard Theological School Press, 2002. Print.

This is a 2000 Minns Lecture Series by Alice Blair Wesley, available for free download at http://minnslectures.org/archive/wesley/wesley.php

The Cambridge Platform 1648

Available to read online at https://books.google.com/books?id=aSkPAAAAIAAJ&ots=rPIGSnDqRP&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q&f=false

by Kristin Famula

Religious Education – Everybody Needs a Rock– August 14, 2016

Everybody needs a rock.

I was introduced to this book early-on in my path as a religious educator – during a workshop on multigenerational worship at General Assembly. I immediately had a strong connection to the story – I loved the gentle symbolism and simple, yet deep message. And I knew I wanted to share it with you today, because it so perfectly explained my vision of RE: the metaphor of finding your ‘rock’ – which will serve as the solid UU foundation that grounds us in life and gets nurtured through religious education.

But, as I was looking up the book online to refresh my memory – I discovered ‘reviews’ of the story.

The first reviews I read were from rock-hounds and teachers: these reviews said things like, “this is a great story! It fit in perfectly with the lesson on geology and exploration of the natural world. We’re going to read the story in class and then go examine rocks and figure out if they’re metamorphic or igneous! ”

These reviews caused me to pause: “Obviously they’re missing the intent behind the book, right? It’s clearly not meant as a book about rock hunting!”

But then I kept reading – (you know how you get sucked in when you’re online?)

One review shared that it’s about paying attention to the small things (ok, I thought, that’s closer …)

Another explained that it’s about holding on to something solid during the tough times…

And yet another described the books ability to encourage you to listen to yourself and not what others tell you.

There were pages of these reviews – each with a completely different explanation of the meaning of the story. I got a bit worried. I didn’t want to use the book if there was no agreement about what it’s about… It wouldn’t fit with my theme of the importance of the ROCK – the solid UU foundation — that gets encouraged in our religious education programs.

One book review simply quoted a sentence in the book: ‘You have to make up your own mind. You’ll know.”

And it dawned on me that actually the story fit exactly what I know from religious education. Yes, RE gives us a solid foundation of ethics and principles to ground us in our faith; but more than that, it encourages us to commit to the ongoing process of rock-shaping.

And that’s the whole point of religious education – helping us stay open to each of our own life experiences that contribute to how we make-meaning and take-meaning from something as simple as a story about a rock.

***

Last year, members here were asked, “Which of UUCM’s programs and activities would you like to see growth in?” …and, well, the answer seemed pretty obvious.

This ‘word cloud’ was created to visually show our community’s priorities. Obviously Religious Education is something we are deeply committed to.

And that’s not necessarily surprising. In many churches, the answer to that question would be similar – we understand that religious education is an integral aspect of our faith; we know it’s essential to support our families in the hard work of educating their children; and we understand that a strong religious education program leads to committed families which leads to growth in our churches.

However finding a common understanding of what we should be teaching and what the end goal is has continued to evolve in Unitarian Universalism for decades. In part, because we are so committed to not just the content of the classes, but our own ongoing learning.

In earlier days we adults dropped off our children and youth at “Sunday School”, happy for an opportunity to sit by ourselves in the service in silence as we received the solitude, thoughtfulness and adult-time necessary to begin another week of work.

And as the adults sat in the service, UU “Sunday School” usually consisted of our children and youth engaging in a ‘comparative religions’ type curriculum that would introduce them to the world of beliefs that exist. We knew it was important that they form their own opinions about what they believe.

But then we began to realize that just teaching about other religions didn’t give our children and youth anything to stand on when their religious beliefs were being questioned at school or elsewhere.

I was one of those children, standing in a middle school classroom in bible-belt Oklahoma – where my friends, would cry and pray for me about my inevitable path to hell. And while I sincerely appreciated that they cared about me, I wasn’t prepared to advocate on my behalf about my own religious convictions. Simply saying that UUs believe in a free and responsible search for the truth didn’t give me enough leverage when their convictions about heaven and hell were so defined. “I can believe whatever I want about Hell” didn’t give them (or me) any confidence.

For years, our UU children had no language to explain what they believed, only that they were allowed to believe what they wanted. And so we learned that we needed to actually teach about our own faith, not just that of others, and we learned how to teach our children about our own UU theology and helped them develop their own answers to the big questions of the world: Who are We? Why do we exist? What is our purpose?

In our religious education classes we began shaping opportunities for this deeper questioning and wonder. We developed Coming of Age programs so that our youth could learn how to create their own credos – their own statements of belief – and we challenged our children and youth to come up with their own answers to these existential questions.

And then our learning progressed further and we discovered that not only is RE about religion and spirituality, but it’s about living our principles in the world. It’s about understanding what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist in real life. And so we incorporated service and social justice and action into our curricula.

And throughout this time Unitarian Universalism itself was changing – questioning our use of words like Religion, Faith, and God. Incorporating learnings from Humanist, Pagan, and Atheist UU’s…Discarding language that didn’t work, reclaiming language that could… gleaning new understandings of what it means to be a religious community.

Even the documents that are seemingly so fundamental to Unitarian Universalists were transformed. The most recent version of our 7 principles was only agreed upon in 1985 – revised from a version of “The Six Principles” passed in 1961 – with the merger of Unitarians and Universalists. The original principles referenced “God” and the “Dignity of Man” and was clearly not inclusive enough for our evolving understanding of the world. This new framing of our principles also finally included our commitment to the earth. In 1995, they were edited again – this time recognizing earth-centered traditions as part of our sources.

Throughout our existence as a religion (as Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists) we have shifted and changed to meet the evolving needs of our congregants and our understanding of the world around us. And in parallel, our UU churches adapt new learning opportunities and expand and transform our philosophy of education in order to reach those new needs. It is a deliberate process. Grown from the UU foundations we set in place, and yet with an intentional commitment towards the progression of our learning – even if it means challenging our own foundations.

I share this history with you because it’s important to remember that the “who, what, why and how” of religious education is constantly transforming – even the name changes! And our growth as a faith is dependent on the purposeful dedication to the process itself.

In the past decade I noticed a shift in RE again as churches recognized a new philosophy of religious education being “all the time; for everyone; everywhere”. And that has once again modified the way we engage in RE practices. At first it was just a new emphasis on the importance of adult education offerings. Now we are beginning to see UU churches leaning in to an emphasis not just on the rock foundations of being UU, but on the importance of this life-long process of learning and changing and meaning-making. Our churches are finding a new appreciation that everything we live daily is religious education.

***

So if our rock of religious education actually reminds us to commit to our ongoing growth and learning – what does that mean here at UUCM?

What does an RE program look like that encourages us to keep searching for our own truth and also to understand someone else’s truth and be shaped by it as well?

This year, the staff team has committed to theme-based ministry and education. We’ve learned that if everyone is challenging themselves through the same theme (in age-appropriate ways of course) that we can go deeper in our learning. We open up new opportunities for finding our truth, because we’ve given ourselves additional openings for conversations with others in our community. If we’re all exploring the theme of ‘love’ – we can talk to each other about. Our children can ask you, during coffee hour, what you learned about love. Oftentimes we don’t make enough space for learning from each other – especially from our younger ones. Many of our young people have been raised in UU churches (while many of our adults are later-in-life UU converts), and so often-times our faith-elders ARE our young people – they’ve been steeped in our UU principles and have clear ideas about the world.

I have this distinct memory of sitting at the kitchen table with my mom when I was younger. She was encouraging me to write a thank-you note to a family friend. My parents are liberal UU’s who encouraged all of my foundations of ethics and values in the world. I remember after writing the letter that I was addressing the envelope and wrote “Lynn and John Smith” on the front. My mom scolded me and told me that the formal and appropriate way of addressing the letter was to write, “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith”. I was shocked that my mom, model of all things progressive and good, could possibly think that referring to a woman as “Mrs. John Smith” would be appropriate! I responded with self-righteous outrage while she sat in reflective silence.

This memory seems silly, but it was a key moment in our shared learning – that the values I had learned (that she had taught me, along with many UU’s) were now helping to shape new cultural norms; and my mom’s willingness to take in that new thinking, born of the same foundational principles she herself had taught me and allow the new thinking to sink in to her own truths – was part of the ongoing learning and shaping. We are invited to be willing to listen to one another and be open to our truths being shaped and transformed.

Sarah van Gelder, an editor of YES! Magazine, which offers stories about positive changes happening in the world, once wrote in her editor’s letter, “As a child, I remember thinking adults reached a magical age when they became “grown-ups” and were therefore done growing. Now that I have reached that age myself, I realize that we’re not done—we have the option of continuing to develop throughout life. We need people who choose to continue learning.”

I really resonate with her call for people who CHOOSE to continue learning. We get to be intentional about the fact that we’re always learning throughout our lives and we can be deliberate about putting ourselves in places where our growth is guaranteed and supported. UUCM is one of these places. Helping us grow in our understanding of the world; helping challenge us to be more creative, loving, and authentic.

It was the courageous UU’s throughout our history that continued to shape the very foundations of our faith because they were committed to ongoing learning and a dedication to incorporating that learning into our changing understanding of the world – and it will be us, helping shape our future.

***

None of this learning is confined to just one age group. No one needs it more than anyone else. Elders, seniors, children, teens, young adults, however you identify. Religious education is for all of us. It’s about learning how to live our lives as Unitarian Universalists. It’s about how we show up as authentically as possible and make meaning of the situations we find ourselves in. It’s how we stand grounded in our principles, and also allow ourselves to be shaped by the process – always willing to keep learning and growing – always willing to reshape our truth and be shaped by the truth of others.

We need people who choose to continue learning.

We need people who know that more than just searching for the perfect rock, it’s about committing to the journey, and allowing yourself to be shaped by the process and practice of the search.

May it be so.

NOT KNOWING

Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Kane

They say that if you’re going to give a talk, you ought to address a subject you know something about. So I’d like to talk about something I feel pretty accomplished at: not-knowing.

I don’t know the answer. After decades of this, they’re finally saying, “Dad, what kind of a doctor are you, anyway? You never seem to know anything.”

I have to answer, “I’m one of the few honest doctors you know.”

After all, my profession is rich in ignorance, if we’d only admit it. The dean of a medical school was addressing his graduating class. He said, “I’m very sorry, but about a third of what we’ve taught you is incorrect. We just don’t know which third.”

What he meant was that the way we understand and practice medicine today is certain to be obsolete in fifty years. Our current style might even be laughable then, in the way we now think of leeches and cathartics. Medicine is a story of continual evolution of knowledge, and it’s the same in the world at large. We can’t get around that, which leaves both knowledge and ignorance troublesome.

As for knowledge, Will Rogers said, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”

And as for ignorance, world renowned expert Donald Rumsfeld said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is, there are some things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

At least we’ve been around long enough to recognize that we’ll never know everything. That doesn’t stop us from trying, though. In fact, seeking facts like flies seek honey describes the entire history of science. We love learning about the world so much that when we hit a cul-de-sac, a place that won’t reveal its pattern, we feel terrible. And we deal with that feeling by repressing it or denying it.

I had a boss once, the director of a hospital, who would say the most outrageous things. “You really don’t have to treat a lot of cancers,” he’d say. “They clear up by themselves.”

When we suggested diplomatically that maybe we hadn’t heard him right or that he was overgeneralizing to make a point, he’d double down. “I’m right,” he’d say. “Try not treating some patients and see what happens.”

“Are you sure?” “Are you absolutely sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. There is a tiny chance I’m wrong, but I’m sure.”

We see this posture’s full bloom in politics. Better to be sure of what’s not so than admit ignorance. Voters love that Strong Chin of Certainty. If you’re running for office you can say Mount Rushmore is actually a mound of blue cheese. When you’re challenged, all you need to do is repeat it confidently, and you’re still on solid ground. But if you’re asked about an issue and you respond that you don’t know, you’re a dead duck. You may as well pack up your bumper stickers and go home.

Ignorance is bliss? No it isn’t. In fact, not knowing constitutes much of human suffering, especially when we’re sick. I’ve worked with cancer patients and their families half a century now. I’ve seen a lot of suffering. Some is physical, but most is emotional. And most of that—the issue that drives people to tears and beyond—is their discomfort with not knowing. And when we don’t know, we employ our very human tendency to fill in the blank with negativity, fantasizing about all the things that can go wrong. In the cancer support business, we call that “awfulizing.”

Maybe you were told once that there was something amiss in your body, and it might be serious. No one takes that as small talk. I’ve been there. Many years ago an x-ray showed a sharp bony growth crimping my spinal cord at the second cervical level. I was looking at impending quadriplegia. The doctors advised me, “Whatever you do, don’t turn your head. Let’s get you into surgery right away.”

I didn’t turn my head, but I didn’t choose surgery then, either. I went home and performed emotional cartwheels around not knowing for weeks. “What does this mean?” I asked myself. Will I survive? If I do, how will it affect my life? We were building a home then, and we added a wheelchair ramp. What’ll it be like to be unable to move my limbs? Were the friends who didn’t contact me respecting my privacy or frightened by my situation?

In the cancer world especially, there’s far more unknown than known. Where did this illness come from? Did I do something to bring it on? What treatments should I choose, or decline? Which of the twenty diets my friends suggested should I go for? Might alternative therapies be effective or only make things worse? Should I look for clinical trials? Contact Hospice? If I feel better, does that mean my treatment is working, or would I have felt better anyway? If I feel worse, does that mean it’s not working, or that maybe I’d be dead without it?

Not knowing isn’t simply unnerving. It’s more like we’re fallen off the Good Ship Reality As Usual and we’re flailing around in the waves grabbing for any little piece of flotsam. Sooner or later, facts—or at least reputed facts—drift in, and whatever those facts are, they relieve us to some extent. Even bad news is often better than no news. We might say, “At least now we know what’s going on, so we have a course of action.”

That makes sense, yet at that point the next unknown pops into our normal human mind. Should I think about retiring? Who should I name as my healthcare agent in my advance directive? What’ll happen to my family if I die? Where do we go when we die?

These are worthwhile questions and deserve to be asked, but they don’t deserve to torture us. A man in our cancer group asked another, “So what are you doing about your cancer now?”

“Well, I’m worrying a lot.”

“Oh, good. Is it helping?”

Sooner or later, sick or not, we’ll do well to ask ourselves whether every unknown is bound to trouble us, or whether we can simply accept that not knowing is a natural, normal, predictable flavor of life.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about the qualities of what he called “self-actualized”, or optimally mentally healthy people. One of those was equanimity in the face of ambiguity, as he put it, or, more simply, comfort with not knowing. Since there’s so much not knowing in life, that would seem to be a handy skill. In fact, the Dalai Lama has said, “I sit in the field of not knowing, and invite you to join me there.” But Your Holiness, which way? How do we get to this palace of equanimity?

We can start with humility about what we think we know. Do we really know what we say we do? Listen to some of the things I’ve said to sick people in the past.

“I just know you’re going to come out of this even stronger than before.”

“I’m sure the surgery will be a huge success.”

“You’ll outlive me.”

Were those statements true? They were wishful thinking. I have no more idea than anyone else how things will turn out. I was hoping my confident positivity would alleviate the sick person’s discomfort with not knowing. Really, though, that never works; I was only comforting myself.

When I’m with someone who’s sick, I realize now there are only four things I can know. First, they’re sick—unless you want to argue about what “is” means. Second, they are mortal, and so will one day die. Third, they are unquestionably alive right now. And finally, I can know my own feelings in response to being with them. Virtually everything else is conjecture.

The more I hang around this planet, the less sure I am of just about everything. I’ve seen people with cancer choose a staggering variety of ways to address their illness, from prayer to chemo to Romanian clinics to incomprehensible diets to doing nothing. Should I tell them to get a grip and choose today’s cutting edge medical science? Well, I don’t do that because it turns out that the results are all over the landscape. In terms of both quantity and quality of life, those who do best are the ones who’ve chosen the route they most deeply believe in, whether it’s chemotherapy or visiting Our Lady Guadalupe.

When I had my spinal problem and got over the initial shock of diagnosis and could once again think somewhat, I figured I’d first try disciplines I’d been teaching, yoga and imagery. If they didn’t work, I’d consent to surgery. Gradually, as I practiced them, my symptoms diminished, and a year later another x-ray showed the bony growth had retreated. Does that mean yoga and imagery cured me?

I don’t know. Is it okay that I don’t know? It better be, since it’s logically impossible for me to know, anyway.

To sum up: not only don’t I know, but I can’t know. Further, obsessively craving to know distracts me from seeing more fully what’s going on now, which includes a greater range of possibilities than I’ve recognized so far. So please excuse me. I’m going to go sit with the Dalai Lama and see if I can get comfortable there. Where is he? I have no idea, so here will have to do.

*****

Note from Jeff: Folks who are interested in more material in this vein can browse my KVMR podcasts at http://HealingHealthcareBook.com/category/Healthcare-As-Though-People-Matter

Father’s Day Reflections

Gail Johnson Vaughan

June 19, 2016

Happy Father’s Day.  My thoughts for today are organized as a letter to the father I admire the most, my son Brent.

Dear Brent,

Happy Father’s Day, my heart is touched by the lovely man you have become. When you were a child your beauty was so great my heart would melt. I never dreamed it would continue to blossom, and blossom, and blossom.

As I realize that – the fact that I did not expect your beauty to survive manhood – I learned a lot about myself and perhaps about our society. What is the context, what are the belief systems, that give birth to such a thought? What have I learned from the fathers that have gone before you, and what do I learn from the fathers you and your brothers have become?

I was born into a world of war. The fathers were away. Many did not come back. And many that did were wounded – in body and in heart. Those wounds of war were visited on their sons and their daughters, wives and parents. War does not just wound the soldiers.

My father stayed a soldier – a soldier of the sea. Each fall he would leave for half a year to sail his submarine through distant seas protecting us from unknown enemies. Each time we would watch him sail away. My mother would drive us out the long peninsula to the lighthouse point. It was beautiful – graceful green lawns sloping down on either side to touch the blue water, and miles of tidy white tombstones – graves of the daddies that did not return. She would hold me high while we watched the ship grow smaller and smaller on the unending water until it fell off the edge of the world.

Things were different when my father was away. My mother was strong, confident, competent, in charge. And when he returned she slipped into the background. That was the way things were done in those days. World War II demanded that women step forward into the workplace, into self-sufficiency, into leadership. The quest for equality of opportunity, so hard fought for so many years before the war, was moot when the nation needed women to step into the fullness of their capacities while the men were away. The wheels of production needed workers, and families needed direction.

In America’s postwar “Father Knows Best” years there was a great effort to restore the imbalance. I was raised to know my place and to prepare for life as a professional wife. And then war came again – Korea and then Vietnam, and a new generation was asked to go. We were the sons and daughters whose fathers fought in World War II. We had already been wounded. The healing of our wounds made a strong in new ways. We learned, in a deep nonverbal level, that war does not make sense. We said “no”. We said “no” at every corner – no to war, no to racism, to sexism, to corporate greed, to false morality. We changed the rules.

Being a father, even being a man was not easy for the fathers of my generation.  Changing roles and expectations, housewives and mothers going on strike wearing “boots made for walking.” Being a father, even being a man is not easy for fathers today. Men and women of conscience struggle to replace the imbalance of patriarchy with the social system that gives both women and men more options. It is not easy. We have had to retool at the most fundamental level. There are still many battles to fight in pursuit of gender equality, but many have also been won.

We in this room have been the transitional generations of these great changes.  It has not been easy for any of us.  We have been confused, determined, courageous, strident, strong, broken, triumphant. It has not been easy.  And we women have not been alone in the effort.  You, our brothers, have been beside us.  Thank you for your commitment to personal growth that has allowed you to be the pioneers of the post war generations, and thank you for raising your own children with a very different set of values regarding gender equality than my generation was born into.

But I must now go back to my earlier question about what contributed to my assumption that you, my son, would lose your loveliness as you matured. I see now the impact of war – some part of me had learned that grown men fight, that grown men leave, and I steal myself for that unlovely loss. And I see now how the impact of limited role options available to men for so many years helped sculpt my assumption.

When I was growing up and considering the options for my future – teacher, nurse, stay-at-home mother and wife – my brothers were looking at options limited in other ways. The broad array of career choices men had came at high price. It separated them, sent them away from home, made them persons apart from the family. They were often resented, neglected or ignored and more often than not misunderstood.

Erma Bombeck said:

“When I was a little kid a father was like a light in the refrigerator. Every house had one, but no one really knew what either of them did when the door was shut.”

And we love them nonetheless, and fear their loss with a clutching pain, and if it comes, carry the loss with us forever.

Erma later wrote:

My dad left the house every morning and always seem glad to see everyone at night.

He opened the jar of pickles when no one else could.

He was the only one in the house wasn’t afraid to go into the basement by himself.

He cut himself with when shaving, but no one kissed it or got excited about it.

He signed all my report cards. He put me to bed early. He took lots of pictures, but was never in them.

I was afraid of everyone else’s father, but not my own.

Once I made him tea. It was only sugar water, but he sat on a small chair and said it was delicious. He looked very uncomfortable.

Whenever I played house, the mother doll had a lot to do. I never knew what to do with the daddy doll, so I had him say “I’m going to work now” and threw him under the bed.

When I was nine years old, my father didn’t get up one morning and go to work. He went to the hospital and died the next day.

I went into my room and felt under the bed for the father doll. When I found him, I dusted him off and put him on my bed.

He never did anything. I didn’t know his leaving would hurt so much. I still don’t know why.

I know why, and so do you. Daddies, absent or not, are the center of our world. That’s why we can be so hard on them when they aren’t perfect. We are bolstered by their positive regard and dashed by their indifference or criticism. We expect the world of them. We expect them to always be bigger, and better, and wiser than we are. And in the end they, as we, are imperfect works-in-progress who leave us with the strength of the bent branch.

Many of us lay the expectation of perfect parenting on ourselves as well, and become our own worst critics, carrying self-blame for the imperfections of our young. Perhaps we can give ourselves the gift of self-forgiveness and strive to be like the children – truly our greatest teachers. What do we have to learn from them? Is it their guileless honesty? Their easy access to joy? Their clear and spoken limits, the capacity to love and be loved? Their belief that everything is possible if you believe in it.

And so my dear Brent, firstborn child of my heart, I recognize the blazing light inside you. I recognize the deep and constant river of peace from which you live, and from which you father your beautiful children. You have taught me what your grandfather yearned for me to know – that men do indeed grow in loveliness, if we allow it, and that all that you had the moment before you were born is still with you. Thank you for your courage and letting your light shine. Thank you for being a beacon that shows the way for your brothers, and fathers, sisters and mothers. May we each, in turn, live our life from our light as well. I love you.

by Rev. David Usher

June 5, 2016

Two years ago, UUCM was in need of an Interim Minister, so you set up a Search Party of Amy Renee Patterson, Suzanne Ferroggiaro and Keith Johnson.  The scoured the entire United States, looking for someone prepared to come to Bandit Territory of Nevada County but, alas, they could not find anyone.  Word had obviously got out.  And so they had to go looking further afield, to England, where your reputation might not have become known, and to ad to the lure, they promoted Nevada County not as Bandit territory but Gold Country.  I took the bait.  After all, it is an established fact that all Americans are millionaires, even if some are suffering from a temporary financial embarrassment.    I thought to myself, Gold Country, this is my big chance to get rich quick.  The US Government did step in for a while, reluctant to let in a foreigner, but when they learned that originally came from a convict colony, they figured bandit territory was a natural destination, and so they relented.

On the very day I was to leave for California, the very day, I fell off a short step ladder and badly dislocated my right shoulder.  Now you would think that anyone would surely take this as a sign from the universe, but I was too obtuse to read the signs and so, in September 2014 I came to Grass Valley to do a two year interim ministry.

The purpose of an Interim Ministry is not just to be a caretaker until the next settled minister comes along, it is to help the congregation prepare for that next ministry.  That means identifying and addressing institutional problems, effecting change to make the congregation more healthy, more functional, more able to move forward.   The reality is, some have liked that process, some of you have hated it (and have not been shy about saying so), and most of you have been somewhere in between, for the most part grateful but also chafing at some of the rough spots.

And is that not true of any relationship?  Is it not the case that even in the most successful and harmonious of relationships, there are occasional tough times, and that it is often during those tough times that the relationship is strengthened.  You learn about a relationship by being in one, not by reading a book about it.  How many of you in a relationship can say that your partner has never angered, irritated or disappointed you?  Similarly, you learn about interim ministry not by reading a book about it, but by doing it.

So, after these almost two years, how well we have done together?  The answer is – it is too soon to tell.  The success of this ministry in many ways will not be known until you are well into your settled ministry, it will be determined by how well you adapt to your new settled minister.  If you think you will simply revert to what you remember as the good old days, as if this interim time simply has never been, then this interim will indeed have been a failure, as, alas, will likely be your settled ministry.

But at the heart of all ministry, interim or settled or any other kind, at heart of what this place is, is worship.   I calculate I have stood at this lectern to lead you in worship on at least sixty Sundays.  What has that been all about?

I know some of you have trouble with the word worship.  But that is because you think it is a transitive verb.  You think it is a verb that requires an object.

I confess, I am a philological pedant.  I like words, I like grammar, I like correct punctuation.  Not just in sermons or letters or anything else I might write, but in emails I fuss over proper syntax and punctuation.  Even with texts, I refuse to lower my standards.  And when I read other people’s grammatical and syntactical errors – especially the misuse of the apostrophe – I notice it and get all judgmental.  And what is wrong with the letter u?  Why can’t it be in words like flavour and colour.

Because of my philological pedantry, I used to bridle with the Americanism of simply saying Enjoy!  A waiter would deliver my meal with the invitation to Enjoy!  Enjoy what, I would wonder to myself.  “Enjoy” has to have an object.  It is transitive verb!

Well, I am pleased to say I got over myself.  I have come to like the imprecation to Enjoy!  Yes, it can be an intransitive verb.  Enjoy!  Take delight.  Be appreciative!  You don’t have to specify what it is you are enjoying.

Likewise, worship is not a transitive verb.  Or at least, it does not have to be.  If for you, worship is transitive, if you do indeed worship a God/object/something other, then that is wonderful and may you long continue to do so.  But you can also worship intransitively, by being in that presence of that which transports you, which fills you with meaning, which helps you to make sense of the world and to delight in it.  You can do that by being in nature, by glorying in a loving relationship, by reading a profound book or wrestling with provocative ideas, you can worship by being of service to others, you can do it by with at one with the highest that you know, which is to be with your God.  Worship is being filled with wonder, with reverence, with gratitude, with awe.  To worship is to acknowledge the mystery and the miracle of this remarkable thing called Life.

In the words of Philip Larkin’s poem which I shared earlier, this is a place to grow wise in.  In which to grow wise!  One does not grow wise  by forcing answers on others (sadly so fashionable these days for some who call themselves religious), one grows wise by asking searching questions of oneself?  How am I to live this one precious life?  What are the highest values which command my loyalty?  What is it that rules my heart and guides my actions?

This is not a place of transaction, but transformation.  This is not a place simply where you pay your few bucks in return for an interesting talk, and then a cup of coffee and perhaps a cookie.  This is a place to ask those What if questions of Oriah Mountain Dreamer …. what if they really did mean something?  What if they really did transform your life?  What would that mean?  Are you open even to that possibility?

I remember when I was a kid in Australia, my family was one of the last in the neighborhood to get a TV.  It was a huge box with a tiny screen, black and white, of course, and you had to turn it on half an hour before you wanted to watch it.  And the really quaint thing was that if you wanted to change channels, you actually had to get up off the sofa to do so.  Not that that was really such a problem, given that there were only two channels to choose from anyway.

There were two programs that I would rush home from school to watch.  One was The Lone Ranger.  Do you remember it?  Each episode he would ride into town, sort out the bad guys, and then ride off into the sunset, leaving the townspeople wondering.  Who was that stranger?  I don’t know who he was, but he left this silver bullet.  Wonderful stuff.  Well, being an Interim Minister is a bit like being the Lone Ranger, you ride into town, you for them out, and then you ride out again.  If only I had a silver bullet.

I have one more Sunday with you, the Picnic Service in Condon Park, but this my last service here.  I want to tell you, you are an excellent congregation to lead worship for.  You are attentive, appreciative, discerning, fun.  It has been a challenge, yes, and it has been a pleasure.  I regret to tell you that I am no richer financially, but I certainly am richer experientially.  I hope that we have grown wiser together.

The other program I used to love watching after school instead of doing my homework was cartoons.  A favorite was Porky Pig.   So, like Porky, let me conclude by saying, That’s all, folks.

by Rev. David Usher

Easter sermon, March 27, 2016

The old Jewish story tells of the old man who, every evening at sunset, walked through the village crying “Repent, repent, turn from self-seeking and serve God, for the day of judgment is at hand.”  Nobody paid him any attention.  They all thought he was a crank.  But a villager who still had some sympathy for him, one day said to the old man “My friend, why do you waste your time like this?  Can’t you see that nobody is paying any attention.  What you are doing is not changing anybody.”  The old man replied, “You don’t understand, do you.  I’m not doing it to change them.  I’m doing it to change me.”

Over the years, from time to time I have taken part in various vigils.  I don’t like shouting slogans over and over – it must be the English in me – but I have often stood in silent vigils, holding a banner, staring into the middle distance.  Like the old man in the story, I am unsure what effect, if any, it has on anyone else, but it never fails to have a profound effect on me.  If you have never done it, try it.  I commend it to you.  I commend to you the practice of standing up and bearing public witness to something you believe in.  Having passersby look at you either with amusement or bemusement or, occasionally, with angry contempt.

For some reason I remember one particular vigil, many years ago when I was minister to the Unitarian congregation in Hampstead, north London.  This was in the late 1980s, a time when the threat of nuclear annihilation was very real, and I was a tolerably active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  The United Kingdom plays host to numerous US Air Force bases, some of which, then as now, carry nuclear arsenals.  So, on a regular basis, along with other dead-beat, Commie-loving, long-haired anarchist hippie peaceniks – who else would be against the possession and threatened use of weapons which would destroy the planet in order to “defend” a narrow national vanity – I would troop off to one of those bases, Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire.  And there we would stand for several hours outside the razor wire perimeter with our banners and signs.  It always seemed to rain on the days we went.  On this day that stays in my mind, I was standing very close to the razor wire and the guard patrolling on the other side came right up to me and stared directly at me, contempt dripping from his face.  I stared dumbly back.  Finally, he muttered a few carefully chosen words which delicacy prevents me from repeating here in front of the ladies, spat at me, and continued on his way, evidently pleased with himself that he had shown me what for.

I have seldom felt so utterly the futility of what I was doing.  I wasn’t changing the world.  I wasn’t saving it from the insanity of nuclear annihilation.  I wasn’t a fearless warrior for peace.  I was just a deluded middle-class parson standing in the rain making a fool of himself.

Perhaps I remember that vigil and my feeling so chastened because, as serendipity would have it, the very next day I stumbled across an essay by the late and very great English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch.  Perhaps you recall seeing the movie starring Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, called simply Iris, about her remarkable life and then sad and sudden decline into dementia and death.  The essay was called The Invincibility of Goodness.  It’s almost thirty years now since I first read it, but I have often returned to it.  Especially at this Easter season.

To paraphrase Murdoch very loosely, her essential argument is that goodness is “pointless.”  She uses the word “pointless” with a subtle but profound double meaning.  The world, she says, is pointless.  It is without design or purpose.  Therefore life in this world is pointless, as pointless as it is precarious.  We, in our individual littleness, are not part of a grand scheme; we are not actors, witting or otherwise, in a grand cosmic drama which is drawing to its inevitable if unknowable conclusion.  Life is an accident, she says.  It simply is.  And we discover ourselves to be participants in that life – feeble, frail, and frequently frightened.  This life is not the ante-chamber to glory.  This life is pointless because it does not lead to anything else.  And whatever we do in this life, of good or ill, is therefore pointless.

But, lest you think that this pointlessness leads Murdoch to an existential nihilistic despair or a self-absorbed escapist hedonism, in fact she draws exactly the opposite conclusion.  Do good, she says, not because it necessarily will lead to the saving of the world or the creation of the kingdom of heaven on earth or because of any other worthwhile end result.  Do good simply for its own sake.  Do good simply because it is important to do so.  Its very pointlessness is what makes it worthwhile.  It is what grants it its virtue.  The only thing which is constantly and eternally true about the universe, argues Murdoch, is its pointlessness.  Therefore, to be part of what is eternal, participate in its pointlessness.  The pointlessness of being and doing good.

She draws the analogy of art.  She writes:

“The arts, especially literature and painting, show us the peculiar sense in which the concept of virtue is tied on to the human condition.  They show us the absolute pointlessness of virtue while exhibiting its extreme importance; the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue.  The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.  Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form…. Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality…  It is a kind of goodness by proxy.  Most of all, it exhibits to us the connection in human beings, of clear realistic vision with compassion.  The realism of a great artist is essentially both pity and justice.”

For me, the goodness, nay the greatness, of Jesus as he faced the desolation of his own impending death was not that he did so as the fully cognizant incarnate Son of God, about to face a rather uncomfortable and unpleasant few hours but fully assured that he would soon return to glory. His greatness is that he did so in the likely knowledge that all that he had done, all that he had taught and wanted so dearly for his people, all of his struggle and sacrifice, all of it was about to be brought to naught.  All of his virtue and his goodness had been pointless.  And yet, in spite of that pointlessness, perhaps even because of it, he remained faithful and good.  The invincibility of goodness lies in its pointlessness.

There are many messages in this Easter season.  Of all religious festivals, Easter is the richest seam to mine, without recourse to any of the more improbable orthodox Christian doctrines.  The message I choose to offer you this morning is that Jesus remained faithful to goodness even unto death, and his doing so was pointless, and it is within that very pointlessness that is discovered its universality and its invincibility.  And two thousand years later, his pointlessness has lost none of its power.  It is that pointlessness which offers us the daring challenge: might we too be good, might we too do good, might we too offer ourselves steadfast even in the absence of guarantee?

Whether in the market square calling for others to repent, whether standing at the razor wire confronting the indifference of overwhelming military might, whether whatever it is in the struggle of the moment, our own life is pointless, the universe is pointless, and therein lies the wonder.  Therein lies the possibility.  Therein lies the call.  Do you hear the call?  Will you answer?

Readings from the Easter Service,  March 27, 2016

Easter Exultet, by James Broughton

Shake out your qualms.

Shake up your dreams.

Deepen your roots.

Extend your branches.

Trust deep water and head for the open,

even if your vision shipwrecks you.

Quit your addiction to sneer and complain.

Open a lookout.

Dance on a brink.

Run with your wildfire.

You are closer to glory

leaping an abyss than upholstering a rut.

Not dawdling.

Not doubting.

Intrepid all the way

Walk toward clarity.

At every crossroad

Be prepared to bump into wonder.

Only love prevails.

En route to disaster insist on canticles.

Lift your ineffable out of the mundane.

Nothing perishes;

nothing survives; everything transforms!

Honeymoon with Big Joy!

 

Prayer

O God, we thank thee for the stir of thy Spirit within us;

for the courage which is equal to every new day;

for the hopes which rise out of the failures of yesterday;

for the resolve which lifts its head above wrong and woe, and affirms its right to repent and begin again;

for the life which cannot be holden by death;

for the healing which comes to wounded hearts through time;

for the sunrise which is greater than our fires and ashes;

for the joy which breaks in we know not how and when least expected;

for the disappointment which releases better desire;

for the darkness where the roots grow;

for the golden thread of valor and goodwill never lost through all our strange wanderings;

for all the labors of those who have sown that others may reap;

for the high calls of duty in our day and time;

for the goodness which is at the heart of the world;

for the spirit of Jesus;

for all the saints; for all we love;

for the longing of this our prayer.

 

“Easter” by Joy Croft

A myth is not a tall tale.  Quite the reverse.  Whether it is true or false historically speaking, a living myth is true to life.  The story of Jesus has lasted because it proved true to life after human life.

Daily, ordinary people show extraordinary courage.  Grasped by some vision of a better life, a better world, they declare it and live by it, although bystanders insist the time is wrong, the idea is nonsense or worse, although there is no guarantee of a happy ending. And all too often, there is no happy ending.  Who has not cherished a dream that would not come true?  Have we not all known the scourge of uncomprehending rejection, the pain of defeat?  That pain is as real as the pain of the crucifixion.  That death is real too: the irredeemable death of dreams.  Yet there is hope beyond the grave, and meaning to the suffering.  New visions can rise from the ashes, wiser and more compassionate ones.

There is meaning: there is value.  Yet, when darkness surrounds us, it is hard to believe.  At such times, let us turn to the tale of one who lived and died on such a scale that his significance is undeniable.  The Easter story is our small passion tides writ large.  So let this man’s faithfulness till death dignify our own acts of faith.  Did he die?   did he rise again?  Let the truth of it rest within us, giving us courage, helping us hope.

 

“He is risen” by Clinton Lee Scott

Jesus is risen from the dead.  The centuries have not been able to bury him.

Forsaken by his friends, sentenced to die with thieves, his mangled body buried in a borrowed tomb, he has risen to command the hearts of millions, and to haunt our hate-filled world with the restlessness of undying hopes.

The years bring him increasingly to life.  The imperial forces that tried to destroy him have long ago destroyed themselves.  Those who passed judgment upon him are remembered only because of him.

Military might and political tyranny still stalk the earth; they too shall perish, while the majesty of the carpenter-prophet bearing his cross on the hill will remain to rebuke the ways of violence.

by Kia Hatch and Frank Lawrence

Statements by people who have orbited planet Earth

After an orange cloud – formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air current – reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat.   Vladimir Kovalyonok, USSR

From space I saw Earth – indescribably beautiful with the scars of national boundaries gone.  Muhammed Ahmad Faris, Syria

The first day or so we all pointed to our countries.  The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents.  By the fifth day we were aware only of one Earth.  Sultan Bin Salman-al-Saud, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

As I looked down, I saw a large river meandering slowly along for miles, passing from one country to another without stopping.  I also saw huge forests, extending across several borders.  And I watched the extent of one ocean touch the shores of separate continents.  Two words leapt to mind as I looked down on all this: commonality and interdependence.  We are one world.  John-David Bartoe, USA

During a space flight, the psyche of each astronaut is reshaped.  Having seen the sun, the stars, and our planet, you become more full of life, softer.  You begin to look at all living things with greater trepidation and you begin to be more kind and patient with the people around you.  Boris Volynov, USSR

One morning I woke up and decided to look out the window to see where we were.  We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow, the first snow we ever saw from orbit.  Light and powdery, it blended with the contours of the land, with the veins of rivers.  I thought – autumn, snow – people are busy getting ready for winter.  A few minutes later we were flying over the Atlantic, then Europe, then Russia.  I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same here as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same.  And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth.  It does not matter what country you look at.  We are all Earth’s children, and we should treat her as our Mother.  Alexander Aleksandrov, USSR

Before I flew I was already aware of how small and vulnerable our planet is: but only when I saw it from space, in all its ineffable beauty, did I realize that humankind’s most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.  Sigmund Jahn, Germany

 

Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different.  It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep Black and velvety cosmos, seeing – rather than knowing for sure – that there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy or time, of space in the cosmos – that it was beyond our rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a non-rational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.  There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.

On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.  The peaks were the recognition that it is a harmonious, purposeful, creating universe.  The valleys came in recognizing that humanity was not behaving in accordance with that knowledge.

We went to the moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.  Edgar Mitchell, USA

 

From Endymion, by John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Its loveliness increases. It will never

Pass into nothingness, but still will keep

A bower of quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, we are wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days

Of all the unhealthy and o’erdarkened ways

Made for our searching.  Yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our darkened spirits.

 

The Bright Field, by R. S. Thomas

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it.  I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past.  It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seems as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

 

The First Spring Day, by Christina Rossetti

I wonder if the sap is rising yet,

If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate,

If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun

And crocus fires are kindling one by one:

Sing, robin, sing;

I still am sore in doubt concerning Spring.

 

I wonder if the springtide of this year

Will bring another Spring both lost and dear;

If heart and spirit will find out their Spring,

Or if the world alone will bud and sing:

Sing, hope, to me;

Sweet notes, my hope, soft notes for memory.

 

The sap will surely quicken soon or late,

The tardiest bird will twitter to a mate;

So Spring must dawn again with warmth and bloom,

Or in this world, or in the world to come:

Sing, voice of Spring,

Till I too blossom and rejoice and sing.

 

Religion in everything, by John Ruskin

There is religion in everything around us, a calm and holy religion in the inbreathing things in Nature.  It is a meek and blessed influence, stealing in as it were unawares upon the heart.; it comes quickly, and without excitement; it has no terror, no gloom, it does not rouse up the passions; it is untrammeled by creed…

It is written on the arched sky, it looks out from every star; it is on the sailing cloud and in the invisible wind; it is among the hills and valleys of the earth where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter; or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of green foliage; it is spread out like a legible language upon the broad face of an unsleeping ocean; it is the poetry of Nature, it is that which uplifts the spirit within us… And which opens to our imagination a world of spiritual beauty and holiness.

 

White Heron, by John Ciardi

What lifts the heron

leaning on the air

I praise, without a name.

A crouch a flare, a long stroke

Through the cumulus of trees

A shaped thought at the sky

Then gone.  O rare!

 

St Francis, being happiest on his knees,

would have cried, “Father!”

Cry anything you please, but praise.

Praise the white original burst

of those two soft hissing kites.

When saints praise heaven, lit by doves and rays

I sit by pond scum till the air recites its heron back

And doubt all else,

but praise.

 

Through the Earth I am aware, by Elizabeth Birtles

I am a part of the earth.

I am a part of the solid, unshakeable,

Immutable rock

Of the mountain.

A part of the stark, rain-washed slabs of slate,

A part of the crumbling granite of shining boulders.

I am part of what makes

The green rounded hill

With its splashes of laughing yellow gorse.

Through the earth I am aware

of what I am:

All that is firmly fixed and endures forever,

All that is shifting imperceptibly,

Being gently folded and unfolded,

All that holds the possibility

Of shattering violence and eruption;

All that is contained in

Is, and Was, and Shall Be.

 

For such awareness, coming from the Earth,

I give my thanks today

For the earth, and my part in it.

 

On Learning How to See, Part II

a sermon by Jerry Jacoby

at the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains

March 6, 2016

         As many of you know, I am a retired engineer, and during my thirty-year career I learned much about the history of science, although it was mostly catch as catch can. I was particularly impressed with the book Connections1, by James Burke, which was made into a television series by the same name. Burke selected a component of modern society, for example plastic, and researched the steps—backwards—about how that component of society came to be discovered and then developed into a usable product. But in the book and the TV series he told the story forward, beginning in ancient times. I recall being fascinated with each episode of the TV series, wondering, half way through, how the story was all going to come together. I thought history should always be taught that way, by topic, so that it would come alive; never mind the recitation of endless, boring lists of what king reigned when and for how long, and who came next.

I mentioned the process as “catch as catch can,” because the science and engineering courses focused on the technical aspects of the subject, and history was only occasionally touched upon. Nevertheless, it was clear that there is a whole universe out there, so to speak, just waiting to be discovered. Consequently, I am what Alan Sokal in a recent book described as a “modest realist.” He summarized my philosophical outlook in a few lines:

…there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the … scientific method.2

The term “epistemological strictures” refers to the disciplined method of gaining knowledge. Later in his book, Sokal wrote a thirty-page chapter entitled “Defense of a modest scientific realism.” In the mathematically oriented sciences, these laws are usually encoded in mathematical equations, some of them very complicated. In social sciences, scientists first gather large amounts of information and then construct a narrative that incorporates as much of that information as possible. Then new information provides a test of the narrative. For example in developmental psychology, the narrative of human development (over simplified) predicts that humans proceed through stages from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to world-centric, and so on, with each stage providing the individual a broader, more encompassing perspective. When psychologists study groups of humans, they observe that this qualitative development takes place in the predicted order. And thus the narrative is verified.3

I want to tell you today about part of the universe that I personally discovered in 1982, and have spent the last thirty-four years exploring. I’ll spend the last five minutes or so explaining what I think it means for all of us. The tale begins in the fall of 1973, shortly after the personal tragedy I told you about in my sermon three years ago next month. A man met me in the hallway outside my office one afternoon. I had never seen him before. He expressed condolences for my recent loss and then handed me this book: Life after Life4, by Dr. Raymond Moody, Jr. He added that he thought I would find it “comforting.” Then he turned and walked away, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

As you can see, it’s a small book, with fairly large type and wide margins, and someone who focuses might get through it in a couple of hours. As I recall, I did so shortly thereafter. Life After Life is about near-death experiences. But for some reason the book did not speak to me. So I closed it and put it on the shelf, where it stayed for years, except for four moves that briefly interrupted its dust gathering.

Time went by, and I lived my life. Then, and it must have been in 1982 (call it eight years later), I happened to be in the Los Alamos County Public Library looking through the new books, and found a second book, Recollections of Death5, by Dr. Michael Sabom. “Hello,” I thought to myself, “what’s this?”

So I checked it out. Sabom relates, beginning on page 3, how he was introduced to near-death experiences in 1976, by Sarah Kreutziger, at his adult Sunday school class, at a Methodist church in Gainesville, Florida. She reviewed for the class Moody’s book, Life after Life. Sabom wrote that at the end of the class, “The kindest thing I could find to say at the moment was, ‘I don’t believe it.’ ”

But he and Kreutziger decided to ask around, so to speak, among their patients. He was completing his first year of cardiology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and she had daily contact with patients in the kidney dialysis unit at a hospital in Gainesville. On page 4, I came to this paragraph: (Sabom is speaking.)

The third patient I approached was a middle-aged housewife from Tampa who, by her medical records, had suffered several near-death crisis events of various sorts. She was in the hospital for routine diagnostic tests. I met her in her room one evening about eight o’clock, and we had a lengthy discussion about the medical details of her previous illnesses. Finally, I asked her if she had had any experiences during the times she was unconscious and critically ill. As soon as she was convinced that I was not an underground psychiatrist posing as a cardiologist, she began describing the first near-death experience I had heard in my medical career. To my utter amazement, the details matched the descriptions in Life After Life. I was even more impressed by her sincerity and the deep personal significance her experience had had for her. At the conclusion of the interview, I had the distinct feeling that what this woman had shared with me that night was a deeply personal glimpse into an aspect of medicine of which I knew nothing.6

I confess, after this paragraph I was hooked. I read Recollections from cover to cover and eventually bought my own copy. (Note that its dust jacket got lost some time in the last thirty-four years.) After Recollections, it would not be an exaggeration to say I read everything I could find on the subject. This pile of books [gesture to the card table beside the pulpit] are the ones I’ve read. The subject of near-death experiences was not taught in the community college in Los Alamos, and it’s not taught at Sierra College either, so I am self-taught on this subject. I have no credentials in this subject, nor any related subject.

So what is a near-death experience? An example will illustrate, and I have to advise this congregation that both Moody and Sabom are Christian doctors. Consequently, they frequently use terms that I’m confident some members of UUCM would find personally offensive.   So, here is an example from The Light Beyond, published in 19887. A woman experienced an allergic reaction to the anesthetic while undergoing an operation, and suffered a cardiac arrest. She related afterwards,

I found myself floating up toward the ceiling. I could see everyone around the bed very plainly, even my own body. I thought how odd it was that they were upset about my body. I was fine and I wanted them to know that, but there seemed to be no way to let them know. It was as though there were a veil or a screen between me and the others in the room.

I became aware of an opening, if I can call it that. It appeared to be elongated and dark, and I began to zoom through it. I was puzzled yet exhilarated. I came out of this tunnel into a realm of soft, brilliant love and light. The love was everywhere. It surrounded me and seemed to soak through into my very being. At some point I was shown, or saw, the events of my life. They were in a kind of vast panorama. All of this is really just indescribable. People I knew who had died were there with me in the light—a friend who had died in college, my grandfather, and a great-aunt, among others. They were happy, beaming.

I didn’t want to go back, but I was told that I had to by a man in light. I was being told that I had not completed what I had to do in life.

I came back into my body with a sudden lurch.7

The most common reaction at this point by skeptics everywhere is “hallucination,” in a word, and I agree that, in and of itself, this particular experience can’t be distinguished from a hallucination. However! That brings up the topic of veridical studies. Kenneth Ring writes:

Perhaps the best known case of this kind is that of a woman named Maria, originally recounted by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark. Maria was a migrant worker, who, while visiting friends for the first time in Seattle, had a severe heart attack. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was quickly resuscitated.

The next day, Clark was asked to look in on her, and during their conversation, Maria began to tell Clark of her [out of body experience] during her arrest. Maria told the usual tale of being able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. Clark, who had heard about [near-death experiences] but was skeptical of them—and of Maria’s story—listened with feigned but seemingly empathic respect to the patient’s account of what was, for Clark, her bizarre-sounding narrative. Inwardly, as she now confesses, Clark found plausible explanations to dismiss it—until Maria mentioned something highly unusual.

At this point, she told Clark that she did not merely remain looking down from the ceiling; instead, she found herself outside the hospital. Specifically, she said, having been distracted by an object on the ledge of the third floor of the north wing of the building, she ‘thought herself up there.’ And when she ‘arrived,’ she found herself, as Clark put it, ‘eyeball to shoelace’ with—of all things—a tennis shoe on the ledge of the building! Maria then proceeded to describe this shoe in minute detail, mentioning, among other things, that the little toe had a worn place in the shoe, and that one of its laces was tucked underneath the heel. Finally, and with some emotional urgency, Maria asked Clark to please try to locate that shoe: She desperately needed to know whether she had ‘really’ seen it.

[Ring continued] I have been to Harborview Hospital myself, and can tell you that the north face of the building is quite slender, with only five windows showing from the third floor. When Clark arrived there, she did not find any shoe—until she came to the middlemost window on the floor, and there, on the ledge, precisely as Maria had described it, was the tennis shoe.

Now, on hearing a case like this, [Ring went on] one has to ask: What is the probability that a migrant worker visiting a large city for the first time, who suffers a heart attack and is rushed to a hospital at night would, while having a cardiac arrest, simply “hallucinate” seeing a tennis shoe—with very specific and unusual features—on the ledge of a floor higher than her physical location in the hospital?8

Concluding the story, Clark retrieved the shoe and took it to Maria, and the shoe became veridical evidence that near-death experiences are not—emphatically not—hallucinations. I have read similar accounts by other authors. For example, a patient, while having an out-of-body experience, “saw” a single tennis shoe on the roof of the hospital. Subsequently a medical worker went up to the roof (aided by a janitor) and found the shoe exactly where the patient said it would be. Trying to keep it a little light, Ring points out that one of the mysteries of this field is how these single shoes, that is, not a pair of shoes, came to be where they were.

At this point, it seems to me, we need to avoid two extremes. At one extreme is gullibility, which means to be easily deceived. The Desiderata says it exactly: “Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery.” Oh yes indeed it is. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is sometimes said that it’s important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

The other extreme is described by Dr. Elisa Medhus, a physician in Texas:

Being raised by two atheists was, in many ways, like housing the mind in an iron box with no windows or doors. It did have its advantages. I didn’t have to think or question; my mind was closed to the two-way flow of all ideas related to life after death. On the other hand, it left me with no tools with which to explore that subject.

Throughout my life, I have encountered many examples of the existence of life after death, but my doubts have tested the sturdiness of my iron box. For example, I stumbled upon a television show covering the many uncanny visions and predictions of Edgar Cayce, American spirit translator and founder of the Association for Research and Enlightenment. I read a fascinating New York Times article about toddler twins found inexplicably speaking the ancient language of Aramaic. I encountered a news report about a Seattle woman who had a near-death experience following a heart attack. While allegedly in an out-of-body state, the woman noticed a tennis shoe, with the laces folded underneath the heel, stuck on a ledge of the hospital’s third floor. The exact shoe was later retrieved by hospital staff, from the exact location the woman specified.

Although I couldn’t explain the uncanny accuracy of some spiritual communicators’ predictions, the seemingly indisputable accounts of near-death experiencers, and the extraordinary past-life stories told by children, I remained stubbornly close-minded.9

In the same vein, Roger J. Woolger, Ph.D., wrote: “When I graduated from Oxford University in the mid-sixties with a joint degree in behavioral psychology and analytic philosophy, my mind had been put into a carefully tailored straitjacket, though I hardly knew it at the time.”10

So how can we maintain a balance between gullibility and extreme skepticism? Let’s admit that it’s not easy. There are a couple of guidelines I’ve found helpful. First, consider all the evidence—which is impossible, of course. This pile of books about the near-death experience is only a fraction of what’s available. But I believe it is a major mistake to consider only one account, analyze it in meticulous detail, itemizing everything wrong, and then tar every other account with the same brush. In my opinion, that approach is dishonest. So how many accounts are enough? There is no objective answer to that question, but I found that after a couple of dozen or so, the accounts became repetitious, and I felt it was time to move on.

Let’s also admit that these stories are anecdotal evidence, with all the problems that implies. So proof in the sense used by the physical sciences is not possible. However, it is possible to take the approach of jurisprudence in these United States. Every working day, around the country, juries are instructed to weigh the evidence they have heard and reach a verdict: Is the defendant guilty as charged beyond a reasonable doubt? So we can ask such questions as, are the accounts consistent with one another? Can some aspect of a particular account be verified by witnesses? For example, if a patient has a near-death experience and describes what one of the doctors does, we can ask the doctor if he did what was described.

Third, recall what I said about the scientific method in the social sciences. With enough of these accounts it becomes possible to construct a narrative, or a descriptive model of the near-death experience. That has been done by others, but I think we each need to do it ourselves, and that is what I propose doing in the two Chalice Circles that meet tomorrow afternoon and evening. Specifically, I suggest we look closely at these accounts and be a jury ourselves.

More important than the near-death experience itself, I believe, are the long-term effects of the experience on the people who have had them. The first person to systematically investigate this question with enough people to attain statistical significance was Dr. Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist in The Netherlands. He and his team interviewed survivors of cardiac arrest and divided them into two groups: those that had a near-death experience and those that didn’t. Subsequently, the team followed both groups of people for eight years. They reported the results in the British medical journal Lancet in 2001. Subsequently, in 2004, van Lommel summarized the results as follows:

This study was designed to assess whether the transformation in attitude toward life and death following an NDE is the result of having an NDE or the result of the cardiac arrest itself. In this follow-up research into transformational processes after NDE, we found a significant difference between patients with and without an NDE. The process of transformation took several years to consolidate. Patients with an NDE did not show any fear of death, they strongly believed in an afterlife, and their insight in what is important in life had changed: love and compassion for oneself, for others, and for nature. They now understood the cosmic law that everything one does to others will ultimately be returned to oneself: hatred and violence as well as love and compassion. Remarkably, there was often evidence of increased intuitive feelings. Furthermore, the long lasting transformational effects of an experience that lasts only a few minutes was a surprising and unexpected finding.11

Finally, before I close, I would like to get up front and personal, and explain what all this means to me.

First, I have been studying this genre of books for thirty-four years, ever since I found Recollections of Death on the new-book shelves at the Los Alamos County Public Library. In addition to this pile of books on the near-death experience, there are four other piles of books on related subjects. And I am persuaded by all this evidence, beyond the slightest doubt, that the Spirit World is real, and that the near-death experience is a window into that Spirit World.

At a very minimum, the evidence is that our true essence is spiritual, and that each of us is currently living in a human body. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings have a human experience.” When our bodies die, our consciousness will move effortlessly into the Spirit World, where it will continue its existence. The evidence indicates that the Spirit World is a place of great beauty permeated with love. When the apostle John wrote the letter we call First John, he wrote that “God is Love.” Later in the same letter, he wrote “God is light, and in him there is no darkness.” He must have had a near-death experience and tried, very inadequately, to tell us what the Spirit World is like. Modern people return from a near-death experience and tell us the same thing.

Another implication of all this evidence, as I see it, is that every major doctrine of modern Christianity13 is wrong. Jesus was not born of a virgin. Jesus is not and was not God. In fact, historians of mythology discovered many years ago another mythical figure called Mithra, who (according to the story) lived in ancient Persia in the third and fourth century before the Common Era. The story of Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the story of Mithra of Persia, except that the former has been adapted to the Palestinian culture. You can look it up. When you get home after church, Google “Mithraism.” Mithra is spelled with an i: M-i-t-h-r-a. Please have the wit to realize that Catholic writers have conflict of interest, but there are scholars who tell the story straight.

I agree that there was probably a real man upon whom the myth was built. A small body of evidence suggests his name was Yeshua, and his intimate friends called him Yeshi. The evidence suggests he was a social reformer, that he did in fact run afoul of the religious authorities (called the temple cult), and that he was in fact crucified. Archaeologists found his burial box, and you can read that story in a book called The Jesus Family Tomb.12 The authors estimated the odds that the story is exactly as it seems—those odds are about two-and-a-half million to one.

Further, Jesus did not die for our sins. The whole idea of sin needs to be thrown into the garbage for the rubbish it is. The life review shows that we are all accountable for how we live our lives, but any judgment about it is ours to make.

And lastly, Jesus is not coming again. Neither is the Jewish Messiah. Both of those doctrines imply that we don’t have to solve our problems, because Jesus will make all things right when he comes back. Or the Messiah will restore Israel to the glory of Solomon. So they proclaim that we can leave it to someone else to solve all our problems. So we don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out what’s wrong with our educational system or our health care system or our political system. So those doctrines are bad psychology and bad religion as well.

Closer to home, the near-death experience, as a class of human experiences, suggests that humanists need to re-examine their meaning of the supernatural.

One of the invisible piles of evidence is about reincarnation. About six years ago I had a life-between-lives session with Jeri Roraback in Sacramento. Following that session I spent a huge amount of time reading and reflecting on what I learned. The knowledge I gained during that session, along with the study, allowed me to understand the grand sweep of my life and why I’m here—my life’s purpose. Consequently, when Jan e-mailed me one day two-and-a-half years ago and asked if we could get together for a conversation, I readily agreed.

And that purpose informs my behavior today. A seemingly trivial, but I claim profound experience happened about a year ago. Jan is in charge of the laundry at our home, and we change the bed linens once a week. We have been in complete agreement about what the re-made bed should look like since day one of our re-marriage. But how to get the bed from a bare mattress to a made-up bed has been the source of great frustration. And so, we found ourselves on opposite sides of the bed one Wednesday morning, glaring at one another with total frustration. And I found myself saying, “It would be easy for me to throw up my hands in disgust, and walk out with the words, ‘Make the bed however you want.’ But that response is a simple, easy-to-understand, wrong answer.’ Similarly, (I continued speaking to her) it would be easy for you to throw up your hands in disgust and walk out with the words, ‘Make the bed however you want.’ That response is also a simple, easy-to-understand, wrong answer. The only right answer is to keep at it.” So we did. Jan wanted the top sheet farther toward the head of the bed, and she explained why. I decided that was actually a pretty good idea. I wanted Jan to start the blanket at the head of the bed, make it even there, and then spread it toward the foot of the bed, without pulling on it. She agreed to do that. And so on and so forth. Now, on Wednesday mornings, after having kept at it and not walked away, we’re able to make the bed—together—harmoniously. And sometimes even laugh together about it afterwards.

If you take nothing else from this sermon, remember the concept of easy-to-understand, simple, wrong answers, because our society is full of them.

Amen. Shalom. Namaste. Blessed be.

————— 4,112 words, 29 minutes —————

References:

James Burke, Connections, Little, Brown and Company, 1978.
Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 7.
Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World, Integral Books, 2006, chapters 1 and 2.
Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D., Life after Life, Bantam Books, Bantam edition, November 1976. How this book, printed in late 1976, came to be put in my hands in the fall of 1973 is a major mystery to me.
Michael B. Sabom, M.D., Recollections of Death, Harper & Row, 1982.
Ibid, page 4.
Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, The Light Beyond, Bantam Books, 1988, p. 62, as reported by Jeffrey Long, M.D. and Paul Perry in Evidence of the Afterlife, Harper Collins, 2010, p. 25.
Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience, Insight Books, page 65 and 66.
Elisa Medhus, My Son and the Afterlife: Conversations from the Other Side, Atria Paperback, 2013, page xxiii.
Roger J. Woolger, Other Lives, Other Selves: A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives, Doubleday, 1987, page 3.
Pim van Lommel, M.D., “About the Continuity of Our Consciousness,” in Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness, edited by Calixto Machado and D. Alan Shewmon, Springer, 2004, page 118.
Simcha Jacobovici and Chales Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb, Harper Collins, 2007.
I use the term modern Christianity to distinguish the modern version from the original, as described by Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker in Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. The two theologians show how original Christianity, up until about the eighth century, was based on paradise in this world. “In Christianity’s second millennium the Crucifixion expelled paradise from earth.” Page 224. There are 420 pages of text, followed by 95 pages of notes; it’s a major read.