Past Services

by Rev. David Usher

“The thing about being a Unitarian Universalist that I like is that I can believe anything I want.”  I wonder how many times I have heard that, or a variant.  I wonder how many times, in explaining to an enquirer what Unitarian Universalism is, I have said something which might have been interpreted as us being the church where you can believe anything you want.  Because we are non-dogmatic, non-creedal, because we do not gather around a shared and enforced statement of belief, because we gladly include in our number theists and non-theists, humanists and Christians, Buddhists and Jews and Pagans and Pantheists and Panentheists and just about any other theological category and sub-division you might care to think of, because we affirm that in matters of faith, it is the individual and his or her own reason, conscience and experience which are the final arbiters and not The Church, not the Magisterium, because of all of that, all of which I celebrate, it is tempting to conclude that each and every one of us can believe anything we want.

But no we can’t.  That is not who we are.  If that is how we understand ourselves, then we have abandoned our long-held heritage of intellectual and ethical rigor.  If that is how we understand ourselves, we have become weak-minded and self-indulgent, and that is not, I think, how we want to be.

This morning my sermon is about the third in the occasional series of sermons about the seven Unitarian Universalist principles, which is “Acceptance of one another, and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.”

Let’s look at that, phrase by phrase.  Acceptance of one another.  Here’s what that means to me.  It means that when someone comes through that front door for the first time, we seek to honor the authenticity of their spiritual journey so far.  We want to say, “Here is a person whose worth and dignity we honor and respect, whose spiritual and religious needs are as valuable as our own.  We do not demand that they renounce those things of their past which remain dear to them, that they conform themselves to our pre-determined theological mold.

And not only to newcomers, but to each of us who have been around a while as well.  If your way of experiencing and interpreting the world is through a Christian lens, you are entitled to expect that others here who see the world differently will honor you and accept you warmly into the circle.  Equally, if your way of experiencing and interpreting the world is through a humanist lens, you are entitled to expect that others here who see the world differently will honor you and accept you warmly into the circle.  Whatever your personal theological lens, it is the third Unitarian Universalist principle that you will be accepted for who you are and what you believe.  But, and this is the catch, as you are accepted, so must you accept.  As others make room for you, so you must make room for others.

It is fine to disagree.  It is not fine to disparage.

Let’s consider the word which is often the single most controversial word in a Unitarian Universalist context.  God.  For some of us, the word is deeply problematic, and we would be perfectly happy never to hear it again.  It conjures up images of a Being which we find intellectually untenable, particularly in the way it is often portrayed in the bible – punitive, partisan, judgmental, cruel.  We find such a God morally questionable as well.  Perhaps we grew up with that God and now we have discarded it, as we have discarded much of our childlike way of understanding the world, and we don’t like to be reminded of what we have left behind.

And for some of us, the word God is deeply evocative of all that is most precious to them in our spiritual life.  It speaks to us of mystery and reverence, it speaks of the need for humility in the face of transcendence, of a deep connection with all that is that goes beyond the rational, the scientific, the immediate.  For some of us, the word God is an emotion, not a thought, not about what we believe with our minds but what we feel in our hearts.

And here’s the thing.  Wherever you stand on that God spectrum, there are others here in this room with you, right now, who stand somewhere else along the line.  None of us has the right to say, Because this is where I stand, you must stand here also.  That is what, for me, is so wonderful and exhilarating about being a Unitarian Universalist, when we are at our best, which, let’s face it, we aren’t always.

Because it is the most stimulating of conversations.  A conversation, not a debate, because a conversation is about listening as much as it is about talking, a conversation is about wanting to learn from the other, it is not about trying to convert the other.  I have no interest in talking about religion, or politics for that matter, with someone else who is not open to what I have to say, whose mind is already made up and closed for business.  You know, that boorish uncle or brother-in-law we all seem to have whom we dread seeing at christmas because of his rants.  But I love talking about religion, or politics, with people with whom I might disagree but who allow me to challenge their thinking as I allow them to challenge mine.  I’m usually not learning much when I am talking.  I do tend to learn much more when I am listening.

So we accept each other as we are.  And.  And!  We expect each other to change.  What does “encouragement to spiritual growth “ mean if not that wherever you are now in your journey, whatever you believe now, we expect you to be open to doing the challenging work of deepening your spirit, of changing your mind, and, perhaps, if necessary, of getting over yourself.  When he stood on the dockside of Delft Harbour in Holland in the year 1620, bidding farewell to most of his pilgrim congregation as they were about to set sail for England and thence to the New World of America on their two boats, the Speedwell and the Mayflower, the Rev John Robinson famously said the words which today we still sing, “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word.”

Revelation is not sealed, it is ongoing.  But what use new revelation if our minds, our eyes, our hearts are closed?  Closed to thought, closed to science, closed to experience, closed to wonder?

Being here means we are also willing to be shaken and stirred from our complacency, from our preconceived notions.  I remember well the interview I had with four worthies all those years ago who were considering whether I should be admitted to study for the ministry.  One of them asked what I believed.  I have no idea now what I said in reply, I would probably cringe if I knew, but I do remember what he said after I had stumbled through whatever I did say. “Well, David,” he said, “I hope you don’t still believe that when you are done here.”  He did not mean that I was wrong.  He meant that the point of my education would be to make me grow intellectually, even if, as T S Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  Maybe so, but we will be richer for having made the journey.

We all might say that we want to grow spiritually, but am I right in saying that none of us really likes being made to change.  We want to grow, as long as we can stay as we are.  The only person who likes change is a set baby.  Sadly, it does not seem to work that way.  That is not an option.

There is a story, I believe a true story, which goes to the heart of this.

In 1947 the hour of eleven on Sunday morning was called the most segregated hour in America.  Sadly, it still is.  Leslie Pennington who was the minister of First Unitarian Society of Chicago wanted to integrate his church.  He didn’t feel justified in going out and recruiting black friends as John Haynes Holmes had done in New York; so, in his Chicago congregation it was voted upon whether or not they agreed to open their doors and welcome people of color.  This vote caused a tremendous ruckus in the church.  One board member, adamantly opposed to integrating the church, objected loudly giving many reasons the church should not be integrated.  In the midst of the heated discussion, another board turned to him and asked, “What is this church for?”  The upset man answered with more arguments against integrating the church.  Again, the man asked the question, “What is this church for?”  In his frustration and anger, the objecting member blurted out, “To change people like me!”

That’s why this church exists.  To change people like you.  To change people like me.  We are challenged to change, to grow, within our congregations, because it is within our congregations that we encounter each other.  Not alone.  Not being spiritual but not religious.  But doing the not always easy work of being vulnerable and safe at the same time.  If not that, what is the point?  The end of that story from Chicago is that the board member chose to leave the church, he was not willing to be changed, but had spoken the truth.  The church exists to change people.  To transform them.  To help them grow.  To make them better than they would otherwise be.  They are you and me.  That’s why we’re here.

We change each other, we help each other to grow, when we are honest with each other; when we say You are welcome, but that behavior is not; when we show compassion and care for each other; when we work together to make the world a better place by feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, speaking out against injustice.  We change each other and help each other to grow when we break bread together, when we do the work of creating and sustaining community, when we hold each other tenderly, and allow ourselves to be held, through life’s hard moments.

by Rev. David Usher

It’s 39 years ago that I finally decided I wanted to a Unitarian minister. It was something I had been toying with for several years, but I had always managed to find an excuse not to do it. But I spent 1976 doing what seems almost an obligatory rite of passage for young Australians, I travelled the world. I did it solo, first to New Zealand, then the Pacific islands, then all over North America and Mexico, and finally to Europe. I had lots of time to think – about life in general and my own in particular, and I knew that as much as I had loved my previous four years as a jackaroo in the |Outback, I was probably not going to spend the rest of my life doing unspeakable things to sheep, particularly if they were other people’s sheep. Especially during my travels around North America, whenever a Sunday came around I would look for a church, UU if possible but if not, whatever looked the friendliest. I had two motives. The first was I was genuinely in search for meaning. The second was, it was nearly always a guaranteed way to be invited back to someone’s house for lunch, maybe even be given a tour of the local area.

Anyway, it was in Montreal on a Monday morning in October 1976 that I finally surrendered and decided I would become a Unitarian minister. There was no loud voice from the sky, no road to Damascus experience, it really was a surrender to the inevitable. I once heard that becoming a minister was a bit like throwing up. You could try to ignore it, you could put it off for a while, but sooner or later, if you really had to do it, you would. That’s how it was for me. When I arrived in the UK I made contact with British Unitarians, and before I knew it I was a student at Oxford, studying for the ministry, and my fate was sealed.

I tell this tale to illustrate that although I was raised in a Unitarian congregation, and it has always been a central part of my self-identity, I have been a professional UU, as it were, for almost four decades. I have spent the bulk of my career in the religion business. It would be reasonable for you to conclude, therefore, that I am pro religion. And you would be right. I think religion is a good thing. I know it has been a good thing in my life; I see it being a good thing in other people’s lives; I believe that the world would be a better place if more people were living genuinely religious lives.

And yet, and yet. There are times when I am deeply embarrassed and ashamed by religion. There are times when I want to disown having anything to do with religion. When I see some of the abuses, some of the distortions, some of the violence, some of the hate, done in the name of religion, I recoil. The history of religion is not always pretty. And religion has been getting a particularly bad press lately.

There are those, the militant atheists in the vanguard, who look at the often ugly history of religion and who therefore denounce all religion as, at best, the fanciful nonsense of the simple-minded or, at worst, the deliberate instrument of human wickedness. But to denounce all religion because of its acknowledged and very regrettable abuses is, I suggest, as misguided as it is misinformed, for at least two reasons. First, religion might be a handy hook on which to hang things, but it usually is not the real cause of its perceived transgressions. The conflict in Northern Ireland, for example, was certainly between Protestants and Catholics, but I assure you they were not fighting each other because of their disagreements about the doctrine of transubstantiation at the Eucharist. The war in Bosnia in the early 1990s pitted Christians against Muslims (the Christians were the brutal aggressors, let us remind ourselves) but the war was essentially about political tribalism. The second reason is that the history of non-religion is not much better. Science continues to invent weapons of terrible destruction. Do we condemn all science? How many millions were slaughtered under Stalin’s militantly atheist regime of terror? Was Maoist China a beacon of civilised enlightenment? Do we condemn all government? This past week I saw the excellent movie, Spotlight, which tells the story of the Catholic church’s cover-up of the sexual abuses of its priests in Boston. A telling indictment, to be sure, but the world of corporate capitalism has frequently been guilty of its own egregious cover-ups. To condemn all religion because of its excesses makes no more sense than to condemn all government or all science or all business because of their excesses.

The demagogues of the land, so unattractively to the forefront during this pre-Presidential season, are falling over themselves and each other in their invective against Islam, demonising it as a religion of hate and violence, totally oblivious to the bitter irony that their invective, spewed in the full ugliness of their Christian self-righteousness, is as hateful and violent as the very thing they are condemning. You would think they might be just a tad shy of displaying their total ignorance of Islam so publicly. Islam is not in itself a hateful or violent religion, though some hateful and violent things are done by a few in its name. Christianity is not in itself a hateful or violent religion, though some hateful and violent things are done by a few in its name. Buddhism is not a hateful or violent religion, though some hateful and violent things are done by a few in its name. It is not religion itself which is hateful or violent (though I did recently re-read the book of Genesis. You want to know about violence done in God’s name? Start right there with Genesis), but hateful and violent things are done in religion’s name.

It seems to me that there are profound differences between good religion and bad religion, differences which are more universalisable – a new word I just invented – than the unreflective bigotry of a simplistic “My religion good, your religion bad”. It is too easy to make artificial distinctions based on nothing more than one’s own particular allegiances, to demonise anyone who marches to the beat of a drum different from our own.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said “Stop, don’t do it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

“Well, there’s so much to live for.”

“Like what?” he demanded.

“Are you religious?” I asked.

He said, “Yes”.

I said, “Me, too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?”

“Christian”

“Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

“Protestant.”

“Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”

“Baptist,” he replied.

“That’s amazing,” I said, “So am I. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”

“Baptist Church of God.”

“Extraordinary! Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?

“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said, “So am I. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”

He said “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.”

I said, “Die, heretic scum”, and pushed him off the bridge.

Yes, the story of the Christian Church, particularly from the Reformation on, has been a story of division and schism, often over the most trivial of theological, liturgical, ecclesiological or interpersonal disagreements. Have you ever marvelled that all except one denomination are named either after their founder – Luther, Swedenborg, Calvin – or because of a form of church governance – Episcopalian, Congregational – or because of a style or feature of their – Baptist, Methodist, Quaker. The one denomination with a theological name is us – Unitarian Universalists – and we are the only ones not gathered around our common theology!

I want to suggest there are some identifiable characteristics which differentiate between good religion and bad religion. Those characteristics have nothing at all to do with which religious tradition they identify with. They are not about being Christian or not, being Muslim or not, being humanist or not. They transcend all such artificial demarcations.

I offer you five such characteristics. I’m happy to wait a few minutes if you want to get out a pen and paper so that you can write them down. This list is not necessarily exhaustive. Perhaps you will think of others that you would like to add to the list.

The first characteristic of good religion is that your religion is meant to be about how you live your life, not how you demand that others must live theirs. You may legitimately express why abortion is against your religious beliefs, for example, but in that case, don’t have one. You may legitimately express why homosexuality is against your religious beliefs, for another example, but in that case, don’t do it. It has become decriminalised. As far as I am aware, it has not been made compulsory. Most especially, men, do not tell women what they must do with their bodies, how they must contort and deny themselves so that they do not threaten your fear of losing your longstanding patriarchal power and privileges. Good religion is how you develop an intelligent and thoughtful set of beliefs and morals and practices that you then apply to your life, not that you try to impose on others.

The second characteristic of good religion, not unrelated to the first, is that is has a strong dose of humility. Let’s face it, folks, when it comes to religious belief, none of us really knows what we are talking about. Is there a God? Who knows! It is not a question for objective verification but personal conviction. What kind of God might it be, if there be one? Who knows! Not me. I know what attributes and qualities I would want a deity to have to warrant my devotion, but I’m not sure God can be designed by my own method of mix-and-match. What happens after we die, and why is there life on this obscure little planet anyway? Good questions. I wish I knew. Actually, I’m kinda glad not to know. I want to dwell in a world infused with mystery and wonder, not just of hard fact. So, given we know so little, would not a little humility in our proclamations be as wise as welcome?

The third characteristic is that good religion should lead you to peace, not war; to forgiveness, not lingering resentment; to generosity of heart and spirit, not to meanness, cruelty or spite. If ever you find yourself using your religion to justify an act of violence against another, your religion is bad religion. Spurn the pulpit peddlers of enmity, whose posturing piety would lead a crusade against difference; whose stocks-in-trade are fear, greed and mistrust, who base their own power on the denial of power to others.

The fourth characteristic? Good religion is a life of action, not passivity. Good religion finds its fruit in the street as much as in the sanctuary, the marketplace as much as in the mosque, the humdrum as much as in the hermitage. Good religion is how you live, not what you profess. It is whom you embrace as your neighbour in the largeness of your heart and the generosity of your actions and the consideration of your words. Good religion is about living this life for its own sake, not the anticipation of a possible next life. Perhaps there is a life after this. Perhaps there isn’t. Whatever you might believe about that, use it to be actively kind in this life.

And the fifth thing about good religion? Do please have a sense of humour about it. Let’s face it, as smart as we think we are, as sophisticated and informed and evolved, we are also, every single one of us, just a little bit ridiculous as well. Take life seriously, by all means, but laugh at yourself as well. As Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Man, we are the glory, jest and riddle of the world. Enjoy the joke. Good religion is not po-faced, dour, severe. Good religion knows the joy of life, for all its sufferings and pain. Good religion takes time to admire the sunset, to linger with a loved one in a moment of tenderness, to rejoice in the miracle of being alive. Here. Now. With others.

So, they are my five defining characteristics of good religion.

It is about how you live, not how you demand others must live.

It is humble, it recognises its human limitations of knowledge, insight and experience.

It leads to a life of peace, not violence; love, not hate; inclusiveness, not division.

It leads to a life in which the sacred and the secular are intimately interfused.

It can laugh at itself, it rejoices in the gift of life.

If a religious person has those five characteristics, I care not one fig what name they go by, what festivals they observe, what scriptures they read or in what building they worship. I care not one fig about the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language the speak or the country they call home. I want to call them my brother and my sister, because I want to be part of that universal family of faith.

by Rev. David Usher

I need to issue a full disclaimer right at the beginning of this sermon. I need to acknowledge my debt to a colleague, Rev. Sue Phillips, who is Regional Lead for the UU congregations in northern New England, and whose article, also called A Declaration of Interdependence, I read this past week and from which I have borrowed heavily, particularly for the first part of this sermon.

In her role as Regional Lead, Sue Phillips comes into contact with numerous congregations, but she writes of the congregation which is her absolute favourite. It is comprised of people all of whom are deeply committed to making Love manifest in their time and place. They understand that how they are says everything about who they are. They have learned that people of all ages need help to live faithful, growthful lives, and that it is the congregation’s collective job to be that help. In answer to the “spiritual-but-not-religious” thing which is so common, they say “One person alone is not a church”. They come together so that they can help each other increase the sum of Love in the world.

This congregation doesn’t talk about “membership”, they talk about “covenant,” and they all take it very seriously. They all accept responsibility for reaching out in Love to those who stray from the covenant, not in a spirit of punishment but because they want no-one ever to be cut off from the benefits of the covenant.

They have a process for being with each other in times of conflict, encouraging people to talk first directly to the person they’re having trouble with, and if that doesn’t work asking another person to help them reconcile. If the conflict becomes intractable, this community recognizes that someone might need to leave, since the peace and well being of the whole is more important than that of any single individual. But they also promise one another that they won’t just leave – they promise not to remove themselves unilaterally from fellowship, and they specifically say that being mad at another person in the congregation is not reason enough to leave. Because folks join the community by entering into covenant, folks can leave only by being released from that covenant.  They have promised themselves and each other that none of them will just take their bat and go home because something has happened which they don’t personally like. They know that the health of the whole is more important than the sensibilities of a single person.

Although this congregation governs itself, they celebrate that there are other congregations like them which also govern themselves but with which they feel connected with them. This congregation knows the importance of showing up for their neighbouring congregations, they promise to look out for their welfare, they promise to worship and celebrate together, to share resources, and to work together to expand their faith in the world.

This, says Sue Phillips, is a community that understands what it means to be Unitarian Universalist, where independence and covenant alchemize into precious religious life. I mentioned at the beginning that Sue Phillips is Regional Lead for Northern New England, and it would be reasonable for you to conclude that that is where this congregation can be found. And you would be right. It is Cambridge, Massachusetts. You might be surprised to learn, however, that the time of this congregation was 1648.

But it is not only there, then, it is here, now. It is in our collective DNA as Unitarian Universalists. That congregation about which Sue Phillips speaks, convened in 1648 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, articulated what is known as the Cambridge Platform, and it has been the basis of our congregational polity ever since. Those good folk of 350 years ago are our ecclesiastical ancestors. They were smart enough to realise that although each congregation of the time gathered independently, they each had responsibilities to others. The Cambridge Platform was a Declaration of Interdependence: a declaration of interdependence between persons within a particular congregation, and a declaration of interdependence between congregations. It was a Covenant to which each and all willingly gave themselves because they knew that however independent they might be in their individual thinking, they could not survive without each other, they could not be strong alone, they could not grasp all truth with only their own small minds.

When the UUA, the Unitarian Universalist Association, our national denomination, was formed in 1961, the result of the amalgamation of two previously separate but friendly groups – the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America – the architects of that union echoed the Cambridge Platform, using the language of covenant. When a congregation joins the UUA, it promises to be part of the inter-connecting network of mutual and reciprocal support. When it formed 21 years ago, this congregation made that promise. The money it gives each year to the UUA is not to pay some centralised bureaucracy, it goes to make programs possible which benefit us all.

When you join this congregation, it is not the same as joining the Golf Club, to which you pay an agreed uniform subscription in return for certain privileges and benefits. Yes, the payment of some money is part of the deal, but it is not an act of transaction, it aspires to be an act of transformation. The amount is for you to decide, depending on your personal circumstances and the extent to which you want your pledge to be a reflection of your personal values, an expression in real terms of how important your spiritual well-being is to you and how much you want to contribute to the community which will nurture your spiritual well-being. You join for the opportunity to give of yourself as much as what you expect to get for yourself. You join to be part of something organic of which you become an integral part, and like an integral part of any body, the health of the whole is possible only when each part is contributing to that health. Cancer is what happens when individual cells within the host body are concerned only with themselves, regardless of their impact on the host body.

Six or so years ago, this congregation adopted a Covenant of Right Relations. In a few moments, I am going to ask you all to say it out loud together. I was not here then, of course, so I can’t relate that history from first hand experience, but I am told this Covenant was adopted in response to a conflict which had been going on within the congregation, and the shared recognition that the conflict could have been handled better if there had been some ground rules for people to abide by. I was shocked when I was told this. I had thought that there had never been any tension or conflict, ever, until I arrived a year ago as your Interim Minister and upset everything and everybody. Or, the adoption of the Covenant might have been the recognition that it is the law of the natural world that when two bodies meet, there is conflict. There needs to be mutual accommodation. The thing is not to avoid conflict but to deal with it creatively and constructively, increasing the strength of each body rather than leading to their destruction.

So, becoming and being part of this congregation is not so much about membership, paying dues in return for prescribed benefits and privileges; it is about covenant. It is about entering into a relationship with the others already here, and entering into a deeper relationship with oneself. Everyone is welcome here as they are. But, having arrived and been welcomed as they are, everyone is also expected to change, expected to grow, expected to be affected by their involvement with the process.

So, what is this Covenant of Right Relations? I invite you to say it with me, whether or not you are formally a member of the congregation. I invite you to say it with me, taking in the meaning of the words and what they are eliciting from you.

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:

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.

Is that easy work? You bet it isn’t. Is it worthwhile work? You bet it is.

So may it be for us all. Amen

by Rev. David Usher

November 22, 2015

After becoming a member of UUCM, it took me 2 years, before I started to understand what membership really meant. When I was a Lutheran all I had to do was say I believed what the church said and I could be a member. The UUCM bylaws say all I have to do is make a pledge and sign the membership book. I have finally learned it is so much more than that. Being a Member gave me a vote and a voice in decision making. But I made a serious commitment that is not addressed in the bylaws.

I never understood why people remained visitors or UUCM Friends for so long. I understand now. It should take time to decide what responsibilities I wanted and seriously consider making the commitment that I took so lightly 5 years ago. I have also learned that I don’t always remember the promise I made and that I continually need to be reminded of the importance of our covenant and what it means to live it.

The term ‘covenant’ is Latin for coming together. It is when two parties agree on what they promise each other. A covenant has stipulations, privileges, and responsibilities. Marriage is a covenant that 2 people make with each other. It is a pledge, a promise and a bond….and hard work.

UUCM is not a club or just another non-profit organization. What sets us apart is our promise – not to an organization, but to one another. We pledge ourselves and our financial support not just for the wellbeing of our Community, but for our own personal health and growth. We pledge to promote and live the principles that guide our lives. We promise to each other that we will live by the Covenant of Right Relations. This is what binds us together.

What does being in covenant with you mean to me?

It means:

I will search for shared purposes and values as we work together
It requires that I have a willingness to dialog with those with whom I disagree

It means:

I will not criticize or belittle a person or group because I do not agree with their opinions or actions, and that
I agree to participate in meaningful conversations about those things

It means:

I must do the hard work of ‘being community’ and that
I promise not to walk away physically or financially when things get rocky or they don’t go the way I want them to go

It means:

I work together with you to make this Community a safe, loving, and respectful place. And it means

I lift up and care for you as we do our work together.

I am still an individual with my own opinions and preferences but our covenant calls me to respect people. It does not require that I agree with them or that I like the same things they do. It requires that I speak with love.

Is everything here done the way I like it to be done? No. But I am not the center of the universe, and I am not the center of UUCM. Not everyone likes the same songs I do, or the same speakers, or the same elements in a Sunday Service. I prefer not hearing the word ‘God’, but others want and need to hear this. I prefer not struggling with a new hymn, but others enjoy the complexity and challenge. I don’t just allow others to have their needs met but our covenant calls me to encourage meeting the needs of others as much as possible.

At UUCM , it is my hope that all people’s needs may be met here, but that’s unrealistic. Not every visitor who comes through our doors finds what they seek. And sadly, sometimes I have to say goodbye to a member who needs to leave and move on to another stage in their life. At those times, I wish them well and grieve the loss.

While writing this, I realized what big promises I have made. The truth of my covenant stares back at me from the page. Suddenly these are not just words that we have all heard before, but actions I need to take each day inside and outside our Community. It is hard work that carries the reward of learning about myself and those with whom I live. It’s about feeling vulnerable and safe at the same time.

Have I always lived up to the covenant I have with you? No. Have I faltered? Yes. But I have found forgiveness and healing here. And for that, I thank you deeply.

by Rev. David Usher

My first ministry was in Atherton, a small town on the western periphery of the Greater Manchester conurbation in north west England.  It was a very nondescript working class town, caught in the grip of Thatcherism so that its only two industries of cotton and coal had been ruthlessly closed down, a town of small red brick terrace houses, in the middle of which improbably was the Unitarian Chapel, a building of truly stunning beauty.

I want to tell you a story of something that happened during my ministry there.  A year or two in, I conducted a wedding.  She had been married before, had two young children, and was about four months pregnant.  He was several years younger.  Anyway, I got to know them some, as you do, and the wedding had been a happy day.  I had not seen either of them again for several months until one sunny afternoon I was walking down the main street and I saw Jimmy standing on a street corner.  So I sauntered up to him, full of the joys of Spring, and greeted him cheerily.

“Hey, Jimmy, how are you doing?”

“Not so great,” he replied.  “The baby died an hour ago.  I’m waiting to meet the kids from school to tell them before they get home.”

Oh no, I thought.  I told him I would go straight to their house.  On the way I was thinking to myself, why could I not have been walking on the other side of the street?  Why did I have to bump into him?  I wish I hadn’t greeted him, and then I wouldn’t have to face this horror.  I had a knot in my stomach as I knocked on the front door.  What could I say?  What could I do?  I had no idea.  Remember, I had been a minister for all of a year or so.  I had never faced a situation like this before.

The woman answered the door.  She was ashen.  She was surprised to see me – how did I know? – but her brain was processing the fact that the minister was standing on her door step just an hour or so after this terrible thing had happened, her baby had died of sudden infant death syndrome.  She held up her hand at me and said “Don’t say anything!”  I was kind of relieved.  She had saved me from my embarrassment at having nothing to say.

I spent the next couple of hours standing mute and helpless in the corner.  I watched as the two older children came home and burst into tears as they flung themselves into their mother’s arms.  I had no idea what to say, what to do.  I felt so utterly useless, like I was little better than a voyeur to this family’s grief.  Finally I made my pathetic excuses and left, with the promise to return the next day for more hours of feeling completely impotent.  A few days later I conducted the funeral, the coffin not much bigger than a shoe box.  As difficult as that was, at least I knew what my role was.

Here is the point of the story.  There is nothing I could immediately do or say which could fix this family’s grief.  There was nothing for me to do except be with them in their pain, their rage, their confusion.  And, more than that, to try to “fix” it would have been deeply offensive.  To have tried to justify this terrible event, to tell them that all of this was part of God’s plan, that Jesus wanted their baby for a sunbeam, that everything happens for a reason, whatever platitudinous bromide I might have come up with that might in any way have been interpreted as telling them what they must do, or how they must understand their grief to make themselves feel better, would not only have been inappropriate, it would have been deeply offensive.  The mother instinctively knew this.  “Don’t say anything” she had said.  She wanted no facile sermonising from the likes of me.  As time passed, I was able to help them some to come to terms with their loss, but first I had to be with them in their pain.  The work of compassion was first and foremost simply to be with them, and with my own discomfort because of my impotence.

This sermon is about the second Unitarian Universalist principle – Justice, Equity and Compassion in Human Relations, and how we make that principle real in the world.  And what I want to say is that those three words roll well off the tongue in that order – justice, equity and compassion – but the truth is they are should be the other way around.  First must come compassion.  First must come the experience of truly being with another in their pain and rage and grief and suffering without trying to fix it, to feel in your bones that this other person is not a statistic, not a number, not an item on a social justice or political agenda, but a person.  Not to immediately start offering our solutions to their problems.

We, who have power, must sit awhile with powerlessness. We, who think we know  so much, must wrestle with the discomfort of our not knowing.  We must be present whatever our own discomfort and confusion.  Without that compassion, a word which means feeling with, that willingness to be truly present with another’s pain, we are little better than technicians, administering technical solutions to what we perceive as technical problems.

Young Susie was late home from school.

“Where have you been?” asked her mother.

“I met Mary on my way home.  Her bicycle had broken, so I stayed to help.”

“But you don’t know anything about fixing a bike” said her mother.

“I know,” replied Susie.  “I stayed to help her cry.”

And what of equity?  I have just finished reading a remarkable book, The Spirit Level, by two British academics, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and its sub-title is Why Equality is Better for Everyone.  This book is not some Marxist rant, but a very well researched and reasoned argument that the greater the income inequality in a society, the greater are all sorts of undesirable consequences.  The research focuses on the major developed nations in the world, but also contrasts income inequalities between the fifty states of the United States.  And here are their findings.  As you increase income inequality, you increase the rates of crime and incarceration, you increase the infant mortality rate, you increase the rates of teenage pregnancy, you increase the rates of homicide, suicide, mental and physical illness, you increase the lack of social cohesion.  You decrease the willingness of neighbour to help neighbour, you decrease levels of community involvement, you decrease standards of literacy and further education, you decrease concern for the environment and the common weal.

The American dream is that upward mobility is available to anyone who works hard, that anyone who really wants it can become a millionaire.  As if being a millionaire in itself is a laudable aim.  But the stark reality is that social mobility is far greater in those societies with higher income equality.  The American dream is a sham.  It does not work.  It is a lie sold to the poor to blame them for their state of chronic poverty.  The United States, a country now with greater income inequality than any other developed country, has less social mobility than any other developed country.  If you are born poor, with very few exceptions, you will remain poor, and you will suffer all the indignities of your poverty until you die, younger than you might have done.

Imagine you are playing Monopoly against one other person.  The other player has been given all of the properties around the board, and $100,000.  You have been given Baltic Avenue and $100.  And of course you lose.  And the reason you lose, obviously, is that you are a lousy Monopoly player.

In other words, as income inequality increases, all of the benefits and advantages of society decrease.  And the reverse is true.  And curiously, it does not matter how you attain income equality.  In some countries with a high level of income equality, such as the Scandinavian countries, the equality is achieved through taxation after income.  In other countries, such as Japan, it is achieved before income.  The means are irrelevant.

But here is the really interesting thing.  You might think that creating a more equal society could be achieved only to the detriment of those who would otherwise be at the top of an unequal society.  That the gains of those coming up from the bottom could come about only through the losses of those being brought down from the top.  But such is not the case.  All of the measures show that those at the top live longer, are healthier in body and mind, are happier in more equal societies.  The delusion is exploded that having lots of money for oneself does not lead to a happier or better life when you are part of a society in which others have so much less.

And justice?  Is there anyone who is against justice?  But what do we mean by justice.  I had a fascinating experience thirty years ago.  I was asked to be part of a four person delegation of the British Unitarian Peace Fellowship that went to Northern Ireland.  This was in 1985, when The Troubles were at their height, when the Irish Republican Army was planting bombs in Ireland and mainland Britain (bombs largely bought with money from the United States, by the way.  Do you want to talk about the evils of financing international terrorism?).  Belfast was a city under siege.  The mood of the city was oppressive with fear and mutual hostility.  We spent a good deal of time with our denominational cousins – the Non Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland – but we also visited some Catholic institutions, met with Catholics working for peace and understanding and reconciliation between the warring factions.

Both sides spoke of justice.  Both sides wanted justice.  But their definitions of justice were markedly different.  When the Catholics spoke of justice, they meant they wanted an end to the centuries of political, social and economic discrimination to which they had been subjected by the Scottish Presbyterian immigrants who had settled their land, sponsored by the British Government as part of its deliberate policy of suppression.  Whereas when the Protestants spoke of justice, they meant that they wanted punishment and retribution for those murderous terrorists.

What do you mean when you say justice?  Do you mean, just us?  That the law should be only for our benefit, protecting our property, safeguarding our rights and privileges, even if at the expense of others?  In this country’s dark chapter of slavery, “justice” was meted out to slaves who were not sufficiently obedient, subservient.  Justice came in the form of the lash, and worse.  The injustice of anyone being subjected to the lash because of the colour of their skin, because of the inferiority of their social class, the gross injustice of being enslaved, recognition of such injustice did not register on the radar.  What is your definition of justice in the case of someone who breaks the law by jaywalking, and is beaten to a pulp by police officers for doing so.  Oh, did I mention that the person was black?  What is your definition of justice when the law itself is an outrage?

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations.  There is the fourth element in this principle, the element of human relations.  We all live in community.  Unless we have chosen to live the life of a hermit we all are dependent upon each other.  It always amuses me when some self-satisfied dolt informs the world that he is a self-made man.  For starters, I am thankful that the rest of us are spared any blame for this conceited cockerel, but what delusional nonsense.  None of us could survive if it were not for others.  We are all dependent upon the labour and industry of others for our physical survival, we are equally dependent upon others for our emotional survival.  We cannot choose not to be in relationship with others.  What we can choose is the nature of that relationship.  We can treat each other with respect, or with indifference.  With kindness or with cruelty.  We can seek to build each other up, or break them down.  Which is it to be?  Which do you want?

It is our collective Unitarian Universalist ambition that we might live up to our own second principle of justice, equity and compassion in human relations, and to invite and encourage others, whatever their religious beliefs or lack of, to do the same. I want there to be more Unitarian Universalists in the world not because I want to boast about our market share, or because I want fancier church buildings or other trappings of commercial success.  I want there to be more Unitarian Universalists, and I want you to want there to be more Unitarian Universalists, because I have no doubt that this world would be a better place if more people genuinely embraced justice, equity and compassion in human relations.  That is a part of our work.  That is what we are here to do.  And every day, we get a chance to do it.

by Rev. David Usher

Given that it can be such a contentious issue, particularly in our Unitarian Universalist context, I thought it would be useful if this morning I preached about religious language.  Words are our primary medium for communication, but often they also lead us down the path to misunderstanding each other.  I am frequently made very aware of that as I reacquaint myself with American idioms, and am reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s famous epigram that the United States and England are two countries divided by a common language.  If, for example, I were to tell you that I was mad about my flat, would I be very cross about my puncture, or enthusiastic about my apartment?  And let’s not mention my promise to knock you up in the morning.

The use of correct language is important in our Unitarian Universalist context.  We are a people of the word, we tend to like words and plenty of them, but because we have a broad diversity of theological beliefs, and lack of, it can be difficult to find the right words for all situations.  And as if our diverse theologies were not challenge enough, we are also uber sensitive to language which might be is sexist, ageist, able-bodyist; nationalist, racist, or pretty much anything else-ist.

But particularly this morning, when we are about to welcome people into membership of the congregation, I want to be very aware of my Australian tendency occasionally to say things rather too bluntly for your delicate American sensibilities.  Especially this morning, I don’t want to use any language in talking about religious language which might in any way offend, exclude, confuse or alienate a single one of you.  I hope to say only that which will meet with universal approval.

Silence

Oh, forget it, let’s pray.  I mean, meditate.  I mean, have a time of quiet contemplation.  Oh, do whatever you want, call it whatever you want to call it, but while you are doing it, I will share with you some famous and ancient words.

A second try

You know, maybe it isn’t good enough for me not to say anything for fear of causing offence.  Maybe settling for the lowest common denominator, resorting to the innocuous and inoffensive, is a negation of what can be most exciting in religious dialogue.  Maybe the real challenge in using religious language is to learn ways not only to speak one’s own truth, clearly and unapologetically, but to listen with genuine openness to another’s truth.  Maybe the real challenge in communication is to see beyond the words, to understand that as all theology is actually autobiography, so words are no more, or less, than our best tools for telling the story of our journey to whatever beliefs, principles or values have come to form the foundation for our faith.

I am sure many of you have travelled to countries where English is not the native tongue, and perhaps even to countries where English has not become the default second language.  I know, isn’t it ignorant of people not to know how to speak to us so that we understand them!  So, there you are, trying to tell this other person what you want, and they are not understanding you, they are looking blankly at you and perhaps replying in their unintelligible gibberish.  So what do you do?  You raise your voice, of course.  You shout louder.  As if an increase in volume will penetrate the other person’s obtuseness.

A lot of conversations about religion and theology are like conversations with someone who does not speak English.  You just shout louder, thinking that somehow that will get the other person to understand you and be persuaded by you.  And once they hear you, well of course they will know what you are talking about, they will understand you, they will agree with you.  And if they refuse to agree with you, if they persist in interpreting the world differently from you even after you have very clearly explained it to them, and loudly at that, well the only reason is that they must be stupid.

One of the things I find most intriguing about so many religious conversations is that, with regard to God, for example, they start with the humble assertion that God’s ways are beyond our knowing, that God is inscrutable and mysterious, and then almost immediately come the categorical statements about exactly what God is like.  Insisting that only our language is the right language to describe God, only our experience is the true experience, and to use other language is wrong, and other experiences are invalid.

God, of course, is the most contentious of all religious words.  What do we mean by God?  Is God a noun, or a verb?  Is God real, or imagined?  Is God poetry or prose?  Is God to be dissected, delineated, described, defined to fit neatly into our comprehension?

The other day I was having a conversation with my partner, Vail Weller.  She is also a Unitarian Universalist minister, and we were talking about the difficulties and challenges of preaching in our context so that we were being faithful to our own truth, but doing so in language which you, the patient people in the pews, could hear and translate into your own truths.

(Phone rings)

Hello.  That’s extraordinary, I was just mentioning you.  I can’t talk now.  You of all people should know that.  It’s Sunday morning.  You know where I am and what I am doing right now.I’m in the middle of my sermon.

What?  Really?

Um, okay.  Wait, let me get a pen so I can write it down.

Uh uh.  Uh uh.  Yes, I got it.  Uh uh.  Yes, I will.  What?

Yes, I know you do.  I can’t, people are listening.  I don’t want to.  It’s embarrassing.  OK.  I love you too.

Um, that was God.  And she has asked me to tell you a few things.

First, she loves that you want to think for yourselves when it comes to religion.  She loves that you don’t believe things simply because somebody else has told you.  She understands that many of you can’t believe some of the things people say about her.  She can’t believe some of the things people say about her either.  She wants you to keep using your intelligence.  She loves that you like to think about things, to be rational.  Keep thinking, learning, growing in your knowledge.

But, she also wants you to know that she wants to be not only in your head, she wants to be in your heart.  She wants to be in the smile with which you greet others; she wants to be in the impulse you feel to reach out to help your neighbour; she wants to be in your indignation at injustice; she wants to be in the tenderness of your love.

She is very happy that you worry about using respectful language when discussing religion, especially when discussing her.  She thinks you are smart, and she likes that.  But she wants to remind you that she is found not only in words but in silence; not only in speaking but more so in listening.

That’s pretty much all she said.  I figure that there is not much I can add.

St Francis of Assisi told his followers “Never cease from preaching.  Use words if you have to.”  Seems like pretty good advice to me.  “Never cease from the conversation.  Use words if you have to.”

by Rev. David Usher

November 1, 2015

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

e. e. cummings:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Thomas Moore:

…it is important to honor the dead, especially those with whom we have had a close relationship.  The soul is not limited in its experience to the confinements of life.  Death doesn’t erase a relationship, it simply places it in a different context.  Fostering our relationships to the dead gives the soul its nourishment of eternity, melancholy, mystery, and the kind of relatedness that is not literally of this world.  Many, many stories of the soul tell that it is not fully at home in this life and that it is always trying to break the bonds of this world’s limitations.  We can honor the soul by nurturing our relationships with the dead…

Hugh Robert Orr:

They are not gone who pass beyond the clasp of hand, out of the strong embrace.  They are but come so close we need not grope with hands, nor look to see, not try to catch the sound of feet.  They have put off their shoes softly to walk by day within our thoughts, to tread at night our dream-led paths of sleep.

They are not dead who live in hearts they leave behind.  In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.  And shall live through the years eternal life, and grow each day more beautiful as time declares their good, forgets the rest, and proves their immortality.

George Santayana:

With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.

But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity and young heart’s ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these, once mine, my heart is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be —
What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

Edna St Vincent Millay:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lonely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains — but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love —
They are gone.  They have gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave,
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

by Rev. David Usher

Twenty or so years ago, the congregation in New Hampshire where I was then minister held an auction, and recklessly I offered two items. I offered four hours of yard work, raking the approximately 4,589,357 leaves which fall on every square yard of ground during a New England Fall. And, I offered a sermon on the topic of choice of the winning bidder. I don’t remember the theme of the sermon I was required to preach on that occasion, but I do remember that the yard work fetched more than double the price paid for my sermon. I guess I should have chosen gardening as my career.

You would think I had learned my lesson, but no, at this year’s UUCM auction I again offered a sermon on the theme to be chosen by the winning bidder, and this year’s lucky winner was Phil Hart. He has already told you what he wants me to preach about, and why.

What is the Spirit? And what is the point of prayer?

Let’s disregard the fact that he is really sneaking in two sermons for the price of one here, and that each theme could easily warrant a whole series of sermons and still not scratch the surface. I’ve got twenty minutes here. Let’s see what I can do.

What is the Spirit? And what is the point of prayer?

Spirituality is a word enjoying an increasing popularity today. It enjoys quite widespread currency, even amongst those who claim themselves to be “Spiritual, but not religious”. People often tell me that is what they are, often when they are trying to justify why they don’t go to church. Perhaps you describe yourself that way. But what does that mean? Is it saying anything interesting or profound? As far as I am concerned, we are all spiritual. To be human is to be spiritual. It is the distinguishing features of our humanity that, as far as we know, we are the only species with a spiritual dimension. We are the only species which asks ultimate questions of itself and of life, the only species which worships, which is self-aware. It is both the triumph and the curse of our humanity.

But what is spirituality? None of us really know. A while ago, anatomists were trying to locate the soul, thinking it must be an internal organ. The pancreas was a favourite, because at the time they had not yet figured out what that was for. Even now, nobody can locate the soul. Nobody really knows why we humans have this spiritual dimension, though of course some people explain it by saying we have it because God gave it to us. But our spirituality is not dependent on belief in a transcendent being. Buddhists seem to do just fine without it. Many humanists also.

The best way I can think of to describe or define spirituality is that it is our human search for and our experience of ultimate connection, a search and experience of connection which can take different forms.

First, there is the connection with the universe. I am guessing I am not the only one who has ever stood outside on a beautiful clear night and looked up at the infinite sky and thought to myself Wow! Just as an aside, “Wow” is one of the most important words in the spiritual vocabulary. “Wow” moments are moments of intense spiritual experience if you are receptive to them. So, you look up at all those stars, and you know that even the closest star is so far away you can’t even begin to comprehend the vastness of what you are looking at. And you know that what seems to you vast beyond measure is in fact just a tiny little out of the way corner of only one galaxy and there are hundreds, thousands of galaxies. And it does tend to make you feel just a little bit. You know that since human time began people have stood and gazed at the stars as you are doing, wondering, marvelling, wanting to make sense of it, weaving it into stories and myths to connect us, the finite, with that, the infinite.

You might know, as your ancestors did not, that the earth is not the centre of all creation around which all else moves, but that this earth is the merest speck of insignificance compared with all that is. You might know all of that. Yet on this mere speck stands all that is precious to you – everything of love and beauty and pain and exultation. Then you turn your gaze from the heavens to this earth and you see all of nature’s intimate beauty and pageantry and complexity, right down to the tiniest insect or flower. You might not be a creationist in the simplistic fundamentalist sense, but perhaps you are drawn to wonder about how all of this came about. How did this miracle of creation happen? Could it all be just an accident?

And the most magical miracle of all, how did life begin? Why did it begin? How, why do you have life? When you ask such questions, not seeking to answer them with science but experience them with wonder, you are delving into the life of your spirit. Because you know that, however small the universe might make you feel, you are part of it, you belong. You are connected to it. You are made of the same physical stuff as all that is, you are, literally, stardust. You are connected with the earth on which you stand, you are connected with the air which you breathe in and out every moment of your life, you are connected with water, without which you could not survive. You are physically connected with everything you see around you, from the most distant star to the tiniest insect. But more importantly, you are connected by invisible bonds, the bonds of the spirit. Spirituality is seeking and experiencing that intimate connection with the universe of all that is.

And here is another eternal spiritual question. What does your life mean?

Spirituality is also the quest for connection with meaning and purpose in your individual life. Like all other life, you were born, you live for a while and along the way you experience some pain, some pleasure, each of us in different measure, and then you die. That is the eternal circle of life from which none of us is exempt. But why? What is the point? Is there a point? Perhaps our human life is just a meaningless accident, a bad joke, and the best we can hope for is to get through it with a minimum of suffering and discomfort, and when we die, that is the end. Or is there some grander scheme, some nobler end than an inevitable return to the dust?

Spirituality is the larger quest for connection with meaning and purpose which places the individual within the context of a grander vision. Some of those answers might seem fanciful to the sophisticated modern mind, but even the most modern mind craves a context. Knowing that you are going to die, how are you to live so that your death does not deny your life’s meaning? Spirituality is seeking connection with purpose beyond self, with that which will not die with you. It is demonstrably true that many people, having acquired financial or worldly success, discover with dismay that such success gives them little satisfaction? Their life still feels hollow to them because they have not connected with a larger purpose beyond themselves. Spirituality is the connection of the individual self with meaning and purpose beyond self.

And that purpose involves ethical living. Spirituality is connection with ethical living.

Most of us have a sense of right and wrong. We want to live with integrity and authenticity. We want an ethical code. And we want it not only for our own benefit, we want our lives to touch others. Some people distort personal spirituality into an exclusive focus on themselves. They think that it is all about them, that the only thing which matters is that they get themselves to some imagined paradise and it does not matter what happens to others. I think there are very few absolutes in spirituality, but here is one. If it is only about you and the state of your soul, so that you have no regard for the physical or spiritual well-being of others, then your spirituality is worthless. Authentic spirituality is about living in right relationship with others, all others, in ways which contribute to their good as much as it does to your own. Every great spiritual teacher has said the same, if in slightly different form. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.

Spirituality is the search for connection: with the universe, with meaning and purpose, and with ethical living.

There is one other very important aspect of spirituality. Spirituality is about practice. Some people think that spiritual experience is just something which happens. Certainly moments of heightened spiritual awareness can and do happen spontaneously. Such moments of spiritual ecstasy are real, and can and do come unbidden.

However, spirituality is also a practice. It is a discipline. And that is where prayer comes in. Some people seem to regard prayer as a sort of celestial shopping. Let’s see, these are the things I would like – er, a new car, to lose ten pounds, to cure an illness, and for the Giants to win the world series. And in return, to pay for it, er, I’ll be good. Or at least, I’ll try to be good. For a while. Maybe. Prayer is not doing a deal with God.

Two men had been out fishing all day, they had drunk quite a few beers, and they had not realised that quite a storm had been brewing. By the time they did realise, they were a long way out to sea, the waves were high and pounding down on their small boat, and to top it all off, the engine wouldn’t start. They were in a lot of trouble.

“What are we going to do?” said one of them.

“I don’t know. Should we pray”

“I’ve never done that before. Have you?”

“No, me neither. But it can’t hurt.”

So they got down on their knees in the wildly pitching little boat.

“Lord” one of them called out hopefully, “Joe and I have never bothered you much in the past. You get us out of this one, and we promise never to bother you again.”

Prayer is not a shopping list, in spite of the imprecations of those charlatans otherwise known as TV evangelists. Prayer is not asking for favours, it is not hoping to impress a listening God with your piety and getting Him – always a Him – to do as you ask.

Prayer is the conscious and repeated exercise of making yourself available for connection. Connection with the universe; connection with meaning and purpose; connection with right living; connection with your own best self. It is the intentional opening up of oneself to that possibility. It is acknowledging that you are part of something greater than yourself, in which you discover your own best self.

Prayer is seeking what you really want in life, and seeking it in the place where you are most likely to find it. It is casting your net where there are indeed enduring and meaningful riches, not the riches of consumerism but of contemplation; it is looking in the right place, not just where the world shines its own dazzling but ultimately fruitless light. Prayer is a turning away from that which is superficial and unrewarding; it is a willingness to seek in the shadows.

That’s what I understand as the Spirit; it is what I understand as prayer. Some of it, I know, I have expressed in language with which not all of you are immediately comfortable. But, if that applies to you, this is what I suggest. Be the highest bidder for the sermon theme at next year’s auction.

by Rev. David Usher

Well, the pressure is on. The other day I was looking at the results in so far of the congregational survey compiled by the Search Committee as part of the process of determining what you most value about this congregation and therefore what qualities and strengths you would most like to have in your next settled minister. Not surprisingly, the worship services on Sunday features as the single most central and important program, which I guess is as it should be for a congregation. But here’s where the pressure is on. Of those of you who have responded so far – and if you haven’t yet, please do – for 95% of you the sermon is the thing. Yes, you like singing hymns and hearing good music and having a cup of coffee afterwards and being part of a community, but most of all it seems you want to hear a good sermon, one which stimulates your mind and touches your heart and somehow sends you on your way better equipped for the week ahead. Which means, statistically, all but maybe three of you are now sitting there on your chairs, leaning forward expectantly, thinking to yourself, Okay, Usher, what have you got for me today? Give me your best shot. Meanwhile, those other three of you are preparing yourselves for a nice gentle nap. I promise I will keep my voice down so I don’t disturb you.

According to the survey, we are a pretty well educated crowd, so we are used to listening to presentations of various kinds – academic lectures, TED talks, you name it – which challenge and stimulate our minds. We like to be made to think. That’s great. It is an integral part of our religious tradition, and always has been, that the use of reason is not contrary to faith but an essential ingredient of faith. We actively want you to think for yourself, to reach your own conclusions, not to just meekly accept whatever you hear from the pulpit. Though, let me say, it is also okay, and does actually happen from time to time, for you also to agree with what I say from the pulpit. Just saying.

So, the sermon has long since been the cornerstone of the way we worship. Other traditions emphasise rituals and sacraments, and some want you to get very excited and jump up and down and perspire a lot, but it seems we like our sermons and we like them to have some meat in the sandwich. But, here’s the thing. It might be that the structure of a sermon usually means one person talking and the rest listening, but you are not an audience. You are not an audience. You are not simply a random collection of individuals, each passively hearing a spoken message. You are a congregation, and what happens laterally, from pew to pew, is every bit as important as what happens from the pulpit. You come here, not as you might go to the movies or a concert, where you pay your money and buy your ticket but then sit in your seat to watch and listen to whatever is presented without any connection with the others in the auditorium. You don’t go to the movies expecting to meet people, to connect with people. But you do here. You come here to be part of something greater than yourself. You come here to meet yourself in other people, to recognise that you and they are sharing in something deeply significant –the experience of being aware that you are alive amidst mystery and wonder, the experience of being human.

In other words, as the survey also reveals, you come not just to hear whatever I might offer from the pulpit, you come to be together. You come to be part of a community. You come to have who you are recognised and welcomed and affirmed. You come to give to and receive from each other. It is my strong contention that for each of you, the most important person in this room right now is not me, up here in front of you, but the person sitting next to you. The person who smiles their greeting to you; the person whose warmth of welcome makes you know that you matter; the person to whom you reciprocate that fundamental gift of shared human experience. We come here to connect.

“Only connect” wrote E M Forester in his best and best known novel, Howard’s End. Only connect. Above all else, reach out to connect with that which gives your life meaning and value, and reach out and establish meaningful relationships with those around you. You don’t become part of a community simply by paying the entrance fee and then being a consumer of whatever product is on offer. You become part of a community as you open yourself up to others, as you encourage and allow others to open up to you. You become part of a community primarily according to what you give, not according to what you receive.

That is true of pretty much any community, and it is certainly true of this Unitarian Universalist community of the mountains. The community is what you create.

An old story. An old man is sitting on his rocking chair on his front verandah, whiling away the day, when a car pulls up outside his gate. The driver gets out and asks for directions, saying he is new to the area. The two of them get to chatting, and the driver asks what people are like in this neighbourhood. “What are people like where you come from?” asks the old man. “Oh, they are so friendly. They just can’t do enough for you. They greet you warmly on the sidewalk and in the store, everyone helps everyone else out, people where I come from are just great.” “Yup” replies the old man. “People around here are pretty much like that too.”

After a while, another car pulls up outside the old man’s gate, and this driver also is new to the area and also needing directions. The two of them get to chatting, and the driver asks what people are like in this neighbourhood. “What are people like where you come from?” asks the old man. “Oh, they are so miserable and mean. Nobody talks to their neighbours. They squabble and fight over their boundary fences, and they don’t help each other out if they are in trouble and hardly anyone even knows their neighbours’ names. “Yup” replies the old man. “People around here are pretty much like that too.”

You are the community you want it to be.

It is a basic human need to crave affirmation of our worth. It is our first principle that we affirm the worth and dignity of all persons, and that includes our own. If you are anything like me, you want to find people with whom you can share what is real about yourself, you want you and them to be real with each other, to experience the gift of authenticity, your own and theirs. That is a gift which is surprisingly rare, but so precious when it does happen.

As a way of addressing that basic human need, this year at the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains we are promoting what we are calling Chalice Circles. Some of you know them by another name, perhaps as Covenant Groups. After the service this morning, and again on Tuesday evening at seven, there will be an hour long introduction to what Chalice Circles are, how they function, and what the benefits are of belonging to one. I don’t want to pre-empt those more thorough introductory explanations now, but I encourage you either to stay behind today or come on Tuesday evening, and let me just say this now.

My own experience of being in such groups, of various kinds and comprised of different sorts of people, has been over many years. Sometimes it has been within a group with a specific focus, and sometimes we have been brought together by some shared commonality – for example a Men’s Group I was part of for many years while living in New Hampshire. But all of my experience has been invariably rich. In a group based around a curriculum or course of study, I have certainly learned much from the content of that curriculum. But more importantly, I have not only learned about those other people in the group, their stories, their struggles, their celebrations; I have learned about myself. I have been challenged to trust and be worthy of trust; I have learned how I function within such a group. I have learned what it is to see, and be seen.

John Fox captures something of what it means in his poem, When someone deeply listens to you.

When someone deeply listens to you

it is like holding out a dented cup

you’ve had since childhood and watching it fill up with

cold, fresh water.

When it balances on top of the brim,

you are understood.

When it overflows and touches your skin,

you are loved.

 

When someone deeply listens to you,

the room where you stay

starts a new life

and the place where you wrote

your first poem

begins to glow in your mind’s eye.

It is as if gold has been discovered!

 

When someone deeply listens to you,

your bare feet are on the earth

and a beloved land that seemed distant

is now at home within you.

The Prospectus which is now available in the vestibule lists the many different classes, courses and groups which will be offered here at UUCM this coming year. I invite and encourage you to take one, to look through it carefully, and to choose which speaks most powerfully to you and to sign up for it. If there is something you don’t see in the Prospectus which you would like to see here, then please, step up and offer it. Many of what is being offered are being offered in a Chalice Circle format, designed so that you are not only sitting next to someone else in a class, but you are deeply connecting with that person, and that connection is an integral part of the purpose of the class.

You have said in the congregational survey that there are two main reasons you come here. For the services which offer you inspiration and stimulation; and to be part of a community in which you make meaningful connection with others and feel an agency in something larger than yourself. Chalice Circles are wonderful opportunities for that deep connection. It is my hope that all of you will participate in at least one such group, that you may be part of the deeply enriching experience that they offer.

Only connect, said Forester. Only connect.

by Rev. David Usher

Some years ago, I read a wonderful book called Drinking the Rain. It was a memoir by the journalist and author Alix Kates Schulman about the summer she spent in a small, remote family cabin in rural Maine. She was fifty years old at the time, and had just been through an emotionally wrenching and bruising divorce, so she repaired to the cabin from her apartment in uptown New York as a way of escape. The cabin had no running water, no power, and was in the middle of nowhere. For the duration of the summer, she led a life of solitary simplicity, foraging for her food – berries, edible roots, fungi – fishing in the nearby pond, being very conscious of whatever waste she produced, and drinking the rain. Hence the title of the book. For the summer she was a modern day Thoreau, learning to strip life down to the basics, cleansing her spirit and her body of the emotional and physical toxins which had been poisoning her. She lost weight; her body became chiselled and strong and tanned, but more importantly, she discovered a spiritual resilience in herself that she thought she had forever lost in the devastations of her divorce.

When she returned to NYC at the end of the summer, she was determined to adhere to the regimen of exercise, healthy eating and simplicity which had been her salvation, but of course, she was seduced and distracted by life in the city. How could she drink the rain in her high rise apartment? How could she forage? Bit by bit she returned to her former less healthy habits of diet and indolence.

Most of us are seduced and distracted by life’s many temptations. We have our occasional moments of re-focusing, of re-committing, of renewing, we have our temporary enthusiasms, whether they be ill-considered New Year’s Even resolutions or responses to the crisis of the moment, but then we fall away. We move on. We forget to pay attention. As that can be true for diet, or exercise, or practising the ukulele, so it is often true for the attention we pay to the issues of the day. We are caught for a brief while by whatever is the cause of the moment, we are energised to take action, but then when it no longer dominates the headlines and the evening news and the twitter feeds, we lapse back into our accustomed indifference.

Just over a year ago, as I am sure you recall, Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Witness accounts of what happened conflicted, but what was true is that Michael Brown was black, he was unarmed, he was shot several times, his body lay in the street for four hours before it was finally removed, and the officer who shot him was never charged. Indeed, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from well-wishers across the country.

It is unclear why that particular killing attracted such national attention. The killing of unarmed black men and women by the police has been going on for years, but attract national attention it did, and it caused protests in Ferguson which were met with brute militarised force by the authorities. It was shortly followed by other such instances, of Eric Garner on Staten Island, killed by officers who used a choke hold on him, something expressly forbidden by the force’s own code of conduct. There were no doubts about the manner of his death, it was caught on camera and witnessed by the nation, and yet the officers responsible were never charged. So far this year, almost 600 people have been be killed by police in 2015, a hugely disproportionate number of them black, most unarmed. It continues to this day.

I think we can take some pride in what we have done here to be informed and concerned, in the whitest county in all of California, hardly on the ugly front line of the racial divide. We have tried to educate ourselves about institutional racism and how we are its privileged beneficiaries. We invited the Grass Valley Chief of Police to speak to us. We had two speakers, one black and one white, address us about racism at a Sunday service in April. But, I think it is true to say, as a congregation, we are not paying attention as once we were. We have been seduced and distracted by other things, good and worthy in themselves as those other things are.

Meanwhile, on the national stage, in response to this sustained assault upon their persons and their lives, there has arisen the Black Lives Matter campaign. Protests have continued. The first anniversary of Michael Brown’s death was observed with large demonstrations in Ferguson, with many of my Unitarian Universalist ministerial colleagues present. One of them, Rev. Terasa Cooley, a personal friend, wrote afterwards about her experience, and how frightened she was the whole time. How she, an educated, articulate white woman wearing a clerical collar, felt threatened and intimidated by the menacing police presence and the jeering white crowds. She always had the option of melting away. She could retreat, disown her witness. Others don’t have that option. They can’t change the colour of their skin.

I was in Minneapolis this past week, attending the Interim Ministers Training in a hotel adjacent to the Mall of America, that ultimate cathedral of consumerist excess. Not so long ago there was a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall, with 3,000 people gathered, many of them Unitarian Universalists. Police were called. Even though the protest was entirely peaceful and short-lived, some were arrested on ridiculous, spurious charges by an aggressive police response. Why? Because, above all other values, it must be business as usual. Nothing, nothing, must interfere with the white man making his profit.

Black Lives Matter. How extraordinary it is that even the slogan should be controversial. Do they not matter? Some people say they don’t like the slogan because All lives matter. Well, of course, they do. As heirs to the Universalist tradition, how could we say otherwise? But saying Black Lives Matter is not saying Other Lives Do Not Matter. It is insisting that Black Lives Matter because for so long, for so many, they haven’t mattered. Black lives have been demonised, criminalised, marginalised, brutalised for centuries. White lives haven’t been. Where were those who counter, All Lives Matter, when no attention was being paid to the miserable plight of so many black lives? Is the need for us whites always to be at the centre of attention, always to dominate, so desperate, so pathological that we cannot allow the lives of anybody else, ever, to be lifted up, to be the focus?

I saw a cartoon recently which made the point perfectly. The caption was, All Houses Matter, and the drawing showed two houses, one on fire and the other not, and the fire brigade aiming their water hoses at the house not on fire. We whites are not suffering the indignities of institutionalised racist violence. Why do we demand still that our lives should receive all the concern?

At the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly this past June, the Rev. Rob Hardies of Washington DC told how he discovered this faith in which he is now such a leading luminary. He had recently moved to Portland, Oregon, to start a new life for himself as a young twenty something who had just come out as gay, to himself and to the world, and who was feeling very unsure and unsafe. One day, walking the streets alone, he turned a corner and lo, there was the UU church wrapped in yellow ribbon. The whole church, declaring itself a Hate Free Zone at a time of virulent anti-gay hatred. He went inside, and heard a message that said, in effect, not that all lives mattered, some generic piece of pablum, but that HIS life mattered, HE mattered. He was gay, reviled by some, certainly by many churches, but HE mattered. It was a moment which certainly transformed his life. Perhaps, even saved it.

Many of our brother and sister UU congregations around the country have put up Black Lives Matter banners or signs outside their churches. Many of them, perhaps most of them, have had those banners or signs vandalised. Some have had them torn down, the word Black ripped out. Some have had graffiti written on them. The word All over Black in some cases. The word White over Black in others. No ambiguity about the racism there. Some have received threats over the phone. Remove the sign – or else! Our near neighbours, the UUs in Reno, have suffered this fate to their sign, but they are unbowed. As they have publicly stated, they will not allow themselves to be ruled by fear, they will be guided by faith, they will stand on the side of love. They replaced and rededicated their sign last Sunday, with an overflowing congregation standing firm, standing up, standing out, standing on the side of love.

I wonder. Might we erect a Black Lives Matter banner on our front lawn? We have our rainbow flag, telling the town that we gladly welcome gays and lesbians and all of the wonderful variations of human gender and sexual expression. There was a time when flying that rainbow flag invited ridicule, even violence. There was a time, I have no doubt, when there were those within this congregation who struggled with being so publily identified. Now, the law of the land recognises the right of same sex couples to equal marriage. We have come a long way, even in Rowan County, Kentucky. How many rainbow flags had to fly to help turn that particular tide of human hate and bigotry?

How many Black Lives Matter banners, marches, protests, speeches, demonstrations and interruptions to Business as Usual, will it take to turn this tide of ugly human hate and bigotry?

The necessary price that we, the privileged and the powerful, must occasionally pay so that others might have their share of life’s bounty is that we might have to endure some moments of discomfort, some temporary disruptions, some relinquishment of our entitlements, we might need to accept that it cannot just be business as usual. Did women win the vote because men voluntarily offered it? No, men had to be shamed into it. No social reform has ever happened without the discomfort and displeasure and disapproval of those who held the reins of power. Is it too much to ask that we should accept being made temporarily uncomfortable that others might live?

When I am challenged about my beliefs, my attitudes, my easy assumptions, my initial reaction is usually to resent the challenge. I don’t welcome it any more than I imagine you do. I resent being made uncomfortable. But it is through discomfort that growth comes, it is through confusion that clarity and enlightenment emerge, it is through pain that there is eventual healing.

I invite you to consider that we put up Black Lives Matter banner outside our church. I invite you to consider doing so, in the knowledge that if our experience is anything like that of our brothers and sisters in Reno and elsewhere, it will be stolen, vandalised, destroyed. I invite you to do so, knowing that we might have to put the sign back up, again and again and again.

I invite us not to accept business as usual. I invite us to be ruled by faith, not by fear. To stand on the side of love, not hate. I invite us to risk suffering a little, that the suffering of others might cease.