Good News or End Times: An Examination of Eschatology
A Dialogue Sermon between the Rev. Dr. Steven Epperson and Joe Cherry
December 12, 2010
Eschatology, Steven, Part 1
In June 1976, the city of Vancouver was the site of the Third Session of the World Urban Habitat Forum sponsored by the United Nations. It was big deal. 15,000 people from around the world registered and participated in the discussions, workshops and events of Habitat. It involved governments, local authorities, civil society, nongovernmental groups and experts in every sphere of urban life. Some of those Habitat participants may be sitting in this Sanctuary today.
One person who showed up in Vancouver for Habitat was Thomas Banyacya, a tribal elder of the Hopi people of Southwest United States. He carried an extraordinary message from his tribe; I’m only going to quote a brief passage from a speech he gave one early June morning in Vancouver:
“According to many prophecies “purification” is near,” he said. “It is my sacred duty to relate this message…Hopi and other Native spiritual leaders are greatly concerned with the conditions of Mother Earth and her children…They have watched the white brothers systematically destroy the Native people as they did natural resources….the Hopi know that greed, pollution and the lack of understanding of nature are about to destroy Mother Earth… According to our beliefs and prophecies if this destruction continues, man’s existence on this world will soon be ended.”
Today, Joe and I are going to talk about a kind of worldview, a sensibility and belief that focuses on the times ahead of us. It’s not the kind of time reckoned simply by sunrise/sunset, or one calendar year succeeding another, or what next year’s fall fashion season has in store. Rather, it’s a kind of human attentiveness to a larger, mythical canvas about last things, final things—the kind referred to by that Hopi elder and prophet—that, and the consequences of this way of looking at things for the here-and-now. The theological term is eschatology—a general term for teachings and beliefs concerning the end of the world, and the processes of salvation that include death, judgment, the afterlife, and a longed for future golden era of peace on Earth that Christians call the millennium.
If this seems a little foreign to you, picture in your mind, or think about the following: what do disaster movies like Dr Strangelove, The War of the Worlds, 2012, and The Day After have in common? What connects the 19th century Taiping rebellion in China, the Peasants War in 16th century Germany, and Karl Marx’s end-of-history communist utopia? What links Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the million words written by Sir Isaac Newton interpreting the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and jokes about meeting St Peter at “the pearly gates?” What drove George de Bennville, James Relly, John Murray and Hosea Ballou to repudiate the doctrine of hell and preach universal salvation instead? Last year a Canadian journalist writes a best seller about religion and politics in the Harper government and calls it The Armageddon Factor. The Arma—what? How is it connected with the eleven novels in the “Left Behind” series that have sold 55 million copies in North America and a thirty volume spin off for teen readers called Left Behind: the Kids, in which four teenagers are left behind after the Rapture and band together to fight Satan’s forces. I kid you not.
Whenever and wherever human beings have been haunted by death and the prospect of hell and heaven, or crushed under the grinding boot of oppression, or mocked for their beliefs; whenever history just doesn’t make sense anymore, when the times are out of joint, when mushroom clouds loom on the horizon, or the fate of nature is perceived as hanging by a thread—there you find eschatological, end time, Kingdom of God, tipping point, gallows humour, messianic, millennial thinking, writing, believing, politicking, and art making. The world is and has been awash in it; but it seems we don’t swim in those waters much, or we don’t like to admit it publicly. And aside from the rhetoric of environmentalism, eschatology isn’t something Unitarians think or talk about. We’re more likely to echo Emerson’s words, when he said: “Five minutes today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the millennium. Let us be poised and wise, and our own, today.”
But recently, a Unitarian Universalist theologian named Rebecca Ann Parker has taken a closer look at eschatology. And Joe has some interesting things to say about it….
Eschatology, Joe, Part 1
In Minneapolis, at General Assembly and a student breakfast hosted by the UUMA, a member of the UUMA Executive pointed her finger at me and very dramatically asked “Can you define your theology in three words?” I worried that this was some hazing ritual. After she said that she was only kidding I still felt the call to rise to her challenge, and so I answered her: “There’s always hope.”
Now ‘there’s always hope’ isn’t likely to go down in history as one of the great theological statements of all time, but I’m sticking with it. Hope isn’t always easy. In fact, hope is sort of a hard place to stay in. Life can really kick you around, and being hopeful means being vulnerable to disappointment.
In her essay, “The Holy Ground,” contemporary theologian Rebecca Ann Parker explored the issue of place of hope in liberal theology as part of her analysis of three eschatologies: Social Gospel, Universalist and, Radically Realized.
Having studied Jane Addams and her intersection with the Chautauqua Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I was pretty familiar with the Social Gospel eschatology. Parker sums this up “We [the practitioners of the Social Gospel] are here to build the kingdom of God on earth.”
Universalist eschatology was something that came naturally to me as a child. I rejected Hell by second grade because to me, the messages that ‘God is Love’ and ‘God allows eternal punishment’ did not seem to go together. I didn’t know the Bible, and I didn’t know about Hosea Ballou, but eternal punishment seemed cruel and didn’t allow a person a chance for redemption or hope. “God intends all souls to be saved,” Parker identifies as the Universalist eschatology.
Radically Realized eschatology on some level marries the two aforementioned eschatologies. For me it is what has been missing in our Unitarian Universalist understanding about the world around us. Yes, we are responsible for creating God’s Kingdom on earth by working to alleviate suffering and injustice around us. Yes, God’s love is transformative, redemptive and available to all souls. But also, as Parker states, we are still in the Garden of Eden. This is Paradise, and we need to also focus energies on helping ourselves and others realize that this world contains not only suffering, but beauty. Great beauty surrounds us, we need only to learn to see it.
There is beauty and there is pain. There are flowers that bloom in the sunshine, and there are places where the garden needs tending. As people of faith one of our roles is to observe the world, tending it where it needs to be tended, admiring it where it is appropriate and being deeply grateful for being here at all.
Hope isn’t always an easy stance to keep in this life. It is complex and often leaves you open to profound disappointment. There are those who may even say that I have been expelled from the metaphorical Garden of Eden by people who have worked to marginalize me based on my birth defect, my sexuality, my working class background and by my half-and-half racial make-up of bi-raciality. It would be easy to imagine that I’ve been oppressed and shoved out of the Garden’s flower patch, vegetable area and out onto the lawn. But in reality, the lawn is part of the garden, and there is unique beauty to be explored there, too.
Do you feel like people have tried to remove you from a place because you didn’t act, look, feel or seem like “one of them”? It’s could’ve been when we you were young, when maybe your older cousins didn’t want to include you at family gatherings. It could’ve been at work where maybe your methodologies where new and untried, or you yourself were new to the profession. It doesn’t take much to feel like an outsider, and it takes even less when there are people around you who are hinting that you’re not part of the “in” crowd.
And, brave face on it or not, that hurts us.
When we are hurt, or when we are confused, if we can have an eschatology to help guide our thoughts and help us to deal with our situation, that can be helpful. Look to the front of your orders of service. Let me be clear about this: I am not suggesting that Lucy has the eschatology that you should adopt!
In Bahá'í eschatology creation does not have a beginning nor end. Instead the eschatology of other religions is viewed as symbolic.
The Brahma Kumaris believe that the old world will come to an end, at the end of the cycle, through extensive destructive events which will wipe out the whole population of the old world. The end of the cycle is referred to as "the end". At the end of the old cycle, a new cycle begins.
Christian eschatology is concerned with death, an intermediate state, Heaven, hell, the return of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, a rapture, agreat tribulation, the Millennium, end of the world, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth
Contemporary Hindu eschatology is linked in the Vaishnavite tradition to the figure of Kalki, or the tenth and last avatar of Vishnu before the age draws to a close, and Shivasimultaneously dissolves and regenerates the universe.
Islamic eschatology is documented in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, regarding the Signs of the Day of Judgment. The Prophet's sayings on the subject have been traditionally divided into Major and Minor Signs. When these signs come to pass, the Day of Judgement is here.
Zoroastrian eschatology says at the end of time there will be a great battle beteen good and evil, which good will win.
With so many eschatologies to choose from, which is the right one for you?
Oh, would that I had some sort of magical “eschato-meter” to tell you. That you’ll have to figure out on your own, and its going to take some work. In fact the only way you’re going to find a valuable system of beliefs is if you spend time with yourself thinking about what’s of ultimate value to you.
Eschatology, Steven Part 2.
Several weeks ago, Joe and I talked about Parker’s essay and her analysis of these three kinds of eschatology. What really stood out for me, especially in her advocacy for a “radically realized eschatology” were the statements that we are still in the Garden of Eden; that this is Paradise; and that great beauty surrounds us, if we only had eyes to see it. My response to those statements…? Well let me put it this way. One Sunday morning some time ago, Diana and I were listening to a Unitarian minister preaching eloquently about the holy now and beauty in the world, when she leaned over and whispered to me: “only someone with central heat and air conditioning would say that.” It’s not that Parker’s statements about Paradise and the Garden are flat-out wrong; I just find them wanting in serious reflection about the darker side of nature and human history.
Looking back, it seems, by my lights, that beauty’s taken quite a beating, and that baldly stating that we are in the Garden of Eden just doesn’t cut it. The 20th century and the first decade of the present century have been grim teachers. World Wars, totalitarian regimes, the gulags, the camps, genocide, residential schools, our chronic inability to adequately feed and house our own people, the spectre of global warming, the daily onslaught of media, advertizing, and materialism…where’s the garden in all of this? How difficult it can be to find, feel and experience the holy now!
A fear I have with Parker’s radically realized eschatology, it’s assertion that we are in the garden, is akin to my feelings about the conclusion, the summation that comes at the end of Voltaire’s Candide. His fictional characters have gone through every kind of imaginable affront to human dignity: earthquakes, inquisitions, kidnappings, senseless deaths—catastrophes innumerable—and his philosophical conclusion to all this mayhem?: “cultivate your own garden.” I get it; and am tempted myself. But there’s something wanting here…a kind of lateral disregard for others; a resignation, a final, self-absorbed indifference to the fate of others and the world.
The Scottish poet Edwin Muir wrote a poem called “One Foot in Eden.” One foot in Eden…? It’s a tentative conclusion that Muir claimed; and it was dearly won—arrived at by him only after severe personal losses and a sober reckoning with the mass violence he lived through in the 20th century.
One foot in Eden…? perhaps; though more often than not, I still feel very much cast out from it; and the road is long, though I’m trying to find, somehow, a way back in. It’s not easy.
And beauty? Think about this with me for a moment: The root meaning of our word beauty means fairness, not just what is comely, or attractive. Rather, beauty is a condition of fairness; of what is good, well, and fitting. Beauty is closely related to the word bounty; that is, plenitude and liberality. Our language of moral judgment is saturated with aesthetic ideas, opinions and judgments. The virtues and vices we experience in the lives of others and ourselves prompt us to come up with expressions like: fine, delightful, simple, pure, sweet and rotten, vile, foul, ugly, sick and gross in order to help us describe what we do, think, value and feel. That is to say, the experience of beauty and ugliness can put us in contact with moral ideals or the absence of them.
It’s possible, though far from certain, that by placing ourselves on the path of beauty, we prepare ourselves for justice, not just tending one’s own garden. It may be that beauty acts to agitate us to bring more beauty into the world; it can convey a heightened sense of aliveness to ourselves and access to what’s alive and striving in others. It puts us into a state of high alert to the arrival and achievement of beauty, and can make us even more conscious of when it is not attained. Rather than stopping us from seeing and striving against the ugliness of injustice, want and violence, the desire to walk in beauty seeks the widest possible distribution of its goods to the greatest number of people. It incites us to share its wealth: that heightened sense of awareness, care, protection and enhancement we feel whenever we encounter what is truly beautiful. “Beauty prepares us for justice.” (Elaine Scarry)
If that’s what Rebecca Parker means by paradise now and beauty—then how can I be a Scrooge; how can I say: Bah Humbug!?
Eschatology, Joe Part 2.
I would add to Steven’s comments on beauty, which I appreciate and agree with, that part of the core at the center of the spiritual discipline in finding beauty is gratitude.
Take this jar of tomatoes I brought with me from my Mom’s kitchen. It has it’s own simple beauty, and not just because my Mom canned it herself.
This jar, for me, represents many stories. We, as a family, learned to can in the late 1970’s because my Mom is always trying to save money, because honestly, my parents needed to watch every penny. There are a lot of family stories about canning and putting up vegetables and jams and things in my family.
Those stories are in this jar of tomatoes. And other stories of my own. I have canned my own vegetables and put up fruit also to watch my pennies. There are also stories of women in the plains and farms who put up food to this day to make it through long harsh winters. There’s a whole history of food here in this little jar.
What people who live at the less lush corner of the garden know is this: If you can’t take away my ability to see Beauty and bounty around me, you can’t break my spirit.
The working poor of this world know that they’re never going to own their own house on the Lake or Oceanfront, if they ever get to own a house at all. But in their own spaces, beauty can be found, even if, compared to the volume of obvious beauty around the wealthy, it is precious little.
Yes, it’s true. Life in this world can be unfair and can punish those who ought not be punished. But when life is not handing you a dozen long-stemmed roses in a pretty box, still there are dandelions in the park.
When we stop saying that long-stemmed roses have more beauty value than the dandelion, when we can stop attaching our own sense of worth to which flower we get to see, and how those flowers cross our paths, then we are really going to be on to something!
Yes, there is ugliness in this world. And injustice and mistreatment. But if all I ever focused on were those things, I couldn’t go on. I would feel crushed that only once in my life did I receive long-stemmed roses.
Instead I walk the sidewalks, looking for little purple wildflowers in the cracks. Knowing that like so many, those flowers have pushed through concrete to be seen, and so often they’re walked right by. I promise to try to see them and be glad for the gift.
I’ve been working with Laura Imayoshi’s program for 3 months now, and I see first hand every week women who remind me of my cousins back home. Rough lives, addiction, men who abuse them. And then I watch them interact. True, there is sometimes pettiness about who is getting more variety of food, or more volume of food. These are the women who’ve lost their ability to see any beauty. It stings my heart. And for them, I try to bring a little beauty into their lives, even if it’s only a couple of hours a week. I’m a former waiter, and I treat the ladies as if they’ve come into my restaurant to dine.
And then there are the ladies for whom beauty is not lost. They’re able to acknowledge a small kindness, because even in a harsh life, they are not completely closed to it. I have seen them bring new women in from the street, get Laura involved and already I’m convinced they helped save one young woman from freezing (to death) last month. They brought her in for dinner, they called her Honey and Sweetie, and sat her down to eat with them, and then Laura and others found some clothing to wear that would be better for the cold snap we were having.
Their collective action is a good example of what I mean when I say that we have a responsibility to attend to the Garden. With their very limited resources, still they were able to reach out to someone in at least temporary deeper need then they themselves were. They offered her kindness, they used their knowledge to offer material assistance they might not have had themselves.
To me, this is why the ability to recognize that we are all still in the Garden of God is so important.
Maybe the Garden of Eden has been oversold to us, as some place where everything was handed to Adam and Eve with ease. There are stories of “the Golden Age” of fill in the blank in every culture.
And yes, our world is anything but fair and equitable.
But if we can celebrate the small beauties that enter our lives, we don’t have to be filled with despair. We can share those beauties with others, we can create new beauty for others. We can use the energy, the love that comes from beauty and all that Steven said about fairness as the root word, we can use this to do what the Social Gospel folk charged us to do. We can create God’s Kin-dom here on Earth. We can use the power of our Love to witness to the world our eschatology that God loves every being.
And we can stay together in this Garden, our Garden, and invite new folks to join us. And we can share with them our ways that we find beauty, and we can ask them to teach us how they find beauty.
May we be bold enough, and brave enough and loving enough to make this so. And from here, we can and will change our world.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Volver: To Return
Delivered to the First Unitarian Society of Chicago,
November 07, 2010.
Volver is a Spanish verb that means to return to a place. Return and place are sort of my topics this morning.
For those of you who do not know me, Hi, I’m Joe. This has been my home church since 1996. I’m now sort of a wandering member, though, and so you may not have seen me before. But no matter how far my travels take me, this place is never far from my heart. Gathered here every Sunday are many people I love.
The ancient Jewish people believed that G-d, Jaweh, the Holy, was a god of place. The first temple, sometimes known as Solomon’s temple, was built in about 957 BC, and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The second great temple was begun in 528BC, and was eventually destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Some believe there will be a third great temple built on that same site.
For the ancient Jews, this is G-d’s place.
I’m not explaining this to ridicule the ancient Jews. This, to me, is not a silly idea of people from a time long ago. It’s actually quite amazing.
Think of all the temporary things we have in our lives. What, in fact, is permanent?
Nothing.
Nothing.
And yet, there is a spot on this earth, where for centuries, people have believed that this space is G-d’s space.
To their cousins, the Muslims, since the 7th century, this has been where the Dome of the Rock has stood. For almost three thousand years of recorded history, this place, where Solomon’s temple stood, has been a place to engage that which is most Holy.
Our sanctuary is not so old, few man-made things in North American are that old. But even so, it is a place where we come to engage with that which is most Holy.
And this is the place where I came, week after week, for a dozen years, to find people that mattered to me, people for whom I mattered.
I can think of perhaps no place that is more Holy to me.
Relationships are what make this sanctuary Holy. It is the friends who are no longer with us, our friends downstairs whose ashes are in our crypt, our friends who are here with us now, and the people we have yet to meet and with whom we will discover a kinship. These relationships are an expression of the Divine.
I have been away on my internship. Vancouver is a lovely city, though a bit pricey! It’s Canada’s most expensive city! I moved from Detroit to Chicago, and my cost of living went up. I moved from Chicago to Vancouver, and my cost of living went up. If this trend continues I’m going to have to either move to Hong Kong or London.
Vancouver is a lovely city. And the congregation that I am serving has been very welcoming and embracing. I gave my first sermon there in September, and I got many positive responses to it. I am happy where I am.
So why am I speaking this morning about Volver, returning?
Because more than my physical return to Hyde Park, which has been so very nice, my heart returns here often.
You can’t see it from where you are, probably, but the wallpaper on my cellphone is a picture of our Rose window. So literally, every time I pick up my phone, to answer a call, to check email or to add another appointment in my calendar, I am transported back home for an instant.
Except, really, you can’t return completely, can you?
Life is a flowing stream, and as the popular saying goes, you can’t step into the same river twice. Part of the flavor of volver is the sadness and longing that knows this. Part of it is the joy of recognizing this and still having so much anticipation about seeing the familiar.
Have you ever had the experience of returning someplace you haven’t been for a long time? Have you ever gone back to your elementary or high school, and had a good look at it?
It’s not quite as big as you remember, is it? You don’t feel quite as small there as you once may have.
Even if you are the exact same height you were when you graduated from those places.
Where is a place that you long to return?
In Pedro Almodovar’s film Volver, from which I shamelessly borrowed the title of today’s sermon, two sisters leave the coastal town of their birth and move to Madrid. They are called back to the town after the death of their beloved Aunt, Paula. It’s a lovely film, and I recommend it highly. Penelope Cruse is perhaps the world’s most beautiful crier.
The sisters are caught between their lives in Madrid where they work and have children, and their ancestral home, where they still feel some responsibilities, and of course, the emotional pull of the familiar.
Maybe you can relate to this idea. Even if you have never moved away from the home you were born into, you’ve changed and grown. You’ve built for yourself a life in a new place.
While I was in a second-hand store in Vancouver, I checked out a globe, and I am farther away from home that London is from Istanbul. A more accurate distance is that between Paris and Cairo.
I will tell you that when I discovered that I got to feeling very homesick. Not just for Chicago, but also my family, another 380 miles further away.
I’d like to ask you to settle in and get comfortable for a moment. If you feel comfortable, please close your eyes. I’d like to take you on a little guided meditation. When you hear the sounds of the bell, please open your eyes.
Take a deep, relaxed breath.
In your mind, think of all the places that mean something important to you.
Don’t forget things like swing-sets from your childhood.
Or your first school dance.
The place where you had your first kiss.
The place where you first told someone you loved them and they said they loved you back.
Your first day of your very first job.
The place where you had to say a difficult good bye.
The place where you find rest.
Of all these places, which is the most cherished?
(end meditation.)
Later today, or maybe tomorrow, revisit some of the places that came to your mind. Picture them in your mind and ask what they mean to your soul.
Human beings are meaning makers. We connect dots that aren’t even there. Human pattern recognition is part of our software. It’s how we are able to see a complete circle when there isn’t one. It’s why we see shapes in clouds that aren’t really there.
Recently, I was at a UU Men’s retreat at Lake Sasamet in British Columbia. I got up very early one morning, as is my habit, and I went down to the Lake to watch the sunrise. Except since I was in the middle of big hills, not the mountains, and there was no giant lake to the east, I mostly saw the sky getting lighter, but not really a sunrise.
Next to the lake there is this giant rock. And I mean giant. Most of it is submerged below the soil and still the area you can stand directly on is about as big as the apse in this church. I had to look that word up, by the way. It’s spelled A P S E, and it’s the place between these steps and where the empty niche is.
So I’m on this giant rock, and it’s a bit chilly, and not quite light out. And then this idea strikes me. For thousands of years, men have stood on this rock. They came from Africa through Asia, the Bering Straight and into Canada, and they have stood here, watching the sunrise just as I am doing right now. In deference to this idea, I took off my socks and shoes, to join the women and men who’ve stood at this rock, overlooking this lake.
And as I stood there, feet admittedly cold, I saw a miracle. Not a super-natural miracle, but an ordinary, every day one.
Across the surface of the lake, I watched moisture gather from the surrounding land. Over and over, it kept just falling from the land, which is at a higher point than the lake, into the lake, but the little bits of fog did not fall completely into the lake. Instead these wisps of fog skimmed along the surface of the lake, eventually coming together and then forming a large column that reached up into the sky.
It was breath-taking.
And these wisps of fog, to my brain, looked often like people, walking. Now I k-n-o-w that this is just my brain’s pattern recognition software kicking in. But I let it kick in, and I stood there, in the slowly brightening morning, watching these “people” gathering, wave after wave.
I saw a little girl with a bicycle. I saw an older, heftier couple dancing a waltz together. I saw individuals taking hands, I saw some who walked alone. I even saw one woman walking her dog.
And for the first time in my life, in seeing this, I know why people describe ghosts the way that they do.
And the thing that made me cry on that beautifully warm autumn morning was that these people, whether they were young or old, alone or in pairs, all came together as one. That whichever part of the lake they came from, whichever side they were on…it didn’t matter. In the end, they came together and together they rose into the heavens.
Theologically, I am a Universalist. Which means that I believe that God, the God we cannot wholly know or wholly name, is Love. That eventually we return together to gather in a place of Love. That all will be reunited there, that love is our final destination.
And on that Sunday morning, so very early, I had a vision of what that might look like.
We humans are meaning makers. So go forth from this place, and make meaning in and of your lives. Visit the holy places of your life, if only in your heart, often.
And of course, come to church often!
May each of us develop the courage to live our life emboldened by Love. May we be strengthened by that Love so that we may share our Love with the world through acts of friendship, generosity and kinship with the friends we have yet to make.
May it be ever so.
Amen.
November 07, 2010.
Volver is a Spanish verb that means to return to a place. Return and place are sort of my topics this morning.
For those of you who do not know me, Hi, I’m Joe. This has been my home church since 1996. I’m now sort of a wandering member, though, and so you may not have seen me before. But no matter how far my travels take me, this place is never far from my heart. Gathered here every Sunday are many people I love.
The ancient Jewish people believed that G-d, Jaweh, the Holy, was a god of place. The first temple, sometimes known as Solomon’s temple, was built in about 957 BC, and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The second great temple was begun in 528BC, and was eventually destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Some believe there will be a third great temple built on that same site.
For the ancient Jews, this is G-d’s place.
I’m not explaining this to ridicule the ancient Jews. This, to me, is not a silly idea of people from a time long ago. It’s actually quite amazing.
Think of all the temporary things we have in our lives. What, in fact, is permanent?
Nothing.
Nothing.
And yet, there is a spot on this earth, where for centuries, people have believed that this space is G-d’s space.
To their cousins, the Muslims, since the 7th century, this has been where the Dome of the Rock has stood. For almost three thousand years of recorded history, this place, where Solomon’s temple stood, has been a place to engage that which is most Holy.
Our sanctuary is not so old, few man-made things in North American are that old. But even so, it is a place where we come to engage with that which is most Holy.
And this is the place where I came, week after week, for a dozen years, to find people that mattered to me, people for whom I mattered.
I can think of perhaps no place that is more Holy to me.
Relationships are what make this sanctuary Holy. It is the friends who are no longer with us, our friends downstairs whose ashes are in our crypt, our friends who are here with us now, and the people we have yet to meet and with whom we will discover a kinship. These relationships are an expression of the Divine.
I have been away on my internship. Vancouver is a lovely city, though a bit pricey! It’s Canada’s most expensive city! I moved from Detroit to Chicago, and my cost of living went up. I moved from Chicago to Vancouver, and my cost of living went up. If this trend continues I’m going to have to either move to Hong Kong or London.
Vancouver is a lovely city. And the congregation that I am serving has been very welcoming and embracing. I gave my first sermon there in September, and I got many positive responses to it. I am happy where I am.
So why am I speaking this morning about Volver, returning?
Because more than my physical return to Hyde Park, which has been so very nice, my heart returns here often.
You can’t see it from where you are, probably, but the wallpaper on my cellphone is a picture of our Rose window. So literally, every time I pick up my phone, to answer a call, to check email or to add another appointment in my calendar, I am transported back home for an instant.
Except, really, you can’t return completely, can you?
Life is a flowing stream, and as the popular saying goes, you can’t step into the same river twice. Part of the flavor of volver is the sadness and longing that knows this. Part of it is the joy of recognizing this and still having so much anticipation about seeing the familiar.
Have you ever had the experience of returning someplace you haven’t been for a long time? Have you ever gone back to your elementary or high school, and had a good look at it?
It’s not quite as big as you remember, is it? You don’t feel quite as small there as you once may have.
Even if you are the exact same height you were when you graduated from those places.
Where is a place that you long to return?
In Pedro Almodovar’s film Volver, from which I shamelessly borrowed the title of today’s sermon, two sisters leave the coastal town of their birth and move to Madrid. They are called back to the town after the death of their beloved Aunt, Paula. It’s a lovely film, and I recommend it highly. Penelope Cruse is perhaps the world’s most beautiful crier.
The sisters are caught between their lives in Madrid where they work and have children, and their ancestral home, where they still feel some responsibilities, and of course, the emotional pull of the familiar.
Maybe you can relate to this idea. Even if you have never moved away from the home you were born into, you’ve changed and grown. You’ve built for yourself a life in a new place.
While I was in a second-hand store in Vancouver, I checked out a globe, and I am farther away from home that London is from Istanbul. A more accurate distance is that between Paris and Cairo.
I will tell you that when I discovered that I got to feeling very homesick. Not just for Chicago, but also my family, another 380 miles further away.
I’d like to ask you to settle in and get comfortable for a moment. If you feel comfortable, please close your eyes. I’d like to take you on a little guided meditation. When you hear the sounds of the bell, please open your eyes.
Take a deep, relaxed breath.
In your mind, think of all the places that mean something important to you.
Don’t forget things like swing-sets from your childhood.
Or your first school dance.
The place where you had your first kiss.
The place where you first told someone you loved them and they said they loved you back.
Your first day of your very first job.
The place where you had to say a difficult good bye.
The place where you find rest.
Of all these places, which is the most cherished?
(end meditation.)
Later today, or maybe tomorrow, revisit some of the places that came to your mind. Picture them in your mind and ask what they mean to your soul.
Human beings are meaning makers. We connect dots that aren’t even there. Human pattern recognition is part of our software. It’s how we are able to see a complete circle when there isn’t one. It’s why we see shapes in clouds that aren’t really there.
Recently, I was at a UU Men’s retreat at Lake Sasamet in British Columbia. I got up very early one morning, as is my habit, and I went down to the Lake to watch the sunrise. Except since I was in the middle of big hills, not the mountains, and there was no giant lake to the east, I mostly saw the sky getting lighter, but not really a sunrise.
Next to the lake there is this giant rock. And I mean giant. Most of it is submerged below the soil and still the area you can stand directly on is about as big as the apse in this church. I had to look that word up, by the way. It’s spelled A P S E, and it’s the place between these steps and where the empty niche is.
So I’m on this giant rock, and it’s a bit chilly, and not quite light out. And then this idea strikes me. For thousands of years, men have stood on this rock. They came from Africa through Asia, the Bering Straight and into Canada, and they have stood here, watching the sunrise just as I am doing right now. In deference to this idea, I took off my socks and shoes, to join the women and men who’ve stood at this rock, overlooking this lake.
And as I stood there, feet admittedly cold, I saw a miracle. Not a super-natural miracle, but an ordinary, every day one.
Across the surface of the lake, I watched moisture gather from the surrounding land. Over and over, it kept just falling from the land, which is at a higher point than the lake, into the lake, but the little bits of fog did not fall completely into the lake. Instead these wisps of fog skimmed along the surface of the lake, eventually coming together and then forming a large column that reached up into the sky.
It was breath-taking.
And these wisps of fog, to my brain, looked often like people, walking. Now I k-n-o-w that this is just my brain’s pattern recognition software kicking in. But I let it kick in, and I stood there, in the slowly brightening morning, watching these “people” gathering, wave after wave.
I saw a little girl with a bicycle. I saw an older, heftier couple dancing a waltz together. I saw individuals taking hands, I saw some who walked alone. I even saw one woman walking her dog.
And for the first time in my life, in seeing this, I know why people describe ghosts the way that they do.
And the thing that made me cry on that beautifully warm autumn morning was that these people, whether they were young or old, alone or in pairs, all came together as one. That whichever part of the lake they came from, whichever side they were on…it didn’t matter. In the end, they came together and together they rose into the heavens.
Theologically, I am a Universalist. Which means that I believe that God, the God we cannot wholly know or wholly name, is Love. That eventually we return together to gather in a place of Love. That all will be reunited there, that love is our final destination.
And on that Sunday morning, so very early, I had a vision of what that might look like.
We humans are meaning makers. So go forth from this place, and make meaning in and of your lives. Visit the holy places of your life, if only in your heart, often.
And of course, come to church often!
May each of us develop the courage to live our life emboldened by Love. May we be strengthened by that Love so that we may share our Love with the world through acts of friendship, generosity and kinship with the friends we have yet to make.
May it be ever so.
Amen.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
A Whole New World
I entitled this morning’s sermon “A Whole New World” not because I imagined us spontaneously breaking into that song from Aladdin, but rather because every moment, we are living in a wholly new world. Were you reading this text, instead of hearing it, you might be relieved to know that I used the word wholly with the w and not the other one. Though truth be told, I also believe that every moment is holy….without the w.
Change happens to us instant by instant. We may think that sometimes we’re stuck in a rut, but really, there is no rut. Each time we get up on Monday morning and go to our jobs may seem the same dull routine, but there are subtle differences. Last year at the UUA’s General Assembly, I attended a workshop on Unitarian Universalist Mystics. There the Reverend Lillia Cuervo, who’s voice and rich Mexican accent reminds me so much of my Great Grandmother’s, spoke about her spiritual practice of cooking. She said that she tries to remember that every time she cuts into a pepper, she is the first being who has ever seen inside this pepper, and it’s a little miracle.
Life takes place in sometimes large changes and sometimes subtle ones.
Like Steven Epperson, I walked into my first Unitarian church about 15 years ago. I was a sort of under-developed 27 year old, who was trying to find my way through life. The man that I was dating at the time told me he thought I might really like his church, and asked to me accompany him on a Sunday.
To my 27 year-old ears, this was practically a marriage proposal.
It wasn’t by the way.
But Greg brought me to the First Unitarian Society of Chicago in the Autumn of 1995. That congregation is my home church, and they are sponsoring my candidacy for the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
What Greg understood was that while I was attending a Presbyterian church near my apartment, the theology didn’t really fit me. I was attending largely because I enjoyed the community setting. I had chosen the Presbyterian church near my home because it was gay friendly, and as a boy, for a couple of years, we attended a Presbyterian Church.
But even as a boy, I was a trouble maker.
When I was in second grade, which made me about 8 years old, and the year 1976, my family attending the Peace Presbyterian Church. It was meant to be a progressive church, new building, young pastor, etc. My Sunday School teacher’s name was Rhonda. There are two things you should know about Rhonda. Number one, she was very patient with me, and number two my Sunday School teacher had such an impact on my life that 32 years later I still remember her name. In saying that I just want to momentarily lift up just how important our teachers are.
Rhonda sent me twice to the minister’s office that year, and one time she actually physically walked me down to Pastor Jim’s office.
The first time I got sent down, it was because I, at age 7, wanted to know why Mary was not God. I knew where babies came from, I am the oldest child in my family, and I’ve always asked a lot of questions, and my parents were honest about sexuality with us. “So, if Mary gave birth to the Saviour of the entire human race, without touching a man, why isn’t Mary God?”
The second time Rhonda sent me to see Pastor Jim was during our lesson on the Holy Trinity. “When the Holy Spirit comes to earth and talks to people, does she let them know who she is?” “Joe, do you keep saying “she”? “Well, you have the Father and the Son, and you can’t tell me that they tried to pull this off without a woman involved. I mean, you can’t do anything without women.” And off I went.
Now Pastor Jim was a very nice man, and he didn’t threaten me with heresy or anything. During our little talks he twice said to me “It’s a matter of faith, Joe.” To which I replied “Pastor Jim, I don’t know what that means.”
To him “it’s a matter of faith” was an answer. For me that was just confusing.
The time that Rhonda took me by the hand down to Pastor Jim’s office was one of the last times I remember going to church. She sat me in one of his office chairs and said to me “Tell Pastor Jim what you just said in class!” I think I’d finally worn away her patience, because she spun around and went back to our classroom.
Pastor Jim looked at me. “Well?”
And I said “I said that I didn’t believe in Hell.”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked me.
“Hell is a stupid idea.” I said, “It can’t be real.”
And Pastor Jim asked me to explain this, and this is essentially what I said: The whole reason for punishment and discipline is to get people to change their behaviour, right? That’s what prisons are for, that’s what being grounded or spanked is for. It’s to get you to change what you did and to make you do things differently. Part of the deal is that you get to show you learned your lesson by changing what you do. If you don’t get a chance to show that you’ve learned something, then there is no point to punishment except cruelty. If Hell is nothing but eternal punishment, with no chance to show that you learned something, then it’s just cruelty. God’s cruelty. And you’ve been teaching us that God is Love. So either God isn’t Love or Hell is not real.
He just looked at me and said “You’re like 8, right?” I nodded. “Who’s giving you these ideas?” he asked me. I told him “No one. It’s just me.”
I’m sharing this story with your for a couple of reasons. The first is so that you’ll get a little larger glimpse of who I am at my core. I question things. I want to know why. In seventh grade, my English teacher nick-named me “ya-butt” because I was always saying that in class. “Yeah, but what about this? Or Yeah, but what about that?” That hasn’t really changed much.
But what has changed, is the phrase “it’s a matter of faith, Joe.”
Faith is not an answer. Faith is not what gets one safely from point A to point B. It is not a ferry boat that takes you to Victoria and back. It’s instead closer to the idea that Faith is what lets you get on that boat, assuming it’ll get you safely to Victoria and back.
There is no proof. It can’t be reasoned. Faith can only be embraced. Faith is that thing that is just beyond the intellect and all the academic training we may have. It boils down to, “It’s just what I believe.”
Change is constant. Sometimes it’s a grand sweeping change, sometimes it’s subtle. I can’t tell you exactly when “It’s a matter of faith, Joe” went from being a wholly unsatisfactory answer to one that I can accept and embrace.
Change is necessary for growth.
Earlier Meredith presented a reading, written by a 40 year old woman from my former home town of Chicago. I selected this reading was because it talked about change. This author, who identified herself only as “BC from Chicago,” is confronting change in a big way. Much of her self-identity was being challenged because at 40, she’s no longer the 30 year old she once was, and this is shaking her to her foundations. One can easily imagine that she sees 40 as a little bit of dying.
But she needn’t see 40 as that at all. If she could just shift her perspective a little bit, she could see 40 as a time to really step into her own power. How can she do this? Change. Can she do it alone? No. There is too much cultural baggage and too many businesses relying on BC’s fears, who are selling her that lip-gloss.
As a culture, we need to change to show BC that 40 is not the end.
One of the things they warn you about in seminary is putting too many sermons in one sermon, so I’ll save my thoughts on feminism for another time.
There are times when change comes at us like a slow train coming. And there are times when it comes like a tiger out of tall grass.
Change is a spiritual challenge. When it comes slowly, like a train, we must do what we can to prepare for it. This could come in the form of an child going away to college, a partner getting some very terrible health news, or a new degree from a college or seminary, that’s coming soon. In each of these scenarios, we owe it to ourselves to prepare for these shifts in our reality as thoughtfully and purposefully as we can.
When change comes like a tiger, we must do what we can do adjust and not lose ourselves wholly and permanently in transition. We must mourn a loss, or celebrate an promotion, and we must try to find balance. This is not to say that mourning should be artificially abbreviated, we must mourn for as long as we must. But we musn’t stop living.
When I told my Dad that I was going to seminary to become a minister, his first words were not “Congratulations!” or “Have you lost your marbles?” But instead his first words were “What will you tell people when their child dies?” My second brother, Christopher, died at 11 months old, in 1970. Some mourning goes on a lifetime.
But even so, we must go on living our lives. We owe it to ourselves to live as richly as possible, to experience this, our lives. We should absolutely rejoice in cutting open a green pepper and looking inside of it, experiencing the small miracle of being the first to see inside.
Change happens.
According to Charlotte Rasl, author of “If the Buddha Got Stuck”, these are 10 traits of people who get stuck.
1. A Sense of Helplessness or lack of entitlement at one’s core
2. Negative Thinking
3. Keeping life chaotic
4. An inability to calm or soothe oneself in healthy ways
5. Difficulty connecting with other people and a lack of support system
6. Looking to external sources for a sense of happiness
7. Lack of an adequate concept of self-care and setting limits
8. A sense of self that is identified with images, concepts and beliefs
9. Repeating the same behavior and hoping the outcome will be different
10. Focusing on the overwhelming, how bad life is and the terrible state of the world.
I can safely say that I can identify with some of those traits at different points in my own life. She also offers a list of 8 traits of people who stay “unstuck.”
1. Confident in one’s capacity to problem-solve and take action
2. Unwilling to remain in extremely unhappy or stressful situations indefinitely
3. Able to give and receive support from friends and family
4. Do not attach their identity or ego to success of failure
5. Willing to experience, try new ways of doing things, make mistakes and then try again with a new plan
6. Able to tolerate frustration and uneasiness in the interest of taking on a challenge
7. Possess a sense of humour and lightheartedness
8. Demonstrate profound care and concern for the well-being of all life.
I know that the above lists are long, and I’ll be happy to share them with anyone in written form later, or to recommend Dr. Rasl’s book. But for now, just try to see where your commonalities with these lists lie.
The story of the two wolves that I shared with the young folks this morning demonstrates, that we have agency in our own lives. We can choose to feed the wolf who resists change unhealthily, or we can feed the wolf who tries to embrace change as best as possible, even though it sometimes hurts and is frightening.
Change is a challenge. But it is the very stuff of life.
Our lives swing from the greatest happiness to the deepest sorrow. As part of my spiritual practice, I try to think about that daily. Let each of us look for the courage within ourselves to consider the changes that life brings to us, and in so doing live a life deep with meaning.
Joseph M Cherry
Delivered Unitarian Church of Vancouver
26 September, 2010
Change happens to us instant by instant. We may think that sometimes we’re stuck in a rut, but really, there is no rut. Each time we get up on Monday morning and go to our jobs may seem the same dull routine, but there are subtle differences. Last year at the UUA’s General Assembly, I attended a workshop on Unitarian Universalist Mystics. There the Reverend Lillia Cuervo, who’s voice and rich Mexican accent reminds me so much of my Great Grandmother’s, spoke about her spiritual practice of cooking. She said that she tries to remember that every time she cuts into a pepper, she is the first being who has ever seen inside this pepper, and it’s a little miracle.
Life takes place in sometimes large changes and sometimes subtle ones.
Like Steven Epperson, I walked into my first Unitarian church about 15 years ago. I was a sort of under-developed 27 year old, who was trying to find my way through life. The man that I was dating at the time told me he thought I might really like his church, and asked to me accompany him on a Sunday.
To my 27 year-old ears, this was practically a marriage proposal.
It wasn’t by the way.
But Greg brought me to the First Unitarian Society of Chicago in the Autumn of 1995. That congregation is my home church, and they are sponsoring my candidacy for the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
What Greg understood was that while I was attending a Presbyterian church near my apartment, the theology didn’t really fit me. I was attending largely because I enjoyed the community setting. I had chosen the Presbyterian church near my home because it was gay friendly, and as a boy, for a couple of years, we attended a Presbyterian Church.
But even as a boy, I was a trouble maker.
When I was in second grade, which made me about 8 years old, and the year 1976, my family attending the Peace Presbyterian Church. It was meant to be a progressive church, new building, young pastor, etc. My Sunday School teacher’s name was Rhonda. There are two things you should know about Rhonda. Number one, she was very patient with me, and number two my Sunday School teacher had such an impact on my life that 32 years later I still remember her name. In saying that I just want to momentarily lift up just how important our teachers are.
Rhonda sent me twice to the minister’s office that year, and one time she actually physically walked me down to Pastor Jim’s office.
The first time I got sent down, it was because I, at age 7, wanted to know why Mary was not God. I knew where babies came from, I am the oldest child in my family, and I’ve always asked a lot of questions, and my parents were honest about sexuality with us. “So, if Mary gave birth to the Saviour of the entire human race, without touching a man, why isn’t Mary God?”
The second time Rhonda sent me to see Pastor Jim was during our lesson on the Holy Trinity. “When the Holy Spirit comes to earth and talks to people, does she let them know who she is?” “Joe, do you keep saying “she”? “Well, you have the Father and the Son, and you can’t tell me that they tried to pull this off without a woman involved. I mean, you can’t do anything without women.” And off I went.
Now Pastor Jim was a very nice man, and he didn’t threaten me with heresy or anything. During our little talks he twice said to me “It’s a matter of faith, Joe.” To which I replied “Pastor Jim, I don’t know what that means.”
To him “it’s a matter of faith” was an answer. For me that was just confusing.
The time that Rhonda took me by the hand down to Pastor Jim’s office was one of the last times I remember going to church. She sat me in one of his office chairs and said to me “Tell Pastor Jim what you just said in class!” I think I’d finally worn away her patience, because she spun around and went back to our classroom.
Pastor Jim looked at me. “Well?”
And I said “I said that I didn’t believe in Hell.”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked me.
“Hell is a stupid idea.” I said, “It can’t be real.”
And Pastor Jim asked me to explain this, and this is essentially what I said: The whole reason for punishment and discipline is to get people to change their behaviour, right? That’s what prisons are for, that’s what being grounded or spanked is for. It’s to get you to change what you did and to make you do things differently. Part of the deal is that you get to show you learned your lesson by changing what you do. If you don’t get a chance to show that you’ve learned something, then there is no point to punishment except cruelty. If Hell is nothing but eternal punishment, with no chance to show that you learned something, then it’s just cruelty. God’s cruelty. And you’ve been teaching us that God is Love. So either God isn’t Love or Hell is not real.
He just looked at me and said “You’re like 8, right?” I nodded. “Who’s giving you these ideas?” he asked me. I told him “No one. It’s just me.”
I’m sharing this story with your for a couple of reasons. The first is so that you’ll get a little larger glimpse of who I am at my core. I question things. I want to know why. In seventh grade, my English teacher nick-named me “ya-butt” because I was always saying that in class. “Yeah, but what about this? Or Yeah, but what about that?” That hasn’t really changed much.
But what has changed, is the phrase “it’s a matter of faith, Joe.”
Faith is not an answer. Faith is not what gets one safely from point A to point B. It is not a ferry boat that takes you to Victoria and back. It’s instead closer to the idea that Faith is what lets you get on that boat, assuming it’ll get you safely to Victoria and back.
There is no proof. It can’t be reasoned. Faith can only be embraced. Faith is that thing that is just beyond the intellect and all the academic training we may have. It boils down to, “It’s just what I believe.”
Change is constant. Sometimes it’s a grand sweeping change, sometimes it’s subtle. I can’t tell you exactly when “It’s a matter of faith, Joe” went from being a wholly unsatisfactory answer to one that I can accept and embrace.
Change is necessary for growth.
Earlier Meredith presented a reading, written by a 40 year old woman from my former home town of Chicago. I selected this reading was because it talked about change. This author, who identified herself only as “BC from Chicago,” is confronting change in a big way. Much of her self-identity was being challenged because at 40, she’s no longer the 30 year old she once was, and this is shaking her to her foundations. One can easily imagine that she sees 40 as a little bit of dying.
But she needn’t see 40 as that at all. If she could just shift her perspective a little bit, she could see 40 as a time to really step into her own power. How can she do this? Change. Can she do it alone? No. There is too much cultural baggage and too many businesses relying on BC’s fears, who are selling her that lip-gloss.
As a culture, we need to change to show BC that 40 is not the end.
One of the things they warn you about in seminary is putting too many sermons in one sermon, so I’ll save my thoughts on feminism for another time.
There are times when change comes at us like a slow train coming. And there are times when it comes like a tiger out of tall grass.
Change is a spiritual challenge. When it comes slowly, like a train, we must do what we can to prepare for it. This could come in the form of an child going away to college, a partner getting some very terrible health news, or a new degree from a college or seminary, that’s coming soon. In each of these scenarios, we owe it to ourselves to prepare for these shifts in our reality as thoughtfully and purposefully as we can.
When change comes like a tiger, we must do what we can do adjust and not lose ourselves wholly and permanently in transition. We must mourn a loss, or celebrate an promotion, and we must try to find balance. This is not to say that mourning should be artificially abbreviated, we must mourn for as long as we must. But we musn’t stop living.
When I told my Dad that I was going to seminary to become a minister, his first words were not “Congratulations!” or “Have you lost your marbles?” But instead his first words were “What will you tell people when their child dies?” My second brother, Christopher, died at 11 months old, in 1970. Some mourning goes on a lifetime.
But even so, we must go on living our lives. We owe it to ourselves to live as richly as possible, to experience this, our lives. We should absolutely rejoice in cutting open a green pepper and looking inside of it, experiencing the small miracle of being the first to see inside.
Change happens.
According to Charlotte Rasl, author of “If the Buddha Got Stuck”, these are 10 traits of people who get stuck.
1. A Sense of Helplessness or lack of entitlement at one’s core
2. Negative Thinking
3. Keeping life chaotic
4. An inability to calm or soothe oneself in healthy ways
5. Difficulty connecting with other people and a lack of support system
6. Looking to external sources for a sense of happiness
7. Lack of an adequate concept of self-care and setting limits
8. A sense of self that is identified with images, concepts and beliefs
9. Repeating the same behavior and hoping the outcome will be different
10. Focusing on the overwhelming, how bad life is and the terrible state of the world.
I can safely say that I can identify with some of those traits at different points in my own life. She also offers a list of 8 traits of people who stay “unstuck.”
1. Confident in one’s capacity to problem-solve and take action
2. Unwilling to remain in extremely unhappy or stressful situations indefinitely
3. Able to give and receive support from friends and family
4. Do not attach their identity or ego to success of failure
5. Willing to experience, try new ways of doing things, make mistakes and then try again with a new plan
6. Able to tolerate frustration and uneasiness in the interest of taking on a challenge
7. Possess a sense of humour and lightheartedness
8. Demonstrate profound care and concern for the well-being of all life.
I know that the above lists are long, and I’ll be happy to share them with anyone in written form later, or to recommend Dr. Rasl’s book. But for now, just try to see where your commonalities with these lists lie.
The story of the two wolves that I shared with the young folks this morning demonstrates, that we have agency in our own lives. We can choose to feed the wolf who resists change unhealthily, or we can feed the wolf who tries to embrace change as best as possible, even though it sometimes hurts and is frightening.
Change is a challenge. But it is the very stuff of life.
Our lives swing from the greatest happiness to the deepest sorrow. As part of my spiritual practice, I try to think about that daily. Let each of us look for the courage within ourselves to consider the changes that life brings to us, and in so doing live a life deep with meaning.
Joseph M Cherry
Delivered Unitarian Church of Vancouver
26 September, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Theological Promise of America. (Part I)
(This homily was written to be presented on July 4, 2010. The service was shared with me by the Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Society of Chicago, the Reverend Dr. Nina D. Grey, who presented Part II.)
Good morning.
This morning I’d like to share a story with you. It’s the story of a people, come from many different lands, different languages and different reasons for arriving on the shores of this country.
It’s not a perfect story. There is a lot of heartbreak involved.
According to archeologists, humans first came to this country after leaving Africa, from the west about 20,000 years ago, over the Bering Straight from what is now Russia, through what is now Canada, through the United States, and into Mexico and the South American countries.
And for a long time these peoples lived isolated from the other 5 populated continents. That is until the Europeans developed boats that could traverse the Atlantic Ocean.
There was a culture clash, and things have been somewhat messy, but sometimes they’ve also been beautiful. Relations between peoples and people have gone well when each person has operated out from a position of generosity and grace.
In 1492 Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue, but the part of the story I want to focus on takes place in a little village called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire in the United Kingdom, starting about 1590.
In that little village, which I visited last summer while in England serving a church near Manchester, has today about 400 people living in it. It’s this tiny, really sort of no-where place. But it’s very important to the history of the modern United States.
In about 1590 a small group of villagers decided that their religious calling was in a different direction than that of the Church of England, which was then the state religion, and remains so this very day. And so they began to meet in secret.
As I said, I went to Scrooby last year. I went as sort of a religious and historical pilgrimage. These separatists from Scrooby eventually become the people who land at Plymouth Rock. So I went to St. Wilifred’s Church, from which this group dissented and formed their own faith community because they are direct ancestors of ours theologically. It was a very moving experience for me.
They broke free from the state religion because they felt there was more to their beliefs than what the established church offered them. And they went to Holland and stayed for a generation, and then moved to America in 1620.
They were engaged in what we call “liberal theology.” I bet you never thought you’d hear the Pilgrims being called liberal! James Luther Adams, Unitarian Universalist theologian, defines liberal theology as one that is open to critique and criticism at all times. The people in Scrooby did just that, and found the Christianity being practiced around them wanting, so they branched off and created a version that spoke to their souls. Literally.
And then they founded their own version of The City on The Hill, in Plymouth, MA, and became orthodox. They stopped examining their theological assumptions and traditions, and insisted that they had the right way to do things. A little later on, others would challenge their system, as they had challenged the Church of England, and the pattern continues to this very day.
So here we have this pattern. People engage with a system. They think about it, they question it and if they think they have a better answer, they pursue it.
I’m suggesting that when people engage with a system they are operating in, they do that because they have a sense of abundance around them. They feel like there is something more out there. And when they act on this hunch, they become reformers, and often they set themselves up in opposition to the orthodoxy, or those who wish to keep the traditions they’re used to.
We, we being Unitarian Universalists, come from a long line of reformers. Both as a People of Faith, and people. You can ask my Mom, I’ve been challenging orthodoxy since I first learned to talk. This self-reflective examination of our place in the world and the way we engage with that which is most sacred and holy to us is a small microcosm of the theological promise of our country.
In our country now we have what’ve been called “the culture wars” going on. I don’t really like that phrase, but it’s convenient. In this clash, we have the reformers on one hand and the traditionalists on the other.
The reformers, like myself, like to think that we are operating from a position of abundance. Of course all people should have access to health care, marriage rights and a whole host of other things, because we should all be equal.
Now, it would be easy, and frankly both intellectually and spiritually lazy to say that the traditionalists are just people unwilling to share the abundance that they already possess. But we’re not going to do that.
Throughout American history we can see that the people in the traditionalist camp don’t like change. They have a view of what their world should be and they want it to stay that way.
Why is this?
I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, but I have a theory.
They live in scarcity, not generosity.
Traditionalists want to hold on to what they have because they don’t think there’s enough to go around. They are not mean, or evil. They are worried. It is true, though, that sometimes in their worry, traditionalists have done some pretty awful things.
In the 17th Century some of them banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston for her religious views. In the 18th Century some of them imported millions of human beings in a system of slavery. In the 19th Century they claimed states’ rights to uphold human slavery, fought a war over it and denied our Universalist Ancestors the right to defend themselves in court, because we didn’t believe in Hell, and therefore could not be depended on to tell the truth in court. In the 20th Century there was racial violence, codified homophobia and the cold war. In the 21st Century, there is a fight over gay marriage and immigration.
The Reformers, though have not been innocent, so don’t feel too pleased with yourself. Over and over we push the envelope, disturbing the peace with our ideas about fairness and equality. The Traditionalists didn’t fight a war against themselves. We’ve been plenty agitating.
What we Reformers need to do in our quest for equality for all is to remember that the Traditionalists are also part of the equation.
In our heady feeling of generosity, we often forget to be generous with those whose system we are challenging.
Through our spirit of abundance, we must learn to be generous with those Traditionalists. Because honestly, until people in the Traditionalist camps can come to see the Abundance that we see, they will never stray from their camp, clutching onto the few things they think they have, all the while eyeing us suspiciously.
In Abundance and Spiritual Generosity, it is our charge to be gentle with the people who are not yet with us in spirit. To push for change, true enough, but to do it first and foremost with love in our hearts for ALL of humanity, not just those to whom we share a natural, mutual bond.
Afterall, we know, in our heart of hearts, when we are being our best selves, and living the very theology of abundance…we know that there is enough for everyone.
There is enough food
There is enough water
There is enough clothing
There is enough housing
There is enough love to go around so that each and every person feels surrounded by it.
And when the day comes that all people understand this as we do, there will be no more denial of the rights of people, there will be no more denial of the basic humanity of people, no more exploitation of the Earth and her resources.
But that day will only come if we lead the way in love.
Good morning.
This morning I’d like to share a story with you. It’s the story of a people, come from many different lands, different languages and different reasons for arriving on the shores of this country.
It’s not a perfect story. There is a lot of heartbreak involved.
According to archeologists, humans first came to this country after leaving Africa, from the west about 20,000 years ago, over the Bering Straight from what is now Russia, through what is now Canada, through the United States, and into Mexico and the South American countries.
And for a long time these peoples lived isolated from the other 5 populated continents. That is until the Europeans developed boats that could traverse the Atlantic Ocean.
There was a culture clash, and things have been somewhat messy, but sometimes they’ve also been beautiful. Relations between peoples and people have gone well when each person has operated out from a position of generosity and grace.
In 1492 Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue, but the part of the story I want to focus on takes place in a little village called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire in the United Kingdom, starting about 1590.
In that little village, which I visited last summer while in England serving a church near Manchester, has today about 400 people living in it. It’s this tiny, really sort of no-where place. But it’s very important to the history of the modern United States.
In about 1590 a small group of villagers decided that their religious calling was in a different direction than that of the Church of England, which was then the state religion, and remains so this very day. And so they began to meet in secret.
As I said, I went to Scrooby last year. I went as sort of a religious and historical pilgrimage. These separatists from Scrooby eventually become the people who land at Plymouth Rock. So I went to St. Wilifred’s Church, from which this group dissented and formed their own faith community because they are direct ancestors of ours theologically. It was a very moving experience for me.
They broke free from the state religion because they felt there was more to their beliefs than what the established church offered them. And they went to Holland and stayed for a generation, and then moved to America in 1620.
They were engaged in what we call “liberal theology.” I bet you never thought you’d hear the Pilgrims being called liberal! James Luther Adams, Unitarian Universalist theologian, defines liberal theology as one that is open to critique and criticism at all times. The people in Scrooby did just that, and found the Christianity being practiced around them wanting, so they branched off and created a version that spoke to their souls. Literally.
And then they founded their own version of The City on The Hill, in Plymouth, MA, and became orthodox. They stopped examining their theological assumptions and traditions, and insisted that they had the right way to do things. A little later on, others would challenge their system, as they had challenged the Church of England, and the pattern continues to this very day.
So here we have this pattern. People engage with a system. They think about it, they question it and if they think they have a better answer, they pursue it.
I’m suggesting that when people engage with a system they are operating in, they do that because they have a sense of abundance around them. They feel like there is something more out there. And when they act on this hunch, they become reformers, and often they set themselves up in opposition to the orthodoxy, or those who wish to keep the traditions they’re used to.
We, we being Unitarian Universalists, come from a long line of reformers. Both as a People of Faith, and people. You can ask my Mom, I’ve been challenging orthodoxy since I first learned to talk. This self-reflective examination of our place in the world and the way we engage with that which is most sacred and holy to us is a small microcosm of the theological promise of our country.
In our country now we have what’ve been called “the culture wars” going on. I don’t really like that phrase, but it’s convenient. In this clash, we have the reformers on one hand and the traditionalists on the other.
The reformers, like myself, like to think that we are operating from a position of abundance. Of course all people should have access to health care, marriage rights and a whole host of other things, because we should all be equal.
Now, it would be easy, and frankly both intellectually and spiritually lazy to say that the traditionalists are just people unwilling to share the abundance that they already possess. But we’re not going to do that.
Throughout American history we can see that the people in the traditionalist camp don’t like change. They have a view of what their world should be and they want it to stay that way.
Why is this?
I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, but I have a theory.
They live in scarcity, not generosity.
Traditionalists want to hold on to what they have because they don’t think there’s enough to go around. They are not mean, or evil. They are worried. It is true, though, that sometimes in their worry, traditionalists have done some pretty awful things.
In the 17th Century some of them banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston for her religious views. In the 18th Century some of them imported millions of human beings in a system of slavery. In the 19th Century they claimed states’ rights to uphold human slavery, fought a war over it and denied our Universalist Ancestors the right to defend themselves in court, because we didn’t believe in Hell, and therefore could not be depended on to tell the truth in court. In the 20th Century there was racial violence, codified homophobia and the cold war. In the 21st Century, there is a fight over gay marriage and immigration.
The Reformers, though have not been innocent, so don’t feel too pleased with yourself. Over and over we push the envelope, disturbing the peace with our ideas about fairness and equality. The Traditionalists didn’t fight a war against themselves. We’ve been plenty agitating.
What we Reformers need to do in our quest for equality for all is to remember that the Traditionalists are also part of the equation.
In our heady feeling of generosity, we often forget to be generous with those whose system we are challenging.
Through our spirit of abundance, we must learn to be generous with those Traditionalists. Because honestly, until people in the Traditionalist camps can come to see the Abundance that we see, they will never stray from their camp, clutching onto the few things they think they have, all the while eyeing us suspiciously.
In Abundance and Spiritual Generosity, it is our charge to be gentle with the people who are not yet with us in spirit. To push for change, true enough, but to do it first and foremost with love in our hearts for ALL of humanity, not just those to whom we share a natural, mutual bond.
Afterall, we know, in our heart of hearts, when we are being our best selves, and living the very theology of abundance…we know that there is enough for everyone.
There is enough food
There is enough water
There is enough clothing
There is enough housing
There is enough love to go around so that each and every person feels surrounded by it.
And when the day comes that all people understand this as we do, there will be no more denial of the rights of people, there will be no more denial of the basic humanity of people, no more exploitation of the Earth and her resources.
But that day will only come if we lead the way in love.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Pentecost: A Common Language
Story for All Ages:
The Parable of the Herbs
(adapted from the Lotus Sutra.)
The Buddha acknowledged that his student did in fact understand importance of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Sutra. When the student said he was concerned that all beings be able to hear the Sutra, the Buddha told him this parable.
Full knowledge of the truth is very important. Imagine for a moment, a vast forest. In the forest there is every kind of plant, from the largest flowers, to the oldest trees to the youngest sprouts.
Can you see all the plants in their variations, almost too many different types to name or count?
The Buddha continued:
These plants live together, side by side. Each of them seeking the same nutrients from the Earth, the same sunlight to feed them.
When the rain comes, clouds come from the West and cover the sky! And what happens when dark clouds come over the sky? That’s right… it rains.
And when the rain comes down from the cloud, each plant gets the water it needs to live, to thrive.
Each plant in the forest gathers water in it’s own way. Leaves are often shaped to trap water, and direct water to the plants’ roots. And there as many different leaf shapes as there are plants!
But even with all the diversity of plant leaves and plants, each plant gets the water it needs to live. And it uses the water to help it to reach it’s full potential of plantness. The sunflower becomes the sunfloweriest it can. So does the Birch tree. It becomes the most Birch tree-ish it can; so to do the fern, the shrub, the mushroom…. All of them use the same water, as best it suits them, to reach their potential.
They have the water in common. Whether they produce strawberries or thorns, the water unites them.
In the same way, no matter how a person worships, or practices their religion, even if they practice no religion, each person is nurtured by a common source.
Buddha called it The Wonderful Dharma, or Law, of the Flowering Plant. Other people call this source God. Some call this source Allah, The Great Goddess, and many other names.
Like the plants, some of us will use one idea to gather our nourishment, others will use a different method.
What is important though, more than the name used, is that you use the source to help you to become the best person you can be.
Pentecost: A Common Language
We are living in The Information Age. We have 24-hour news channels, Internet, and talk shows that come to our radios, televisions and NPR that uploads shows directly to my iPod.
Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
It seems like no matter where we go, we can’t get away from the constant barrage of information, opinion and people trying to influence the way we think.
And no, I’m not blind to the irony that here I am on Sunday morning, talking.
What if we took time for listening? Really, deep, listening?
This morning’s readings told us the story of the Tower of Babel and the time of the Pentecost. Are we in our modern version of Babel? Or of Pentecost?
Are we instead, in a modern blend of the two?
Through the internet I can read papers from many lands, as long as I speak the language. And really even that’s changing. Google is introducing a new free service that will translate any language for you. It’s actually pretty amazing. Through skype and the internet I can speak with friends from around the globe. That doesn’t make Poalo’s English any better, and my Italian is so poor as to not really count as a language. I speak more like a parrot than a person.
But still the tool exists. And frankly, if 20 years ago, you had told me this technology would exist and be so common that I would have it in my own house, I would’ve thought you were nuts. Honestly, I expected flying cars, long before I expected personal, laptops with which I can literally talk to the world.
Is the Internet a tale about Babel or Pentecost?
There are many ways to consider and think about the stories of Babel and Pentecost. Pride and humility. Angry God and Loving God. Punishment and Grace are among them.
I’d like to suggest that instead of a dichotomy, we consider theses two paired stories as a continuum, in which our behavior and engagement in the world slides from one side to the other, seeking, hopefully, a balance in the middle.
Earlier I listed just some of the barrage of information and data heading our way on a daily basis. There is now so much information that we cannot possibly take it all in. Time was, not even so far back as a whole century, the town had one or two newspapers, and that was for your data input. Well, that and the local pub, or back fence, depending on your gender.
We used to have time to digest news.
The Reverend Alice Blair Wesley gave a series of lectures in 2000, on the history of religious covenant in the United States. In 1637 there were some families who founded the town of Dedham, Massachusetts. She gave the first lecture there. The men of Dedham decided that they needed to form a commonwealth and consider the founding of a church. They meet weekly, in someone’s home. Before the end of the weekly meeting the topic for next week’s meeting would be decided upon so that each speaker, man or woman, would be able to present quote “a considered opinion” on the question.
When is the last time you had a week to consider a question?
With all this data and information flying passed us seemingly every moment of the day, in someways, it can feel like we’re living in Babel. Even if the language is all my native tongue, there is so much of it as to render it confusing and meaningless.
Modern communication is both Babel and Pentecost. Confusion and salvation.
Through our modern technology, we can have friends from around the world. I have friends who’ve moved to Belgium, Germany and far-flung parts of this, our own country. I have friends that I made when I was the summer minister in a church outside of Manchester England. I have friends who speak many different languages than I do.
There are people we interact with on a regular basis for whom English is a second language.
When is the last time you sat with someone and just talked? When is the last time you sat with someone, for an hour, and didn’t pull out your laptop, cell phone or other communication device? When is the last time you sat with a friend, new or old, for an afternoon and didn’t have to care about what time it was?
We have made our own Babel.
And since we’ve proven we can do that, perhaps we can help bring our own Pentecost into being. We can plant the garden in which a Pentecost can grow. We can make space in our lives for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Love, to come to us and to help us communicate passed all the noise, to communicate from one heart to another.
We can take time to engage the shop clerk in 90 seconds of actual engagement. Instead of the precursory “How ya doin’?” What if you looked in their eyes and asked them “How are you today?” and then waited for an answer?
What if you took the time to ask each person you met three questions about themselves, and not about your business transaction?
In some ways I think of the gift of the Pentecost as a break from the babble of multiple languages, not just as a tool to teach what the Lord said, but also to listen. Most people approach the story of the Pentecost from the point of view of the people in the room. They were able to speak, through some miracle, so that each person outside the room could hear the message in their own tongue.
But what if we considered the miracle from the point of view of the listeners? What if the real lesson here isn’t about speaking, but listening?
Like the Parable of the Herbs where the water reached each herb, as the herb was, and helped the herb to reach it’s full potential as the herb it was meant to be, so too is the ability not just to hear the myriad of sounds that go by us every moment, but to understand and discern what’s being communicated.
Imagine the shock and amazement you might feel if suddenly, instead of hearing a thousand different sounds, and dealing with a hundred distracting thoughts, you were able to hear, really hear and understand your neighbor; your beloved.
Your “enemy.”
From the Christian Century in an article on the Pentecost: “What would it look like if in our worship, our speaking truth to power, we invited the Holy Spirit among us to bring the miracle of understanding? What would happen if amid our ongoing speaking in our native tongues and world-views and truths, we could at least marvel at understanding what the other was saying, whether or not we could shout amen? What if I could at least grasp that had I been shaped by another’s life, and that I might think as another does, even though my life shaped me to think that person is dead wrong?”
Susan Werner wrote, in a song called “Forgiveness” these lyrics.
How do you love those who never will love you
Who are happy to shove you out in front of the train
How do you not hate those who would leave you lie bleeding
While they hold their prayer meeting
How do you love those who never will love you
Who are so frightened of you they are calling for war
How do you not hate those who have loaded their Bibles
And armed their disciples, ‘cuz I don't know anymore
And I can't find forgiveness for them anywhere in this
And with God as my witness I really have tried
How do you love those who never will love you
I think only God knows and he is not taking sides
I hope one day he shows us how we can love those
Who never will love us but who still we must love
What Ms. Werner is looking for is understanding. She is acting as the hearer, asking how we can love those with whom we don’t agree. How can she practice the love she believes God wants her to, when the people she’s supposed to love are actively engaged in ways that not only confuse her, but actually leave her feeling frightened and threatened.
The answer may be less pleasant than we’d like.
We have to put ourselves out in the world, and hold our arms wide and our ears open. We have to take on the responsibility of being the ones who offer the olive branch of peace first. If we want peace and understanding, we must be prepared to offer it to the world.
In the story from Acts, the Holy Spirit came down from heaven, and allowed the people to hear each other.
If we understand the message of Pentecost, not as a story about the speakers, but the hearers, the focus of the story shifts from that of the message, to a story about understanding. Through this understanding the people can come together. And through coming together, they can effect change.
If we want to create a Heaven on Earth, we must strive to learn to hear and understand one another.
If we want to help the homeless on the street, the women struggling with reproductive choices, the new immigrant who left his entire family of origin so that his children might have a better life, we have to learn to hear. And then we need to learn to speak, speak the language of those we are called to help.
Theodore Parker said “Ours is not a Sunday Morning religion, but a religion for all seven days.” Go into the world and practice spreading your arms open wide to the world, exposing your heart. Try to make a habit of asking each person three questions. Practice listening to the people around you. If the world is to be made a better place, then we are the ones who must start the work.
Many blessings for your journey.
The Parable of the Herbs
(adapted from the Lotus Sutra.)
The Buddha acknowledged that his student did in fact understand importance of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Sutra. When the student said he was concerned that all beings be able to hear the Sutra, the Buddha told him this parable.
Full knowledge of the truth is very important. Imagine for a moment, a vast forest. In the forest there is every kind of plant, from the largest flowers, to the oldest trees to the youngest sprouts.
Can you see all the plants in their variations, almost too many different types to name or count?
The Buddha continued:
These plants live together, side by side. Each of them seeking the same nutrients from the Earth, the same sunlight to feed them.
When the rain comes, clouds come from the West and cover the sky! And what happens when dark clouds come over the sky? That’s right… it rains.
And when the rain comes down from the cloud, each plant gets the water it needs to live, to thrive.
Each plant in the forest gathers water in it’s own way. Leaves are often shaped to trap water, and direct water to the plants’ roots. And there as many different leaf shapes as there are plants!
But even with all the diversity of plant leaves and plants, each plant gets the water it needs to live. And it uses the water to help it to reach it’s full potential of plantness. The sunflower becomes the sunfloweriest it can. So does the Birch tree. It becomes the most Birch tree-ish it can; so to do the fern, the shrub, the mushroom…. All of them use the same water, as best it suits them, to reach their potential.
They have the water in common. Whether they produce strawberries or thorns, the water unites them.
In the same way, no matter how a person worships, or practices their religion, even if they practice no religion, each person is nurtured by a common source.
Buddha called it The Wonderful Dharma, or Law, of the Flowering Plant. Other people call this source God. Some call this source Allah, The Great Goddess, and many other names.
Like the plants, some of us will use one idea to gather our nourishment, others will use a different method.
What is important though, more than the name used, is that you use the source to help you to become the best person you can be.
Pentecost: A Common Language
We are living in The Information Age. We have 24-hour news channels, Internet, and talk shows that come to our radios, televisions and NPR that uploads shows directly to my iPod.
Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
It seems like no matter where we go, we can’t get away from the constant barrage of information, opinion and people trying to influence the way we think.
And no, I’m not blind to the irony that here I am on Sunday morning, talking.
What if we took time for listening? Really, deep, listening?
This morning’s readings told us the story of the Tower of Babel and the time of the Pentecost. Are we in our modern version of Babel? Or of Pentecost?
Are we instead, in a modern blend of the two?
Through the internet I can read papers from many lands, as long as I speak the language. And really even that’s changing. Google is introducing a new free service that will translate any language for you. It’s actually pretty amazing. Through skype and the internet I can speak with friends from around the globe. That doesn’t make Poalo’s English any better, and my Italian is so poor as to not really count as a language. I speak more like a parrot than a person.
But still the tool exists. And frankly, if 20 years ago, you had told me this technology would exist and be so common that I would have it in my own house, I would’ve thought you were nuts. Honestly, I expected flying cars, long before I expected personal, laptops with which I can literally talk to the world.
Is the Internet a tale about Babel or Pentecost?
There are many ways to consider and think about the stories of Babel and Pentecost. Pride and humility. Angry God and Loving God. Punishment and Grace are among them.
I’d like to suggest that instead of a dichotomy, we consider theses two paired stories as a continuum, in which our behavior and engagement in the world slides from one side to the other, seeking, hopefully, a balance in the middle.
Earlier I listed just some of the barrage of information and data heading our way on a daily basis. There is now so much information that we cannot possibly take it all in. Time was, not even so far back as a whole century, the town had one or two newspapers, and that was for your data input. Well, that and the local pub, or back fence, depending on your gender.
We used to have time to digest news.
The Reverend Alice Blair Wesley gave a series of lectures in 2000, on the history of religious covenant in the United States. In 1637 there were some families who founded the town of Dedham, Massachusetts. She gave the first lecture there. The men of Dedham decided that they needed to form a commonwealth and consider the founding of a church. They meet weekly, in someone’s home. Before the end of the weekly meeting the topic for next week’s meeting would be decided upon so that each speaker, man or woman, would be able to present quote “a considered opinion” on the question.
When is the last time you had a week to consider a question?
With all this data and information flying passed us seemingly every moment of the day, in someways, it can feel like we’re living in Babel. Even if the language is all my native tongue, there is so much of it as to render it confusing and meaningless.
Modern communication is both Babel and Pentecost. Confusion and salvation.
Through our modern technology, we can have friends from around the world. I have friends who’ve moved to Belgium, Germany and far-flung parts of this, our own country. I have friends that I made when I was the summer minister in a church outside of Manchester England. I have friends who speak many different languages than I do.
There are people we interact with on a regular basis for whom English is a second language.
When is the last time you sat with someone and just talked? When is the last time you sat with someone, for an hour, and didn’t pull out your laptop, cell phone or other communication device? When is the last time you sat with a friend, new or old, for an afternoon and didn’t have to care about what time it was?
We have made our own Babel.
And since we’ve proven we can do that, perhaps we can help bring our own Pentecost into being. We can plant the garden in which a Pentecost can grow. We can make space in our lives for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Love, to come to us and to help us communicate passed all the noise, to communicate from one heart to another.
We can take time to engage the shop clerk in 90 seconds of actual engagement. Instead of the precursory “How ya doin’?” What if you looked in their eyes and asked them “How are you today?” and then waited for an answer?
What if you took the time to ask each person you met three questions about themselves, and not about your business transaction?
In some ways I think of the gift of the Pentecost as a break from the babble of multiple languages, not just as a tool to teach what the Lord said, but also to listen. Most people approach the story of the Pentecost from the point of view of the people in the room. They were able to speak, through some miracle, so that each person outside the room could hear the message in their own tongue.
But what if we considered the miracle from the point of view of the listeners? What if the real lesson here isn’t about speaking, but listening?
Like the Parable of the Herbs where the water reached each herb, as the herb was, and helped the herb to reach it’s full potential as the herb it was meant to be, so too is the ability not just to hear the myriad of sounds that go by us every moment, but to understand and discern what’s being communicated.
Imagine the shock and amazement you might feel if suddenly, instead of hearing a thousand different sounds, and dealing with a hundred distracting thoughts, you were able to hear, really hear and understand your neighbor; your beloved.
Your “enemy.”
From the Christian Century in an article on the Pentecost: “What would it look like if in our worship, our speaking truth to power, we invited the Holy Spirit among us to bring the miracle of understanding? What would happen if amid our ongoing speaking in our native tongues and world-views and truths, we could at least marvel at understanding what the other was saying, whether or not we could shout amen? What if I could at least grasp that had I been shaped by another’s life, and that I might think as another does, even though my life shaped me to think that person is dead wrong?”
Susan Werner wrote, in a song called “Forgiveness” these lyrics.
How do you love those who never will love you
Who are happy to shove you out in front of the train
How do you not hate those who would leave you lie bleeding
While they hold their prayer meeting
How do you love those who never will love you
Who are so frightened of you they are calling for war
How do you not hate those who have loaded their Bibles
And armed their disciples, ‘cuz I don't know anymore
And I can't find forgiveness for them anywhere in this
And with God as my witness I really have tried
How do you love those who never will love you
I think only God knows and he is not taking sides
I hope one day he shows us how we can love those
Who never will love us but who still we must love
What Ms. Werner is looking for is understanding. She is acting as the hearer, asking how we can love those with whom we don’t agree. How can she practice the love she believes God wants her to, when the people she’s supposed to love are actively engaged in ways that not only confuse her, but actually leave her feeling frightened and threatened.
The answer may be less pleasant than we’d like.
We have to put ourselves out in the world, and hold our arms wide and our ears open. We have to take on the responsibility of being the ones who offer the olive branch of peace first. If we want peace and understanding, we must be prepared to offer it to the world.
In the story from Acts, the Holy Spirit came down from heaven, and allowed the people to hear each other.
If we understand the message of Pentecost, not as a story about the speakers, but the hearers, the focus of the story shifts from that of the message, to a story about understanding. Through this understanding the people can come together. And through coming together, they can effect change.
If we want to create a Heaven on Earth, we must strive to learn to hear and understand one another.
If we want to help the homeless on the street, the women struggling with reproductive choices, the new immigrant who left his entire family of origin so that his children might have a better life, we have to learn to hear. And then we need to learn to speak, speak the language of those we are called to help.
Theodore Parker said “Ours is not a Sunday Morning religion, but a religion for all seven days.” Go into the world and practice spreading your arms open wide to the world, exposing your heart. Try to make a habit of asking each person three questions. Practice listening to the people around you. If the world is to be made a better place, then we are the ones who must start the work.
Many blessings for your journey.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
What You Want, What You Need.
You can't always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need. – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
This week I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. Just yesterday in class I sang a Bob Dylan song, a capella. Today I’m quoting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Who knows what tomorrow might bring.
And that’s what I want to talk about this evening. Not knowing what tomorrow brings.
Our world is sort of in bad shape right now. Well, depending on where you are, our world is in really bad shape. The people of Haiti are on our minds frequently these days, and as well they should be. They are in real trouble there. And there are the folks in New Orleans, who still haven’t had ample chance to recover from their disaster. There are many people who are suffering because of humanity’s inability to interface well with Nature. Places where Nature has just not conformed to our will. And where we have failed to subdue Nature, sometimes we suffer.
You can’t always get what you want.
And if you try sometime you find, you get what you need.
Notice the lyric does not say “And if you try some time, you find, you get what you want.” Nope, you get what you need.
Who among us can say that they, at all times, know what they need?
I am not prepared to stand here and count myself among them. Often times I’m not even sure what I want.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess to you that I’ve never heard the Rolling Stones version of that song I quoted earlier. I know only the version from the television show, Glee. Also, I’ve never heard Bob Dylan sing “I Believe in You,” the song I used in class just yesterday. I know only Sinead O’Connor’s version. I’ve never had a lot of exposure to either the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan, just enough to know that it isn’t really the sort of music I enjoy, and yet here I am this week, betraying my Motown roots. I’m sure Diana Ross is furious. And yet, both songs express something that I deeply needed this week. Not what I wanted, but what I needed.
As part of my own spiritual journey and practice, I have been working very diligently at remaining open to Possibility. And by that I mean the capital P possibility. I’ve been working very hard to embrace the things that Life, also with a capital letter, has to offer. Largely I blame my dear friend and colleague Pam Rumancik for this, as she spent our first two years in seminary saying to me “It’ll be what it needs to be, Joe.” At first I used to grumble under my breath, because I needed to know what it needed to be. I didn’t need to wait for it, whatever it was, to be. I had a deep seeded need to help it become whatever it was going to become.
Eventually, like water over a stone, Pam wore me down and I began to embrace the wisdom of what she offered me. It was hard at first, and like all new skills, I was very clumsy at first, and often impatient for results.
What I’ve cultivated now, instead of my impatience, is an awareness to the Universe around me. From Luang Por Sumedho
Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings,
of attitudes, of moods, or material change,
and emotional change:
Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible.
It’s not something that changes.
It’s a refuge you can trust in.
This refuge is not something you can create.
It is not a creation. It’s not an ideal.
It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or nor noticed.
When you’re mindful,
you’re beginning to notice,
it’s like this.
If you concentrate only on what you think you want, you may be missing what it is that you really need.
We live in a world where our desires are constantly manipulated by corporations whose very existence depends on our deciding that we need or deserve the product they’re selling. And often, and perhaps not surprisingly, things are not really what they seem.
We’ve all seen a cute little car commercial with a zippy little car, or a grand dame of luxury, right? They’re not really selling you that car. They’re tying to sell you happiness.
Just like when you were a kid, they tried to sell you happiness in the form of a slinky that walked down stairs, alone or in pairs.
The slinky and the car are really only the means by which you get the opportunity to gain or achieve this happiness.
Except of course, that’s a lie.
Happiness can’t be bought, and since it can’t be bought, they can’t charge you interest on it, or raise market share. So they fool us into thinking that we want that Bose stereo system with the iPod dock for our study. Because music brings joy, joy brings happiness. See how easy the formula is?
Except of course, happiness can’t be bought.
The accessories to happiness, however might be a different matter.
But as nice as the Bose system might sound, and look, I don’t need it. I just want it.
So, what does one need? That of course, is a highly individualized answer. What does one really need? Can you search within yourself and identify that which you really need, and not just desire?
Those people in Haiti? They need shelter, they need food.
None of us needs an iPod system. Though, obviously, some of us want one very much.
I’m not advocating a life with a stark, monastic quality without comforts. What I’m suggesting is a little more attention be paid to what we need, and not what we want.
And what we need is often a lot less about material items than we’re pressed into buying.
Spend some time this week thinking about what you absolutely need. Listen for the answer that comes from within. Honestly, sit with yourself, and with integrity, ask yourself if this is what you need. If you don’t spend time with yourself examining your values, you may never know the difference between what you need and what you want.
There is no guarantee that you’ll get what you need, according to Mick and Keith, but sometimes you just might.
And the rest of the time, you’ll have to figure out how to make do.
Now making do isn’t always fun. I’m not blind to that. It means stretching what you have, doing as my parents used to say “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” But there is something to be gained in this experience of not having everything that you need. If you take to heart what my friend Pam says “It’ll be what it needs to be,” you just might find that you what you thought you needed, you didn’t.
And that, friends, is a form of spiritual growth.
The Reverend Kate Braestrup, Chaplain for the State of Maine's Warden Service is a minister who came to her own ministry largely through grieving her late husband who was a State Trooper and seminarian. She tells this beginning of a story in her memoir;
Around three in the afternoon, as my kids are trooping into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks in the mudroom, describing their school days, the telephone rings.
"Your Holiness!" Lieutenant Trisdale roars: "We've got a situation up here by Masquinogy Pond we could use your help with.
What Kate wanted to be was a minister's wife. She wanted her husband to finish seminary, and to continue her own writing career.
This, of course, isn't what happened. And while searching for what she needed to grieve her husband, Kate discovered her own call to ministry.
You may think that you need one thing, and maybe you’re wrong. Instead of a new romance, you may need to deepen your friendship with someone close to you already. Instead of needing a night on the town, perhaps you need an evening in, a pot luck with friends.
Open yourself up to the possibilities the Universe can offer you. Spend some time with your soul and ask questions. Make room for the Grace of the Spirit of Life. This’ll take some work, of course, and sometimes when you’re scrabbling around to make sense of your life you might not feel like investing your energy in this.
But this is important spiritual work, friends, but your life will be the richer for it.
You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you’ll find, you get what you need.
Blessings for your journey.
Amen.
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need. – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
This week I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. Just yesterday in class I sang a Bob Dylan song, a capella. Today I’m quoting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Who knows what tomorrow might bring.
And that’s what I want to talk about this evening. Not knowing what tomorrow brings.
Our world is sort of in bad shape right now. Well, depending on where you are, our world is in really bad shape. The people of Haiti are on our minds frequently these days, and as well they should be. They are in real trouble there. And there are the folks in New Orleans, who still haven’t had ample chance to recover from their disaster. There are many people who are suffering because of humanity’s inability to interface well with Nature. Places where Nature has just not conformed to our will. And where we have failed to subdue Nature, sometimes we suffer.
You can’t always get what you want.
And if you try sometime you find, you get what you need.
Notice the lyric does not say “And if you try some time, you find, you get what you want.” Nope, you get what you need.
Who among us can say that they, at all times, know what they need?
I am not prepared to stand here and count myself among them. Often times I’m not even sure what I want.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess to you that I’ve never heard the Rolling Stones version of that song I quoted earlier. I know only the version from the television show, Glee. Also, I’ve never heard Bob Dylan sing “I Believe in You,” the song I used in class just yesterday. I know only Sinead O’Connor’s version. I’ve never had a lot of exposure to either the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan, just enough to know that it isn’t really the sort of music I enjoy, and yet here I am this week, betraying my Motown roots. I’m sure Diana Ross is furious. And yet, both songs express something that I deeply needed this week. Not what I wanted, but what I needed.
As part of my own spiritual journey and practice, I have been working very diligently at remaining open to Possibility. And by that I mean the capital P possibility. I’ve been working very hard to embrace the things that Life, also with a capital letter, has to offer. Largely I blame my dear friend and colleague Pam Rumancik for this, as she spent our first two years in seminary saying to me “It’ll be what it needs to be, Joe.” At first I used to grumble under my breath, because I needed to know what it needed to be. I didn’t need to wait for it, whatever it was, to be. I had a deep seeded need to help it become whatever it was going to become.
Eventually, like water over a stone, Pam wore me down and I began to embrace the wisdom of what she offered me. It was hard at first, and like all new skills, I was very clumsy at first, and often impatient for results.
What I’ve cultivated now, instead of my impatience, is an awareness to the Universe around me. From Luang Por Sumedho
Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings,
of attitudes, of moods, or material change,
and emotional change:
Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible.
It’s not something that changes.
It’s a refuge you can trust in.
This refuge is not something you can create.
It is not a creation. It’s not an ideal.
It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or nor noticed.
When you’re mindful,
you’re beginning to notice,
it’s like this.
If you concentrate only on what you think you want, you may be missing what it is that you really need.
We live in a world where our desires are constantly manipulated by corporations whose very existence depends on our deciding that we need or deserve the product they’re selling. And often, and perhaps not surprisingly, things are not really what they seem.
We’ve all seen a cute little car commercial with a zippy little car, or a grand dame of luxury, right? They’re not really selling you that car. They’re tying to sell you happiness.
Just like when you were a kid, they tried to sell you happiness in the form of a slinky that walked down stairs, alone or in pairs.
The slinky and the car are really only the means by which you get the opportunity to gain or achieve this happiness.
Except of course, that’s a lie.
Happiness can’t be bought, and since it can’t be bought, they can’t charge you interest on it, or raise market share. So they fool us into thinking that we want that Bose stereo system with the iPod dock for our study. Because music brings joy, joy brings happiness. See how easy the formula is?
Except of course, happiness can’t be bought.
The accessories to happiness, however might be a different matter.
But as nice as the Bose system might sound, and look, I don’t need it. I just want it.
So, what does one need? That of course, is a highly individualized answer. What does one really need? Can you search within yourself and identify that which you really need, and not just desire?
Those people in Haiti? They need shelter, they need food.
None of us needs an iPod system. Though, obviously, some of us want one very much.
I’m not advocating a life with a stark, monastic quality without comforts. What I’m suggesting is a little more attention be paid to what we need, and not what we want.
And what we need is often a lot less about material items than we’re pressed into buying.
Spend some time this week thinking about what you absolutely need. Listen for the answer that comes from within. Honestly, sit with yourself, and with integrity, ask yourself if this is what you need. If you don’t spend time with yourself examining your values, you may never know the difference between what you need and what you want.
There is no guarantee that you’ll get what you need, according to Mick and Keith, but sometimes you just might.
And the rest of the time, you’ll have to figure out how to make do.
Now making do isn’t always fun. I’m not blind to that. It means stretching what you have, doing as my parents used to say “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” But there is something to be gained in this experience of not having everything that you need. If you take to heart what my friend Pam says “It’ll be what it needs to be,” you just might find that you what you thought you needed, you didn’t.
And that, friends, is a form of spiritual growth.
The Reverend Kate Braestrup, Chaplain for the State of Maine's Warden Service is a minister who came to her own ministry largely through grieving her late husband who was a State Trooper and seminarian. She tells this beginning of a story in her memoir;
Around three in the afternoon, as my kids are trooping into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks in the mudroom, describing their school days, the telephone rings.
"Your Holiness!" Lieutenant Trisdale roars: "We've got a situation up here by Masquinogy Pond we could use your help with.
What Kate wanted to be was a minister's wife. She wanted her husband to finish seminary, and to continue her own writing career.
This, of course, isn't what happened. And while searching for what she needed to grieve her husband, Kate discovered her own call to ministry.
You may think that you need one thing, and maybe you’re wrong. Instead of a new romance, you may need to deepen your friendship with someone close to you already. Instead of needing a night on the town, perhaps you need an evening in, a pot luck with friends.
Open yourself up to the possibilities the Universe can offer you. Spend some time with your soul and ask questions. Make room for the Grace of the Spirit of Life. This’ll take some work, of course, and sometimes when you’re scrabbling around to make sense of your life you might not feel like investing your energy in this.
But this is important spiritual work, friends, but your life will be the richer for it.
You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you’ll find, you get what you need.
Blessings for your journey.
Amen.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Be Gentle with Heroes
A hero, according to Daniel Webster, is defined as:
1 a : a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability b : an illustrious warrior c : a person admired for his or her achievements and noble qualities d : one that shows great courage.
Hero is a word that gets used a lot. Certainly there are many who show great courage, and there are many people who could be admired for their achievements and noble qualities, but so few of us are endowed with great strength and abilities due to our grandparents who live on Mount Olympus.
If we tried, collectively we could come up with a long list of both archetypical and personal heroes.
Recently President Barack Obama made a trip to China. It was all over the news. And President Obama’s trip is what got me thinking about this idea of being a hero.
It must be very hard work to be a hero.
Today is the 314th day of the presidency of Barack Obama. Think back, all the way back, to January 20th, Inauguration Day. Where were you? I know where I was. I was at school. The entire Meadville Lombard community came together and watched the Inauguration on a big screen. There was a lot of weeping for joy, and we were probably not alone in that.
But it has been an embattled 314 days, hasn’t it?
Just think back over the summer and all of the town meetings held about Health Care reform. Part of me was very happy that so many people turned out for discussions about the political process, and seemed to be interested in the democratic process (our 5th Principle!), but I was very disheartened by the way people chose to express themselves. There was an utter lack of not only respect, but what I would call common decency in the way people chose to express themselves.
Please understand that I am not making a political statement here, nor am I endorsing the policies of any one party over those of another. This is not about politics. This is about the difficult job of being a hero.
Before the President went to China, he did not have a meeting with the Dali Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. And people were plenty upset about that, too. But really, the President was in a difficult situation.
He was about to go to meet with President Hu Jintao. President Hu is the leader of China, one of our biggest trading partners, growing industrial power, and potentially the world’s next super power.
President Obama knows about the Dali Lama, and he knows about the human rights abuses. But he also knows that we are a trade deficit, that we have our own human rights abuses to deal with.
And yet here Obama was, caught between our country’s need for trade for economic growth, and our citizen’s needs to recognize a difficult situation regarding Tibet and the Dali Lama.
Before this turns into an apology and apologetic of Obama’s 314 days in office, let me point out to you why I used his story as an illustration.
When there are two seemingly diametrically opposed sets of needs, it’s hard to create a win-win situation.
A very close friend and mentor of mine and I were talking about Obama’s presidency recently. She is a life long liberal, and introduced me to the term “red diaper baby,” meaning that her parents were extreme leftists from her childhood. She’s worked for decades in the political system of her home city. She told me “When Obama was first elected, I felt like I was walking with him. I celebrated, I cried, I was elated. But as this year has gone on, and decisions have been made, or delayed by political process, I feel like we’re no longer walking side by side. Sometimes I bump into him, or he bumps in to me, or he walks so far ahead that I can’t see him around the corner.”
This is how our heroes get tarnished. We begin to see that they are human beings. We bump into their reality.
Sure, it’s easy to hero worship superheroes or fictional heroes, or human heroes who are no longer alive, who’s short-comings have been erased by time. One can easily admire the poetry of Walt Whitman for example, and think about his genius. And that’s much easier when you don’t have to watch him get food caught in his moustache as he eats. Abraham Lincoln’s words are to this day inspiring and carry great weight, but when delivered with a high reedy voice, which he is reported to have had, some of their gravitas might be lost.
I’m here suggesting that we be gentler with our heroes.
Unlike Wonder Woman, the personal heroes I have in my life are just people. They have bad hair days, and sometimes they don’t feel like being heroic. Worse yet, sometimes they make mistakes of judgment.
When this happens, you can either abandon them as your hero, you can shun them, or you can reach out to them. One of my classmates at Meadville Lombard Theological School is a Buddhist minister in Rissho Kosei-Kai. I thank the Universe almost daily for bringing him into my life. I have learned so much from him.
One lesson I have learned from him is that we are all Bodhisattvas. A Bodhisattva is a teacher.
When your hero, or teacher, or Bodhisattva, stumbles and shows their human frailty, you can become the bodhisattva of the moment, and teach the importance of compassion by showing compassion.
You can step up to the plate, so to speak, and let your highest self be gentle with your hero. This will be good for both you and your hero. Your hero will be shown love and caring. Living heroically in this world takes a lot of energy and effort, it is good to offer some in return to those living heroically. It will be good for you, because you will begin to realize your own bodhisattva nature, the hero within you.
We’ve just entered the 6 week-long sprint in America called “the holidays.” What’s that line from that Christmas Carol “There’ll be much mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing on and on and on….” That’s a lot of pressure.
There are presents to buy, which is stressful. At my house we’re having a cookie party, where everyone is supposed to be bringing a batch of home-made cookies. There are parties to attend, and a lot of red and green to wear, and on top of all that there is the emotional baggage of Christmases long, long ago. Hap-happiest season of all? Maybe.
I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment. Place your feet on the ground and relax. When you hear the sound of a bell, you may re-open your eyes.
Call to mind a favorite holiday moment from the past.
Who is there with you?
Are there any particular smells, like cookies or pine?
What makes this moment special for you?
(ring bell twice.)
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the moment you picked was not the moment you were driving around the mall parking lot, searching for a spot.
We’re all under a lot of pressure for the next six weeks, to make as many amazing, life-long memories as we can. Probably we’re under pressure to make more of those memories than are humanly possible.
Cookies to make
Presents to buy
Homes to decorate
People to please
Parties to attend
And all that on top of our already busy schedules.
One would have to be a superhero to do it all, and do it flawlessly.
And you’re only a regular hero.
So be gentle with yourself. Take care of yourself during this busy time. Take time for a cup of tea, or coffee. Have a moment where you just stop and look around your home and allow the gratitude, for the imperfections and good things in your life, allow that gratitude to flow over you.
Try this at least once a week.
Try this year-round.
Be kind to yourself, especially in times of stress. It’s often hard to remember that, but try.
Because you are a hero, to someone, be gentle with yourself.
Many blessings on your journey.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)