Peace in the Family

There are places that only the bravest venture into.

Alexander Pope, in his 1708 piece An Essay on Criticism: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Shakespeare wrote about fools in many of his plays, and in a lot of literature; they are the ones who speak the truth.

Because of the place they occupy at the Royal Court, Fools and Jesters can say what no one else dare say, since they live both inside and outside the system.

Families, they warn you in seminary, are dangerous territory. One of the first things they teach you is to NOT try to be the minister in your own family. It will never work. To your Mom you will always be the kid who cut their teeth on the coffee table, to your Dad you will be the who kept borrowing tools and not putting them back, etc.

There is always more to a family than you can see on the surface. People, myself included, have blind spots around their own family, and there are hidden influences everywhere.

Some of you may remember that I have shared a little youtube video called “Friedman's Theory of Differentiated Leadership Made Simple”[1] with the Board and one of last year’s Church council’s meeting. Edwin Friedman was a Rabbi and a family therapist who studied family systems theory. Friedman studied under a man called Murray Bowen, who was an American psychiatrist and one of the pioneers of family therapy, systematic therapy and in the 1950’s began working on a systems approach to family dynamics.

In the last two years I have attended trainings on family systems theory with a student of both Bowen and Friedman, called Bob Diddle. He and a small group of students of Bowen and Friedman have a formed a group to continue the academic study of their teachers. These students have been meeting for over 30 years, and many of them knew and studied with Murray and Ed.

I’m going to share Friedman’s version of Cinderella with you.

 (Insert Edwin Friedman's "Cinderella" from Friedman's Fables)

The moral of the story is that all the world loves a charmer, but nobody remembers the responsible person’s birthday.[2]

Here are some of the questions that are razed by Friedman by way of his re-telling of Cinderella.

How did Cindy’s Stepmother get herself stuck with all this responsibility? What is it in her own past that got triggered by this doting widower who was going to be rarely home, who was going to stick her with raising his kid?

What is it that the stepmother is always considered “mean” and the natural father always “nice”?

Does Cindy’s stepmother have a right to treat her as if she were her own child?

Is discipline more important than affection in parenting?

What does the popularity of the original, romantic version say about society’s avoidance of dealing with issues?

As Irish novelist Maeve Binchy wrote “Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.”

I’d like to invite you for a moment into reflection about your own story. How might one of your siblings or cousins tell your story differently? How about one of your parents?

What Bowen and Friedman are inviting you to do is to look at the story of your family from a systems perspective. They want you to ask questions like how does your birth order effect the way you walk in the world.

Are you the oldest son in the family and also the first-born? Then chances are pretty good you’re going to be in some kind of a leader position your whole life, because it’s what you learned as a small toddler. Are you the oldest girl in your family? Well, then you’re probably a Mom figure. Are you the oldest girl, but the second born? You’re probably still going to be a Mom figure.

Are you the youngest? Chances are you’ll take bigger risks, see your oldest sibling as a stick in the mud who cares more about responsibility than fun.

I don’t agree with all that Bowen and Friedman put forth, but it is a tool that can be used to ask questions about the way you navigate in the world.

You may recall that I was in Oregon earlier this year, and this was so that I could attend these trainings on family systems.

While the people I met there were very nice, the system sort of put a burr under my saddle.

And right now, because you’re the middle child, you’re wondering if once again, you’ve been over looked and forgotten. Don’t worry, you haven’t been.

So back to Oregon…

There was something that just sort of bugged me about the system. And then one presenter said “The ideal marriage is between an oldest son and a youngest daughter who has older brothers.”

Now I want you to know that I had been a very good student up to that point.

I was in a room with 26 other ministers at this workshop. All of them were various flavors of Christian; all of them heterosexual and all of them white as the day is long.

Putting a multi-racial, gay, non-Christian minister who believes, perhaps somewhat radically in a Love that transcends all boundaries, into a room like this is pretty much like setting a kitchen timer.

Eventually, there’s going to be a very loud ding.

“The ideal marriage is between an oldest son and a youngest daughter who has older brothers.”

This was the moment when I went “Uhm, what?”

And there you have three days of responsible studentship, sunk in a moment. Foolishly, or perhaps with a Machiavellian genius that I do not possess, the presenter said “Do you have a question, Joe?”

“The best possible marriage for whom?” I asked. “For a man who doesn’t like to be challenged? For two people who want to blindly perpetuate the patriarchy?”

Like all tools, the Bowen/Freidman theories have their spots that they don’t address, but they can be a good at getting one to consider the role you play in your own family, and how that role promotes or discourages peace.

Peace in the family.

And once you take a hard, long look at your role, how do you want to change your own behavior to promote peace with the ones you live with?

Here are three simple examples.

Can you stop being the bossy older brother, and just try to be the older brother who listens? 

Can you be the youngest sister who goes against the narrative her family has built for her and clearly demonstrate your leadership style?

Can you be the middle child who doesn’t keep score?

By better knowing ourselves, we are more able to become the kind of people we admire. By questioning our behavioral habits, and figuring out what’s behind them, we can break old systems of frustration and create peace in our homes.

It’s a long journey, I know, but you’re on a journey through your life anyway, why not make your journey that of an awakened, alert and intentional person?

I know you can do it. I have faith.

---

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdcljNV-Ew

[2] Friedman, Milton, Friedman’s Fables, © 1990.

The Spiritual Practice of Gratitude

There is something in the American psyche that defaults to dis-satisfaction.

I figured that was a better opening line than saying “We are a nation of mal-contents.”

All kidding aside, though, I have spent a lot of time wondering about just why that is, and how this is a core value to the American way of life.

We are a forward-looking people, who sometimes look back into our past, and the image we see is almost always more photogenic than reality. And this brings up a conflict for us.

In the past, our lives were better. We have the “good old days,” and from that false projection of the good old days, we forecast that today is not as good, and the world is just going to you know where in a handbasket.

I read a book once called “The Way We Never Were,” that sort of brought this idea to mind. I read easily over a decade ago, and so it is in storage back in the Mid-West, so I can’t quote it directly to you, but the gist of the book is that we have this false idea about who we used to be as a nation, and we liked that version better.

This happens to each generation in turn. Some long for the days before “horseless carriages” were everywhere, some long for a world that looked like Leave it to Beaver.

Personally, I’m hoping that my own generation will be cooler than that, but evidence to date shows that we are no better than anyone else,

so at the very least I’m hoping we long for something cool, like Rubik’s Cube or something.


It seems to be in our genetic code that live in the tension between nostalgia and pushing forth into a new world that we create, in which we can find greater happiness.


The very arrival of Europeans onto this continent was a giant experiment in “there must be something better, somewhere.”

For both commercial and spiritual reasons, Europeans risked weeks over an ocean to come to a place unknown to them. The Mayflower voyage, for example, was 66 days from England to the sighting of land at Cape Cod, which as you probably know, was not where they actually settled.

These dissenters who broke away from the Church of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first in a little village called Scrooby… these dissenters are part of our own theological ancestry.

I know it may be hard to hear for some, but we descend, in large part, from the Puritans. Theologically, we are very different from that group of ancestors, but in behavior, not so much.


Our Ancestors the Dissenters and the Puritans were so called because they led a movement within the Church of England to purify the church. They were trying to return the church to a “more pure” form of Christianity. To them the Church of England looked too much like that Church in Rome.

Having found the church of their youth so untenable, they left that church behind them and sought a new way of religious life.

Does that sound familiar to any of you?

They, like us, did this in part because of the pursuit of happiness and well-being. They were looking for a way to live their lives that would put them more in concert with their understanding of God’s will, a way to live that they could be grateful for.


Now, it’s fairly likely that your own definition of understanding the will of what is Holy, that which is of ultimate importance, is quite different from the understanding of William Bradford, the author of “Of Plimouth Plantation,” which records the journeys of the Dissenters from Scrooby to Plymouth, Massachusetts.

But your desire to live a life that is in concert with your values is likely VERY similar.

And you may not have left your home, moved to a foreign country for 17 years, and then left for an unknown land to bring the bright beacon of a City on the Hill into being, but you’ve made your own journey.


And now, like the Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock, we are in a new place.

We no longer have to be tied to a life directed by a tireless pursuit of happiness. We no longer have to look to the mall for guidance about what makes a good life.


As Rev. Meg Barnhouse sang to us during the offering, We have been thinking Mango thoughts in this meatloaf town.  When I say “this town,” of course I don’t mean Modesto. You know how much I have enjoyed living here. “This town” refers to our whole culture.

Meg’s song is a song of joy and gratitude. She wrote this song for her Unitarian Universalist congregation, and it fits all of us.

She could’ve written a song about how much consumerism stinks. About the seemingly endless treadmill of advertisements offering us a new, quicker way to happiness.  But she’s smarter than that.

Meg knows that a big part of happiness is looking around you and really loving what you’ve found.

And this can be a big challenge for people.

Even on regular days there are all sorts of things that can upset your apple cart. People drive poorly, people do horrible things to each other around the globe. The news is filled with misery.

And there are also sometimes internal forces that one has to deal with. Depression, a blue day, a broken heart.

But what I hope Meg’s song will get you to think about is how the everyday can offer you so much to be grateful for…if you can just see it in the ordinary.


In this very room there are dozens of things to be grateful for. There are people that we care about, and people who care about us.

Believe me, when you’re feeling friendless and alone, a room like this is a miracle.


Today’s sermon is called “The Spiritual Practice of Gratitude,” so I assume you guessed that you’d get some pretty concrete ideas about how to make this happen.

It’s very simple, really.

Take time to notice all the blessings of life around you.

In her Contribution to This I Believe, Mary Chapin Carpenter’s wrote:

One morning, the young man who rang up my groceries and asked me if I wanted paper or plastic also told me to enjoy the rest of my day.  I looked at him and I knew he meant it.  It stopped me in my tracks. I went out and I sat in my car and cried.

 What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow, and hopefully days beyond that.  I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude. 

A moment that took Mary completely by surprise, the kindness and authentic wish that some stranger would enjoy the rest of their day, brought her to tears. Tears of gratitude.


You’ve already come so far from the Standard American Life of orthodox religion, stepped away from mindless consumerism, you think about the earth when you recycle. You are more awake to the world than many of the people we know.

This doesn’t make us better, of course. Being awake comes with it’s own price.

But being awake also comes with tremendous benefits.
One of those benefits could be a focus on gratitude.


Just like when you buy groceries, you make choices that are best for your body, and the body of those you love. So you can, at every instance, choose a path of gratitude.

When you take a walk around your neighborhood, instead of noticing that your one neighbor hasn’t taken care of their yard in the way that you would, focus on something that brings you joy.


You may remember back when I gave that sermon on Wonder Woman.  During my research for that sermon, I came across an article that said “If you want to have the confidence of Wonder Woman, stand like she does. Your body will respond chemically to that stance, and you will, in fact, feel more confident.”

In a similar way, if you want to live a life deep in gratitude, you only need to assume the position of gratitude. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.


Here are a few hints about what you might do to help you walk in gratitude.

At the end of the day, spend 5 minutes recording the good things that happened each day. Make a bullet list, or if only one good thing happened today, write about it great detail for 5 minutes.


If you’re like me, though, that practice will last about 3 days. I’m not a good journaler.

So now I do make a mental list while I brush my teeth before bedtime.

Though I can offer no scientific proof, I think this also helps me to sleep better.

When I wake up in the morning, I spend 5 minutes, after I let the dogs out, to sit in my quiet home and think about what makes me feel grateful.

This week while I’ve been doing this practice, there has been peppermint soap curing on the dining room table, so my nose is filled with one of my favorite, fresh clean scents.

These two, small, simple practices can take you a long way toward a greater awareness of the gratitude swarming around you.


If you get really ambitious, you might even try to take time during your lunch to notice what you’re grateful for. Or at dinner.

Denis and I say grace pretty regularly at home. It’s a grace that he introduced me to.

“Bless the Sun and the Earth and the marriage in between. Bless those who plant, those who sow, those who reap, those who buy, sell and transport this bounty which we are about to eat. May we take the energy from this food and use it to make good in the world.”

There are slight variations in it most days, but that’s the general idea of it.


If you want to live a life of radical gratitude, you must find a way that works for you, that brings gratitude to mind.

You can choose the default position of “what I have is not, and will never be enough,” or you can discover that in your life that which is enough.

And you can sigh with happiness.


I’d like to recommend one more radical act of gratitude, and that is to express it to others.

Don't think of gratitude as something you share only with yourself, as something that is only internal.

Think about what happened to Mary in that grocery store. Imagine what it would be like for a clerk at O’Brien’s for you to say to them, every time you see them, “Thank you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day,” and you really, really mean it.

Amen.

Conversation, Not Conversion

It was sort of a brisk April morning in Chicago, and I was a little nervous. We had been dating about 6 months when Greg asked me to go to church with him, as he thought I might really like it.

I had been going to a gay-friendly Presbyterian church near my apartment up to this point. I’d chosen it because for a brief period my family had attended a Presbyterian church when I was growing up, there was a rainbow flag on their church sign, and it was close enough that I could walk to services. On days I was feeling fancy, I would even stop into the Starbucks and get a mocha latte, and still be in the sanctuary in time for the prelude.

It’s true that I had to skip parts of the Apostle’s Creed, and I never took communion there, but the people were nice, and still being fairly new to Chicago, it was nice to be around people since I hadn’t really made many friends yet.

But this morning I was going to a different church, a church I’d never heard of. The First Unitarian Society of Chicago. I supposed it would be somewhat like the Presbyterian church in that there would be things they would believe that I didn’t, but that I would just skip over the parts that I didn’t want to say.

And it isn’t that I didn’t want to say them out of some sense of moral high-ground. I just didn't think it was polite to lie in someone else’s church just to fit in.


After our breakfast, we walked to church in Hyde Park, up to this big stone, cathedral-looking building. We walked in through the double doors and into, what I learned later was a replica of a 14th century Norman cathedral. It looked very high church, and I got even more nervous.

But then the greeters said Hello, and Greg and I sat down, and the funniest thing happened.

Well, actually it didn’t happen, and that what was funny to me

Nobody paid us any attention.

Nobody shot us, a gay couple, dirty looks.  Nobody fell all over themselves to show how liberal and accepting they were.

We were boring! We were just regular and every day to these folks.

And to me, in 1996, that was amazing.



Like Starr King School for the Ministry, here in the East Bay, my own seminary is part of a collection of seminaries, where you can take classes. So I took classes at the Lutheran School of Theology, the University of Chicago Divinity School and so on. This also meant that students from other schools could take classes at our school.

Meadville Lombard is a small school, and the student to professor ratio was about 6:1 in a class. This meant that you could not “pretend” to have done the reading, because there was no sitting in the back of the classroom.

I had a class there on theatre arts in worship. There were four of my classmates there and…. four Lutheran seminarians. We were like the Jets and the Sharks, but only theologically, and there was no dance music.

One afternoon in class, after we’d been together a couple of weeks, one of the women from the Lutheran school asked us about our conversion experiences. Because by now, it had become clear to her that we were not going to be Christian ministers in any way, at least not by her definition, and in genuine curiosity, she asked about our stories.

She told us that at 14 she had welcomed Jesus Christ into her heart, and then a little bit about how that worked in her life. The other three Lutherans told earnest stories that were largely similar.

And the Unitarian Universalists began to sweat.

As each of us told our stories about how we found our way, each as adults it so happened, to Unitarian Universalism I began to notice a pattern.

Unitarian Universalists don’t have “conversion experiences, I think,” I told our classmates. “We have coming home experiences. We spend our whole lives looking for people who are like us, who agree that there is more than one truth, one path, one way to live. We try this group and that church, and then one day, we find ourselves at the door of a Unitarian Universalist church, we sit down, and for the first time, maybe in our lives, we well, we exhale as if we’ve just come home.”

We realize that we have found our people.

Here it doesn’t matter if your people share your ethnicity, the color of your skin, the way you define gender, or your affectional orientation. These are your people.

And like all extended families, you have the weird uncle, you have the aunt who insists on kissing your cheek when you see her. You have ancestors of whom you can be very proud, and some you wish had made better choices. There are the cousins who are too loud, and the ones allergic to peanuts.

But they are your people.

They become your people by conversation. By sharing narratives of lives, by telling their stories about theological journey, and then them asking you about yours.

And here’s the funny part: they listen. It’s not just a polite dance of expected small talk.

And conversation by conversation, event by event, week by week, you go from saying “I can agree with the philosophy of what Unitarian Universalism is about,” to “I am a Unitarian Universalist.”
Conversion by conversation.

There are people among us today who have made this journey from “I agree” to “I am.” It is a privilege to be companions on their journey and to welcome them into Fellowship with us.


If you happen to be a visitor to our congregation this morning, don’t worry, there won’t be an altar call! There’ll be no pressure for you to sign up and join us. These folks have agreed in advanced to join us, after giving it a lot of thought, and going through several afternoons of discussion about what it means to be a member here. Or we were just lucky enough to have them move up here from San Diego where they were members there.

But this is almost universally how we become Unitarian Universalists. We find others who agree that all life should be valued, that each person has inherent worth, and deserves dignity. We believe in an honest search for meaning in the world. We know that no matter what your theological inspiration, Christian, Pagan, Buddhist, Atheist, Hindu, Agnostic, Mystic or some combination, we have only our own hands, and the hands of our fellow travellers, to create a world a place for more fair, more just, and more loving.

On this lovely, crisp morning we welcome new members into our covenant. They by signing our membership book, and then we as a whole, now larger body make verbal affirmation of this, our shared journey.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I get a little religious at a moment like this, but I’m the minister, and I’m somewhat pre-disposed to it.

Will those who are present and who are joining our Fellowship, please come forward?
(after they come forward)

May your individual journey with this Fellowship be long and fruitful. May you come to know that these people will love you deeply, warts and all. That they will comfort you when life is hard. They will bring you food when you are sick, they will cry with you when someone you love dies.

They will celebrate your victories with all of their hearts. They will protect your children as their own.

They will teach you and your kids, by example, how to live a life in concert with your values.

They will challenge you, and push your buttons. They will happily and without complaint accommodate your aging bodies.


Please join me in a spirit of prayer.

Spirit of Love, look upon us this morning. Swim among and between us. So often we rush from moment to moment in this life, help us to pause for this one moment so that we may recognize its deep meaning,

and celebrate the homecoming of these lovely people.

Amen.

(c) The Reverend Joseph M Cherry

The Problem of Columbus Day

History has gotten a little more complicated since the mid-point of the 20th century. Time was there used to be a single narrative about the history of our nation. It was taught from coast to coast, Canada to Mexico.

It was a history that told tales where names of the heroes and the names of the villains were almost in two columns. The good guys and the bad buys. Us vs. Them. Usually, in this history, “them” included anyone whose family was not White, of Anglo-Saxon heritage and believed in the Protestant version of Christianity.

Times were simpler then…


Not the historical times that were being reported on mind you. Those were not simpler times at all. They could be, to quote Thomas Hobbes from his seminal work fro 1651 The Leviathan: And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

But rather, history was simpler to report back then.


I had a dear friend who graduated from Dartmouth college in 1931 with a degree in American history. The American history he studied was most often the history of straight, white men, most of whom had died, and were universally seen as heroes.

Like many other academic disciplines, the Field of Study know as History has undergone some major changes in the last 80 years.

Learning history was simpler then, less nuanced.

You learned that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of whom it could be argued were Unitarian, were great men. They were part of the pantheon of Founding Fathers, to be revered.

And that was that. History understood.

Except obviously, that wasn’t that.

There were of course sub-groups in our culture, those who’s stories had been discounted, ignored, left to neglect because the learned men of the time didn’t consider them worth studying.

Happily, this has been changing.  So now, as we study Jefferson, we learn about Sally Hemings, the slave woman who bore him six children. We begin to see that the same man who crafted words like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” himself had feet of clay. Like all of us, Jefferson was both a man of his own time, but also a man striving toward a future of greater equality for all.

I know that when one read these words 237 years later, it may be difficult to reconcile Jefferson’s words with his actions.



It would be easy to shout words like hypocrisy at a moment like this.

But that would be a bad idea.

We cannot judge people with the values that we hold today, when they lived in a context different than our own.

Think of the moral struggles of our own time. Think, for example, about current hot, political topics. Think about in 237 years what our progeny might say about us and our inability to, for example, guarantee a living wage for all people; or that we put up with such barbaric practices as the death penalty.


Many of us know the old rhyme: In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean, blue.” We know that Columbus was looking for a short cut to Sub-Continental India, and instead “discovered” the New World.

I’m not really up here to debate the historicity and accuracy of all those things.

One of the things that Columbus did, even though it probably never entered his mind, what Columbus did was leave us, these 521 years later, he left us a giant controversy.


As early as 1792, celebrations were held to commemorate Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. In New York City, a celebration was held, and in Baltimore, MD a monument was dedicated to Columbus.  In 1892, a statue of Columbus was raised at Columbus Avenue in New York City. Further, at the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago that year, replicas of Columbus' three ships were displayed.

By 1886 Italian-Americans were promoting Columbus Day as a day of ethnic pride and in 1906, Colorado became the first state to recognize Columbus Day as a holiday. In the late 19th century, Italian-Americans were in desperate need of something to celebrate their culture, because at the time they, along with other immigrant groups, were very poorly treated, and frequently treated as “non-white.” Certainly, they were non-protestants, in a land where it would take another almost 80 years for a Catholic to be elected President of the United States, and he wasn’t even Italian, but Irish!


Now we have a conflict. In a similar way that the Italian-Americans wanted to lift up their cultural contributions to the Great Melting Pot that is our nation, so to, as their own voices began to be recognized and honored, so did the descendants of the people who were already in the Americas want to have their own history recognized and valued.

These two stories are at cross-purposes.

This is the Problem of Columbus Day.  Well, one of the problems of Columbus Day.


The exact specifics of Christopher Columbus’s trip to the Americas is of course very interesting for those who love history. There were four voyages, not all of them went smoothly, and now parts of his remains are in the Dominican Republic and some are in Spain. He was not Spanish by birth, Italian in fact, but before the modern Nation State of Italy, and he tried to get three other monarchs to sponsor his trip before Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand agreed to fund him.

In his first trip, only two of the ships actually completed the journey. The Santa Maria, Columbus’s Flag Ship ran aground on a coral reef and had to be abandoned.


All these facts, though, are sort of beside my point though. Interesting as they may be, accurate as they may or may not be, what is of interest to us today is the conflict that grows out of knowing a more complete picture of the story, not the minutiae of one version of the story.


On the one side, you have this Italian hero, celebrated by Italian-Americans in the late 1800’s. And they need a hero.

Their hero, though, is a villain to those people whose ancestors were already on this continent. The question of what we do to honor both of these stories in concert with each other, is in fact the Problem of Columbus Day.

Columbus was a very early explorer, certainly NOT the first European to find their way to the shores of what would eventually come to be known as “North America.” When he arrived, he found himself confronted by peoples who were not like him, but also who were not the Indians he expected to find.

Following Columbus came many others, and these people some unintentionally, some by design, ravaged the population of people who were already living here. Due to disease, poverty, conquest, subjugation and slavery, the indigenous population was decimated.

And there is a lot of pain and anger felt by their children.



This month’s theological theme is “unity and diversity.”

How can we hold, in just this one example—these two realities of history that surround one man—how can we honor both stories, deeply honor them, when they are so wildly divergent?


Unitarian Universalism enjoys a reputation in “church-circles” for being really excellent at doing interfaith work. About 18 months ago, I came back from a Minister’s Training to report to you how a Black Southern Baptist preacher, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, sang our praises regarding our leadership in Interfaith work, work that he sees as the future. But Dr. Forbes also said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that we needed to get our collective selves in gear, because the world needs us NOW and we are still too busy being “God’s still small voice.” He said, Stop it! Go out, and show the world what we can be if we work together!

I think one way in which we are able to work so well in Interfaith circles is that we have a faith that requires no testament, no single statement of belief, that we have no creed or dogma. We don’t feel the HONEST need to save people by showing them our way of believing, because we don’t, at our core, feel that people need to be saved.

This is a gift from our Universalist ancestors. It is a gift for which I am profoundly grateful and inspired.

Last month when I was attending a meeting with the Stanislaus County Interfaith Council we were planning the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service together. As I sat at the table with Christian and Sikh religious leaders, I was very pleased. Pleased to learn more about Sikhism, pleased be a part of something greater than just me.

I could do this more easily because I didn’t have a deep and serious investment in the outcome. I mean, I want the service to be a success, of course, but I didn’t walk in the door with an idea of how I thought it should look when all the planning was done.

Not having an idea about that, I’m less likely to be frustrated, upset, and even hurt if things turn out a way that is different than what I imagined they would be.


It’s easy not to have a deep investment in one, singular Interfaith Thanksgiving service. Easy because that service doesn’t represent hundreds of years of oppression, theft and other spoils of conquest.


Well, actually, it does, doesn’t it.

But what it also represents is people gathering together, intentionally gathering together, to heal the wounds of the past. To address the wrongs that have happened, something that religious liberals and political liberals are VERY GOOD at doing.

But in order for this to happen, we must come to the table not only ready to discuss what has happened that has wronged us, but we must also come to the table with the incredible sense that we are also prepared to forgive.


We must be prepared to sit at whatever table we do, at work, at church, with extended family, and while we’re passing along the mashed potatoes, we must also be prepared to share forgiveness.

To forgive someone who has wronged you does not mean that you pretend something didn’t happen. It means to move beyond that hurt and to search for the inherent worth that person has. It means to treat those persons with dignity.

If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.  — The Bhagavad Gita

This ancient book, like many others, has wisdom for us.

The problem of Columbus Day is in part that it represents two ethnic groups, each of whom have felt the need for the wrongs perpetrated against them, to be addressed.

And we are not addressing them.

Also, we have turned this day into a sales flyer, which only adds insult to injury.

Let us follow the wisdom of this Hindu Holy Book. “If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.”

Go forth from this, our sacred place, and practice bravery and heroism.

Unity & Diversity

On Friday evening I attended a concert of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra at the Gallo Center. The concert opened in a way that no other symphony concert I have ever attended opened. It started with the whole orchestra standing, playing our National Anthem.

When I played in the Modesto Band during the summer, each concert started with us playing The Star Spangled Banner, and this wasn’t so shocking to me. It was an outdoor venue, it was summer, and I’d played our National Anthem hundreds of times since I first picked up the clarinet in 1979.

But I’d never been in an orchestra, or seen an orchestra do this.

I guess I should also say that I am a sucker for the National Anthem. I know that the song is a struggle for many to sing because of the vocal range, I know that many don’t like the song as it’s original poem was inspired by a battle and a war.

So Friday night, as I stood in the Gallo Center, hand over my heart, singing our National Anthem, we get to the end and the lyric is “Oh, say does that Star Spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

And for the first time in my life, my heart asked the question, “Does it?”

Yes, the Stars and Bars still flies over our land from sea to shining sea, but are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?


One of the difficulties of writing a sermon that is based on current events is that current events keep changing, and one is trying to build a theological structure on shifting sands. Particularly in a 24 hour a day news cycle.

In today’s Reading from the Global Scripture, Methodist minister, Rev. Morgan Guyton takes a look at the “truthiness” of Representative Ted Cruz’s speech to the Iowa Family Leadership Summit.

This post modern “truthiness” that Cruz employs is not brave. Cruz is not being brave in the way that our National Anthem is asking about. Cruz is bold, true enough, and he’s learned about Christian Dominionism from his father, Rafael Cruz, a preacher in a very “fundamentalist” Christian Church.

But bold and brave are not the same thing.

Anyone can be bold. Even the words on your page can be bold, all you have to do is highlight them, and go to your word toolbar and hit b.

Brave though is more difficult. Bravery is about honesty, integrity and potentially dangerous consequences.

Bravery changes the world.

Kathrine Switzer, who in 1967, was the first woman to officially run in the Boston marathon was brave. She was actually assaulted on the course by some men, and then other men came to her aid, they surrounded her and ran with her.

In 2007, 50 year-old construction worker Wesley Autrey, had a seizure and collapsed, falling into the train tracks between the two rails. A 20 year-old stranger, seeing the train coming, jumped down into the tracks putting his body between Mr. Autrey and the train, holding him down to the ground as the train went over them. When the train stopped, Cameron Hollopeter shouted up to the crowd that had been silenced by shock, to “We’re both okay! Please tell the girls their Dad will be with them shortly.” The train cars were so close to the two men that Hollopeter’s hat was covered in grease from the train’s undercarriage.



What Ted Cruz, and the rest of the Republican Representatives have done with this government shut down is not bravery. This is not a partisan statement. I am not telling anyone from the pulpit who to vote for, or who not to vote for.

I am using the pulpit to speak about what is morally right and correct.

In his book 1984 George Orwell wrote:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

Of course, the party that George Orwell is writing about when he wrote this book in 1948 was the party of Big Brother, not our American Republican Party.

What those representatives in Washington who have voted to halt the government have done is not bravery. It is not “good and responsible government.” It is wasteful.  I have read that estimates are that this shut down is costing the U.S. Government $300 Million dollars a day.

Wasting $300 Million dollars a day may be bold, and it may make a statement, but it is not bravery.

There are many things that make these actions upsetting, and listing them would take some great while. With the suffering of one program I can demonstrate the monstrosity of the power play going on in Washington DC right now. WIC, the program that helps poor women with infants and children feed there kids is on furlough.

The most vulnerable in our nation are the ones who are suffering the most right now, and it isn’t like the Members of the House of Representatives pay is being interrupted.


Are these the actions of “the Free”?

Yes, I suppose these actions could be seen as actions of free men and women.

But freedom is relatively easy, once you have it. It’s easy to abuse, and misapply. One can claim freedom to do just about anything.

In this nation we are free to do all sorts of things, but it doesn’t mean that they should be done. That they are the moral and correct things to do.

Right now, one of us could yell “Fire!” in the sanctuary. You are free to do so at any time, but if there is in fact no fire in the sanctuary, it is the wrong thing to do. It is immoral to do it, yet still you are free to do so.

I expect that you won’t, though. Because if nothing else, the minister will give you a very stern talking to.


So it’s true, that with their freedom, those who have voted to halt the government because they don’t like the Affordable Care Act, can do so. They are perfectly within their rights to do so. But in doing so, they are ignoring their responsibility.

I hope you’ll indulge me for a short minute while I quote an old Spiderman comic book.

It is in The Amazing Fantasy Comic #15, published in 1962 that Stan Lee first wrote a phrase that will forever be attached to his fictional Spiderman character. “…with great power there must also come—great responsibility.”


When one does not act with responsibility as one uses one’s freedom, a freedom hard won by the blood of many warriors, then one is most certainly NOT acting in bravery.


Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Diane Dowgiert, captured the essence of why the government shutdown is shameful:

"There are moral issues at stake, which is why I care so much. The disconnect between elected officials and those they allegedly serve is apparent to me. To pit the interests of one group of people against those of another is, well, sinful. In this case it's federal employees against the medically uninsured. An orchestrated Faustian dilemma serves no one, except the already outrageously rich. Common folk cannot afford to be silent or complacent."

It is Rev. Diane’s phrase “To pit the interests of one group of people against those of another is, well, sinful”, that brings us to our home stretch, so to speak.


Here in this faith, we talk frequently of our unity and our diversity. We are rightly proud of our openness to peoples who are different than we are as individuals. Here in our congregations we have people who love differently, we have people who have different kinds of job and people who have ancestors from across the globe.

Here there are people of differing theological orientations. We go from those who will be frustrated that the minister used the phrase “theological orientation,” to those for whom a phrase like that makes their heart swell with possibilities.

We can have all these things because we are a free church.

We are not the only free church, mind you, but we are our free church. And in our free church we can have women clergy, we can have openly gay clergy, we can have clergy whose ancestry includes people who have been historically marginalized.

It might also be noted that we happily allow straight, white men to be clergy, too.

Our professional ministry reflects the people who are in our pews.


With all of this freedom, though, how are we practicing responsibility?

Are we ever on guard so that we never use the kind of “post-modern truthiness” that Mr. Cruz used in Iowa?

It would be easy to slip into using “truthiness.” You get a little information, you mind and heart responds to that news, and you begin to form an opinion. And then maybe you share that opinion. But have you checked on the facts? When an argument is logically sound, but not based on actual facts, it becomes “truthiness.”

I know this happens because I have been on the wrong end of truthiness. People have heard, surmised and shared all manner of things about why Rev. Joe has done X-thing, and by the time I actually hear about all of this, people are upset, mad, frustrated and even hurt.

In our diversity, we have many ways of approaching life and our shared life, together here.

In order to deepen and enrich our lives together, we must act responsibly with our freedoms together, and not, as Mr. Cruz has seemingly done, use personal agenda, disguised as moral outrage, as a weapon to get one’s way to the determent of others.



Our great diversity is, like all things it seems, a gift and a challenge.

Unitarian Universalism has spent decades trying to manage both the diversity that we have, and the diversity we wish for. Like many faiths, we believe that we have a message, a gospel, some good news for the wider world. We believe that our message of openness, a religion without creed and with little or no dogma, can welcome people of all sorts to our doors and into our pews.

I too, believe this is true.

But I also feel like it’s high time we change the way we engage in this work of seeking greater unity and diversity. For decades our sort of catch-phrase has been “unity in diversity.”

It’s true, you can find it on all manner of publications.


We should change the order of those words, though. Unity in diversity says that Unity is a given, that unity is our default, that we are united.

The truth is that we are not always united.

But we are always diverse.

We are diverse in our approach to what we believe. We are agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Humanists, Muslims, Pagans all the way down the alphabet to Zoroastrians, and for many of us, we are some blend of these things and more.

Diverse is our default. It is inextricably part of who we are. We need to stop focusing on diverse, and start moving our energy to unity.

In order to move our faith forward, we must be willing to do what Ted Cruz and his co-hort is not willing to do, and that is act for the greater good.

Sometimes you have to just get in the boat, grab and oar and row, without being the one who determines where the boat is going. Not because you’re a blind sheep, willing to do whatever it is you’re told, but rather because you believe that the people you’ve chosen to travel with, your fellow congregants, your fellow Unitarian Universalists, because you believe that they, too, are working to make the world a better place, a more fair place, a more loving place.

This is what diversity in unity is about. We use our diverse talents and gifts in the service not of our own goals and agendas, but in service with others of amazing talents and gifts toward a larger goal.

I have quoted this passage from Theodore Parker before, and it’s oft quoted elsewhere, so you may have heard it before: “The arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.”

The arc will continue to bend with the work of many hands, many diverse hands, working together with a unified purpose.

Please join me in a moment of prayer.

Spirit of Love, may my own hands be one of a million pair that work in harmony with others, so that we may, each of us, play a small part in the bending of the arc of the universe toward justice.

Amen.

The Problem of Busyness

Reading:

Excerpt from The ‘Busy’ Trap by Tim Kerider (New York Times, June 30, 2012)

“If you live in American in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot o people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts at the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence."

Sermon:

In the past week, how many people here have used the phrase “I’m so busy,” or “I have too much to do,” or something in that same spirit.

We are living in an epidemic of “busyness.” This morning’s reading came from an article in the New York Times from June of 2012. A quick search through the internet though, shows that it’s an article that has been written, in differing forms, pretty consistently over the past decade.

And Mr. Kreider is correct, it has become our default answer to things. “How are you?”

“So busy!”

I am, myself, not immune to this. Just Thursday after I went home for dinner before I returned to church for the meeting or the Board of Trustees, I told Denis that I left my laptop AND my iPad at work… on purpose. His surprised expression contained a strong lesson to me.

I am never without a computer, an iPad or a smartphone.

Never.

Which means I never really disconnect.

As I was writing this, I was sort of hoping I’d be able to catch someone texting during church or checking their email. I was hoping this because part of me thought it’d be funny and ironic, but I wouldn’t want to shame anybody for actually doing so.

Sometimes I have a sardonic sense of humor….

Even our dog, Toulouse, has taught me a lesson about my computer usage at home. Whenever I close my laptop, he perks up and looks around, because he thinks I’m heading for the door, and he likes to go along wherever the car goes.

So the dog taught me that I spend too much time on the computer at home, and I really only close the computer to leave.

Who’s training whom?

All last church year we used monthly themes to guide our time together. We explored nine topics: Vision, Evil, Covenant, God, Creation, Religious Authority, Redemption, Freedom and Mercy.

I know that on first glance, not all of those topics were ones people were terribly interested in hearing about from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit, but by the time the year was over I heard a lot of positive comments about the idea of using the monthly themes.

The themes this year are: Vocation & Calling, Unity & Diversity, Gratitude, Peace, Grace, Prayer/Spiritual Practice, Letting Go, Salvation and Truth.

Which makes this month’s theme Vocation & Calling.

So, why then, a service on the Problem of Busyness, when it can be argued that Vocation and Calling are all about being busy?

Busyness can get in the way of your true call to a vocation or an avocation. Busyness can become a screen or a fog which clouds your vision about what is truly of deepest value to you. Unless you turn off all of your electronics and go for a walk in the woods, take a drive out to one of the reservoirs at night to look at the Milky Way, how will you listen to your deepest self to find out what matters most to you?

Sure, you could go along, living life, bouncing from activity to activity, driving your kids from soccer practice to viola lessons, but what are you teaching yourself about what matters to your inner poet, your inner day-dreamer, your inner philosopher?

By rushing them from place to place, what are you teaching your children about their own inner poet?

To quote our own Transcendentalist forebear, Henry David Thoreau “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”

Now not all of us are lucky enough to be friends with a man like Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose back yard we can build a little home near a pond and spend some time contemplating life, and then write a book about our experiences.

But you might have a friend named Ralph. Or know of a little place you can stay for a lessor time than two years, and sit in the quiet and think about big important and little important things. 

Mary DeMocker had an interview about climate change with nature writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore in 2012. Dr. Moore is Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University.

There are two quotes from DeMocker’s interview that I think are relevant to today’s sermon. Particularly placed in juxtaposition. The first is:

“Are we going to let it all slip away—all those billions of years it took to evolve the song in a frog’s throat or the strip in a lily—because we are too busy?”

and the second is:

“The thought that we might be losing songbirds, trading them for something I don’t care about at all, like running shoes, makes me angry. And still I drive to the store and buy running shoes.”[1]

Dr. Moore is the author of 9 books on nature and philosophy. She teaches in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion. This is a thinking person, a person whose spent some serious time investigating questions of ultimate importance, and yet even she buys the running shoes.

I brought this up so that you don’t have to leave here feeling like a total failure at living a spiritual life that is well and deeply integrated with all of nature. That we do make compromises in our lives, that the spiritually pure action isn’t always the practical action.

We can’t all be Thoreau.

But neither should we throw our hands up in the air in frustration and give up at the first, second or 157^th thing that tries to separate us from our desire to figure out a way to live a life that is balanced with the earth, and with that which is of the ultimate importance.

Busyness is a problem. Busyness has become our default as a culture. Busyness has become a mechanism by which we can avoid the very uncomfortable questions of meaning and meaning making in our lives.

Busyness is an avoidance technique, disguised as virtue.

Busyness steals time away from deep contemplation about what your soul really wants in life.

What is your busyness keeping you from discovering?

How are you using busyness to hide something from yourself?

Going back to the story I shared with “the kids” earlier, you do know that those stories are also for you, right? Going back to the story, who do you think has a deeper, richer, more awake life? Is it Whitney the Go-Getter, or is it Hollis, the contemplative one?

It seems to me that a life led by default, the kind of life where when you ask someone how they are, and you expect “I’m fine,” as an answer; the kind of life where you go to work, and there around the water cooler you make routinized complaints about your spouse and children, the kind of life wherein your theology is fed to you from a preacher who represents a faith that is answer driven… 

That sort of life is probably easier than the life you may be leading.

The sort of life that lets you seek out answers from a God who cares about you, so much so that not even a little sparrow falls without His knowledge.

I will confess that I have sometimes yearned for a life like that. A life wherein answers come when I ask the hard questions. And I know that I am not alone in that.

But we are who we are, after all.

We don’t easily accept answers; we struggle against them. This is in fact, part of our spiritual work: to struggle with the meanings of things.

That struggling takes time, and our cultural default of busyness robs us of the precious time we need to wrestle with ideas, hopes and dreams.

Marianne Williamson wrote in her Course in Miracles, an often quoted paragraph, one that is probably familiar to many of you, but likely not all of us here in the room.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.[2]

Busyness is a form of this shrinking that Ms. Williamson is talking about. Busyness keeps us from attending to our light; form re-filling the oil lamp, or polishing the reflective surface through which our light shines into the world.

Busyness lets us hide our fears of inadequacy behind a façade of “doing important things.”

Busyness does not mean doing things like going to work and tending to your families, it means using activities to fill the gaps in between.

The gaps that are frightening because they contain the unknown, or more clearly, they contain space in which one encounters the unknown. And like children afraid of the dark, many of us have not developed the tools we need to encounter those gaps, to peer into the darkness of the mystery of our lives.

And busyness is a good band-aid for that.

Or at least that’s how it appears.

Williamson asks the question “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”

I have some good and bad news for you.

I already know that you are brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous. 

The jig is up.

The truth is out.

I see on a regular basis the wonderful people that populate this room, that come together in meetings, that call each other when sick.

You have fabulous written all over you.

You can’t hide behind busyness anymore.

Take time to eschew busyness, this pretend safety net that our culture is so enamored of, a problem going back so far that even Thoreau talks about it, and spend some time with your heart.

Listen to it beat.

Hear what it’s calling you to do.

Really, really listen.

Don’t respond with “But I can’t” or “it’s not practical” or any other negating language.

Say instead “Thank you.”

Say instead “I may not be able to do that right now, but I can work in the direction of that which is my burning passion.”

When you listen to your heart, may it reveal to you what others can already see in you. May you offer the world liberation as you live as an example of a person who is bold enough to follow their dreams and through their work and example, help manifest a world more fair and loving.

---

[1] Sun Magazine, December 2012, Issue 444

[2] Williamson, Marianne, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles", 1992