Gardening is an act of faith. When we plant seeds, we know there is no guarantee that flowers will grow, or bell peppers. We work in concert with the Earth, we tend, we weed, we water as necessary. But we can not force a plant to grow.
I invite you now to close your eyes and settle for a moment as you are comfortable.
Take a moment and figure out, what is your most precious hope?
Imagine that you and your hope are a tiny seed, planted in the spring’s dark rich earth.
Visualize your hope growing from tiny seed, it starts with the cracking of the shell of the seed. Before there can be growth, there must be a disturbance.
As the rain comes from the sky through the earth to your seed, sometimes not often enough, sometimes too frequently, your hope grows.
The roots of your hope grow strong in the earth, as this precious little seedling pushes it’s way up to the surface. Up toward the Sun and sky.
Once your hope is visible to the rest of the world, you may notice several things. You are not alone, there are others nearby.
And they and you are not the same, there is beauty in your diversity.
And as you grow, you in turn, produce seeds within your own being.
And these seeds become the hopes of tomorrow.
As you grow, within you and your hopes, grow the hopes of tomorrow.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Grace (A Sermon for the MFC)
Chalice Lighting:
Unless you call out, who will open the door? - Ethiopian Proverb
Sermon:
“I do not ask for this faith because I shrink from paying the great debt of nature. But I ask for it that I may have respect for myself
—that I may feel life is worth living—
that good is worth striving for above and beyond its mere return of earth.
And above all else, I ask for that faith because it makes life grand,
and gives to us sublime possibilities. And further,
it gives a substance of joy and bliss which nothing earthly ever gave,
and which nothing of earth can take away.”
-Eunice Waite Cobb
Eunice Waite Cobb was a 19th century Universalist.
I chose this quote from her for this morning because I think it invites us into some bit of discomfort, and self-reflection.
Mrs. Cobb does not take her faith as the default position, as the lowest common denominator, as the easy thing. She challenges herself, and her reader, to strive, to work for their beliefs. And she also lays out an expected reward for her labor. Her life will be made grand by her faith, and a joy that nothing on earth can give or take away will be hers.
We rarely make statements of faith like this anymore.
And I fear that it’s starting to show.
Recently I was in an interview for a Chaplain Residency and one of the interviewers, a Jewish pastoral care person, said to me “I know that Unitarian Universalists have difficulty with theology and God. How do you deal with this problem? To whom do you turn when you need help?”
When the co-interviewer behind the desk, an American Baptist, nodded his head in agreement, I was a little embarrassed. He then asked me: “Do you pray?”
This? This is our reputation among our clergy colleagues?
While working through an answer, I was able to articulate the following:
“I desire from Divinity not salvation, but a companion on the Journey of Life. I don’t need to be saved by a Loving God, I need to be reminded to be radically loving.”
My faith is not about accepting the easiest answer, a relativistic stance of believing in all things and no things at once. Like Eunice Cobb, I embrace this faith for both its work and our promise of a life made better by that work….and by something unstated above: grace.
As Unitarian Universalists, I’ve noticed that we don’t speak much about things like grace, do we? We like to think of ourselves as being the directors of our own success and happiness. I’m comfortable in that theology. If I work hard and am a good person, my life will have meaning and that shall be my reward.
Except there are a lot of people who work hard who don’t get the same sorts of benefits that I’ve gotten. That we’ve gotten.
Like the actions of the three goddesses called the Graces in Ancient Greece, we can’t see what life offers us. Sometimes we get more than we deserve and sometimes less, seemingly at random, out of our control. I prefer to think of grace as a gift, a generosity from what many may call God.
Perhaps if we engage our faith more strongly, having greater intent with that Unknown Component of Grace we might be more willing to see our fellow humans with greater charity in our hearts. We might be less ready to pathologize them, and have a ready-made solution to their problems.
I’m not suggesting that this pathologizing is born from a place of cruelty. Part of human development is learning to categorize things. Ask any toddler who’s just learning to talk, and you’ll find out that what’s known as a dog to them might be a dog, or a kitten, or a cow. Eventually that child will be able to discern patterns and realize that a dog is only one of many four-legged creatures with whom we share our world.
But also as we grow, we begin to lump things and people into categories, and unless we’re careful, we may over look important details which distinguish one thing from another. We might mistake a white youngster with dreads for a homeless person, or one young person of color as a member of the Hotel staff.
There are others who have worked as hard, if not harder, than we have, who will likely never see the benefits we have now.
This has been a hard realization for me. My parents are laborers. I was a laborer for most of my working career to date. But that’s all changing for me, and I now find myself in a different part of the map. My employability is no longer about how many words a minute I can type, or how much I can lift, or how many tables I can serve effectively.
And suddenly I find myself the guy who doesn’t operate the copy machine or take out the trash from the church office, because that’s no longer “required” of me. It’s no longer in my job description. I’m not blind, however, to the reality that there are going to be times when I am typing, making copies, answering phones and yes, even taking out the trash.
Yes, I worked hard to get here, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all worked hard.
But what about grace? What part does grace play in our successes? Why do we tend to omit grace from our own reflections, not as individuals, but as a whole faith?
Is it because to focus on grace would cause us to focus on the things we can’t control? That which will not respond solely to labor and reason; the things that our sheer force of will, and planning have seemingly no effect on? Is it because to focus on grace would cause us to focus on the other-worldly?
I have heard over and over that Unitarian Universalism doesn’t deal well with tragedy, loss and the more difficult sides of life. Focusing on grace more often might help us to do that.
Once we know in our bones, and can admit freely, that we are not in complete control of our lives, we can begin to really know that others are not as well. Hopefully, we can then move away from a patrician model of charity and into real relationships with the people who aren’t as fortunate as we and from whom we can learn a lot about being in the world.
We are not bad people, and I hope you won’t think for a moment that I’m suggesting that we don’t try to make the world a better place.
I do, however, think with grace as our focus, we could approach our justice work from a different position. One where we continue to recognize that the Spirit is loving and by seeking the companionship of the Divine, we may become as radically loving as our best selves hope to be.
May we be so bold.
Unless you call out, who will open the door? - Ethiopian Proverb
Sermon:
“I do not ask for this faith because I shrink from paying the great debt of nature. But I ask for it that I may have respect for myself
—that I may feel life is worth living—
that good is worth striving for above and beyond its mere return of earth.
And above all else, I ask for that faith because it makes life grand,
and gives to us sublime possibilities. And further,
it gives a substance of joy and bliss which nothing earthly ever gave,
and which nothing of earth can take away.”
-Eunice Waite Cobb
Eunice Waite Cobb was a 19th century Universalist.
I chose this quote from her for this morning because I think it invites us into some bit of discomfort, and self-reflection.
Mrs. Cobb does not take her faith as the default position, as the lowest common denominator, as the easy thing. She challenges herself, and her reader, to strive, to work for their beliefs. And she also lays out an expected reward for her labor. Her life will be made grand by her faith, and a joy that nothing on earth can give or take away will be hers.
We rarely make statements of faith like this anymore.
And I fear that it’s starting to show.
Recently I was in an interview for a Chaplain Residency and one of the interviewers, a Jewish pastoral care person, said to me “I know that Unitarian Universalists have difficulty with theology and God. How do you deal with this problem? To whom do you turn when you need help?”
When the co-interviewer behind the desk, an American Baptist, nodded his head in agreement, I was a little embarrassed. He then asked me: “Do you pray?”
This? This is our reputation among our clergy colleagues?
While working through an answer, I was able to articulate the following:
“I desire from Divinity not salvation, but a companion on the Journey of Life. I don’t need to be saved by a Loving God, I need to be reminded to be radically loving.”
My faith is not about accepting the easiest answer, a relativistic stance of believing in all things and no things at once. Like Eunice Cobb, I embrace this faith for both its work and our promise of a life made better by that work….and by something unstated above: grace.
As Unitarian Universalists, I’ve noticed that we don’t speak much about things like grace, do we? We like to think of ourselves as being the directors of our own success and happiness. I’m comfortable in that theology. If I work hard and am a good person, my life will have meaning and that shall be my reward.
Except there are a lot of people who work hard who don’t get the same sorts of benefits that I’ve gotten. That we’ve gotten.
Like the actions of the three goddesses called the Graces in Ancient Greece, we can’t see what life offers us. Sometimes we get more than we deserve and sometimes less, seemingly at random, out of our control. I prefer to think of grace as a gift, a generosity from what many may call God.
Perhaps if we engage our faith more strongly, having greater intent with that Unknown Component of Grace we might be more willing to see our fellow humans with greater charity in our hearts. We might be less ready to pathologize them, and have a ready-made solution to their problems.
I’m not suggesting that this pathologizing is born from a place of cruelty. Part of human development is learning to categorize things. Ask any toddler who’s just learning to talk, and you’ll find out that what’s known as a dog to them might be a dog, or a kitten, or a cow. Eventually that child will be able to discern patterns and realize that a dog is only one of many four-legged creatures with whom we share our world.
But also as we grow, we begin to lump things and people into categories, and unless we’re careful, we may over look important details which distinguish one thing from another. We might mistake a white youngster with dreads for a homeless person, or one young person of color as a member of the Hotel staff.
There are others who have worked as hard, if not harder, than we have, who will likely never see the benefits we have now.
This has been a hard realization for me. My parents are laborers. I was a laborer for most of my working career to date. But that’s all changing for me, and I now find myself in a different part of the map. My employability is no longer about how many words a minute I can type, or how much I can lift, or how many tables I can serve effectively.
And suddenly I find myself the guy who doesn’t operate the copy machine or take out the trash from the church office, because that’s no longer “required” of me. It’s no longer in my job description. I’m not blind, however, to the reality that there are going to be times when I am typing, making copies, answering phones and yes, even taking out the trash.
Yes, I worked hard to get here, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all worked hard.
But what about grace? What part does grace play in our successes? Why do we tend to omit grace from our own reflections, not as individuals, but as a whole faith?
Is it because to focus on grace would cause us to focus on the things we can’t control? That which will not respond solely to labor and reason; the things that our sheer force of will, and planning have seemingly no effect on? Is it because to focus on grace would cause us to focus on the other-worldly?
I have heard over and over that Unitarian Universalism doesn’t deal well with tragedy, loss and the more difficult sides of life. Focusing on grace more often might help us to do that.
Once we know in our bones, and can admit freely, that we are not in complete control of our lives, we can begin to really know that others are not as well. Hopefully, we can then move away from a patrician model of charity and into real relationships with the people who aren’t as fortunate as we and from whom we can learn a lot about being in the world.
We are not bad people, and I hope you won’t think for a moment that I’m suggesting that we don’t try to make the world a better place.
I do, however, think with grace as our focus, we could approach our justice work from a different position. One where we continue to recognize that the Spirit is loving and by seeking the companionship of the Divine, we may become as radically loving as our best selves hope to be.
May we be so bold.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Where is your Wonder?
Feb 27, 2011
Given at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver
Some of you may be familiar with the following quote from David Henry Thoreau, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” It’s from his book Walden.
Thoreau lived for a time in a tiny community along with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had worked to create a community of thinkers and spiritual folk in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa May Alcott grew up there and Margaret Fuller was an on and off resident there. Concord was quite a little hot bed of transformational thought then. Louisa, at the time, of course, was just a young girl, with a mad crush on Henry. Sad, sad Henry who was never the same after his brother drowned in Walden Pond. Theodore Parker, radical Unitarian Minister was a frequent guest. It was Louisa’s Dad that Emerson had recruited, Bronson Alcott, a radical reforming educator. Also Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for a while as did the man who had a life-long, unrequited love for Nathaniel, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. The names of the people he gathered there are legendary in Unitarian history.
Theirs was an intentional, vibrant, volatile community of people outside the norms of society. In her book, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever chronicles the very soap opera story of this gang of friends. Love triangles, death, and the intense exchanges of ideas were very much at the heart of this movement that would later come to be known as transcendentalism. At the time they were living this life though, they were not so organized as to give it a name.
Throeau wrote his book, Walden, during these heady times at Concord, and I think this is a good way to frame our question this morning: Where is Your Wonder?
As you might be able to tell from what I’ve briefly told you this morning, the people gathered at Concord did not lead simple lives of scholarship. They didn’t live in a cloister there or a monastery. They lived real lives, full of tulmut and chaos. And they weren’t paragons of virtue, either. Not modern day saints.
They were just people, like us.
Emerson struggled with his ministry, and his relationship with the Unitarian church. Bronson Alcott was trying to reform public education. Fuller was a master mind trapped in a woman’s body. Thoreau was largely unemployable and lived in a simple structure he built himself, though Emerson’s wife did all his laundry. Melville was haunted by his love for Hawthorne, who in turn had his own demons.
And yet together they managed to articulate a new spiritual path. In part, they learned to experience the ordinary as extraordinary.
Earlier this year I quoted the Reverend Lilia Cuervo as she talked about the spiritual practice of cooking. She said “Each time I cut into a pepper, I remember that I am the first being ever to see inside that pepper. It is a whole new landscape to be observed.”
Lilia has taken the ordinary and recognized it’s value as a unique experience.
Louisa May Alcott, in her book Little Women, describes an apple, lovingly, as a miracle of nature. The ordinary apple, made holy.
We too can make the ordinary holy.
In fact, we should.
One of the things that Thoreau’s quote about desperate lives warns us against is apathy, the routinization of our lives.
Are you that person who gets up because your alarm is screaming at you, then you go make the coffee, hop in the shower, get dressed, put the coffee in a travel mug and hit the road onto work?
There you’ll spend hours trading your labour for money, and then head home, tired and exhausted?
Or you head to classes. And sit there, wishing to be almost anywhere else?
And then maybe you have family obligations.
You eat dinner.
You do your homework, check the internet to see what’s going on, maybe watch a little television.
And then before you know it, you’re brushing your teeth and going to bed.
How many wondrous things might you have missed on a day like that? Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into years. To quote Burt Bachrach’s Do You Know the Way to San Jose:
“In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star. Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass. And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.”
No one can make you a star but yourself. And by that I don’t mean a star of stage and screen. Even though this is Vancouver, and there’s a lot of movie-making going on around here.
You can be the star of your own life, I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy, by paying attention to the ordinary in your life.
Transcendentalist scholar Meg North, explains that there are 7 things you can do, 7 practices of transcendentalism, you can do to help avoid living a life of quiet desperation.
The are:
1. Incorporate Nature
2. Incorporate Meditation
3. Incorporate Reading Sacred Texts
4. Incorporate Writing or journaling
5. Incorporate Conversation
6. Incorporate The sacred in both a time set aside and a place
7. Incorporate creative expression.
So easy, right? You’re probably half-way there already!
I’ll be honest with you, most of those sound pretty easy and fun, but that journaling business? I hate that. I had a teacher in Grade 9, Mr. Callahan, who tried to extol to us the wonderful daily practice of journaling. I didn’t do it then, which might explain my B+, and I don’t do it now.
But I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a failing of mine not to write in a journal daily. Or at least weekly!
I have spent years trying to train myself to keep awake to the beauty that surrounds me. And for all that work, and all the beauty I see each and every day because of that work, I can not tell what wonderful, amazing thing that I saw a week ago, Tuesday.
And that’s sort of a small tragedy.
I can’t go back in five years and remember the colour of shirt Denis wore when first told me he loved me. And that’s the sort of sweet memory one should be able to recall, don’t you think? Had I written it down in a journal, I could go back, re-read and re-live that moment.
I know this, and yet, I don’t journal.
But the other six? I do them, or try to do them daily.
I incorporate nature into my daily life. I have a house plant at home. I try to walk by and touch it every day. In some perhaps silly way, I’m letting my plant that it’s not alone, even though it’s not next to other plants. I also have a pair of fish that I feed and say hello to.
There’s also walking to the bus, or in the park, or, last weekend, walking on Bowen Island. Something spectacular happened to Steven and I on our way to the minister’s retreat on Bowen Island. Between Horseshoe Bay and the island, each of us saw our very first dolphin in the wild. He saw his first, and though he tried to help me see the same dolphin he’d seen, I ended up seeing another dolphin on the other side of the ferry.
I meditate, usually daily. I have a series of guided meditations on my iPhone and I sit in a quiet place for meditation. We do a short meditation here on Sundays.
Naturally, as a student minister I read a lot of sacred texts. But you know what, before I entered seminary, I read sacred texts often. I sought meaning in the writings of the women and men who lived before me. This is part of why when I discovered Unitarian Universalism, I stayed here. As a people of faith, we are seekers. The reading of texts, both generally accepted “sacred” texts and those reading that our own souls define as sacred, is something that we all seem to have in common.
I enjoy exchanging ideas with people. This, done with intention, can easily be seen as Meg North’s “incorporate conversation.” Talking with others about our faith, our confusions, our hopes….this is spiritual work.
Because you’re here right now, you’ve already begun to designate time in your life dedicated to a sacred space and a sacred time. By coming this morning, you’re already addressing the need to carve out a place that is separate, intentional, for your spirit. You don’t have to limit time to feed your spirit to just Sunday mornings. In fact, I encourage you not to!
Even in the tiniest of suites, one can set up a small altar. I know that word altar might make some people here jump a little inside, but stay with me for a moment. You can substitute “niche” or “corner” for the word altar, but I encourage you not to do so right now. If you have a strong reaction to that word, ask yourself why. And then ask yourself if you want to grow enough to reclaim that word.
On my altar at home, which truth be told is jus the top of my half-bookcase, on my altar at home I have a little statue of the Buddha. I bought it in a bookstore. It’s called “itty-bitty-buddha.” I have it there to remind myself that every being is a potential Buddha, and that my work in this life is treat my fellow beings with the respect that my own highest aspirations can muster.
I also have a prayer by St. Francis, given to me by a Franciscan Nun who works with the … She brought back this from her visit to Assisi.
A Simple Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, let me sow pardon.
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith.
Where there is despair, let me sow hope.
Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
– St. Francis of Assisi
You may struggle as I do, with some of the language in this prayer. Theologically, I do not feel comfortable with asking God to grant me these things. I don’t like the idea of having to rely on God for anything really. I want to feel like the master of my own destiny, to be the force in the universe that is responsible for my own happinesses and successes.
But even so, to live this kind of life is I think a life well lived.
And Ms. North’s final recommendation to live the life of a transcendentalist is incorporate creative expression. This can take many forms, of course. Cooking, painting, photography, dancing, singing in the shower by yourself. The point, I think of this part of spiritual practice is to celebrate life. To let your soul speak though your right brain, and not just your left brain. To work both halves of your mind is one way, and perhaps a pretty great way, to fully embody your spirit’s experience.
To do these seven things, though, requires one to pay attention to your life. And this paying attention to your life is, I believe, the thing that will keep you from living a life of quiet desperation.
If you can train yourself to be mindful of the wonders around you, you can celebrate them. They will not whiz by you, in your life, moment by moment, leaving you at the end of the day asking “where did the day go?”
You will know how your day was spent. You will remember your first cup of coffee and it’s rich flavour. You’ll look back on those early spring flowers you saw pushing their way up from the ground, while you walked to the bus, train, car. You’ll smile at a joke you heard this afternoon. You will remember the robust flavours of the food you ate for dinner.
You’ll be able to see just how rich with experience your days are. And if you’re wiser than me, you’ll write them down.
I’ll make you a deal. I will begin the spiritual practice of daily writing, beginning this evening. If you join me in this discipline, starting sometime this week, I hereby grant you permission to ask me how my journaling is going. Who knows, at the end of the church year, maybe we can create a “journaler’s coffee shop” here, and some of us can read a few favourite parts of our journal to each other over tea and cookies.
The idea of spiritual practice might bring to mind arduous daily tasks and/or great personal sacrifice. Some of us may not even like to think about spiritual things on a daily basis, but I tell you that it is important work, and it doesn’t have to be painful! I hope that this list of 7 things, which I will put up on Ning, that this list of 7 can be recognized for what it is: a lot of things we’re already doing.
This is your life. Depending on who you talk with, we only get this one, and certainly this incarnation is unique. You, and you, and you deserve to drink deeply of it. To celebrate the days of your life! This is about you, your stumblings and your victories. You are the star of your own movie.
Even when, as will sometimes happens, the movie takes a turn for the sad. Love dissolves, there are financial struggles and health concerns. You worry about your supporting cast, your daughter, your friend.
When the music takes on a minor key, and your life is difficult it is especially important to seek out the small beauties that life can offer us.
Please, pay attention to your life. It is, on balance, filled with important events and amazing people. A life fully realized is a gift! Allow yourself to walk around, watching and be filled with wonder.
You are worth that gift.
Given at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver
Some of you may be familiar with the following quote from David Henry Thoreau, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” It’s from his book Walden.
Thoreau lived for a time in a tiny community along with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had worked to create a community of thinkers and spiritual folk in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa May Alcott grew up there and Margaret Fuller was an on and off resident there. Concord was quite a little hot bed of transformational thought then. Louisa, at the time, of course, was just a young girl, with a mad crush on Henry. Sad, sad Henry who was never the same after his brother drowned in Walden Pond. Theodore Parker, radical Unitarian Minister was a frequent guest. It was Louisa’s Dad that Emerson had recruited, Bronson Alcott, a radical reforming educator. Also Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for a while as did the man who had a life-long, unrequited love for Nathaniel, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. The names of the people he gathered there are legendary in Unitarian history.
Theirs was an intentional, vibrant, volatile community of people outside the norms of society. In her book, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever chronicles the very soap opera story of this gang of friends. Love triangles, death, and the intense exchanges of ideas were very much at the heart of this movement that would later come to be known as transcendentalism. At the time they were living this life though, they were not so organized as to give it a name.
Throeau wrote his book, Walden, during these heady times at Concord, and I think this is a good way to frame our question this morning: Where is Your Wonder?
As you might be able to tell from what I’ve briefly told you this morning, the people gathered at Concord did not lead simple lives of scholarship. They didn’t live in a cloister there or a monastery. They lived real lives, full of tulmut and chaos. And they weren’t paragons of virtue, either. Not modern day saints.
They were just people, like us.
Emerson struggled with his ministry, and his relationship with the Unitarian church. Bronson Alcott was trying to reform public education. Fuller was a master mind trapped in a woman’s body. Thoreau was largely unemployable and lived in a simple structure he built himself, though Emerson’s wife did all his laundry. Melville was haunted by his love for Hawthorne, who in turn had his own demons.
And yet together they managed to articulate a new spiritual path. In part, they learned to experience the ordinary as extraordinary.
Earlier this year I quoted the Reverend Lilia Cuervo as she talked about the spiritual practice of cooking. She said “Each time I cut into a pepper, I remember that I am the first being ever to see inside that pepper. It is a whole new landscape to be observed.”
Lilia has taken the ordinary and recognized it’s value as a unique experience.
Louisa May Alcott, in her book Little Women, describes an apple, lovingly, as a miracle of nature. The ordinary apple, made holy.
We too can make the ordinary holy.
In fact, we should.
One of the things that Thoreau’s quote about desperate lives warns us against is apathy, the routinization of our lives.
Are you that person who gets up because your alarm is screaming at you, then you go make the coffee, hop in the shower, get dressed, put the coffee in a travel mug and hit the road onto work?
There you’ll spend hours trading your labour for money, and then head home, tired and exhausted?
Or you head to classes. And sit there, wishing to be almost anywhere else?
And then maybe you have family obligations.
You eat dinner.
You do your homework, check the internet to see what’s going on, maybe watch a little television.
And then before you know it, you’re brushing your teeth and going to bed.
How many wondrous things might you have missed on a day like that? Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into years. To quote Burt Bachrach’s Do You Know the Way to San Jose:
“In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star. Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass. And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.”
No one can make you a star but yourself. And by that I don’t mean a star of stage and screen. Even though this is Vancouver, and there’s a lot of movie-making going on around here.
You can be the star of your own life, I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy, by paying attention to the ordinary in your life.
Transcendentalist scholar Meg North, explains that there are 7 things you can do, 7 practices of transcendentalism, you can do to help avoid living a life of quiet desperation.
The are:
1. Incorporate Nature
2. Incorporate Meditation
3. Incorporate Reading Sacred Texts
4. Incorporate Writing or journaling
5. Incorporate Conversation
6. Incorporate The sacred in both a time set aside and a place
7. Incorporate creative expression.
So easy, right? You’re probably half-way there already!
I’ll be honest with you, most of those sound pretty easy and fun, but that journaling business? I hate that. I had a teacher in Grade 9, Mr. Callahan, who tried to extol to us the wonderful daily practice of journaling. I didn’t do it then, which might explain my B+, and I don’t do it now.
But I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a failing of mine not to write in a journal daily. Or at least weekly!
I have spent years trying to train myself to keep awake to the beauty that surrounds me. And for all that work, and all the beauty I see each and every day because of that work, I can not tell what wonderful, amazing thing that I saw a week ago, Tuesday.
And that’s sort of a small tragedy.
I can’t go back in five years and remember the colour of shirt Denis wore when first told me he loved me. And that’s the sort of sweet memory one should be able to recall, don’t you think? Had I written it down in a journal, I could go back, re-read and re-live that moment.
I know this, and yet, I don’t journal.
But the other six? I do them, or try to do them daily.
I incorporate nature into my daily life. I have a house plant at home. I try to walk by and touch it every day. In some perhaps silly way, I’m letting my plant that it’s not alone, even though it’s not next to other plants. I also have a pair of fish that I feed and say hello to.
There’s also walking to the bus, or in the park, or, last weekend, walking on Bowen Island. Something spectacular happened to Steven and I on our way to the minister’s retreat on Bowen Island. Between Horseshoe Bay and the island, each of us saw our very first dolphin in the wild. He saw his first, and though he tried to help me see the same dolphin he’d seen, I ended up seeing another dolphin on the other side of the ferry.
I meditate, usually daily. I have a series of guided meditations on my iPhone and I sit in a quiet place for meditation. We do a short meditation here on Sundays.
Naturally, as a student minister I read a lot of sacred texts. But you know what, before I entered seminary, I read sacred texts often. I sought meaning in the writings of the women and men who lived before me. This is part of why when I discovered Unitarian Universalism, I stayed here. As a people of faith, we are seekers. The reading of texts, both generally accepted “sacred” texts and those reading that our own souls define as sacred, is something that we all seem to have in common.
I enjoy exchanging ideas with people. This, done with intention, can easily be seen as Meg North’s “incorporate conversation.” Talking with others about our faith, our confusions, our hopes….this is spiritual work.
Because you’re here right now, you’ve already begun to designate time in your life dedicated to a sacred space and a sacred time. By coming this morning, you’re already addressing the need to carve out a place that is separate, intentional, for your spirit. You don’t have to limit time to feed your spirit to just Sunday mornings. In fact, I encourage you not to!
Even in the tiniest of suites, one can set up a small altar. I know that word altar might make some people here jump a little inside, but stay with me for a moment. You can substitute “niche” or “corner” for the word altar, but I encourage you not to do so right now. If you have a strong reaction to that word, ask yourself why. And then ask yourself if you want to grow enough to reclaim that word.
On my altar at home, which truth be told is jus the top of my half-bookcase, on my altar at home I have a little statue of the Buddha. I bought it in a bookstore. It’s called “itty-bitty-buddha.” I have it there to remind myself that every being is a potential Buddha, and that my work in this life is treat my fellow beings with the respect that my own highest aspirations can muster.
I also have a prayer by St. Francis, given to me by a Franciscan Nun who works with the … She brought back this from her visit to Assisi.
A Simple Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, let me sow pardon.
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith.
Where there is despair, let me sow hope.
Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
– St. Francis of Assisi
You may struggle as I do, with some of the language in this prayer. Theologically, I do not feel comfortable with asking God to grant me these things. I don’t like the idea of having to rely on God for anything really. I want to feel like the master of my own destiny, to be the force in the universe that is responsible for my own happinesses and successes.
But even so, to live this kind of life is I think a life well lived.
And Ms. North’s final recommendation to live the life of a transcendentalist is incorporate creative expression. This can take many forms, of course. Cooking, painting, photography, dancing, singing in the shower by yourself. The point, I think of this part of spiritual practice is to celebrate life. To let your soul speak though your right brain, and not just your left brain. To work both halves of your mind is one way, and perhaps a pretty great way, to fully embody your spirit’s experience.
To do these seven things, though, requires one to pay attention to your life. And this paying attention to your life is, I believe, the thing that will keep you from living a life of quiet desperation.
If you can train yourself to be mindful of the wonders around you, you can celebrate them. They will not whiz by you, in your life, moment by moment, leaving you at the end of the day asking “where did the day go?”
You will know how your day was spent. You will remember your first cup of coffee and it’s rich flavour. You’ll look back on those early spring flowers you saw pushing their way up from the ground, while you walked to the bus, train, car. You’ll smile at a joke you heard this afternoon. You will remember the robust flavours of the food you ate for dinner.
You’ll be able to see just how rich with experience your days are. And if you’re wiser than me, you’ll write them down.
I’ll make you a deal. I will begin the spiritual practice of daily writing, beginning this evening. If you join me in this discipline, starting sometime this week, I hereby grant you permission to ask me how my journaling is going. Who knows, at the end of the church year, maybe we can create a “journaler’s coffee shop” here, and some of us can read a few favourite parts of our journal to each other over tea and cookies.
The idea of spiritual practice might bring to mind arduous daily tasks and/or great personal sacrifice. Some of us may not even like to think about spiritual things on a daily basis, but I tell you that it is important work, and it doesn’t have to be painful! I hope that this list of 7 things, which I will put up on Ning, that this list of 7 can be recognized for what it is: a lot of things we’re already doing.
This is your life. Depending on who you talk with, we only get this one, and certainly this incarnation is unique. You, and you, and you deserve to drink deeply of it. To celebrate the days of your life! This is about you, your stumblings and your victories. You are the star of your own movie.
Even when, as will sometimes happens, the movie takes a turn for the sad. Love dissolves, there are financial struggles and health concerns. You worry about your supporting cast, your daughter, your friend.
When the music takes on a minor key, and your life is difficult it is especially important to seek out the small beauties that life can offer us.
Please, pay attention to your life. It is, on balance, filled with important events and amazing people. A life fully realized is a gift! Allow yourself to walk around, watching and be filled with wonder.
You are worth that gift.
Friday, January 28, 2011
The Rabbits Are Coming!
At first blush, a sermon about rabbits may seem a little odd. After all, what is a rabbit but a little mammal with notably little strength at very near the bottom of the food-chain. How should we find inspiration from one such as this?
And they’re so common! Just Ask the people over at the University of Victoria. Last summer the population of feral rabbits at UVic was estimated to be between 1,400 and 1,600. As of January 20, however, the population is down to 50. UVic has promised that all rabbits removed to date have been done so humanely and were sterilized and released into appropriate places elsewhere in the province. They have a goal of zero rabbits by summer.
Since I was fourteen, I’ve been collecting quotes, and I have quite a collection now. Some 28 or 29 pages, single-spaced. One of my favorites is “If dandelions were rare and difficult to grow, they’d be welcomed on any lawn.” I guess the same is true for rabbits.
In just a few days, we will celebrate the Chinese New Year, and the year coming up is the Year of the Rabbit. Lynn Sabourin, she was pleased to tell me, was herself born in a Year of the Rabbit.
The fourth year of every cycle of Chinese years belongs to the rabbit. Rabbits are in folklore around the globe. One telling of the story of how rabbit was honoured with a year of his own goes like this:
Buddha, before he ascended, invited all the animals to be in his presence. He honoured the first 12 to appear by making them part of the zodiac. Of these 12, Rabbit was the fourth to appear.
Another East Asian legend tells us, that:
The ancient god of India, Indra, King of the gods, was weary and disguised himself as a lowly traveler. One of Buddha’s earlier incarnations was in the form of a rabbit, who kept company with a monkey and a fox. When Indra, as the beggar, entreated them for help, the three animals went searching for food. The monkey came back with a handful of nuts, and the fox also had something for the traveler, but the rabbit found nothing. So great was his sense of honor that he said to the beggar, “I have found nothing for you to eat, so I beg of you, so that you don’t go hungry, eat me.” And he jumped into the fire. Indra was so impressed at the sacrifice the rabbit made for him, that he placed the rabbit on the moon where he became the Rabbit or Hare in the Moon, unlike the Man in the Moon in Western traditions.
A little earlier, Lynn shared with us a story from Cameroon wherein Rabbit uses his wit to become the prince of a land, following his hearts affection, and employing his mind to achieve his goals.
In many lands, the rabbit is a trickster god. An almost direct link can be easily drawn from the story from Cameroon and in other parts of Africa, to the Br’er Rabbit stories from the southern United States; wherein Br’er Rabbit outwits his enemies, time after time. You might be able to see, without too much difficulty, how a population in slavery and historic oppression might find comfort in stories about a creature so seemingly weak, and it’s ability to thwart those with more power.
In Native American and First Nations tribes, the Rabbit is also a trickster god. With the rabbit trickster, here are two interpretations—one positive and helpful and the other devious and aggressive. Known as Cottontail to the Paiute tribe of the the Great Basin region, this rambunctious figure carried on a war with the North Wind. After seducing the daughter of his enemy, Cottontail then burned her alive with her brothers. Conversely, the Omaha tribe of Nebraska saw the rabbit trickster in a more positive light. According to Omaha myth the rabbit, known as Mastshingke, is a defender of early man. When the world was plagued by ferocious, man-eating bears and gargantuan snakes, Mastshingke arrived to show ancient man to safety. For this, he is viewed as a giver of life and protector of mankind.
We also have a modern version of the rabbit as trickster god: Bugs Bunny. How many times has he faced the barrel of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun and gotten away? How angry does he make Daffy Duck, because Bugs always turns the situation around?
What lessons, then, can we learn from our little furry friend with the big ears? Clearly from pre-history, humanity has been fascinated by this little creature who, well, breeds like rabbits, who survive and thrive even though they have seem to be so vulnerable.
There are times in our own lives when we doubtlessly feel vulnerable, no? When we feel as though even though we’ve made our best effort and did our best planning we find ourselves facing a metaphorical fox.
Perhaps it’s related to work, where you’ve been careful and diligent in your work, only to find that you’ve been made redundant. Or at home, parenting, where your kid seems to be more like a trickster god than you.
What does a rabbit do?
Pulling us completely out of myth for a moment, let’s look at what the rabbit, the real rabbit, does.
The rabbit has long ears, and they are for detecting the sounds of its predators. When a rabbit hears danger, she thumps her big long foot on the ground to warn others. And then, she runs like Hell to safety. And if the road to safety is blocked, and I think this part is amazing, and actually leads to so much of the mythology about rabbits, if her way is blocked, she can make a 90-degree left turn so quickly as to almost seem magical.
In the warren where she lives in safety and community, she keeps her individual “room” clean. She does not lay her waste in the warren, she goes outside to do that.
What can you learn from her?
Go about your business, and find the sweetest, most tender grass you can find and enjoy yourself. If you like sunshine, then go, eat in the sunshine! If you prefer a place more shady, that’s okay, too. While enjoying your food, or frolicking around with others, do keep an ear out for danger.
By all means though, do not stop enjoying your life for fear of danger.
When danger appears, warn those with whom you share your life. Thump your foot, let them know something is wrong, and then run to safety. Once there, regroup.
As I spent the last couple of weeks thinking about rabbits, one image kept returning to my mind. And that is one of the rabbit’s ability to make a 90-degree left hand turn, seemingly at a full-speed run.
Even if we’re not running away from a hawk in the sky, or a fox in the shrubbery, we are living our lives at full-speed ahead, aren’t we? Even if one has retired, or works in a non-9 to 5 job, still we are living our lives non-stop.
Do you ever feel trapped by the pace of your life? Do you ever feel like you’re just trying to get quickly to the warmth of your own warren, so you can rest? And on the way home, all you can focus on is the path in front of you?
What can the rabbit teach you? She can teach you that it’s okay to make a sudden right turn, because that ability is part of survival.
When is the last time, while driving home from work, you just made a turn and did something unexpected? Went down an unfamiliar street, or popped into a store to have a look-see?
Obviously, we are not all rabbits here in this church. Our lives have become complicated by more in our live, than any rabbit has to worry about. After all, we have mortgages or rent to pay, our education to pay off, or helping our children get theirs, and the list goes on. But still, humanity has for eons watched the lowly rabbit for clues about how to live a better life. There must be wisdom for us in the modern age in there somewhere.
It’s rare for me to re-read a book of fiction. There are already so many to choose from, going back and re-reading seems to be a missed opportunity for some new adventure and universe of characters. One book I have read, over and over, about once a decade is A Brave New World. I first encountered that book at age 11. As a boy from Detroit, the very idea that people would worship Henry Ford and the Model T religiously was fascinating to me. Also, from that first reading forward, I’ve never really trusted government completely.
As I’ve read it, like I said about once a decade, each time I re-read it, I’ve gotten something new from it.
I first read Richard Adams’s Watership Down in grade 6, in Mrs. Kramer’s English class. At the time, I didn’t know how old the book was. It was published in 1972, making it less than 10 years old when I read it. I didn’t know the importance of contextual things like when a book was written back then, and I’d like to publicly thank Mrs. Kramer now for introducing me to such a book, which has become a classic of juvenile literature. When I first read Watership Down, it seemed like an adventure story.
I read the book again about 10 years ago in a book club. My second reading of Watership Down was all about relationships and community.
Briefly, and I hope not too briefly, the novel Watership Down, is the story of 5 younger male rabbits in a warren who venture out on their own to create a new warren. They are inspired into action because one of the smallest rabbits has a vision, which shows him that human developers are coming and the warren they currently live in is doomed.
They try to warn the Chief rabbit, but because they are young, not even 2 years old yet, their warning is not heeded, and they strike out on their own. Along the way they have dealings with two other warrens, neither of which is suitable for various reasons. Once they arrive in the place where they will create their warren, two of the smaller rabbits start digging, which is work that only does, or females do.
This by the way, caused a great discussion in my book club.
Eventually, their leader, Hazel, begins to understand that in order for Watership Down to continue, they must find mates. Find mates they do, suffering losses and gaining allies along the way, and the book ends with an elderly Hazel looking out over what he helped to create.
When I told my teaching pastor, Steven Epperson, that I was doing a sermon called “The Rabbits Are Coming,” he shared an article with me written by Stanley Hauerwas, an orthodox, conservative Christian about the book Watership Down and Christian Ethics.
In this article, Hauerwas examines the little band of rabbits not as the rag-tag group of friends that I’d read about in 1981 or even in 1999. Instead, draws parallels between the story and communities of faith. Of course, he means the Christian universal church as he understands and promotes, it. But I see easily how this relates to any group gathered together to practice their faith. Written in 1981, Hauerwas’s article is available through google books. Google books is both terrific and frustrating because the site offers so many resources, but unless the resource is in public domain they must redact it, meaning that every so often a page or two gets skipped in their reproduction. But if the article captures your attention from google books, perhaps you’ll pursue it further.
Hauerwas writes that the little band of rabbits does not start off as a community. It’s the trials and tribulations that the rabbits go through together, and the learning of their own limitations and the strengths of their compatriots that forge them into a community.
Look around you at this community. See the strengths of the people around you, and know that they can see yours. Know that this community is made stronger not just by your ability to excel at tasks, but also your ability to stand back and let others share their abilities. Learn that it’s okay that you can’t do everything, and that relying on others, within your community, helps to make that community stronger for all.
At first blush, a sermon about rabbits might seem frivolous and potentially silly, I know. I mean, what after all do we have to learn from them?
Enjoy your daily tasks in the sunshine. Keep an ear out for danger. When danger appears, warn others. When it’s time to do so, run for home. As you’re running for home, if the way is blocked by danger, don’t be afraid to turn quickly in a new direction to save yourself. If you have to strike out on your own and form a new home, know that it can be fraught with danger, lessons, loss, and successes.
Once you’re home, don’t leave your waste lying around and be respectful of the others you live with. Work to make your community strong.
And then go out and enjoy your daily tasks in the sunshine.
Repeat as necessary.
Many blessings for our shared journeys.
Amen.
And they’re so common! Just Ask the people over at the University of Victoria. Last summer the population of feral rabbits at UVic was estimated to be between 1,400 and 1,600. As of January 20, however, the population is down to 50. UVic has promised that all rabbits removed to date have been done so humanely and were sterilized and released into appropriate places elsewhere in the province. They have a goal of zero rabbits by summer.
Since I was fourteen, I’ve been collecting quotes, and I have quite a collection now. Some 28 or 29 pages, single-spaced. One of my favorites is “If dandelions were rare and difficult to grow, they’d be welcomed on any lawn.” I guess the same is true for rabbits.
In just a few days, we will celebrate the Chinese New Year, and the year coming up is the Year of the Rabbit. Lynn Sabourin, she was pleased to tell me, was herself born in a Year of the Rabbit.
The fourth year of every cycle of Chinese years belongs to the rabbit. Rabbits are in folklore around the globe. One telling of the story of how rabbit was honoured with a year of his own goes like this:
Buddha, before he ascended, invited all the animals to be in his presence. He honoured the first 12 to appear by making them part of the zodiac. Of these 12, Rabbit was the fourth to appear.
Another East Asian legend tells us, that:
The ancient god of India, Indra, King of the gods, was weary and disguised himself as a lowly traveler. One of Buddha’s earlier incarnations was in the form of a rabbit, who kept company with a monkey and a fox. When Indra, as the beggar, entreated them for help, the three animals went searching for food. The monkey came back with a handful of nuts, and the fox also had something for the traveler, but the rabbit found nothing. So great was his sense of honor that he said to the beggar, “I have found nothing for you to eat, so I beg of you, so that you don’t go hungry, eat me.” And he jumped into the fire. Indra was so impressed at the sacrifice the rabbit made for him, that he placed the rabbit on the moon where he became the Rabbit or Hare in the Moon, unlike the Man in the Moon in Western traditions.
A little earlier, Lynn shared with us a story from Cameroon wherein Rabbit uses his wit to become the prince of a land, following his hearts affection, and employing his mind to achieve his goals.
In many lands, the rabbit is a trickster god. An almost direct link can be easily drawn from the story from Cameroon and in other parts of Africa, to the Br’er Rabbit stories from the southern United States; wherein Br’er Rabbit outwits his enemies, time after time. You might be able to see, without too much difficulty, how a population in slavery and historic oppression might find comfort in stories about a creature so seemingly weak, and it’s ability to thwart those with more power.
In Native American and First Nations tribes, the Rabbit is also a trickster god. With the rabbit trickster, here are two interpretations—one positive and helpful and the other devious and aggressive. Known as Cottontail to the Paiute tribe of the the Great Basin region, this rambunctious figure carried on a war with the North Wind. After seducing the daughter of his enemy, Cottontail then burned her alive with her brothers. Conversely, the Omaha tribe of Nebraska saw the rabbit trickster in a more positive light. According to Omaha myth the rabbit, known as Mastshingke, is a defender of early man. When the world was plagued by ferocious, man-eating bears and gargantuan snakes, Mastshingke arrived to show ancient man to safety. For this, he is viewed as a giver of life and protector of mankind.
We also have a modern version of the rabbit as trickster god: Bugs Bunny. How many times has he faced the barrel of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun and gotten away? How angry does he make Daffy Duck, because Bugs always turns the situation around?
What lessons, then, can we learn from our little furry friend with the big ears? Clearly from pre-history, humanity has been fascinated by this little creature who, well, breeds like rabbits, who survive and thrive even though they have seem to be so vulnerable.
There are times in our own lives when we doubtlessly feel vulnerable, no? When we feel as though even though we’ve made our best effort and did our best planning we find ourselves facing a metaphorical fox.
Perhaps it’s related to work, where you’ve been careful and diligent in your work, only to find that you’ve been made redundant. Or at home, parenting, where your kid seems to be more like a trickster god than you.
What does a rabbit do?
Pulling us completely out of myth for a moment, let’s look at what the rabbit, the real rabbit, does.
The rabbit has long ears, and they are for detecting the sounds of its predators. When a rabbit hears danger, she thumps her big long foot on the ground to warn others. And then, she runs like Hell to safety. And if the road to safety is blocked, and I think this part is amazing, and actually leads to so much of the mythology about rabbits, if her way is blocked, she can make a 90-degree left turn so quickly as to almost seem magical.
In the warren where she lives in safety and community, she keeps her individual “room” clean. She does not lay her waste in the warren, she goes outside to do that.
What can you learn from her?
Go about your business, and find the sweetest, most tender grass you can find and enjoy yourself. If you like sunshine, then go, eat in the sunshine! If you prefer a place more shady, that’s okay, too. While enjoying your food, or frolicking around with others, do keep an ear out for danger.
By all means though, do not stop enjoying your life for fear of danger.
When danger appears, warn those with whom you share your life. Thump your foot, let them know something is wrong, and then run to safety. Once there, regroup.
As I spent the last couple of weeks thinking about rabbits, one image kept returning to my mind. And that is one of the rabbit’s ability to make a 90-degree left hand turn, seemingly at a full-speed run.
Even if we’re not running away from a hawk in the sky, or a fox in the shrubbery, we are living our lives at full-speed ahead, aren’t we? Even if one has retired, or works in a non-9 to 5 job, still we are living our lives non-stop.
Do you ever feel trapped by the pace of your life? Do you ever feel like you’re just trying to get quickly to the warmth of your own warren, so you can rest? And on the way home, all you can focus on is the path in front of you?
What can the rabbit teach you? She can teach you that it’s okay to make a sudden right turn, because that ability is part of survival.
When is the last time, while driving home from work, you just made a turn and did something unexpected? Went down an unfamiliar street, or popped into a store to have a look-see?
Obviously, we are not all rabbits here in this church. Our lives have become complicated by more in our live, than any rabbit has to worry about. After all, we have mortgages or rent to pay, our education to pay off, or helping our children get theirs, and the list goes on. But still, humanity has for eons watched the lowly rabbit for clues about how to live a better life. There must be wisdom for us in the modern age in there somewhere.
It’s rare for me to re-read a book of fiction. There are already so many to choose from, going back and re-reading seems to be a missed opportunity for some new adventure and universe of characters. One book I have read, over and over, about once a decade is A Brave New World. I first encountered that book at age 11. As a boy from Detroit, the very idea that people would worship Henry Ford and the Model T religiously was fascinating to me. Also, from that first reading forward, I’ve never really trusted government completely.
As I’ve read it, like I said about once a decade, each time I re-read it, I’ve gotten something new from it.
I first read Richard Adams’s Watership Down in grade 6, in Mrs. Kramer’s English class. At the time, I didn’t know how old the book was. It was published in 1972, making it less than 10 years old when I read it. I didn’t know the importance of contextual things like when a book was written back then, and I’d like to publicly thank Mrs. Kramer now for introducing me to such a book, which has become a classic of juvenile literature. When I first read Watership Down, it seemed like an adventure story.
I read the book again about 10 years ago in a book club. My second reading of Watership Down was all about relationships and community.
Briefly, and I hope not too briefly, the novel Watership Down, is the story of 5 younger male rabbits in a warren who venture out on their own to create a new warren. They are inspired into action because one of the smallest rabbits has a vision, which shows him that human developers are coming and the warren they currently live in is doomed.
They try to warn the Chief rabbit, but because they are young, not even 2 years old yet, their warning is not heeded, and they strike out on their own. Along the way they have dealings with two other warrens, neither of which is suitable for various reasons. Once they arrive in the place where they will create their warren, two of the smaller rabbits start digging, which is work that only does, or females do.
This by the way, caused a great discussion in my book club.
Eventually, their leader, Hazel, begins to understand that in order for Watership Down to continue, they must find mates. Find mates they do, suffering losses and gaining allies along the way, and the book ends with an elderly Hazel looking out over what he helped to create.
When I told my teaching pastor, Steven Epperson, that I was doing a sermon called “The Rabbits Are Coming,” he shared an article with me written by Stanley Hauerwas, an orthodox, conservative Christian about the book Watership Down and Christian Ethics.
In this article, Hauerwas examines the little band of rabbits not as the rag-tag group of friends that I’d read about in 1981 or even in 1999. Instead, draws parallels between the story and communities of faith. Of course, he means the Christian universal church as he understands and promotes, it. But I see easily how this relates to any group gathered together to practice their faith. Written in 1981, Hauerwas’s article is available through google books. Google books is both terrific and frustrating because the site offers so many resources, but unless the resource is in public domain they must redact it, meaning that every so often a page or two gets skipped in their reproduction. But if the article captures your attention from google books, perhaps you’ll pursue it further.
Hauerwas writes that the little band of rabbits does not start off as a community. It’s the trials and tribulations that the rabbits go through together, and the learning of their own limitations and the strengths of their compatriots that forge them into a community.
Look around you at this community. See the strengths of the people around you, and know that they can see yours. Know that this community is made stronger not just by your ability to excel at tasks, but also your ability to stand back and let others share their abilities. Learn that it’s okay that you can’t do everything, and that relying on others, within your community, helps to make that community stronger for all.
At first blush, a sermon about rabbits might seem frivolous and potentially silly, I know. I mean, what after all do we have to learn from them?
Enjoy your daily tasks in the sunshine. Keep an ear out for danger. When danger appears, warn others. When it’s time to do so, run for home. As you’re running for home, if the way is blocked by danger, don’t be afraid to turn quickly in a new direction to save yourself. If you have to strike out on your own and form a new home, know that it can be fraught with danger, lessons, loss, and successes.
Once you’re home, don’t leave your waste lying around and be respectful of the others you live with. Work to make your community strong.
And then go out and enjoy your daily tasks in the sunshine.
Repeat as necessary.
Many blessings for our shared journeys.
Amen.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Eschatology: Good News or End Times?
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'à 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.
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'à 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.
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)